Five humanoids with white feathers, dyed blue in places, appear in the middle of the room together.

They don't seem to have been expecting this. One of them hits another one.

The locals are very alarmed. One of them reaches under the table to touch something and the lights turn reddish for a second before going back to normal. Someone silently and without needing to move wards the room against most possible kinds of magic, with specific limited exceptions for certain kinds of information-getting, like translation, and for illusions within a certain distance of the strangers, and of course for anything these locals choose to do.

The one who seems to be a woman faces the strangers, takes a breath, and asks, "What exactly are you doing here?"

The strangers try replying in a couple different languages and then murmur amongst themselves.

"...You must be very lost," she says in a different unfamiliar language, in case they know that one.

They don't know that one. One of them grabs the one they hit earlier; grabbee makes a buzzing noise.

A minute later grabber says, "Where is this?"

"Private property in Pecan Grove in Anavel Sani, but I think..." She glances around briefly at the others. "You may stay while we trade information, if you'd like."

"Where is Anavel Sani?"

"The southeast of the main inhabited continent in the Hari Empire. Where did you come from?"

"The village of White Nest in the land of the Long River."

"I see. What is magic like in the land of the Long River?"

"I do not know it to differ from magic in other places, or even from human magic."

"...And yet I did not know teleportation to be possible."

"We were attempting to travel somewhere else. This one may have twitched wrong when someone was distracted." It nudges the grabbed stranger with one foot. "What is your magic like?"

"We have twelve kinds that don't differ from species to species. Some people can move things, but they have to pass through the intervening space to get where they're going, not like what brought you here. But being distracted in the middle of a spell could cause problems, certainly."

"We have twenty eight kinds and must cooperate to cast spells."

"We can cooperate, for spells that do all of the kinds of things each of the casters can do individually. What does your group do?"

"We as a set can do spells affecting the weather, animals, fire, wood, teleportation usually to places we know, and some other things but those are the ones there is the most call for."

"I suspect whatever you do to animals, fire, and wood might be different from what we can do to those things here - we can, say, move animals telekinetically, or change their inheritance..."

"We usually make chickens behave differently, make fire burn hotter for working metal, and knit wood together for buildings."

"Ah," she says softly, trying and failing not to look startled. She thinks for a second. "Well, I am sure I could find you work doing some of those things, in exchange for a cut of the profits."

"I am not sure we will wish to stay, but it may take time for us to reconstruct the original spell issue."

"Of course. We wouldn't want to keep you from leaving."

The wards against their magic acquire another exception, for teleporting away.

The strangers huddle together in an odd configuration, backs to backs in a circle.

After a minute the one says, "It may take us several days."

"Then we might want to talk about arrangements for keeping you fed in that time, and local laws if you're going to leave my house and go exploring."

"What arrangements are available?"

"The biggest question will be whether you want to take payment in cash or in kind - but what I'd do if you wanted my help is talk to people who have farm animals about whether they'd like them to behave differently, and I'd look for architects or maybe carpenters who want to do something unusual with wood in the very near future, and you'd tell me what exactly you can do for them, and I'd arrange transportation for you or them and negotiate a fair price. And then either they'd pay you in cash and you'd give me part of that, or they'd pay me and I'd arrange for you to have a comfortable place to sleep and food to eat while you were here."

"We do not usually use money."

"I have once," says a different stranger. "Trading with lonesomes."

The spokesstranger nods at them. "What kind of exactitude do you mean?"

"Having not yet asked around I'm not completely sure but, say, what counts as an animal, which behaviors can you affect, how precise are you when you do that, how long does it last, what else might happen..."

"Most of our experience is with chickens and donkeys. Other animals will probably work. We usually cause them to make signaling sounds when they detect danger, to stay in certain areas or come when called, and to not fight. It lasts as long as the animal lives and it can be very precise but if you are too strict with an animal it may stop eating or have some other problem like that and die."

"Does the animal need to already know how to do what you make it do?"

"We cannot make them write. We could make them dance."

"I think I have a job for you. So, compensation. What will you need during your stay?"

"We will need shelter and food. We can eat some of the things humans eat."

"The price of shelter around here varies by location, amenities, and size. And humans eat nearly every food anyone eats, I couldn't guess from that how hard it'd be to feed you."

"We need enough space for the five of us. We mostly eat eggs, fish, and rice."

"That should all be doable. So if we measure in fish, about so big, say," she says, gesturing, "since you won't know our currency, what are your usual rates for making animals dance?"

"We cannot eat that much fish before it attracts pests."

"...We can preserve things but it's not that I'm going to pay you entirely in fish, it's that you don't have any chance of answering if I ask how much you usually charge in Hari imperial rings."

"If we imagine we are going to bring most of the fish home with us to distribute to others, we could make an animal adopt a habit of dancing for forty-five fish that size."

"Do you do bulk discounts?"

