Once it becomes clear that Leareth is using a different alphabet, Wilbur switches to teaching him the latin alphabet. 

He is very upfront and apologetic about how insane English's spelling is. 

:- It is not the worst I have seen. Though...it ranks highly in terms of insane spelling. I will do my best: 

If nothing interrupts them sooner, Leareth's attention span for language-learning will be around three hours, during which he can cover a lot of ground. When he starts getting tired, though, the first side effect is that trying to listen to more words sort of hurts - which he's willing to push through, this is important - but after a bit it's very hard not to start crying with frustration. 

"Alright, we're done," Wilbur says firmly at the first sign of this. 

Leareth has been trying to answer mostly out loud for the last hour, now that he knows a basic set of words. 

"I - all right," he concedes, and looks around for Lucy.

Lucy is examining something through a microscope. 

Leareth is curious what she's looking at, but also worried about interrupting if she's doing something delicate, and also-also the thought of having another conversation sort of feels like dragging his brain over sandpaper. 

He painstakingly pieces together a coherent-and-grammatical English sentence no too hard, he'll go for "comprehensible string of words", for his request to Wilbur.

"Can I -" no wait, "Can you - rest place - show me? I tir– I am tired." 

She looks up immediately. "Oh! Of course! Back to the Bazaar, or somewhere closer?"

"What is -" okay nevermind ow, the entire auditory-processing-and-language part of his brain is hurting. :Whichever is most convenient for you, I do not mind: 

"--You don't look up for going through the city again," she diagnoses, and ushers him off to a quiet alcove with a cot. 

Oh, amazing, a surface to be horizontal on. 

:- Is it going to cause a problem if I fall asleep again and have nightmares in Parabola?: he thinks to ask. :I can try not to actually sleep, if it would be inconvenient: 

"No, don't worry about it, Parabola is plenty weird already," she assures him. 

It seems like the question is mostly moot, anyway; whatever resurrection/healing magic she did to him seems to have mostly substituted for 'a good night's sleep', and he's tired but not all that sleepy.

Leareth lies there for an hour anyway, sort of drifting, but never going past a few minutes here or there of half-dozing, and eventually he finds himself awake and staring at the ceiling. He's not feeling eager to leap out of bed, exactly, but the prospect isn't agonizing either, so he gets up and heads to rejoin Lucy. 

Lucy is gesturing enthusiastically at some strange-looking magical substances. She turns and smiles at him as he approaches. 

"Feeling better?"

"Yes. Thank you. What are...thats?" He's blanking on the actual correct pluralization of 'that'. 

"Those," she corrects. "That one is molten warm amber," the concept warm amber points at doesn't mean higher-than-room-temperature fossilized resin, it means something completely different and definitely magic. "That one is an interesting slime mold, and that one is--well, mostly my blood."

"Ah. Thank you." 

Leareth stares intently at them with mage-sight; his Sight is a bit rusty in terms of getting down to fine detail, he mostly lacked access to it for five years and then in the last while he hasn't been using it for work. The old habits are still there, though. 

Does any of it look similar to a particular kind of magic from either Velgarth or Arda? How are the three different from each other? 

All three of them look something like how a powerful mage's reserves might look--but there's more in them, and the thing that's in them isn't mage-energy per se, it's the life-giving light Lucy gives off. 

It's beautiful, and it gets a brief, but genuine smile from Leareth. 

"What does -" ugh this is too hard. :How did you discover the 'slime mold' and do you understand why it is like the other two things? It is - a simple lifeform, no?: 

"Slime mold isn't so much like these other things as it is like apple trees, actually. My father, the Mountain of Light, there's a garden very near him, the apples of which can be processed into a cider which--anyway, living things can build up reserves of life-light, when there's more than they can use for just themselves. The slime mold seemed like a potentially convenient storage medium for completely different reasons than the other two."

"Hmm. I see." 

Leareth stares harder. Tries to see if there's any magical signature where this is reflected, some feature that the two others have in common where the slime-mold is different. He's not expecting too much, though, he's really out of practice at this. 

All three things are pretty different. 

The slime mold is the most different, because the only magic thing about it is the light that it's storing. The warm amber...it looks sort of like Healing-energy, in a completely different way than life-light looks like Healing-energy. Warm amber filled with life-light looks more like Healing-energy than either of them separately, but still very very distinct. 

The blood is less like a vessel that happens to be holding life-light and more, well, a substance that produces life-light. The difference between a bowl and a fountain. 

It's beautiful. 

After staring for a long moment, Leareth pulls back. Looks at Lucy. "What you– what are you using for?" 

"There are, right now, only two people who can safely give off life-light. The Mountain of Light is sessile and I can only be in one place at a time. I could just chip off glowing chunks of myself, but those can...be used for other purposes besides healing people. All medicines are poisons, in sufficient concentration. What I want is to be able to reliably distribute safe doses of vitality to people who are in places where I am not."

"And - all this– all these - have life-light? How - if I eat it, healing -?" 

"That's the idea. It...probably actually isn't a good idea to eat any of those, we're on an early stage of experimenting and none of these specific storage media are necessarily safe for human consumption. The slime mold probably wouldn't do anything to you that the healing-light wouldn't fix but, uh, definitely one hundred percent do not try to eat either of the other two."