"And too late to bring in any fertilized eggs! Which I'm not sure we'd've bothered with anyway, I'm not sure what I'd even do with chickens and an affinity therefor. It's not like thread and spiders. I guess maybe spiders aren't the obvious response to a thread affinity for everyone. I guess I could...make something with the feathers? That sounds so much worse than making things with spidersilk."

"Even if you do turn out to have a useless affinity, I sincerely doubt it would happen to be chickens in particular." 

"Excellent point! And they're not even the most useless possible animal. The only good thing about an affinity for mola mola fish would be that there is no chance anybody ever wrote a spell about them, so I could just cast off-affinity without the void trying to give me spells about them all the time."

"I guess even one chicken'd be too heavy to bring? Even if that would mean real eggs," says Lissa. She pokes hers and sighs.

"--Okay, that'd be a valuable trade good," she admits. "Chalk one up for the anti-mola mola side."

"Well, at any rate I'm probably always going to be in the market for the kinds of basic spells most people can have for the asking in any language they want and I can trade you, uh, I got a variable fire spell last night that I can't find a good use for but it would be fine for anyone else."

"That does sound useful! I'll see if the void gives me anything good in Welsh or Marathi." 

Lissa nods in slight agreement. "Can you ask for specific languages?" she asks. "Or just for some purpose you want?"

"--I guess I'm not sure, but I can at least try." 

"You can but it'll tend to make the spell worse in other ways than if you let it pick. Don't ask it for languages you don't have and aren't even learning, though, Lissa, it'll get confused."

Lissa nods. "Yeah, I won't do that then. Thanks for the advice."