Well, the stove is a good design, which means it's not using up as much material, and the smoke goes right outside.

"I'm sure that'll be handy if you'd like to help. Most of it's not so hard, the big thing to always do is recording what's going bad soon and making sure we don't eat anything that'll make us sick, or lose too much to rot. Manipulating hot metal is real dangerous and finicky, that too- It's a skill I didn't appreciate until I was here. I was a machine operator, working a compressed air supply hub, practically an office worker, not a forger. I can't pull on anything that's still oxide, only elemental metals. Maybe in the days to come we can process some of the ore sitting in a pile up on the highlands. Firing up the forge always takes a whole pile of wood and charcoal, having magic for it instead will save time... I like doing things, making things. Feeling productive. It distracts me from the unfair situation. So I'll be happy to teach- Both of you, if you like."

"Heh, that's a classic task for a catfolk to do. Have you collected data on how long each kind of food usually keeps?

Melting the ore will probably still need a lot of fuel, just less. For the difficult metals, we get a whole bunch of catfolk heating the air in stages. What's a [debasement] and a [something-akin-to-pure] metal? What kind of eggs are you cooking? I ate a frogold egg once, and I've heard that fish eggs and bird eggs are good."

"Erebys, I'll follow you to the place with all the bugs, stay there, and join up with you again when you come back with more water, okay? I want to find out how much I can feed myself that way. If they make me sick, I think it's better for that to happen now while my health is still the best it's going to be for a while."

"Oh, good point, I can eat raw meat, including small animals that you might have been ignoring if they're too hard to prepare according to your dietary needs?"

To Lin: "Sure. Theo bakes bugs into protein bars sometimes, anyway, I imagine it'll help. And since you asked earlier, we do get some groundwater, but not enough for two people and a farm..."

"They're bird eggs! You can see the birds while we wait for this to finish if you like. Sometimes we'll eat them to keep the population stable too. I didn't like that at first, but where did my meat come from back home, eh? We feed them insects and sometimes rice or sago or nuts."

He stirs some rice.

"I suppose we could set up a bunch of little traps. You get mice and little lizards that way. We stopped bothering once we were fairly secure, though, this is more than enough farmland for two people. Or four. I'm not sure what you mean about the oxides and elements? Oxide is the material that metal usually is before you refine it, and elements are pure substances. How does your fire's heat work? If we can get temperatures hot enough to forge iron or steel that'd be grand. I've been working with copper mostly."

"Oh, the soft birds! Yeah, you get used to it."

"Huh? But 'oxide' and 'ore' are different words, as are 'pure' and 'element'? - I think something funny is happening with the translation. I'll talk with Lin when she gets back and see what she thinks." Also, what the hunger, they were just talking about all kinds of magic, and none of them remembered the magic translation. Suspicious.

"My fire makes air hot - hotter than it already is. To melt glass or copper I need a tube with flame all along it, which means there needs to be a way to open it up to touch the inner surface - I have to touch something to put a flame on it, but the flame will continue by itself as long as I'm awake and stay within one catlength, er, [20 meters]. The air goes through the tube and heats up and then heats up again and comes out as a glassflame. To melt iron and make steel, we use a really long tube that coils up on itself, with a group of catfolk to heat it, and more catfolk to drive a turbine to push the air through it, and then we have more turbines to blow cold air to prevent everything else from melting, and to blow air through the iron to make it into steel, and to keep everything clean."

Just in case Theo's presence is what allowed her to remember the magic translation, and she's going to forget as soon as she steps away, she looks around for something to take a note on. Does the stove have an opening she could reach into?  "My fire doesn't consume fuel or air, can I take over heating the stove?"

The stove is a packed-mud box with a hole at the bottom where the fire is, a few small holes letting air pass through to the top, and an open space in the middle with a few sticks serving as a rack. Four ceramic cookpots are sitting inside, mostly filling it. There's even a little copper door to mostly keep the heat in.

"Go ahead! Sometimes we want the smoke, for preserving meat, but not right now. Erebys might be upset she doesn't have an excuse to exercise by chopping wood." He rolls one of his eyes. "Hmm... I'm having trouble imagining it, let's draw some pictures in the dirt later? I have vague recollections of a blast furnace, which got iron-hot by burning coal and forcing air... Maybe I should try to make paper and ink again..."

"She can fight some more sharks, then."

Calsa beats out the fire with her palm, pushes the embers aside, and puts down catfire instead. If someone looked really closely, they might notice that the flames are arranged in the High Elvish logogram for 'language', but the purpose is not for someone to read it with their eyes; the purpose is for Calsa to either stay at least vaguely aware of what she did, or to forget and then notice that her fire went out, which will be startling for her - sustaining a single small fire is a kitten's game.

"Does [Water] have myths about each species having a secret second magic?"

"-Per species? Not really. There's myths about the secret universal magic that anyone can learn if they have the right kind of mind and teacher. I always thought those were just people rationalizing away things they don't understand as 'must be magic, somehow'."

