"What's that gibberish you're speaking?" 

It's not quite an angry shout, but it's definitely not friendly either.

He has a few words now, heard in his language in the ear with the earpiece and the foreign language in the other.  Luckilly the sentences were all pretty short.  Can he put them together?  The grammar is almost certainly wrong, and he doubts he can keep more than a dozen words in his mind without writing them down, but...

"[you're] [speaking] [here].  Ara'Vine [speaking] [there]."  He waves over in the distance, to indicate a very far way away.  

"Ara'Vine," he gestures at his ears.  Ears, ears.  One has a fancy piece of jewlery on it.  "[here]-[speaking] [you're]." 

This seems to be out of the guard's depth. He turns around and calls out, "Captain! There's a newcomer!"

He doesn't leave the post, though, or indicate that Ara'Vine is allowed to pass; instead, he continues eyeing him suspiciously.

Hmm.  He takes the moment to enter into a quick shapeshifting trance, just long enough to transcribe the few words onto his arm in tattoo before he forgets them.  He just needs a couple more...

A few minutes later, another man comes up to the gate. He’s fitter, and his clothes are obviously newer and better fit, even if they aren’t up to the standards of postindustrial textiles. He double-takes when he sees Ara’Vine, but continues forward gamely.

“What brings you to this town?”

Not very useful words.  He hates not being able to speak; that was the whole reason he traded his favorite mask for the earpiece in the first place.

This is already embarrassing but he might as well keep going long enough to figure out the right way to introduce himself in this language.  If not, this is just going to happen again the next time he encounters people.  While he's certainly more than happy to go live in the forest and not deal with people at all, the question of where he is is going to bother him.  

He tries a new tactic.  He puts his hands in front of him as makeshift puppets, and takes off the earpiece to put on his left hand.  The right one makes a yapping gesture and the left nods in understanding.  They switch off, and it's the left one yapping while the newly-earring'd right one nods.  They switch off again.  Then, Ara'Vine holds it up to his own ear, and tries to indicates the the Captain should confirm that he understands the meaning of the puppet show.

"The fact that you have the... jewelry, means its your job to understand languages? Even ones you can't pronounce?"

Okay, those words are slightly more useful.  He tries again, still with terrible grammar and pronounciation, but hopefully the right words.  

"Jewelry to understand languages.  You jewlery to understand Ara'Vine speaking.  Ara'Vine jewelry to understand you speaking."

He does the swap gesture a few more times, than offers the earpiece and indicates that the Captain should put it on.  It's intricate, and composed of what looks like electrum but with a wierd glint of red-violet.

Dubiously, the man takes it from Ara’Vine. He says something unintelligible, then puts it on with some trepidation.

When Ara'Vine speaks, the man can hear a translated version of the words in the ear with the earpiece.  

"That's a translation artifact.  Whoever wears it can understand foreign languages.  We'll need to trade it back and forth to converse. 

"My name's Ara'Vine.  I was brought to the forest nearby from the deserts of Soth by some kind of unfamiliar magic.  I don't know where I am.  I came to this town to ask to see a map, get directions and other information, trade for supplies.  I'll also need to get some paper and help making a phrase-book I can use to avoid this kind of confusion until I can learn the language here."

With what he wanted to say out of the way, he asks for the earpiece back so he can get a reply.

The man jumps when he hears it actively translating, and says something in reply. It takes them a moment to catch on that Ara’Vine isn’t understanding him without the earpeice. He takes it off, and hands it back; when Ara’Vine has it back on, he says that the village is called Darsai, in the northeast Earth Kingdom, and that he has never heard of a spirit doing that. He also says that there are a couple of merchants who would probably let him see a map but that he didn’t think they had any paper salesmen at the moment.

He nods, then offers the earpiece again.  

"I can write a few things on my arms.  The most important thing to have is how to tell people that the earpiece is a translator we'll need to swap it back and forth.

"I'm interested in hearing about Darsai, and the Earth Kingdom."