"– That is a really good point." He gets his phone out again. "I don't know if it has to be high quality but my phone can do recordings, if you want to test?"

"Sure, and we can borrow a higher quality recording device from Bar if this doesn't work. Does the thing that records need a specific kind of acoustical room structure, or?"

"It should work just fine if you hold it near your mouth, the microphone – and device itself, actually – is designed to be used for long-distance voice communication."

He hands it to her. "Red button starts the recording."

"Okay."

She presses the red button, and begins singing. Her voice continues to be kind of astonishing. It's maybe obvious that she was simplifying the song for his benefit, and has now stopped doing that.

He tries not to feel too embarrassed as it's quite clearly (he hopes) a species difference.

And when she is done, here is how to play it back!

She does that. It sounds - not as good as Calassúrë herself singing, but still reasonably pretty. If with occasional feedback issues. Calassúrë winces subtly, but pays thoughtful attention.

"That felt like it worked," she pronounces, once the recording has finished playing. "If - not as well as it could have, with the quality of the playback. Better equipment would fix that, right?"

"It would definitely get higher quality, and you can get pretty high quality – you could listen to some music I have on this? The microphone is quite a bit worse than the speakers."

"Probably a better idea to get better recording equipment, record another song, then play it back through multiple sets of speakers and see how it affects the quality. Not that I'm not curious about your world's music, but we are on a bit of a time table."

"The timetable does seem to be on the order of decades but sure?"

Could they have some better recording equipment from Bar, please?

But of course.

"Even if it is on the order of decades, it's - getting caught up with things that are not focused on reaching our goals isn't - I hesitate to call it a waste of time, but I think it's badly allocating the time that we have. If I can get you immortal, then we have the rest of forever to talk about non-magical music and nonessential cultural details and the like. Instead of failing to make you immortal, and then that being it."

She reads the instructional packet and starts carefully setting up the recording equipment, not letting her curiosity get in the way of efficiently setting up.

He waits for a pause in the setup to continue, "Hm. I agree that we should prioritize, I'm not actually arguing that point, just – we will presumably need to have downtime at some point in the next decade, and learning about my world's music could be one way, so – we will probably get around to it even if we do prioritize?"

"We'll probably have some downtime, but I'm - if I am very mean to myself in the next couple of decades, it'll be unpleasant. But if it keeps you alive, then obviously it's worth it, because I have the rest of forever for recovery. I don't have the rest of forever to save you from slowly dying."

"Oh." Pause. "Thank you? – I don't know how much a lack of downtime would affect your productivity, I guess that would be the only thing to consider?"

"You're welcome. That'll be the main consideration, yeah. I'm not entirely sure, either, I haven't really had to deal with a crisis like this. But I can tell if my productivity is slipping and can take breaks accordingly."

… Nod. "It seems likely that someone else will come into the bar over the course of a decade for us, but I don't know if there's actually a hard cap on the time people have been here alone before."