"What kind of things can it supposedly do, anything at all? Our myths are per species, yeah, and not hard to learn, just hard to do.

Like, if a werewolf goes deep underground, completely surrounded by rock, and meditates for a long time, supposedly they can, well, survive without food and air, and also turn into a giant animal wolf that's made of stone. The story is that our planet is such a wolf, a hero from long ago. Similarly with catfolk, burning as much flame as possible all over our body and sustaining that will make us turn into a mythical species that we call an 'angel'" which is the same word as a real species on [Water], what are you playing at, mysterious translation magic? "and our sun is a really big one.

For other species... for mouselings, who control reed sculptures, it's more like how you said, with the 'right kind of mind and teacher', they can supposedly 'realize' that their body is just another sculpture, and according to some stories gain awareness of their 'real' body, and according to others, gain the ability to control an unlimited number of bodies and outlive their original one. Elves, who store memories, can become ghosts. Kitsune, who teleport, can duplicate themselves? Gnomunks, who store things, can store themselves and I'm not sure what's supposed to happen after that. Equartiers, who run fast, can time travel? Stuff like that."

"There's never any one specific thing. Usual things for the mythical over-magic to do are: Give you extra species magics, reverse old age, resurrect the dead, make people agree with you except it's not mind control for some reason, it's just you being really convincing- Stupid caveat in my opinion it's still mind control if you're using words to do it- Make you able to come back from dying if a special object survives, make you really really good at some skill or another, make you able to change your species and body, make you able to change other people's species and bodies, do arbitrary magic just by wanting hard enough, turn into a great spirit that can hear people thinking about them and do magic anywhere people are thinking about them... Too many different things, and none of them often enough to be the thing."

Something that makes people agree but isn't mind control, like, mm, magically changing the words they hear? No, if the magical translation was distorting words that blatantly, why would it let her know it was capable of that? Maybe to make her give up trying to outwit it? But that would imply that it's worried that she can indeed outwit it!

Maybe it thought she might respond by avoiding verbal communication entirely, and developing a whole new way to communicate that she thinks is safe, and this would be bad somehow, worse than trusting the unsafe speech?

Wait, why is she assuming that the translation is acting against her? Well, because it was trying to hide. But maybe it's just scared. Maybe it has parts, some helpful and some adversarial.

"Are the soft birds, the quail, close enough to look at while you cook? Within [20 meters]?"

"Hmm..."

He closes his eyes for a moment. "The metal latch on the gate is I think twelve [meters] away? If I'm understanding [meters] right."

-And hesitation, but he says, "Erebys is going to want to try and leave again, isn't she? That's a real sore spot for me, but I'll be thinking about it."

- She can talk to the translation spirit later. It was rude of her to try and dash out suddenly anyway.

"From what I know of her, probably, yeah. She said you didn't like her doing that, but I don't really know why, I mean, is it because you don't want to be alone, or don't want to think about the situation, or because she's endangering you...?" Closer to not wanting to think about the situation, it seems, but Calsa doesn't know what exactly bothers him about it. For some people, the best way to get them talking is to talk first and give them something to disagree with.

"It's just... Hard. Complicated. And it's not all one feeling. I'll think about it while you say hi to the birds."

"Alright!" Off to look at these birds.

Theo can sense metal, so she sits inside the cage, operating the latch to open the gate and close it behind her - she's never seen an animal farm before but she's used to keeping entrances closed in Kef.

The birds do look soft. (And smell delicious.)

"So, hi. If you can understand words, can I talk to you? Do I have to be talking to someone? Hi birds, you don't need to hide from me. Changing words is scary, but where I'm from, lots of people have scary magic, but we can be friends. The translation is really useful! What else can you do? I guess you can't reply unless someone talks to me. Or can I write on the ground and read it back?" She brushes a hand over the ground and writes 'here is some writing' in fire.

It's a pretty big cage, big enough to stand in, lined with individual little nesting boxes at one side. The birds are definitely a little scared of her, but not as much as wild ones would be. They've had a couple generations to chill out about people-shaped handlers. They gather near a feeder at her entry. Wait, she's not bringing food?

(If she squints really hard at her own writing she can... Get an impression of how to write the same thing in some new languages?)

She didn't know she was supposed to bring food, sorry, birds! 

Huh, can she tell anything about the new languages? Do they write with alphabets? Do they have sounds like in Sotalese? Do they require a different word order?

There's one that sticks out. It has sounds, and they seem to be the sounds Erebys and Theo have been using. It's subject-verb-object but not very strict about it, and seems to be phonetically written. Another is definitely written with characters but the grammar is nearly entirely ambiguous. It has no pronunciation attached to it. There also appears to be modern Elvish in there, and a different subject-verb-object language that feels related to the first one. It's a somewhat difficult mental trick to try to deliberately focus on any of these, though.