"It is very rare for anyone besides Ruava to ever enter my wing of the palace."

"Okay."

He continues to sit unhappily at the window, but now he's also reading over his summoning notes.

The bird reads over his shoulder. "My command of Eivarne is imperfect since I'm borrowing Sindri's and he's been here for three weeks but I think this entire class of bindings is gonna be awkward in this dialect," it says, pecking a section, "now that I've thought about it more - could be a weakness in my translation -"

"Your command of Eivarne is very impressive for three weeks' exposure," he says. "I suppose it's very unlikely you have any Avashin, Satni, or Hialene."

"I'm - doing technological stuff - to all the writing ever produced on this planet, back home, so eventually I will have okay automatic translation of those things. Perhaps Sindri is just really good at languages, why would he misrepresent how long he's been here."

"I wasn't aware I was this good at languages, but apparently being stranded somewhere that no one speaks English, French, Russian, or Thulic is highly motivating. I have a few words of Avashin but definitely not enough to summon in. I don't even know the word for 'summon'."

"I speak all of them and a few more. If I understand the language transfer right, it's possible Ruava or I should summon someone to make a translator of them."

"That and there's the afterlife thing, at least potentially..."

"Yeah the lecture I was working from doesn't have that in, I didn't know at the time." He explains the afterlife thing.

"Yes, I can see how that would be very useful. But I should not risk an unsafe summoning for an uncertain chance at immortality."

"You could also just summon Sindri's fairy in a perfectly conventional circle, I'm not actually advising unbound summoning. It's just concisely communicable."

"A perfectly conventional circle acquired and verified by what means?"

"I can't make anything Sindri doesn't let me make. He can have me make whatever sort of circle his folks usually use for the fairy and I can't make a circle which is, say, not that."

"I'll wait for Ruava first. It shouldn't be much longer."

"Is she going to be, like, in conversational form - I went to medical school, I could send you another bird with some stuff if she might need stuff albeit I'd need more information -"

"She will be in perfect physical health and capable of contributing to the conversation without difficulty."

"Okay."

He waits.

Ruava, looking not at all like someone who was tortured recently, climbs in the window.

...she blinks at the bird.

"You need not be alarmed by the fake bird," says Korovai. "It is a means of communicating with some strangers from another world who have assorted fantastical claims about how they can help us."

"Hi," says the bird.

"Let's hear some fantastical claims," says Ruava.

"On the other end of this fake bird are me, Cam, indestructible magical summonable being who can make arbitrary material objects, and my summoner, Sindri." Who is some guy. "The bird is nonmagical. It's technology you don't have and was made by magic but itself works on entirely physical principles."

"No offense, but arbitrary material objects sounds like less of a solution to our problems than you might think. Even if you can do very fancy fake birds."