Leo shakes his head.

...only having yes or no questions is terrible. 

"Do you eat?" 

Leo nods his head and then starts nosing Sasha's backpack.

He opens his backpack, which has two textbooks, one history and one math, several notebooks, a binder, and one well-worn copy of The Shining. 

Leo considers this and noses The Shining.

Sasha opens it to the first page and shows it to Leo. 

Leo considers the page thoughtfully and then points to "hired help."

"....you're hired help?" 

Leo sits, lifts one of his paws, and makes a vague wiggly paw gesture.

What does that mean what does any of this mean. 

"Okay," he says, and then says the thing he really should have asked when he realized Leo understood English, which is "Is there magic in the world?" 

Leo nods.

Alright. That was kind of a forgone conclusion given who he was asking, but even so. 

"...are you the only magic thing near here?" 

Leo shakes his head VERY ENTHUSIASTICALLY.

...on the one hand, "in the stories the ordinary high school student who stumbles upon a magical talking animal and thereby uncovers a secret world turns out to be an elven prince" is a dumb way to make predictions about the world. 

On the other hand, he is in fact an ordinary high school student who's just stumbled upon a magical animal who can understand human language and thereby uncovered a secret world. 

"Am I a magic thing?" 

Leo shakes his head.

He does his best not to be a little disappointed. 

"...I'm going to find you a dictionary so we can communicate," he says, and puts Leo down and looks under the bed for the children's dictionaries that were handed out in elementary school and he doesn't think he ever bothered to get rid of. 

Leo nods.

He did not in fact ever bother to get rid of it. He sits back on the bed and opens the dictionary for Leo to look at. 

Leo eventually manages to convey the message "give", "dog", "type", "orders."

...dog-type orders. What are dog-type orders. Sasha has never had a dog. 

"Sit," he tries. 

Leo sits. 

That was not really very impressive.

It wasn't, but it's at least evidence that he was right about what 'dog type orders' meant. 

"Stay," he tries. 

Leo turns to stone.

"— stop staying!" 

Leo turns back into a dog. He looks confused.