"Neither am I, beyond 'the internet' and 'put out a classified ad on the Avalon lampposts.' Do critters even have any of their own research programs or do academically-minded critters just get jobs at the human universities?"

"Seems to be the latter."

"Which is very logical but very inconvenient. I'd consider talking to a non-critter linguist if I had a normal recording and a reliable set of lies."

"You could hide your abnormal recording in something."

"Until they ask me to play it again more slowly, or they want to take it home and compare it to something, or they want me to email them a copy . . . I'm not saying I'm not going to do it, just that I'd want to do a lot of prep work."

"There are some pretty low-feature-density tape recorders that wouldn't work well with email."

"Yeah, that could work. And it would go well with a story like 'I found this tape in my great-grandmother's attic and have no idea what it's about', which would have me mostly off the hook for explaining the content."

"Ooh, I like it. You'll have to get the recorder at a garage sale or something to make it look authentically vintage if you want to go that route though."

"I'm sure I can find something suitably old and beat up. I can probably also enchant the incantations onto tapes in a way that looks a lot like a normal recording at first glance."

"Ooh, that would be cute, just use a tape instead of a rock and tell it to work when it's turned."

"Yeah, exactly. I might even add pausing and restarting and stuff like that, depending how long it takes to get a meeting with a linguist and how much stuff I end up doing with the healing spell in the meantime. Make it act as much like a real tape as possible."

"Yeah, makes sense. I don't know how hard it is to talk to linguists."

"I figure it's got to be easier than talking to, like, a physicist, since linguists probably get fewer crackpots. I might need to go through a bunch to find someone who recognizes the language, and then some more to find someone who can actually understand it, though."

"It may never have been heard spoken, depending on how good their reconstruction of the sounds is."

"Yeah. I'm hoping it will at least be consistent with some existing hypotheses and someone will be able to come up with a translation. Possibly via making a phonetic transcription and analyzing that."

"Good luck. Let me know if you need anything else."

"Thanks, likewise."

And that would seem to be it for their call. What does the Internet have in the realm of old tape recorders?

She can get variously ridiculously priced ones on eBay.

She gets the cheapest one available. She doesn't need it to actually function, as long as the bit that turns the tape works.

She will have to allow two to four weeks for shipping.

She can get some matching cassette tapes from a flea market in the meantime; it might end up taking her that long to get them enchanted to her satisfaction. She also goes through the websites of universities in the area, looking for professors who put their papers or their course syllabi on the internet and who mention ancient languages, or anything about deriving pronunciations from writing.

There's syllabi for one Latin professor at the University of Washington!

Well, the worst they're likely to do is ignore her and if she's lucky they might recommend a colleague. Does the syllabus include an email address, or alternately a set of office hours?

Both, in fact.

She doesn't want to risk getting an offer of an appointment before she has the tape deck and the enchanted tapes, so she'll start in on that first. She starts with the first incantation and the same spell she used to put iron the rock, except with "casette" for "rock" and "whenever the tape wheels start turning" instead of "when a person touches it". She turns the wheels with her fingers to test it.