"Hmm... are there any that aren't like that?"

"There's ones that go off and then they're done, there's some you have to concentrate on to keep up, and there's installations like the building wards that embed in a place or a thing instead of being dependent on the caster."

"That last one. Can you do one of those? I don't really wanna touch these ones on me, they're connected to you and I don't know what that'll do."

"I could make a waterspout but I'd need the spout part... same with communication crystals... I might have paper that'd work for link paper..."

"That last one sounds good! I have some link paper back in my dorm but I wanted to stare at it, should've bought more than one to see if I can grab it instead."

"Paper'd be in my room." He gets up.

He gets up, too. "I haven't actually even shown you any of my magic, have I? For all you know I could be making all of this up."

"Well, your language isn't from Elcenia as far as I can tell so you're not completely shitting me."

"Fair enough. Your language magic is fairly fantastic, where's it getting all this information from?"

"One of the mysteries of the world, what Draconic's scanning to know what it knows. Yet unsolved." To the lift, to his hall.

"The most obvious answer seems to be 'brains' but I'm not sure how to test that. Also, one of the kinds of magic back home does language scanning too and no one knows how, either."

"And dragons work on dead languages."

"How do you know that if they're dead? Or do you just mean reading them?"

"...I mean if I hear that ten thousand years ago people spoke Tanimoht I can locate and speak Tanimoht."

"'Locate'? You have, like, a list of languages in your head?"

"Nnnnno. It's kind of hard to - um, suppose as is in fact the case that Upland and Lowland Alteisec have the same alphabet and the same word for 'stop' and I am wandering somewhere and see a sign saying that in one of the two. I can tell which one."

"...what? But that—what?"

"This is admittedly more useful with false cognates." Oh look it's Kaylo's room. It looks like Korulen's but with different objects-smaller-than-furniture. His roommate is not there.

"But—I mean that's the point, in what sense is it even one language as opposed to the other?"

Hi, Kaylo's room! Kaede's mind is only like 4.7% filled with ideas involving Kaylo and his bed.

"Sometimes it's not, but usually it's a matter of who wrote it. This only works if one person wrote it; it gets muddled if the sign was agreed on by a committee and then painted by somebody who didn't speak Alteisec at all or something. Subjectively it's sort of like picking out an accent."

"That is so completely bizarre and cool. Any elaboration or other details like that about the translation magic you have? This helps figure it out."

"We can do dialects... there's sprite languages which require four arms and a set of wings to dance correctly and we can't do those unless we're in a form that accommodates it but we can pronounce sounds we shouldn't be able to, like, I could speak vampire in any form."

"So where are the sounds generated? Just, magically inside your mouth?"

"It's actually a shapeshifting thing. Any form that can make vocalizations, I should have said, if I turn into a butterfly I can't say anything at all."

"Oh, so does your throat, like, change to be able to produce the sounds it needs or something?"