He's a fast learner.

Then they can also get into Cyrillic and Devanagari.

And eventually he has run through all of his certificates and thanks Cam very enthusiastically. "I'll get some more."

How are you getting this many? That was pretty fast.

"I sold most of my possessions."

That sounds unsustainable.

"Well, this is very important."

Is it? These languages won't be spoken in the forms I know them for a long time.

"Languages are just very important to me, personally, not because they're useful."

You're still going to want another revenue source if you want to learn many of them.

"I'm working on it."

I'm curious what your ideas are though!

"I'm writing something up about what we know of future technological progress and changes to human civilization, and I'm writing something up about how you got here and what things you have been observed to be capable of doing, and I am copying a lot of our books, and I have done some research on the plates and am writing a book about that, too."

On the plates?

"Yes! They're fascinating."

Giggle. It's called plastic. It's cheap and common in the future.

"Then we'd better trade it all before then, I guess."

I'm not sure it'll be cheap and common for faeries, it's not exactly naturally occurring.

"I determined that!"

Giggle. How?

"Animal and plant matter looks different than the plates look under a magnifying lens. And they're not stone or metal either."

How would you have distinguished pottery?

"I haven't studied pottery."

Well, it isn't pottery. Do fairies do pottery?

"Not really. I've heard of people sticking small things into humans' kilns but it's tricky to get right."