After a while, there is a kobold. She's a very quiet kobold, and doesn't come in through the door, so it's entirely likely that Sadde doesn't even notice her until she happens to look up and see a new person sitting on a stool a little ways down the bar, watching curiously, the napkin on the bar near her apparently unnoticed.

Sadde has finished talking to the bar. She is now drinking something chocolate-y and looking around, with an almost hungry look in her eyes. Her gaze eventually settles on the adorable thing. She scoots over to the adorable thing. She doesn't coo, but it takes all she has. "Hello!"

The kobold tenses up as Sadde starts approaching, but then relaxes and grins. "Hi." "Am not sure of..." She pauses to consider something. "Let me try... okay, that seems to work, good. Interesting translation magic you've got here."

"Not me! The bar's. She's a really great bar." She notices the napkin, and points to it. "Look! This is how she talks."

The kobold blinks, and then examines the napkin. "Huh. Well, hello, then, and I'm sorry I didn't realize you were a person; I have my own magic to get food and drinks with if I want any, but it's nice of you to offer. And... am I right that the translation magic is just in the air or something here, and you didn't cast anything on me?" She reads the resulting napkin and nods. "Thank you."

"So, you have the privilege of being the very first person from another universe I've met! Want to tell me your story?"

She takes a moment to consider. "Well, I'm a kobold, to start off - I don't know if you might've heard of us before, we usually keep to ourselves. I personally am also a Speaker and a mage; I help my tribemates work with people from other tribes when they need to do that, and I know a lot about teleportation and a little bit about a few other kinds of magic. And I've done a bit of diplomacy, too, but I'm not sure I'm going to keep working on that - the teleportation magic is new, and it's much easier to enspell my tribemates to be able to teleport away from danger than to stop other kinds of people from being dangerous in the first place."

"Where I'm from kobolds are fictional. And more... lizard-y than you? Wow I have a lot of questions right now and I think if I just list you all of them you'll forget them by the time I'm done one second." She reaches into her robes for her notepad and pen and starts writing. "I'll start with: what's the social organisation where you're from like? You can assume I'm totally ignorant, I don't mind relearning details that I may already know from my world."

"Of kobolds?" She thinks for a moment, and then directs a question to the bar: "I can tell you have a lot of magic here; will any of it let someone go to my world? ... All right, thank you." She returns her attention to Sadde.

"We live in tribes; sort of medium-sized ones, maybe a hundred people each. Every tribe has a chief, who chooses where the tribe spends the year in between meetups and who's in charge of keeping an eye on the whole tribe and making sure there aren't any big problems; they're allowed to order people around, to do that, but if they do that when there isn't a good reason, people will start leaving and they might not have a tribe to lead at all any more. Most tribes have a Speaker - it used to be that every tribe had at least one - who helps the chief and other tribe members deal with people from other tribes, since most kobolds don't talk and it's hard to communicate with someone you don't know very well without that. And then all tribes have mages - our mages mostly do defense, we don't have any straightforward attacking magic - and hunters and parents and crafters and things. A lot of people don't specialize very much - everyone gathers, no matter what other jobs they do - but it's very unusual that I'm both a Speaker and a mage, since both of those jobs need special training."

She ticks the first question off her list while she adds a bunch of new ones. "That's fascinating! I have questions about that and I'll get to them. But one of my old ones: are there other sapient species where you come from? Usually fiction back home that involves kobolds also has other sapient species, like humans or elves or dwarves or a bunch of things."

The kobold's mood darkens noticeably when Sadde mentions elves. "Yeah, we have all of those. The forest I live in has elves," she makes a face, "and tigerfolk, mostly; we get a few other kinds of animalfolk passing through every once in a while, too, and one of the other tribes has a goblin as their Speaker. And there are humans and dwarves, which don't live near us and I've never seen one, and some of the stories I've heard have demons and were-creatures and gods and things in them, but I don't know if those are real."

"Wow. I'm having a hard time getting used to magic being real in my world, yours looks so much bigger! So much stuff! Okay, questions about that later, though I won't ask about elves if you don't want me to." Apparently she did notice, then. "How does this teleportation magic work?"

