"Huh.

Is food the only thing that causes your kind of magic entanglement or are there others?"

"Other one is names. Nicknames don't do it no matter how much you use them, though, I just happened to find out that it's different here before I gave anyone my usual nickname."

"Conveniently no one'd ever share that anyway."

"Yes, it's meant I haven't had to go around warning people as soon as I meet them."

"I have a bunch more questions but I don't want to make you nervous. I am not trying to figure out how to activate the horrible your-world magic entanglement thing, I just like learning about systems of magic. Does forcibly feeding someone something work? Can you detect whether food has a claim on it when you see it?"

"Yes and no respectively."

"That sounds really stressful."

"Food claims are pretty weak when they're between people who natively work like me, which is why I'll eat plants I find there."

"Is there some reason to think they'd be stronger when people who work like us get involved?"

"They're stronger on mortals. Also when the person I'm entangled with gave me a drink it worked."

"Huh, interesting. Okay. "

"In principle I can distribute unusually strong food claims but I can't actually do that right now."

"Why not?"

"Don't dare go to my tree yet."

"Your tree?"

"Leaflets start inside tree trunks. Our trees are ours. And mine bears fruit."

"That's really neat."

"Yes. But he knows where it is."

"Right now you're fast, though, and he isn't."

"He won't be expecting that in particular but he collects sorcerers who are a lot better than me and he's very smart."

Nod.

"Maybe with being fast I'll gamble on it after twenty winters instead of a hundred."

"He sounds unfortunate."

"Uh-huh."

He doesn't know how to say other comforting things! He's never met someone who needed comfort before.