"It's a very old dialect but understandable," he says at the same time as he sends telepathically.

They grin. That's one way to learn a language.

They play with the words, repeating them until they get the pronunciation identical to Kaede's.

"It's a very old dialect but understandable. It's a very old dialect but understandable. It's a very old dialect but understandable. It's a very old dialect but understandable. Understandable. It's a very old dialect but understandable."

How is my accent? Say more things.

"Understandable, but thick and weirdly foreign, like can't-quite-place-maybe-mountain-folk foreign?"

"Un-der-stand-a-ble. Under-standa-ble. Under-stand-able. Understandable. It's a very thick and foreign? It's a like mountain folk? Mountain folk it's a foreign? Mountain folk it's a weirdly?" Trying to get your grammar here.

He repeats those sentences correctly. "I'm terrible at languages, you'll do much better."

"I'm much better at languages? I'm weird and foreign? I'm thick and foreign? You'll terrible at languages?" It gets easier after the first few. Do you just have the one?

"I have like one and three quarters of two others," he says after correcting sentences.

Your world has four kinds of magic, you said? What are those?

"Arcanism, enchanting, elementalism, and metamancy. Do you want the long or the short explanations?"

Long, please.

"Elementalists have 'blessings,' which are persistent states of magic they cast on themselves. An Expressed elementalist always has one and exactly one blessing active. So, a possible blessing is flight, and while an elementalist has flight active they can... fly. At will. But there's a mana cap per blessing, and if they run out of mana they can't fly anymore. Only way to recharge mana is by having a blessing active but not being used. They can only switch blessings out while they're not using them, too. They're called that way because it used to be really common to get blessings that control the elements."

Nod.

"Enchanters can make magical artefacts. They basically define the effect they want an object to have—and that's pretty much anything from a warm blanket to a golem, there are even legends of sapient golems—and pour mana into the object while going through the definition in their heads. They don't have a maximum amount of mana, it just continuously charges from the moment they're born, forever. Artefacts have a mana charge that runs down with time and needs to be periodically recharged."

"That's interesting. My kind of magic-users can all make artefacts with, uh," special training? "but the enchanting sounds some the same."

"Special training," he enunciates, "but yeah only enchanters can do that here. Well, arcanists can do some of that as scrolls—er, they also have unlimited mana, like enchanters, but they attach magic to symbols rather than objects or themselves. Words count as symbols, as well as gestures, or drawings or whatever—any action that conveys meaning. They also have to come up with a definition of an effect and when they've done that and attached it to a set of actions, whenever they perform those actions and have enough mana they will cast the spell no matter what. When an arcanist attaches a spell to something it's stuck with that forever, so they should be careful with it. And the scrolls are things they create that are encoded with spells they made, and other people can use those scrolls, but they're one use only, and are destroyed when they're used."

"That sounds more like the magic I know, though more -" flexible. -"The fourth?"

"Metamancers do magic to magic. They can detect magic—in artefacts and people and things—and tweak it and steal it and convert it and generally mess with it. Also they're said to be blessed by an evil god."

"And which are you?"

"The evil one."

"Do you feel like you're blessed by an evil god? Is evil even observable with your magic?"

"No and no."

"Yeah, I don't feel blessed by an evil god either. I'm, uh, a tiefling. Tieflings are an offshoot of humans, supposedly blessed by Asmodeus. And, depending who you listen to, always absolutely irredeemably evil."

"Well, it is a pleasure to meet you, fellow evil being. But at least your gods look kinda real."

"Well, you've offered up your dark secret, I may as well offer up mine. It's also easier if I don't have to worry about keeping it, I wasn't going to slip up but this is less mental effort." They reach up and remove their face. The face in their hand shifts into a feathered mask.

The face underneath looks like it might have been blessed by an evil god. The eyes are solid black spheres, the teeth triangular and serrated. In place of hair, mostly rigid spines, like a porcupine.

They spread their arms and wait for a reaction.