"I think I was told he is 'even worse', though I don't know that worse is the right word, I found it charming apart from my concern that he was going to drive himself into some kind of genuinely inconvenient poverty over kanji."

"He might? But I think he'll endorse having done it. - anyway, my father is very similar and even - moreso, if you like that better."

"I do. Probably I should teach them disjoint things and they should then teach each other those things. Like Bittorrent for language education."

"I don't know what Bittorrent is but that's the best way to manage the debt, yeah."

"Bittorrent is a way to transmit computer files so that the person with the full original file doesn't overtax their bandwidth - sorry, I'm trying to cut down on loanwords - throughput capacity? - on sending every piece of the file to every recipient separately. It's mostly efficient in situations where huge numbers of people might want the file and the original sharer might stop participating but it's otherwise similar to the language learning model I just described."

"How many languages do you know anyway?"

"Depends on how you count dialects. Dozens, though - uh, as a gesture at order of magnitude, I'm not claiming divisibility by twelve - I took a lot of summons."

"That must be really cool. Do you find some easier to think in than others, or anything like that?"

"I still default pretty firmly to my native language, English, in most situations where it's up to me, and I have a bunch of low confidence guesses about factors that could be involved in that, ranging from - it's not a range really, factors such as it being better equipped to express concepts I'm culturally inclined to, and my having had the opportunity to track its linguistic evolution more closely and immersively than with any other language I know. And I get the approximate fluency level of the summoner, so there are some I have at native quality and some I don't, or didn't until I worked on them the long way. This one I speak with native fluency and have a decently large vocabulary in considering that my summoner doesn't seem very bright - it probably helps that he's likely old enough to have picked up a lot of words even without being very bright. He couldn't read, so I had to learn that myself and am not as fast at it as I am in languages where I got a properly literate summoner to begin with. I read faster in English than most languages anyway probably because I'm naturally the sort of person who reads fast but that counts as an aspect of summoner fluency. Also I did learn a few demonic languages the long way, and those I have to practice - the ones I get by magic stick without it."

"Huh! Does getting summoned by someone who is a speedreader give you faster reading even if you didn't previously know the language?"

"I think an experiment on this may have been conducted with some... angels, I think it was angels. I would need to look it up to be confident of the details and my computer is so annoying to look at but I think I remember the results being something like people who learned explicit speedreading techniques did not confer additional literacy benefits but people who just read slowly or had dyslexia conferred diminished literacy benefits. They probably did this study with angels who didn't already speak whatever language they conducted it on, so they'd be able to control for the factor, but I do actually get a separate instance of a language every time someone who speaks it summons me because I get their exact dialect and accent, so insofar as the dialects and accents are mutually intelligible, I could get faster at reading for example Latin if someone who was particularly quick at reading it summoned me."

"Do you get anything other than languages? Skills or so forth?"

"Languages only. And it's not exact vocabulary, either, so I can't bootstrap up from learning their jargon or anything - we get the summoners' fluency level but geared towards the sort of things we generally learn words for, so I'd get, like, medical and musical and engineering terminology even from summoners whose only advanced vocabulary has to do with obscure lore from television shows and carpentry, but a daeva who was into botany would get botany words from the exact same summoner."

"Huh! And not names they know or anything like that, I take it."

"No - not usually, sometimes a name becomes embedded in an idiom and those we can get. Like, there's a physicist whose name gets used in English of a certain era to mean 'smart person', that could come through."

" - huh. That'd be pretty inconvenient for faeries, if faeries who've summoned someone were to become daeva when we die."

"I don't think it'd let you identify the physicist?"

"Then I guess it's probably fine."

"I hope the Italian bishop whose birth your brother may attend doesn't wind up holding debt over it. I suppose something weird like the debt snapping into place when he writes the piece might happen so we should keep an eye on that date."

"That makes sense. Is he the only person born around now who is - remembered in your time?"

"He's the one with the soonest birthday within hiking distance who is remembered for things he wrote in life that may have enough merit to them to count for anything. Also, Latin will take much less time to learn to read than Chinese."

"Sounds good."

Time passes. Cam practices speaking carefully, and works on the screen flicker problem, and concentrates on Latin when his-father's-son scrounges up more certificates, and swaps stories with Econ Faery Corendi, and writes up a proposal for how to let the prisoners exchange sex for better conditions without it being too coercive and gives it to Lohte though he's conscious that imposing this procedure on visitors to the court is probably too conspicuously weird for Lohte's taste, and he fills orders and accumulates a ton of certificates and begins to find it annoying to store them and tries to figure out if there's a way he can destroy small denominations and create certificates for large denominations in their place that won't wreck things, and after another subjective week has gone by, the brothers' dad is only ten sidereal minutes away (...so like yet another week), Corendi says something cute about the fourteenth adventure of the Limboites and Cam kisses him.

Surprised happy Econ Faery Corendi! Quite surprised. He giggles and bounces.

"- did I not telegraph that well?"