"It could be constructing an elaborate lie about you speaking Azani but I bet not. Anyway, go ahead and uninstall it or however this works."

Bop!

"So what conversation did we have from your end?"

Melda repeats it.

"Well, it doesn't seem like it went badly. So far."

"Do you want it back?" asks the frost giant.

Shrug. "It doesn't seem like there's much reason to say no?"

Bop!

"Thanks. Is that typically free or just when you're testing it?"

"Oh, it's always free, it's just much less hassle for everybody if anyone who wants Allspeak has it and there's fewer miscommunications all around. Plus it takes like fifteen minutes to learn how to use one of these and Vanda Nossëo's economy is like a million times the size of the backwater that produces 'em."

"Huh. At some point I'd be very curious to learn more about that, though I imagine now's not a good time."

"I mean, we didn't know how complicated this was gonna get, I budgeted an hour, but if you're busy I can fuck off and play Snowflake Poem till somebody else needs the Allspeak specialist."

"I'm not, I just figured you would be."

"Sure. You want to learn to use a wand or you want me to diss Asgard some more or what?"

"Can I get both?"

"You got it. So if you've seen one of the envoys - which of you has Princess Beldri's -" Melda raises her hand. "Her, if you've seen her teleport, that's a spell that's made of a few hundred million letters in a magic alphabet. The only person who can use the magic alphabet is the princess of my planet Jotunheim, Princess Beldri. Everybody else who uses the same magic works with giant chunks of magic alphabet, like whole chapters' worth, and their spells are clunkier. Allspeak's made that way, mostly by folks from this planet called Asgard. They're assholes, they were at war with us since forever and also kidnapped Princess Beldri when she was a baby and raised her thinking she was one of them."

"Huh, that's..." He pauses contemplatively for a bit. "Wait, wait, do you mean they thought she was one of them or she thought she was one of them?"

"I think everybody except the Asgardian queen who kidnapped her thought she was one of them, did some magic to make her look like one most of the time."

"Wow! That's fucked up." He wasn't going to say that next but it seems like the only reasonable response. "And somehow she does magic at a finer granularity than anyone else?"

"Yeah, not because of that though, she touched a magic thing when she was a kid. Usually it just kills people who do that."

He contemplates this for a while. "Do a lot of other people try?"

"Nah. Most people it doesn't kill it also doesn't do anything particularly neat for. It or the other ones like it, there's - six? I think it's six."

"So can I get a ride to go touch all six or a subset thereof?"

"I think some of them are held by hostile governments? And you probably can't get the one the Princess has, she keeps it on her and has famous-person levels of you don't get to meet her in person usually. Maybe there's one you can go pat if you sign enough waivers that it's nobody's fault if it explodes you."

"Hmmmmm." More contemplating. If she makes exceptions she probably does it on the basis of precognition about what people will do. He can extract... weak evidence, not proof of anything... if he commits to using any magic he might get as a result in some particular way. He picks off of body language he expects to differ between instances of this conversation (which he supposes this is obviously not the only instance of). If he gets cool magic out of this he'll try to use it to make Azan richer and more powerful. "I'm surprised by that since I expect most of the reason for it is concerns about assassination attempts and I would expect she could just foresee that I'm not going to do that. But I don't have any reason to prefer to try to tackle that first if there's another one I could try."