"Oh." 

"I'm concerned he might...infer a lot more from whatever Vanyel says than Vanyel means to say? I don't know what, I - can't really unpack it more than that, just, it seems like something you'd want to be very careful about." 

Vanyel frowns, looks like maybe he's about to say something, but then sighs and sits down. "Who else is coming?" 

"Tran and Joshel and Keiran and Katha. And Kilchas and Sandra. They'll be here in five minutes - Tarinda, can I get you to hold on until then? And then you can explain the thing you did except under Truth Spell, and - I guess we'll go from there."

Shavri looks kind of unhappy, though more in a 'this is complicated why is it my problem' way than 'displeased with the content of Tarinda's speech.'

"Okay. Uh, you should know that I am not actually technically fluent in Valdemaran. What's going on is that I have a built in smart machine and it's guessing what I would want to say, often two or three options, and translating those guesses for me, and showing me text only I can see of the guesses and a phonetic rendering of that translation for me to read off, and then I pick the option I want or I make a tiny gesture to tell it to try again if I don't like any of them. If I turned it off I'd know like... maybe a hundred words of Valdemaran reliably at this point. I don't know what that would do to your Truth Spell but I do know that my machine can't hear Mindspeech so it might or might not work right when I'm talking this way."

"Oh. Huh." 

"That's part of why we were convinced almost right away that she's really from another world," Dara says. "She learned our language in - a few candlemarks? Or Page did, rather. And multiple other languages on the journey back." 

Savil looks uneasy, probably at the prospect of Truth Spell not being a reliable tool. "If it doesn't work we could...read you with Thoughtsensing, maybe? Very quickly, just to check that you mean the things you're saying." 

"Sure, if you can do that with me thinking in English! Also I can hear and reply to Mindspeech fine if the spell works on that, Yfandes and Rolan translated at first."

"Oh. Interesting. Yes, Truth Spell works fine on Mindspeech." 

Another few people are arriving. One of them, a dark-haired man with worry-lines etched on his brow and around his mouth, nods to them. His expression is carefully neutral but his eyes are definitely suspicious. 

Wave wave.

Dara seems very pleased to see him! And then slightly shy about it. 

"This is Herald Tantras. He was King's Own before me, but, er, the Groveborn died in the war with Karse and when Rolan showed up he chose me." 

The rest of the group trickle in and Tarinda is introduced to Keiran (Lord Marshal's Herald), Joshel (Seneschal's Herald), Katha (spymaster), and Kilchas and Sandra, two other mages. 

Sandra is the one who seems most intrigued by her. "Yfandes told my Companion that you want to work on - crafting things very precisely? This is something of an interest of mine, though I'm not sure the way I do it would be helpful to you." 

"I don't know either! I'm ultimately going to want stuff with details far too small to see with the naked eye, but even incremental improvements in that direction can get me more precise tools to make intermediate steps with."

Sandra's eyes light up with even more interest, and she looks like she maybe wants to say twenty more things, but bites down on it. "I'd like to talk after, then." 

Shavri looks around. Sits. "All right, that's everyone but Randi. I'll catch him up after. Savil, can you do a Truth Spell and we'll see if it works given her, er, smart-machine translation?" 

"Of course." Savil concentrates for a moment, and a blue halo appears on Tarinda's forehead, visible to everyone else but not her. (To Tarinda, it doesn't feel like anything in particular.) 

"To test it, can you say something true and then something false?" 

"My name is Tarinda. I can fly."

"Looks like it works fine. The vrondi sense intent, which I assume happens before all your translation steps with the machine in your head - I suppose that does mean it could be offset from what you're saying, but if this machine is very fast then it shouldn't matter much?" 

"It's very fast but sometimes I take a second to pick a response especially if it guesses wrong at first. It's very good at predicting what I'd want to say, but it can't read my mind, so if I have an unrelated thought I sometimes have to prompt it, it's only going to be really rapid fire if everything follows from the conversation itself. Which it probably will if you just wanna ask me stuff."

"Well, if your intent is to be honest the entire time, then that shouldn't actually matter?" Savil frowns. "Unless - can the machine lie, about what a given translation actually means? Would you know if it were doing that?" 

"It's not the kind of smart where it decides to do things on its own. I guess if it were it could mistranslate things and I would probably not notice. It's okay if you wanna read my mind to be extra sure."

Savil considers it, exchanges a Mindspeech-y look with Shavri and with Tran. "Truth Spell will do for now. If anything comes up where it seems important to be really extra certain, we'll ask to read your mind then. Hmm - to keep this organized, can you explain the history of your world again?"