Maybe she's not in the mood for talking right now. Jisa sits down cross-legged on the floor and pokes at her Gate notes some more. 

Maurabel's back a few minutes later. Starts fixing dinner. "How was your day?"

"Good! We made some money!" Jisa digs for her stash of coins. "Er, I tried to convince Wood that we should split it half and half but he couldn't think of anything to spend his half on, are there things that elementals could buy except for the fact that they're elementals so no one would let them?" 

"I mean, sure. In theory elementals could buy all the same things we do. Clothes, food, land, magic artifacts. But in practice he has to pretend you're controlling him in order to be helpful at all, and that does kind of limit his ability to start as a homesteader with a sack of flax seeds and a hoe and a drop spindle, or discuss his next outfit with someone who takes in tailoring work."

She nods, unhappily. 

"We sort of learned when - outside of this city, and within it any day now - people stopped taking coins, that money isn't just automatically worth something, it's just a way to convince people to give you stuff. Money wouldn't let Wood convince people to give him stuff. But you can buy food for him and a change of clothes - probably a good idea anyway, he's not in a very distinctive wrap there but it's possible his old owner would recognize a patch on it or something - and see what comes up."

"I know how money works." Jisa resists the urge to add that she's not ignorant, snark is not going to help anything, she's just frustrated. 

She turns to Wood. "What sort of clothes do you like?" 

"...I don't know, I didn't wear any in the wild."

"Mmm. Maybe tomorrow we can walk around and look at what sorts of things people are wearing, and you can rank your favourites?" She glances at Maurabel again. "Do elementals wear generally the same things humans do? I wasn't paying that much attention." 

"There are styles that don't work with wings, and people usually put them either in something cheap and shabby or if they're very rich maybe something that shows that off."

Ugh, that makes perfect sense and is also very irritating. 

"- Anyway, should I try summoning the khamsin now? I have all the things I need." 

"Sure."

Jisa attempts the summoning. Externally, it just looks like her turning on the spot, making a circle out of dirt on the floor (she promises to clean it up later), and chanting some words in a foreign language, and then sitting down cross-legged and staring ahead for a very long time. 

- and eventually something happens! The centre of the circular area she's marked begins to glow, mist coalescing into motes of light which eventually shape themselves into a little figure, lizard-like, with jewel-bright scales in a very beautiful pattern and beady, intelligent eyes. 

It says something to her. It sounds very confused. 

"Oh, they're pretty!"

"Right?" Jisa glances back at her, grinning proudly. "This isn't its real body, it's a magical construct form, our Elemental Plane of Earth is very different from the material world - the 'earth' it's made of is more a metaphor than like earth or dirty in our world... It says hello by the way." She turns back to the little creature, exchanges some words with it. "It wants to know if you have any fruit you're willing to share? They really like fruit." 

It can have some dates! "They're 'it's?"

"That's right, they're not human, they don't have a lot of the things that humans have." 

"Our elementals aren't humans but they're still male or female."

"Well, ours don't, or at least that's what we learned in lessons." Jisa hands another date to the khamsin, which seems to be enjoying the fruit immensely, and then reaches for her notes on Gates and starts conversing with the earth-elemental in the same pidgin language as before. 

Maurabel watches in interest while the lizard-creature eats her dates. She can't follow the conversation at all, of course.

Eventually Jisa thanks the khamsin and dismisses the spell. She turns back to Maurabel and Wood. "It wasn't able to help that much, but did say that my call came from a lot further away than usual and a different 'direction'. The kind of directions earth-elementals can give are pretty confusing for humans, because in their natural form their have different kinds of senses from us, but I think that if I try more summonings from other planes, and figure out which ones are further away than I expect and by how much, and then I'll have more information to figure out the Gate. The trouble is that some of the other elementals can be more dangerous, fire in particular. I never had a problem before though, I have a lot of affinity with fire elementals." 

"I can have a Fire checked out. What materials do you need for the other kinds? And, uh, what foods."

Jisa can make a list. For Fire she needs something flammable, not a lot of it, they used incense at White Winds but it doesn't have to be that; for Water she needs a sprinkling of both fresh and salty water to make her circle, plus water elementals like pretty things better than food as presents; for Air she doesn't need anything, they'll come just because they're curious. 

Maurabel can make a little glass ornament for the water elemental. She doesn't know what incense is but they can see if just having a Fire's halo up will do, and if not light up some twigs. She can part with some of her salt hoard against imminent financial collapse to salt some water, the sea's a ways off.