"I don't know if I want to fly for days," says Uamok.

"I do! I need to catch up on Common," says Skon.

"Well, you know by now how I feel about it. Anybody else want to come?"

Nobody else wants to fly for days. After Uamok has collected some goodbye sex Skon is remanded to Raafi's custody.

And Raafi will teleport them south, and then cast a spell that turns them into smudges of colored cloudstuff and summons a gust of wind to whisk them on their way, even further south to where the weather begins to turn arctic and Raafi begins casting spells on them to protect them from the cold every time they pause for meals and to rest.

On the morning of the fourth day, he casts a Sending before they set off, and near midday he spots a smudge that turns out to be three more humanoids, sitting on a rug in the middle of the sky.

The friendliest-looking one is also the shortest, obviously either a gnome or a halfling from Raafi's descriptions of the species, and presumably female based on the emerald-green skirt she's wearing; she waves enthusiastically when they get close. Her companions are taller, but still shorter than Raafi by at least a foot; one is very stout and heavily bearded, wearing an outfit even plainer than Raafi's, and the other is very thin and all in brighter colors, from the cloak of gold-dipped sapphire feathers around his shoulders to his sandy yellow skin and tightly curled brick-red hair.

There might be room for Raafi and Skon to land on the rug too, but not comfortably, and anyway the group starts heading back toward the ground before they're close enough to consider it.

"Hi!" calls Skon in Common, which he has been working on very hard.

"Hi!" the skirted one calls back. "I'm Jan, and these are Cochik in the blue and Rannura!"

"I'm Skon!"

"Good to meet you! It's very exciting being in a whole new world!"

The rug continues down and down until it's skimming the top of the trees.

"My family's going to go visit yours when we can! My mate wants to be a wizard," he says.

"Oh, cool! What kind, have they decided yet?"

This sentence requires some puzzling but eventually he can answer "she hasn't!"

"We talked about her learning to do animal augmentation, I'm not sure what's involved with that though."

    "Oh that's cool, we can always use fleshcrafters. I'll have to ask around if anybody's taking apprentices."

"We'd appreciate it!"

"She likes to learn many different thing," says Skon. "- things?"

"Things, yup! You're good with Common for not using a spell!"

They land in a midsize clearing in the woods; the dirt of the forest floor has been replaced by a smooth granite courtyard ringed with a thick cobblestone wall, and half the space of the clearing is taken up by a large house in an unfamiliar architectural style made of the same stone.

"...you make this?"

"Cochik did! He's a bard - do I need to explain bards? - and he's got a magic lyre that lets him sing up buildings, it's very fancy."

"Wow! What is a lyre?"

"It's a musical instrument! Cochik, show him your lyre."

The lyre in question is a U-shaped piece of dark wood about the height and width of Cochik's torso with a row of blue gems set into each side, a polished bone crossbar across the top, and strings running from the base of the U to the crossbar. No obvious magic happens when he plays it, but that's barely disappointing - it sounds amazing.

"Wow!"

Cochik grins shyly and follows Rannura into the building.

    "You can come in, I think they're packing up, we don't want to stay - too cold here, even with your boyfriend's fancy protection rings." There's a teasing note in her voice. "How much longer do you have on that flight spell?"

"Oh, I can teleport us all."

    "Excellent." And she heads in too, holding the door for them.

The house is tall and narrow inside, compared to a burrow or the local sort of apartment; the front door opens into a small foyer and then a hallway, with a larger room in the back with a fire pit in the center and doors leading off to other rooms around the sides; there's detailing around the doorways and where the walls meet the ceiling, but no furnishings except a low stone bench around the fire pit.

"This is such a building! Will it stay?"

"It will! Cochik has been helping rebuild Oferst city the same way - there's a whole long story about what happened there but he tells it better than I do."

"I'm not sure I can understand a whole story in Common," says Skon.

    "It's not a complicated story, I bet you'd follow it okay. Or - hmm - you know a rune circle of Comprehend Languages wouldn't be that expensive as these things go - I've never done one before, right, if someone in our world doesn't speak common there's not that much call for it, but it wouldn't be hard."

"I'm not sure what you'd need for it but I do have some materials with me."

    "Huh! Sure, I'll take a look, I wouldn't need anything too exotic."

"What's a rune circle?"