"It's odd how rarely I have to specify."

"You don't have any very indistinct brothers?"

"The babies don't have much personality yet but presumably will grow it."

"I don't remember you mentioning babies here when I was interested in meeting faery children!"

"Oh, they're a couple hundred years old, subjectively."

"It takes that long to break the habit of calling them babies?"

"A nickname like that won't accumulate any entanglement."

"Oh."

"Also for most of us it stuck until there was a one-word better descriptor."

"A better one-word descriptor like what?"

"Politician, singer, explorer, economist, linguist - or sometimes we just call him 'our father's son', which will make sense once you meet our father."

"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."