"Yeah."

Sigh. "Thanks. I might go sing for a while."

She reaches out almost as if to touch her, stops three inches short as if hitting a hard wall, smiles faintly. "See you later."

"Yeah. Love you."

"Love you."

Love you. "...is there anything I should be doing, or, I don't know, books -?"

"There are books. I can have someone show you where - you can read any language too?"

"Probably."

"Okay. If not you can ask her to read things to you."

"Thanks."

"I can imagine this is horrible and overwhelming."

"Yeah."

"Let me know if there's anything we can do."

"Under the circumstances you're being really hospitable."

"The circumstances being 'we're mass murdering scourges of the continent who kidnapped you because you have interesting magic'?"

"...I wouldn't have said that."

"Okay. But you can, I don't want you to think you have to appease us to be safe here."

"It sounds like most of the problems around here are because oaths are a thing. I'm not really used to that and haven't totally decided how to think about it."

"They certainly don't help anything. ...wait, no Elves in your home world?"

"No, just humans, the whole planet."

"Most people from worlds without Elves don't have the habit of keeping their thoughts private. It's easy to pick up but has to be taught -"

"...keeping their thoughts private?"

"Osanwë is communicative, not hostile, you can't use it to read anything that the person has mentally demarcated as private. But people who've never met Elves don't usually already know how to do that. But all your thoughts are private, just like if you'd grown up somewhere where osanwë was a thing. And the mind-reading artifacts can't work the same way, from what you said of them..."

"...they don't."

"They wouldn't really work for the purpose they're using them for if they did."