"Sure, you can catch an audience on the way home."

"I'll plan for it, then."

And out scuttles the boy with his books on the monocontinental period.

And Raafi gets back to work, and eventually concludes that he does want his Terran and Aquan notes enough to take his portable hole out in the library.

"Whoa," he hears from outside the hole once he's down in it, "what is that, is it a magic hummun thing?"

"Yup! Or I think this one was made by an elf, actually, but it's definitely magic. Please don't come down, some of the things in here are fragile - I'll be up in a minute though."

"Aw, I wanted to see..."

"Sorry, it's really not meant for visitors." Notes, notes, notes - there they are. He grabs them and climbs back out.

"What've you got there? - aw, it's just paper." The person is a younger girl only about twice as big as Raafi.

"Well, it's notes for the language circle I'm going to give later, I think that's at least a little exciting. But it's not magic, I'm still thinking about how to let everyone see my magic."

"What are the ways you could?" she asks.

"At home I might just go flying through the middle of town and then let people ask me questions, but I'm not sure that wouldn't scare someone. Or cause a stampede, actually. I could do a circle about it, but that only lets a few people see me at once, it doesn't really let everybody see the magic. I am planning on showing off one of my spells for everyone at the end of the day, and that seems like an okay way of doing it, but it still only lets people who go to this school see it, and only if they aren't busy right then and have heard the rumor that I'm going to."

"I don't think it would cause a stampede," says the girl.

"Well, maybe in a couple days I'll have enough free time to try it."

"What are the notes for?"

"Language lessons! People should be able to come and go to my world sooner or later - I don't know when - and it'll be useful. But I've never taught someone the whole language before, just enough bits to get by for a while, so I want to look at my notes from when I learned languages to remind myself how my teachers did it."

"Huh! Do you know lots of languages?"

"Three, which is a little unusual but not very, at home - which ones I know is stranger."

"How is which ones you know strange?"

"Well, the one I grew up with is just the common, which most people - of the species there, we've been calling them talkers to be less confusing - speak. But the other two are from two of the other worlds we know about, the worlds of water and stone."

"Isn't... the normal world... mostly water and stone?"

"Mostly, yep. And air, and a bit of fire, there are worlds for those, too. The worlds of those things are made almost entirely of just one of them, so only species who can live without the other three can live there, or even visit without a lot of magic to keep them safe."

"...how could a species only need fire and not air or water?"

"Magic, usually! The main kind of talker you find in a place like that is fire elementals, who are just made of fire and don't need to eat or anything like a normal species would. - maybe I should do a circle about that, too, there are a bunch of other worlds that we know about at home and lots of them are unusual like that."

"Oh wow... are they pretty?"