It is very rapid! He tries to sound out some words whose pronunciation he's not sure of, and the more he does that the more accurate he gets, and then he starts saying full sentences for grammar checks.

"Welcome to my ship. Now that we can talk, do you want to buy passage out of the middle of nowhere?"

"Maybe! But I don't have money, exactly, I think. If you use money here. I think I come from very far away."

"Your - thing will suffice for that. Particularly if it's versatile."

"My 'thing'?"

"Every fair folk has a thing, I've never heard of van-kire before, but strong bone is something I can sell, you can use it to pay me."

"Oh! I'm not fair folk, I'm not sure you have my kind of thing here. Closest thing I found in that dictionary was a 'vampire' but it's not the same thing."

"Well, you cannot have my blood. And this is not a threat, but if you tried my security system would fire."

"I'm not gonna try to take your blood, don't worry. For one, it's illegal to eat people where I'm from, and we can survive on animal blood. For two, I can actually generate an endless supply of it myself via my 'thing,' that being fairly extensive, er, I couldn't find a word for this, but I can change and create biological things attached to me."

"That was subtle bragging... And that's an impressive magic. Gives you about a couple thousand other options for things to sell. Lucky you."

"Yeah, I got pretty rich off it before I was turned into a vampire. How does your security system work, anyway? Vampires are pretty overpowered, it is very hard to kill or even slightly inconvenience one of us."

"I'm not gonna give away all my secrets, but suffice to say you would end up travelling away from me at high speed, minimum."

"I'll totally give away all my secrets, though, I don't actually want to attack you, I'm just really curious. Because, see, where I'm from, people live in a giant sphere—that's called a planet in my language—and I noticed with my incredibly enhanced vision that the land down there is. Flat. There is no subtle curvature of the planet anywhere, and there is a huge gaping abyss at the edges."

"How would a sphere even - you'd fall off if you tried to live on the bottom! The world is flat because it comes in triangles, which the Fates make and attach to each other... Don't go into the abyss, it starts dissolving things if you get too far below the tile plane."

"—in my world all matter attracts all other matter, except it's a very weak force unless there is a lot of matter together. Planets have enough matter together to attract people and things to their core about as strongly as, erm, 'gravity' here does. So on planets, down is towards the centre."

"What else has it got that we don't?"

"That is kind of a difficult question to answer armed only with the knowledge a dictionary could provide! Flying houses don't exist, though, and vampires and magic are secret. We don't have 'Fates' the same way you do, our magic is much more individualised and localised than that, like, mine. I don't actually know what a Fate is, by the by."

"They're-" A different language has a word for 'god'. "Almost gods. The closest we get. Immortal to most things, they will reappear if you manage to kill one body. Vastly powerful, ability to create new land and the source of all the land in the world, generally stubborn and temperamental, best avoided. Anyone can learn magic here, with diligence and skill."

"...so where did the first tile of land come from?"

"The Elder Six or one of them, perhaps. They won't say. Penelope, Catoblepas, Barnacles, Ragnarosa, Fortuna, and Hogweed."

"And where did they come from?"

"If you believe Penelope, she came from nothing and the rest of them came from her. If you believe Fortuna, not a one of them remembers."

"And where did all the, er, non-Fate people come from?"

"I don't think I need to explain sex to you? ...I jest. Same story there. Not many records survived the cataclysm."

He giggles. "Cataclysm?"