Chris ends the call. "I agree. Sending information to the mainland at any given moment is a resource and now that you can't understand him there's not much benefit to using that resource on that, if we send written messages then we can spend more of that resource on other things. We could pick a spelling of your name for you based on how it sounds but there are often multiple possible spellings."

"Are there in my case?"

Chris makes contemplative clicky noises with his mouth.

"I think so."

"Tomorrow, then."

Chris nods.

"We could go through the Acts of Iomedae now. We're not used to handling valuable books down here so it might be nice if you flipped the pages."

"If you have blank paper I can Scriven off new ones," he says. "And that one I do have two of. But sure."

He will go flip pages of the Acts.

Chris points his pocket device at the Acts and tells Blai when he's done with each two-page spread.

It's too fast to really read much of it, but he's doing the copy that he had Scrivened in-fort that isn't nicely bound and that accordingly he's marked up a bit so he can look at his favorite or the most confusing verses that he scratched squiggles next to as they go.

"I could actually get started on translation now if that works for you, though I'd want to go back to the dining room for it so we could both have chairs."

"That works for me. I'll need to help you, I know more about archaic Taldane than Share Language will have given you when I aimed for the Chelish dialect."

"Alright."

They can walk back to the dining room. Chris grabs more food while he's there.

And then he pulls up an image of the first page of the Acts on his not-book. The text is a dark black, the stroke quality looks worse, and the background is mostly white but a bit spotty, moreso towards the spine.

"I think I ought to go word-by-word here. It's not going to fit into the English sentence structure but it's probably going to be more helpful."

"If you say so; I haven't done translations beyond very basic language-learning exercises."

"I might've done some in Spanish class but I've forgotten pretty much all of it."

Chris gets started putting words and sometimes phrases in blue English next to individual words in the Acts. He doesn't even make it past page 1 before having questions for Blai.

Blai will proactively volunteer that various words are old spellings of words that Chelish has standardized differently, that this word has drifted in meaning, that he's pretty sure this phrase is idiomatic for this other concept, and that this word order is basically only for poetry and his personal Shared knowledge of Chelish is very low on poetry but he is pretty sure it works out like so, and this word has fallen completely out of Chelish but in standard Taldane it now means this thing and probably used to mean that thing -

"You are going to make a lot of linguists very excited."

"...I'm not familiar with the archetype."

"People who study languages. We have only so many groups of languages on our planet and yours is presumably completely unrelated."

"You do have chess. But the languages might be different."

"That's actually very weird and a very good point. I wonder how that happened."

"Probably one way or the other it was brought between planets by some traveling archmage," he shrugs. "A language would be harder to bring in that way."

"I guess we can't rule that out. …huh, this has griffins and vampires in it, we have some stories about those."

"Do the words match?"

"Not obviously. This has her riding the griffin, so it's a big one, right? In that case I should maybe spell it 'gryphon'."

"...should you? If you say so."

"It's how it works in some games."