"I'll see him at school tomorrow, my school has boys. I could show you to everybody at school!"

"That sounds like a fun way to spend a day, sure."

"I don't know if Mother'll want you in the burrow overnight. And I'm not sure where you'd sleep, there isn't room in the nests."

"I have camping stuff with me, I'll be fine outside unless you have a lot of predators around."

"Nah. Well, there's bugs, I don't know if bugs would try to eat you, but no big ones, spren are the biggest animals around and they won't come anywhere near where people live."

"I bet I'll be fine, then, the bugs I've seen so far haven't been that intimidating. And if they do try for me I can do magic about it."

"I guess you can! What magic would you do?"

"Well, usually if something startles me awake I'll teleport a little ways away, because I always have that spell on me and it gives me time to figure out what else to do. And then today I didn't know what I was going to find, so I have a few different spells I could use from there - I have one that turns me into a living statue for a little while, and one that lets me summon a big monster to fight for me, and I can fly for a little while if I just need to get out of range and wait for it to go away, and if it was something really big like a forest fire where I had to leave altogether, I have one that'd let me turn into a cloud and fly all the way to the city. Tomorrow I'll probably only prepare the monster spell - I like having something around for emergencies, and I can summon different kinds of monsters with that one and ask them to do different things, not just fight."

"That makes sense! What other things do the monsters do?"

"I usually summon elementals with it, they're a kind of monster that's made of rock or water or air or fire, and they can do different things depending on which one of those they are - I'd want a water elemental to put out a fire or save someone from drowning, or an earth elemental if I needed some rocks moved or if I was trying to get to something that was buried, or an air elemental to fly around and look for something, or a fire elemental if I needed a very hot fire, or needed one someplace and couldn't get there to make it myself."

"Wow. Please don't start a forest fire."

"I won't. It's been a long time since I've had a fire get away from me even a little bit."

"Oh good. You seem like a very nice alien."

"Thanks. Oh, since I'm thinking about it, I wonder how long your species lives? It varies quite a lot at home, from one species to another."

"Oh, about twenty-five years? I think there was a male who was thirty once."

"Oh, huh. That's short, compared to humans - I guess I don't know if the years are the same length here, they're about three hundred sixty days at home? And humans'll get eighty to a hundred of them, sometimes a bit more."

"Our years are five hundred and seventeen days," says Uamok. "But it sounds like hummun live a long time!"

"I guess we do. I'm kind of old for a human, I'm a little over sixty of our years, but I guess that won't be such a big deal here."

"Is it a big deal in the hummun world?"

"It can be. Our world has five common species of people, and humans are the shortest-lived of them, so it seems to the other ones like we get old very quickly, and they're not always kind about it."

"That's mean! Are hummun going to be mean to us about getting old faster than them?"

"Well, it's hard to promise anything, of course. But I wouldn't expect us to, we know that that hurts even when it happens by accident."

"How's it happen by accident?"

"People not thinking about what they say, mostly. Or sometimes making rules about how old you have to be for something without thinking about what that means for other species, but that's not so common, the other four species vary too so they're usually already thinking about it at least a little."

"Like how I couldn't have a bank account till this year?"