"I really want to find out what they were for."

"If I stared at them for a while—like I did at the wall—I might find out, unless they were meant to interact with other things that aren't around anymore, but people would find it weird if I started just staring at them for too long.—although now that I can generate my own mana I guess I could just make us invisible and do the staring."

"And then you'd know!"

"But that'd be a few more hours of staring which is bound to bore you out of your skull."

"But then we'd learn things! I don't know, is there anything for me to do while you stare at things for hours since you're clearly going to do it so often?"

"Well I have books? Not many, though, I don't usually need entertainment on these trips because the process itself is incredibly entertaining to me and I didn't pack expecting company, however delightfully surprised I am by having acquired it."

"I can learn to read! That sounds occupying."

"I wonder if you'll be able to do it instantaneously like you did the language."

"Probably not."

"Not even after I taught you the alphabet?"

"Well. I guess we'll see!"

She giggles and grabs a book from her backpack and starts teaching Ruava the alphabet—they have a few more minutes before they reach the huge eggs.

Learning! Yay!

Indeed! It is a phonetic alphabet with mostly consistent sounds, except some of them are kinda weird and combine in not very intuitive ways. Words using that alphabet always have only a single pronunciation, however, so it's never ambiguous.

"Oh, this is way better than some of the other alphabets I know," she says.

"Yeah, there are some other alphabets used by a couple of languages in the north that are way more complicated. And the arcanist constructed language's alphabet is really really simple and straightforward."

"The arcanist constructed language?"

"Oh I didn't tell you about that, did I. So remember how arcanists imbue words and gestures and things with magic? And how it costs less to create incantations that have something to do with the spells themselves? So they invented this one language in which most mainstream spells are made."

"What good does that do them?"

"Can create short, cheap spells that they don't accidentally cast whenever they say the word 'light' or 'fire' or 'flight' or whatever."

"Ooh, clever."

"Yeah. But for the effect to work the language needs to actually be spoken so lots of papers are written in that language and classes at universities are taught in that language and—get this—every noun and verb, and several other words, have two versions, so people can choose to take one for spells and the other for common conversation."

...she giggles.

"It's really interesting, talking in that language. People actively fight fashions because they make spells more expensive for everyone, so you never know what specific arrangement of words someone's chosen until you talk to them."

"What do you mean, 'fashions'?"