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In the middle of self-recriminations about preparing stupid spells, Blai appears in a cemetery.
It's dark, so it takes him a Light spell to notice that it's a cemetery, but while the range of headstone styles is unfamiliar the spacing and the inscriptions give it away. It doesn't look super actively haunted, so it's not an emergency, but he keeps one hand on his holy symbol and one on his mace as he picks his way across the grounds, looking for buildings or something.
"But he might want to wait until he has all the books copied first, to maximize time spent reading while he understands the language."
Rupert returns, carrying a bulky object that he sets down on the coffee table and plugs into a wall outlet. It has an obvious spot where you'd put a book, a sort of cradle made of two flat rectangles joined at a right angle, and above that a part that looks a bit like an angular bird's head staring down at the book-cradle from atop its spindly neck, all made of some strange matte black material. He pokes it a bit and it makes some widgety noises; satisfied, he turns and gestures for the book.
Blai hands it over. "So what I gave you is Chelish, which is - with some effort - mutually intelligible with standard Taldane, but the books are all in standard Taldane. If he mostly wants the Share Language for reading he might want me to give him Taldane, which will make for a slightly interesting mix of vocabulary if we try to all have a conversation."
"I'm sure we'll manage with some combination of available languages. Though I expect once he has the language he'll want to focus pretty sharply on reading the books."
Nod nod. "To be exact the Acts were written in Taldor proper, back when it covered most of the continent including Cheliax, so it's more archaic than diverged relative to Chelish or modern Taldane, and the handbook's from Lastwall and in their dialect of Taldane which more closely resembles the form in the Acts perhaps deliberately, and the chess book claims to have been collected in the River Kingdoms which will have taken different linguistic influences than either."
"I see. Well, he has plenty of practice puzzling out texts in various mixes of related languages, so whatever reasonable starting point you can give him should work fine."
Meanwhile Rupert is gently laying out the book in the cradle and fiddling with his widget. It makes noises and lights while he flips carefully through each page one by one.
It looks like an appropriately gentle widget. Share Language lasts 24 hours, there's not much reason to wait; Blai holds out his hand.
His response is pretty clearly along the lines of "oh? Well, all right." He pauses the operation of the machine and turns to take the hand.
"Fascinating!" he says in the target language, and turns back to his work, now skimming the pages with a glance or two each as they go by. "May I make copies of your other books as well once I've finished with this one?"
Eliza sets a steaming cup of tea on a coaster by Blai's chair; a faint scent of ginger wafts from its surface. She takes her and Rupert's cups over to where she was sitting before she got up to pour.
"It's still pretty hot," she warns when she sees him going for it, but if he blows on it a bit he can get ginger into him without taking any damage.
Besides being hot, it is also tea, and ginger. It does its job about as well as you'd expect.
Elizabeth is sipping her own tea, which has milk in it, a bit less cautiously.
The milk presumably cooled it down.
Is there a chessboard in the room already or should he make one, while the widget works on his books.
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