"Oh. Oh no."

"Out of all the mistakes I've made in my life, that, I think, is the one I regret the most."

"I can imagine. Was your friend all right?"

"Eventually, yes."

He nods. 

"My brother doesn't believe that he's here."

"...Damn," says Miles.

"Have a story for us?"

"...Maybe. I'm not sure."

His thoughts are disordered; he tries to sort them out.

"I've - there's - this isn't something that has specifically happened to me or anyone I know, but - a solution springs to mind. I'm not sure if it's a good one. Does he think he's dreaming, or - being made to dream? Or...?"

"Apparently the Enemy can induce whatever impressions he wants and sometimes uses this to try to get reactions or information from him. And "you've been miraculously rescued and are safe" seems like an obvious instance of such a hallucination."

"It would. But - I keep surprising everyone. I and my life are not things the people of this world expect, or could easily invent. So what if I introduced myself, and... told him stories? All of the stories. The entire contents of my memory. I couldn't drop literally everything else for it, it would be an enormous project, but I'd do it if it seemed like it might help. I speak four languages not previously found in this world, I have had cultural and personal experiences not previously found in this world either..."

He goes very still for a second. "It could be worth a try. I don't think the Enemy could make you up."

"If it's worth a try, I'll give it one. I don't think the Enemy could make me up either. It might help if I knew how to make my thoughts visible on purpose - I still can't even tell which things I'm showing, and the extra depth could only help, I'd think."

"That's teachable, or should be. We teach it to small children at - at about your age, actually, probably." He shakes his head. "What happens if you imagine saying something aloud to me, but without moving your lips or making a sound? Surely sometimes you've desired badly for someone to read your thoughts from your face..."

He tries to put himself in the relevant state of mind. An intense desire to communicate, to be understood...

The test message isn't speech: it's a childhood memory of listening to his grandfather explain how maple sugar is made, rich with sensory and emotional depth. It comes across very clearly.

"Yes, I caught that," he says. "You're sure no one in your world can do this? You can hear and you can speak, it's bizarre you can't do it with each other."

"I have never experienced this phenomenon, or heard of anyone experiencing it, until I came here. If there was another human available we could try 'speaking' and 'listening' to one another and see if it worked, but unfortunately the supply is rather limited. Should I try introducing myself to Maitimo now?"

He goes still again. "Probably not now. He's a bit agitated."

"All right. I can catch up with the inventors instead, if that would be more suitable."

"Yes, I think they'd appreciate it. Bring them dinner when you go in? We have to feed our inventors, they forget to do it themselves."

"Yeah, sure. Where do I find inventor-food?"

He points him towards a large hall with food. "It'll be set aside on plates near the end, or you can ask someone."

"Thanks."

So he acquires inventor-food and then seeks out inventors.

They are both in the workshop, and both initially look annoyed when the door opens.

"Hello," says Miles. "Sorry to interrupt. I have food, and also notes on railgun designs which I can trivially copy to the local readers because I figured out how to pass around and display information in Quenya easily on my devices. Can I ask you to catch me up on what you've been doing while I've been busy elsewhere?"

That makes them look significantly less annoyed. "I told you the first part of this process involved establishing the correspondance between certain magics and the effects on nearby biologicals," he says, "and am sketching out the series of combinations that will be maximally informative towards that end. For example, you might think it's most efficient to tweak only one thing at once. But there are thousands, and they intersect; it turns out to be most productive to create paired and trebled elements, find the nature of their interactions through - hmm, perhaps there's an easier way to introduce you to the concept, given your background. Imagine you have a million items - the names of all the Men in an intermediate-sized city, for example." He nearly smiles. "You need to sort and store information about them. What's the fastest way to sort the information?"