She'll just relax and enjoy the music, then.

"You don't want to learn how?"

"I'm not so much musically talented. I don't want to mess up your harmony."

"It's any magic, not just music."

"Oh, well, in that case..."

"Interested now?"

"Uh huh."

"Excellent."

"So how's this work, then?"

"Well..."

So: the Spelljammer helm is flat out a minor artifact. You can jerry rig one by stringing together several ordinary magical items, but that's not really safe or effective - instead, they have a central artifact supported by magical items... It requires users attune to it - which is a process of syncing your magical aura with an item's. With the more powerful magic items, that gives you a kind of telepathic input into them. Spelljammer helms, unlike most artifacts, can have more than one person attuned to them at a time, and as a class they're not choosy about who attunes - though individual helms will get pickier about their navigators over time, with earlier navigators and experiences shaping later preferences. Hers is pretty old, named Serenity, and might not let Ellie attune to it.

She'll try to make a good impression.

Kiss! "You'll do fine. Serenity has excellent taste."

"I'm probably not too far off, if they like you."

"I'll put in a good recommendation."

"Thanks."

"Happy to help."

"So you just put it on to start?"

Her expression goes briefly blank and kind of confused, then - 

She giggles. "Ship helm, like what you use to steer it, not like a hat."

"-Oh."

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I was thinking some kind of magic hat that telepathically controls the ship."

"Probably anyone's ever built something like that? Elves are weirdly fond of thrones, dwarves like these incredibly complicated things they insist aren't puzzle boxes even though they totally are, there was a big human group really into spinny wheels for a while - so you do get these aesthetic trends. But, yeah, a helm is just anything used to control where a ship goes."

"Yeah, I just didn't put that together. In my defense, this doesn't look much like the ships I'm familiar with."

Giggle. "Fair enough."

"So show me what this non-hat helm looks like, then."

"Your wish is my command."

To the navigation room! It's massive, and shaped like the inside of a paper lantern. They emerge into it through a tight spiral staircase into a circular platform in the lower part of a cynlinder that runs through the sphere's middle, where the light might normally go. The edges between panels are thick and papery, but each panel seems to be a screen of sorts. A band of them show the area outside the ship in three hundred and sixty degrees, and a cluster above that has some kind of - data readout? There's panels showing far away scenes too, some with diagrams or guides Ellie can't make heads or tails of, and a few that seem currently inert.

And hovering just above the platform's center, at the absolute center of the paper sphere - 

A gyroscope with golden threads between the hoops and a complicated golden sphere in the center. The golden parts glow and flicker softly like fire, and the rings turn lazily as if the threads aren't there.