"Any other language works fine? No matter how well you learn it?"

"Yeah, even if you become fluent it's not your first, apparently that's got some importance weighed towards it. I don't know how people who grow up bilingual do, maybe both languages are just barred for chanting."

"Okay. So I guess I'll fall back on Spanish unless - if I recall right you're in French? Will it be really inconvenient for us to be working in different languages?"

"I'm in French. It's what I use for chanting, I thought about Latin but it wasn't offered in school, so I went with French. It might give us some problems cheating off of each other's chants, and it'll keep us from catching mistakes with chants as easily as we would if we spoke the same language, but other than that and it should be fine. Not really that inconvenient, just a little bit."

"So probably slightly less inconvenient than me trying to catch up with you in French, too. Okay. I do all right in Spanish, I'm not fluent but - how ridiculously weird-looking is it going to be if I go to Señora Goff and ask her to check my grammar?"

"Depends on what you want to say. If you use the right excuses for it you can probably get away with it not looking too weird. Dungeons and Dragons might be a good scapegoat. 'Okay, so my character is going to say this at some point in time and I want to get the grammar right' or something."

"Why would my D&D character be speaking Spanish?"

"Because they are from a country that is equivalent to Spain and you like being authentic?"

"Hmmm. I don't actually know Señora Goff well enough to guess if she'll buy it. I can try it with something relatively innocuous, I guess, unless literally all of the chanting is 'magic thing, magic thing, happen now, in real life, also the person casting this is a literal sphinx' or whatever."

Darren snorts with laughter. "No, they usually don't go like that, but many would be weird in casual conversation. I doubt you tell dirt to wake up, or for the air to sit still so it can listen that regularly. Some are innocuous, though."

"Maybe my character is writing weird scrolls? Is that a thing D&D characters do, write weird things on scrolls?"

"If you take the skills necessary for it, yeah - that's a thing you can do. You have to be a spellcaster, though. It's basically storing a spell for later, so more of the chants would make sense."

"Is there any good reason not to be a spellcaster?"

"In Dungeons and Dragons? Well, you are really squishy and don't have much magic at early levels. So you hide behind the warriors and barbarians after casting like - flare or something and pray nobody sees you and how defenseless you are."

"Sounds like a ripoff. Isn't there magical defense?"

"Well, of course, but those show up later levels and for balance reasons they don't let you wear armor and reliably cast spells. In practice, once you get past the first few levels you can start pulling your weight, and after that you start carrying the party. Epic levels you are scary."

"How does armor get in the way of casting spells? It has to be sufficiently maneuverable that you can fight in it if you're going to wear it at all."

"Because if wizards got to wear full plate armor the warriors would cry themselves to sleep at night."

"So basically the advantage of being a warrior is that you can clank."

"And hit things. Don't forget hitting things."

"Speaking of my real-life total inability to acquire combat skills, among other things, where do you think you'd start on fixing my clumsiness problem with some sort of spiffy accessory?"

"Hmm," he says, tilting his head and thinking. "I think it's possible, certainly, and I have some ideas but I don't know how to explain them when you don't know any of the runes. I can make that a long-term project? I need to get more item creation practice, anyway, what with how I want to make more medallions."

"Right." Bella writes this idea under 'ornament of Gyges' on her list.

"Do you want me to actually get started on teaching you about the runes?" teases Darren. "We can talk about Dungeons and Dragons some more, if you like."

"Gimme a rune."