".....huh. Okay..."

"So that's how computers talk. It's all - you'd be close if you imagine tiny depressions in metal which a little reader can read and register as a nod or a head-shake. If a book is on a computer, it's there with eight little yes-or-nos for each character. If a picture is on a computer, it's made of tiny squares with yes-or-nos specifying the color of each square. Eight yes-or-nos is called a byte. A thousand-twenty-four bytes is called a kilobyte. A thousand kilobytes is called a megabyte. A thousand megabytes is called a gigabyte, and a thousand gigabytes a terabyte, and a thousand terabytes a petabyte, and a thousand petabytes an exabyte, and that computer of yours fits about fifty of those."

"That's really clever!"

"Isn't it? Computers are so cool. I think your translation here should be better."

"Thanks!"

Read read.

He writes Boots a letter.

Eventually: "So no one is likely to bother us here, but it's not a good place to build a house or anything. You probably wouldn't be happy in a human dwelling?"

"Not usually, no."

"Okay... there's a hilly area around the city we dropped the others off in which isn't built up and might have a convenient tucked-away spot to put a house that suits you in it. It wouldn't be convenient to move large amounts of stuff to and fro, but that's without teleporting."

"Okay! Are we likely to attract enemies, should I try to make it safe?"

"Hm, what do you mean by safe?"

"I could surround the whole thing with invisible walls that don't let people through, or I could have very visible walls, or I could have it mostly underground in case - technologies you probably don't have yet - get tried that could knock down above ground buildings."

"We don't have very much technology but it's maybe a good idea to be prepared as though we did in case there's weird embroideries involved."

"Okay. We will have a underground palace with biofilters and state-of-the-art surveillance."

"I wasn't sure you could do underground - how does that work? If you teleport out the inside of a hill won't the outside of it collapse?"

"Yeah, I'd teleport out the whole hill and then put the building in and then put hill in around it. If I were very clever I could teleport out a bit at a time while I added foundations for the building but that'd be harder and I don't actually do this much so it's probably better to just clear it out and put it in. People won't have long to notice it's missing."

"How long is not long?"

"If I plan it all out before I start, twenty minutes?"

"Okay. Probably best to do it at night but that should be safe as long as we check for anyone out stargazing or something."

Nod. "I can do illusions but they never come out quite right for anyone except Loki."

"Yeah, I read that. It sounded like it might be easier to make it look like the hill is exactly how it was to begin with, if you look at it from a few angles first?"

"Yeah. I can go invisible and fly all around it."

"That should do just fine."

"Now?"

"...yeah, it's dark enough." She sends him a mental image of the hills.