"I'm not sure how I'd even pick an illuminating example, I'm sorry."

"Well, in the mean time, I imagine you'll want to set up trade and travel regardless. Do we need to discuss travel beyond figuring out a good place for people to teleport to and from?"

"Usually intraplanetary busses just fly, so if you want service to Niazon and so on, someplace suitable for a flying busport will also be useful! But yeah, it's not very complicated beyond finding an available parcel."

Hmm. Missed the implication that Azan already has teleportation and blueprints for internal combustion engines, or figured out how limited Azan's access to those things is?

"Niazon's not exactly far away but it's possible we won't have the spare teleportation capacity for trips to the other side of the world any sooner than you could set up flights. As an aside, I'm not used to people calling flying things buses, in my experience people only call ground vehicles buses."

"It's a genericized brand name, 'Airbus'."

Is he supposed to know what a brand name is. Is this a trap. "I can see how a flying thing that does what buses do would end up with that name."

At some point when they've talked for a while he suggests that maybe someone could go visit their worlds and see what they're like.

"Absolutely! Are you imagining more of a guided tour or do you just want a few people to be turned loose in a bus station with an Allspeak installation?"

"...An Allspeak installation?"

"Our standard translation magic. It's free."

Apparently their form of teleportation doesn't just have language-learning as a mysterious side effect. He neglects to explain that Adrian's works that way.

"Sounds useful. How does it interact with other translation magic?"

"You know, I'm not sure it's been tried; we've got lots of kinds of telepathy, and nonmagical translation things, but for translation spells per se Allspeak is about it. I believe it can be removed but not by people who only have bus-station levels of knowhow about installing it, so I'd need to get a specialist ready if there's concern about interactions."

"I don't specifically have any reason to expect there to be interactions but I suppose it'd be silly to rely on anyone being able to say that there were interactions, huh?"

"Quite! So probably we want to prepare whoever goes first to have Allspeak put on and taken off again and then see how they're doing."

"I'm not sure we should expect that to tell us what to expect going forward, but it's not a bad idea."

"Is there an obvious candidate subject to try this with who already has your translation magic?"

Well, the thing is, that depends. Does Adrian have translation magic? Do people from Emika have translation magic? Apparently it's not people who travel to other worlds, and maybe it's not people who travel to Azan from other worlds, though conceivably they wouldn't have noticed if it's totally redundant with Allspeak. Are the people who learn languages by magic the ones with the magic, or the ones whose language is learned? It's probably not the Azani language or they'd have noticed already, right?

"I don't know if it inheres in people or works some other way. The magic that brought it about is new and dangerous to test. We could ask Val to go first but I don't actually know if that'd be more informative than any randomly selected person."

"Val?" inquires Melda.

"Val learned Azani by magic after coming here. Whereas I barely travel and don't speak anything besides Azani and Sesati, and arguably that's not even two languages."

"Huh, and he doesn't know how he did it?"

"Not unless you count 'by magic', or if he does he's not telling."

"Can you introduce us? If there's going to be challenging magic interactions better to find out sooner than later."

"Yeah, one moment." He'll step into a hallway and retrieve Val. (They sent word to Val and Jamie, among others, while he was talking strategy with Azan she. Otherwise this wouldn't be nearly so convenient.)

Val looks less like Valan than most Sesatis do, and he isn't built like Valan, and he doesn't even hold himself like Valan. There are some similarities in their expressions but not to the extent that it's notable just yet.

"Hello!" Melda says, and she introduces herself and her colleagues again.

"It's nice to meet you. I'm Val Renaud." That's not even structured like an Azani name. "I hear you're concerned about whether your language magic has side effects and want me to test it?"