"Yes. Athrai are strange and alien. They do... strange things."

She nods, frowning.

"Do you know why?"

He shrugs helplessly. "No. People don't know why athrai do things."

She nods again.

"... But you mentioned there was another, non-creepy magic I could learn."

"Yes. It's not athra magic, it's..." he waves vaguely around, at the windowless room lit by glowing rocks, at the walls and the lifeless wasteland beyond them. "This is not Haela. I don't know where this is. But it has useful non-creepy magic, and I learned some."

"... Could I learn some too?" ventures Yvette, a little shyly.

"Yes! But - hmm. More vocabulary first, maybe..."

He fetches a boxy backpack-looking thing from where it hangs on a peg on the wall. There are about ten of them on the row of pegs, and more pegs without any backpacks. He carries this one to the large wooden table in the middle of the room, puts it down, unlatches and opens it. Inside: two books strapped securely to the lid, something that looks like it might be a bundle of paintbrushes, a couple of perfectly flat round metal plates, and a lot of glassy globes tucked securely into brown leather containers.

"Don't do this," he says, touching the surface of one of the globes, a turquoisey-blue one. "It's not - good. I can, I have athra magic."

"Don't do that, it's dangerous, it's not safe?" she offers, frowning. "And I won't. Though - what happens if I do?"

"Yes. And I don't know, I'm safe!"

He digs around in the box-pack and produces a pair of heavy leather gloves, which he hands to her. The leather is dark brown, with a faint silvery sheen.

"It's safe with those."

And then he detaches one of the books from the lid and flips it open to a sort of diagram, and takes out the small metal plate and puts it on the table, and gets one of the paintbrushes - it ends not in bristles but in a sort of blunt cone-shaped blue sponge - and 'dips' the paintbrush in one of the glass balls, somehow, right through its seemingly solid surface, and carefully copies out the diagram.

When he's done, the ink-or-whatever vanishes from the surface of the plate, and a big pile of identical squares of fine white linen appears on the table in front of it.

She puts on the gloves, because that just seems to be the obvious thing to do, and watches with fascination.

"Oh, that's really cool," she pronounces, delighted.

"It is!" beams Tiro. "That's what this magic does."

He clears the linen off the table and flips to a different diagram and produces a similarly-sized pile of glowing rocks like the ones already scattered around the room.

"So you paint the diagram and get the item. How do you get the globes? And can you invent new diagrams?"

"Inventing new diagrams is dangerous. Don't do it," he says. "You paint the diagram, you get the item. Bad diagram, bad item. The globes come from..." hand-wobbly insufficient-vocabulary gesture.

"I will not do it," she agrees. "Uh - I don't know how to get you your missing vocabulary. Point me in a direction you want words in?"

"Hmm..."

He takes one of the spheres out of its holder. He goes outside, beckoning her to follow.

She follows, of course, leaving her linen blankets behind. Thank you, linen blankets, but Yvette doesn't require your services right now.

There's a bunch of weird plants - is that a bush growing little rolled-up strips of raw bacon? It totally is - but he leads her to a particular weird plant, whose cuplike rolled-up leaves are full of a blue liquid the same colour as the sphere. He tips out a few drops out of one of the leaves, and catches them on the sphere, which seems to absorb them seamlessly; he rubs the place where they fell with his fingertip to demonstrate that the liquid no longer remains.

".... Huh," comments Yvette. "Okay, two questions. Is that plant safe for me to touch, and does that other plant over there grow bacon?"

"The plant is safe; the," he points at the inside of a half-filled leaf, "is not safe. And yes. Yes it does."

"Excellent," says Yvette, delighted. "Now, are there other unsafe plants in here that I should stay away from?"

"Just these ones." He points out a couple more of them, scattered up and down the hill with their pitcher-leaves in varying states of fullness.

Yvette nods, mentally mapping their locations so she can stay away from them. For safety. Maybe they should have their own hill section? 'The section Yvette is not allowed to touch.'

"And these are from the diagrams, too?"

"Yeah, all these plants are from the diagrams."

"And some of them grow bacon. How many diagrams do you have?"

"Books full of them."