"Is something wrong?"

Marel shakes himself. "I was...surprised, that you still follow the same gods. Even after so long..." 

"Were you expecting the gods to change, or just the religion?"

"Both, I suppose. I didn't think the whole thing would survive this long." 

He scrolls through the wiki page some more, reads the part about how people seeing or speaking to the gods has become much less common since the end of the Ancient period, and snorts. 

"I guess the gods have changed some, if they don't speak to people as much. Either that or everyone else has changed."

"One or the other, yes." 

Marel looks around and blinks as something occurs to him. "Is this your bedchamber? I'm sorry, I've been very rude. Should we go somewhere else?" 

"We can go somewhere else if you don't mind me needing to explain you to my parents."

"That sounds like a good plan. Unless your parents are likely to react badly?" 

"I think they'll be shocked, but they'll deal with it? Probably it will go better if we tell them now than if I act like you're a secret. And presumably you'll want to interact with people in general sooner or later."

"Yes, you've been very helpful, but I would like to speak to more than one person in this new era eventually." 

Downstairs they go, then? 

Downstairs they go! Margaret explains the situation to her parents, who are initially suspicious that Marel is up to unspecified No Good but calm down eventually. And then they can hang out in the living room, which has the advantage of not being a bedroom and therefore having multiple chairs.

Marel sinks into one with a groan of relief before asking if he might trouble them for something to eat and drink. 

Mariga can totally raid the pantry on his behalf. "I don't know if any of this is like what you're used to. Anything in particular you're hoping we've got?"

"I must learn to adapt to the tastes of this new world sooner or later." 

While he eats, perhaps Mariga can teach him what these foods are called in Makazo, and also a bunch of other useful vocabulary words so they no longer have to communicate entirely through the translation app on her smartwatch. 

That's a good plan. She starts with nouns so they can do it by pointing, then goes back to the translation app for some verbs and uses that to explain basic grammar.

Marel is an attentive student, although not a brilliant one. Despite his obvious age, both his hearing and his short-term memory seem fully functional, and he asks intelligent questions. It seems as though he's had some practice learning languages. 

That's good, because Mariga has very little experience teaching him. But the translation app helps a lot. At one point she refers to her magic in an example sentence and realizes she hadn't previously mentioned she's a mage.

"How exciting! It has been...well, a long time, even in my memory, since I last met a new mage. There were so few of us, by the end..."