The kobold nods appreciatively at the bit about the elves, then considers for a second. "It's probably easiest to just show you." She unwinds a loop of twine from where it was serving as a bracelet and closes her eyes to focus on it for a few seconds. At the end, she nods, opens her eyes, and spreads the twine to show that the inside of the loop is now a window to a dim - though not completely dark, there must be a source of light someplace nearby - cave. "That's a portal; if it was big enough to walk through it'd take you to my experimenting cave. I can do direct teleportation, too; enspell a thing or a person to teleport to a particular place under particular conditions."

"Oooh! That looks so interesting! And you can do cross-universe stuff too? Bar said time is paused back home when I'm not there."

"Yup! It doesn't usually do anything to time, though, that must be something about this place. And I can't go to places I haven't been before except by luck - if I'm making a portal that'll go to a random place, I can set what I want in terms of light and temperature and air and things, but it's like... if you're traveling in a cave and you're going someplace you know, you know what turns to make to get there, but if you make different turns from that, you'll definitely wind up someplace but you don't know where until you get there? It's like that, kind of, except I have to pick all the turns when I cast the spell, without getting to see what each part does."

"Can you teach me?" she asks, the other questions—not forgotten, but neglected for the time being.

"I can teach it, but someone with my kind of magic - even just teleportation - can do a lot of damage to the people around them, particularly if those people aren't expecting it and don't know how to defend themselves. If there's a problem you're thinking about trying to solve, I might be able to help without actually making you a mage, though."

"Oh, damage's bad. Why can it do a lot of damage? Do I need to learn a lot of non-teleportation-related things or do I get the potential to learn those things or something?"

"...let me start from the beginning, I've gotten a little bit ahead of myself. With my kind of magic, I can cast on things, like the twine, but I can also cast on people, and casting on people is a little bit different. With something that isn't living, as soon as the thing is broken," she demonstrates by peeling a strand of fluff off of the twine, "the spell breaks, too." She holds it up for Sadde to see, and then wraps it around her wrist again while she talks. "But with people or animals, that doesn't happen; if I cast a spell on someone, it's on them forever. And the spell is whatever I set it to be - a lot of my tribemates have spells where if they want to be back in our cave, they teleport there, neat as you please, but they only go where they want to because that's what I made the spell to do; I could just as easily cast one that, say, sent them to the edge of a cliff when they wanted to go home, or back to the cave every time they sneezed. I wouldn't, ever, but there's nothing in the magic that would stop me."

"Oh. Yeah, that's worrying. And I understand you probably can't trust me with that. There wasn't any particular problem I wanted to solve with that, though, I just really wanted to be able to teleport places. And have more, different magic, that's always a plus. Oh, yeah, I have magic as well—and time's paused so I guess I can cast it here!" She reaches inside her robes for her wand, swishes it and flicks, calls "Wingardium Leviosa!" and now her chocolate milk's levitating. "Technically I'm going to learn how to apparate—that's personal teleportation—when I'm seventeen, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't work across universes."

Nod. "It's not impossible that you could convince me to teach you, but, yes, my kind of magic isn't the sort of thing it's a good idea to teach to strangers. I could cast spells on you, if you wanted, though, that's safer at least from my perspective." She peers at the floating milk. "That's pretty neat. My kind of magic mostly can't do effects at a distance like that."

"That's interesting! Mine's mostly effects at a distance." She lowers the milk. "There are exceptions, like Lumos," wand tip lighted up, "Nox," and no longer, "but most stuff is like the levitation spell. Bublio," she calls and soap bubbles that don't burst when you poke them start leaving the tip of her wand. "A lot of the stuff is hexes and jinxes, though, and most of the non-distance stuff is Transfiguration." She touches her wand to her glass of milk, and it slowly turns into a wooden cup.

The kobold looks briefly displeased at the soap bubbles, but when blowing a puff of air at one turns out to be effective at making it shoo, she relaxes again. "Yeah, your magic is very different than mine - it's a lot more active while it's working; mine just kind of exists. ...can you see it directly, actually? I can, yours and mine and the background stuff, I have a spell for that."

"See it directly? No, not really. I mean, some magic has visible effects, like Lumos and Bublio" (she doesn't cast them this time) "but most spells don't. What does it look like?"

"Enspelled things appear to glow, basically. Different sorts of magic can have different colors, depending on how the spell is cast - magic-detection is one of the kinds of magic I don't know as much about, so the colors aren't very meaningful, but it's still useful sometimes. And for your magic, I can see how it goes from your wand and moves around the thing you're casting on, or stays with the things it's made."