"I can't read this yet," Cam calls through the door.

Someone opens the door. "Oh! I'm sorry to bother you. The note was just to let you know how to get in touch with us, should you want to. Can you make things appear on our side of the door?"

"Yes, though my aim won't be great."

"That's fine. If there's something there we'll take it as a sign to come on in. Is everything okay right now?"

"Think so. Though if it won't fuck too much with whatever mess of a debt situation I'm in at the moment I would like someone to teach me the alphabet, I can probably go from there without too much trouble."

"Oh! Yeah, sure, I can do that, it's very simple -"

It is phonetic. There are also clever correspondences between the letter shape and where in your mouth the sound is made but very few people find that helpful in learning it.

It might be useful during one very specific stage of acquiring fluency but mostly nah. "Cool, do you have book recommendations?"

There's mostly the science books written by the head of their court.

"I suppose you would have a little trouble inventing the novel. Thank you."

"Of course." He leaves.

Cam reads science books.

This is a long and admittedly speculative argument that the Earth goes round the sun. This is an examination of the properties of gravity at different sizes. This is about the surface tension of water. This is a very speculative attempt to characterize how human societies might work. This is an incredibly precise, detailed and remarkably accurate account of how human languages around the world developed and are presently spoken.

This will keep Cam occupied for a fairly long time.

Then eventually the human will wake up. She looks around hurriedly to see if there's anything she needs to do.

"Good morning! I have found my notes on how to deal with you recovering from malnourishment. - but I still don't know how dishes get washed around here. I will, uh, summon a faery to ask about that, I guess." They didn't specify what should be a sign to come in so he hooks a light over the top of the door, which will respond to his chip on only about two seconds' delay when he wishes to toggle it. On it goes.

They come by a little while later.

"Can I help you?"

"Hey! I can make things but cannot disappear things. This has implications for dishes, which I've so far been avoiding by mostly making things that do not require dishes, but that's annoying. What's the state of the art around here on getting dishes washed, would the court like to gradually accumulate any particular sort of dish, etcetera?"

"Oh! Uh, some people wash them as their chore, it won't be much trouble to add more, if you do something pretty and foreign in interesting materials that'd be great."

"Cool, where should we leave them to get picked up and if there begin to be too many where should we pick up preexisting ones to put food on?"

"You can leave them at the door and we can bring clean ones there. Is the door hard for you to reach? We could come in and put them on a table but we'd usually try not to when your room is in use."

"I am unable to travel even very short distances under my own power at this time. You could knock?"

"All right!"

"Thanks!"

And he makes Auda her fortified breakfast porridge in a sparkly blue bowl, which is made of plastic, because it is too eleventh century for plastic to be tacky.

She is quietly delighted about her porridge and her bowl.

"What is the debt nightmare situation at the moment?"