What, really?

Yep! They're trying to figure out how to ask her something about it.

She's probably not going to be much help. While they're trying to figure it out she mends the rips the claws left in her dress.

Whoa! The lion people are so impressed!

...This is really trivial. Are they seriously more impressed by a spark and some repair work than the healing and claw-denial?

It's sort of hard to tell exactly where the comparison falls because she can't understand them, but they definitely find her really impressive. They watch her in fascination.

...Okay then. "Do any of you know how far into the desert we are?"

They do not have enough vocabulary in common to handle this question.

Annoying. They can keep vocabulary-building for a while, then.

Yup. They are debating what she is besides a kyis (they still think she's a kyis, but think she must also be something else).

Kyis means human, right?

If she wants to know whether those people over there are kyis the answer is yes. The lion-people are not kyis.

Just checking. What exactly do they think she is besides human?

They're not sure. She might be this word or that word but that word can't do the one thing and this word can't do the other thing and nobody can do the third thing...

She has no idea what any of those things are. She's a mage.

They transliterate this as a stopgap but do not seem to find it a satisfying explanation.

Well clearly she can do all the things she can do, so if those other things can't then she's not them, right?

They don't seem to have known there were other things who did stuff!

Well, she's still not clear on what the things they're aware of are, so.

Eventually they decide she's probably an "ehis", but, like, a really fancy ehis.

Okay so what is an ehis.

An ehis is somebody who does things with waving their hands around and saying things, but she must have a way around that or she made an ehis-thing to do it without the waving-and-saying steps.

She has never heard of a mage saying things and waving their hands because they needed to instead of for purposes of drama.

Is any of them an ehis? Maybe all the ones they've met were just dramatic.