"We are not familiar with the idea. It would be cheaper to purchase our services many times in the same location, because we would not need to travel separately."

She'll try to pin some more details down and maybe haggle them down a bit, if that's possible, but then they should figure out what to do for tonight. She can let them stay in this room and borrow the downstairs bathroom for the night, or she can cover renting rooms for them elsewhere if they don't mind owing her.

They do not mind owing her, or at least they acknowledge that this will result from accepting her offer and then accept it.

"That'll do, then. And just - you won't run into many chances to break laws while you're here, but the laws say you mustn't touch people without permission, or take things that aren't yours, or lie about things you're selling, or try to hold anyone prisoner who doesn't belong to you. Or turn objects into empty space by magic. All of that make sense?"

"We must be able to touch each other."

"Yes, quite. Families often touch each other. But strangers might get angry if you touch them."

"We will not touch other people."

"That'll do, then." She gestures to one of the men with her. "Seli will show you where to go and carry the rings for you."

The strangers follow Seli.

They pass through a big house that clearly houses a lot of people although very few of those people want to be between them and the front door right now. Seli grabs a necklace of magical color-changing coins on the way out.

A couple minutes away on foot, past a fenced-in area of tall straight trees and an oddly-shaped blue building that looks like its third floor floats about half a foot above the top of its second floor, there's a building advertising rooms for rent, short- and medium-term, the ground floor of which has two walls made entirely of archways. The lobby is manned by a small bird on a perch on a desk, beside a pad of paper and a jar of honey, who greets them when they come in.

The strangers are interested in the floaty building but do not try to linger there. They are mildly surprised about the bird talking.

"We need room for five for - tonight's what I'm authorized to pay for right now, but they might end up wanting more time than that," Seli tells the bird.

"Together or separately?" asks the bird.

"Together."

A drawer opens and some notes come out and hold themselves up for the bird's inspection. "There's a caralendar-style suite on the fourth floor that might suit you. How late were you hoping to rent it for, would you be leaving or renewing by dawn or will you need more time than that?"

"I do not know what time it is here," the spokesstranger says to Seli.

"It's around dusk. Something like five twenty-fourths of a day before midnight. Ish. Something like that."

"I can show you exactly for a ring," says the bird.

"We will need more time than that," it says.

"Then we can do afternoon checkout, no later than when the sun's about like so," the bird says, as the pad of paper rises on its own to illustrate the angle, "about four hours after noon." And the bird can quote them a price for the suite for that long.

They glance at Seli.

Seli haggles a bit and then hands over some coins, after which a small stone with the room number written on it floats up out of a drawer and sets itself down on the desk.

"That'll be the room key," says Seli, "I think you tap it to the door to lock and unlock it?"

"Yeah - near the handle, not the hinge," says the bird. "Bring it back here when you check out."

One of the strangers collects the key, inspecting it minutely until a different one pulls out a feather on its elbow, and they proceed to the room.

It's a classy suite. There's one big central room with a table and eight stools, and two boxes labeled "chill" and "freeze"; there are two bedrooms each of which has some currently unrolled soft mats and one of which has a spare rolled up in the corner; and there's one small room with something similar to a toilet and shower, equipped with a smallish box of sky-blue soap that is neither entirely liquid nor entirely solid. All the interior walls are the blue of the ocean; the bedrooms have almost-but-not-quite wavelike swirls of white. The windows are tall and narrow and come with metal shutters.

They have to do a separate spell to read the labels. They arrange the mats so they will all be able to curl up in a pile together to sleep.

No one interrupts them during the night.

In the morning they retrace their steps to the house belonging to the person who had work for them.

She can be found, and wants them to follow another of her men to another place where the animals are.

The strangers are reasonably amenable to this, occasionally swatting each other if one dawdles or gawks.

He heads for what looks like a large building mostly painted the same green as the trees around it, in a direction orthogonal to the one they came from. Near the entrance are a group of boys and one kitten playing freeze tag.

"Are the animals here?" asks the spokestranger.

"Yeah, inside there. Um, one thing first, there are a lot of enchantments in there that affect who can scry what and where illusions can go, and I don't expect you to stop being able to translate while you're there but if that does happen just... don't panic about it, if nothing else we can come back out here to talk."

"Very well."

Inside there are a number of animals of various species that should learn various dances.

The strangers assess the animals - they need to know about their range of motion and so on - and then they can stand in their odd way and make the animals dance. They don't do it on command, it just becomes something they might do like they might pace or groom themselves, but the training can be applied to the behavior once it's there.

The person who brought them here threads some rings onto a necklace, equal to the price for enchanting the animals minus the price for the room last night.

"I forgot to ask Lanisal if I was supposed to pay you in cash or help you get things from the market," he confesses once they're done.

"We will need food," says the spokesstranger.

"I can help with that, then. You mentioned you eat fish, was it?"

"We can eat fish."