"No, or I'd know a lot more about the diagram magic."

"Oh, that - makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I can teach you to read English."

"Good!"

He goes and gets pens and ink and paper. And copies of all three of his recipe-diagram books.

"Do you want to start with a quick reading English lesson, or - I suppose we can also write translations on the list itself, so we both can read it."

"Yeah, good idea. Okay, uh - maybe I should tell you all the recipes I know, and you can write them all down, and then write them down again afterward more organized?"

"Sounds good. Do you have - I don't know, nicknames for each of the diagram books for the citation references, or should I just be really uncreative and number them?"

"Uh, I haven't nicknamed them, but I know these two are a set," he indicates two of the three, "volume one and volume two, because I figured out their numbers - should I try to teach you those? They're a little weird."

"Sure, sounds useful."

So he picks up a pen and sits at the table and draws four symbols: a dot, a vertical line, a slightly flattened N, and a slightly flattened N with a vertical line through the middle.

"Those are zero, one, two, and three."

Another row beneath that: a dot with a horizontal line through it, a vertical line with a horizontal line through the middle, an N with a horizontal line through the middle, and an N with both horizontal and vertical lines.

"Four, five, six, and seven."

Next row: a dot between two horizontal lines high and low; the horizontal lines high and low, with the vertical line through them; the squashed N with the horizontal lines added, making a square crossed by a diagonal; and the square with the diagonal plus the vertical line.

"Eight, nine, ten, and eleven, and..."

Dot with all three horizontal lines, high and low and middle. Vertical line with all three horizontal lines. Squashed N with all three horizontal lines. Squashed N with all three horizontal lines plus the vertical.

"...twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen."

He gestures to the finished chart. "Isn't it so tidy? But then the tricky part is putting them together, because like, if I want to write twenty it's not two-zero like it would be in Haelahar or Sanash, it's one-four. Do you see what I mean?"

"... Base sixteen," pronounces Yvette after a considering pause. "Yeah, that would get confusing to translate between. Even if it's very tidy."

(She is fond of the tidy system.)

"It's not that bad but it took some getting used to. I think maybe when we list the recipes we should write the page numbers as they appear in the book and in English and Haelahar, so we don't have to keep converting every time we read the list."

Nod.

"Luckily it sounds like you use base ten, too? So it's slightly less confusing."

"Yeah."

"All right, let me figure out a format to write these in - it's a pity we don't have colored pens."

"The ink colours for the diagrams are all actually numbered, there's a list at the back of every book, but if you were going to use colours for something else - yeah."

"Well that's just absurdly tidy," snorts Yvette, amused. "I mostly just like the idea of being able to perfectly copy the diagrams. This will work fine."

She figures out a format that she doesn't utterly despise, with space for explanations in both languages and all three sets of numerals (and writes out a quick key for converting from Arabic numerals to the Haelahar set on a separate sheet of paper), and then nods.

"All right, ready."

Getting the list of tested recipes and their effects out of Tiro is a bit of an adventure. He's been keeping it all in his head, and his memory is kind of astonishingly good but it doesn't store things in neatly sorted spreadsheet format. So he gets out the first book and pages through it, and every time he comes to a recipe he's tested, he tells her the page number and which inks were used and what it made, and as often as not he has other information to add.

"This is the one for the glowing rocks - I'm pretty sure ink number three, the yellow, is 'light', because the recipes that use it are always for things that glow—"

"And this one's for water, don't draw it indoors, I use it to water my plants because it never rains—"

"—and I think ink number eight is 'fire', because, uh, fire is what happens when you draw random lines on a plate with it—"

Well, the other information can get carefully listed on another sheet of paper with the corresponding numbers, because that seems important enough to write down.

And then soon enough they have a list, and then shortly after they have another, more organized list, in two languages and with page numbers listed in three formats.

"There," says Yvette, pleased. "How'd you keep all of this straight in your head?"

"I have a good memory, I guess? Your way is much better organized."

"Thanks," she says, smiling a little. "I like keeping things clear and organized. It's often pretty useful. Though I can't say I expected to get to organize diagrams for a magic system. It's kind of fun?"

"It kind of is!"

"Yeah. ... Do you want to work on reading English now, or wait?"

"I want to work on reading English!"

"All right, I'll write up an alphabet."

Alphabet! She writes all of it out as a guide for Tiro to look over, uppercase and lowercase.

"Do you want me to start in alphabetical order, or by which letters are more often used?"

"Alphabetical. Why is there two of everything?"