He hands off the rope and continues to hold cloak guy up. "I might want to learn magic, if it's a thing that can be learned. Knowledge is power and so on."

"I don't know very much myself, since it's a huge time investment and by the time I learned it existed I was already a college student with a full course load and no desire to drop out, but I can introduce you to some people who do."

"Thank you, I appreciate it."

"Well, you did rescue me, after all. I'd have gotten out after another half-hour of keeping him monologuing and working at the ropes, but you certainly couldn't have known that. So what-all is there where you're from, besides tall fairies with round ears?"

"It's an infinite flat plane, not a planet. There's trees and lakes and mountains, colorful plants and animals, that kind of thing. The only people there are more of my kind of fairy. We don't do cities so much, but there's a bunch of towns and the like."

"That sounds beautiful."

"I have pictures." He brings out an outdated tablet computer that probably looks like sci-fi to her. "Oh, I'm Nick by the way."

"Daphne. Oh, I was right, this is lovely. Is this magic or just more advanced technology than we have here?"

"...What year is it? The expected answer is 2180 something. It's just technology, bought it off a summoner a few years ago."

"It's nineteen ninety-nine."

"...I should grab a physics textbook or ten when this guy unsummons me."

"...And Biology, maybe? I'm a biology major an an enormous nerd about it."

"Yes, all the books, I was being sarcastic."

"Sorry, I'm just really excited."

"No, I get it, I would be slapping knife guy awake right now at the prospect of engineering books from a hundred fifty years in the future."

"I'm not literally slapping him awake because I haven't finished learning everything this century has to offer, but--yes. That."

"Exactly. Should I carry us all to a better place than... Wherever this is?"

"A forest a few miles away from Borgia University, where I study. My car's broken down a little ways off into the treeline."

"I can fly a car easy if you need it. Maybe after resummoning me, though." Poke, poke, wake up knife guy.

He wakes up groggily.

"Sounds good. I don't think we have any animate willow trees in this forest to crash into, so that shouldn't be a problem. ..Um, do you still have Harry Potter in a hundred and fifty years?"

"Sounds vaguely familiar. I'll just write off the willow thing as a pop culture reference. Dont mind the threats they're for show."

He speaks up. "Hey, knife guy. You are going to unsummon me or you're going to regret it." His rusty knife hovers in front of him threateningly.

"Wha-how-I can't! You have me tied up! How am I supposed to do anything without the use of my hands?" he cries.

"Unsummoning me works by chanting 'return to whence you came, fairy' in your head until it takes." No it doesnt, Nick just thinks it'll be amusing. "You have two minutes."

He looks appropriately terrified. He's almost certainly complying with the superfluous request, since his lips are moving slightly in time with what might be the chant. And in two minutes--

Actually it's closer to one minute, he gave a safety margin. Nick disappears.

And flies off to call in some favors and copy most of a library to his little computer.