"No", Zoriana is not trying to trade with Val and Alyssa.

"Yes", she is trying to get shared vocabulary.

Alyssa describes this.

"Oh. That's really good, I didn't think we'd have quite that much mutual comprehensibility - I guess 'trade' kind of clear, but 'shared vocabulary', really? Do you understand most of what we're saying?"

"Yes!"

"We came here looking for a bigger world and other people! We're really curious why the vacuum didn't seem to be bothering you."

If she had prepared Light she would cast it. She hasn't. She has a headlamp with Continual Flame. She'll sketch a person with a bubble around them, point to it, and say "Zoriana". …and get out her headlamp in case this raises useful questions.

"I didn’t see a bubble."

Zoriana doesn't have the vocabulary to say things like "it is not the most visually prominent bubble, especially if you don't regularly try to find other very subtle spell effects, but it's there".

So she'll just make a bit of a face and repeat what she said last time.

"Zoriana. Alyssa. Val." She points.

"Yes. Zoriana, Alyssa, Val." Zoriana can also point.

Alyssa and Val still don't seem to get that she's understanding them via magic, and they should really ask her lots more questions while making sure they can take binary or visual answers. If she says 'magic' and performs some maybe that'll get her a bit closer to communicating that she can magically understand them. Which she'd normally do by reusing the word and indicating her ears, but if they're this unfamiliar with spoken language it probably won't help. Still, more words are better.

Guidance is subtle, Detect Magic isn't helpful at all, and Creating Water in someone else's vessel in freefall is not a good way to make friends. She doesn't want to use more than an orison on this if she doesn't have to.

She scratches at herself enough to just barely draw blood (a blade would be faster, but she doesn't want to draw one in these circumstances), and then uses Stabilize to heal the area. (She doesn't use her holy symbol during casting, Stabilize doesn't actually require a focus and she doesn't want to be deceptive.)

Then she gestures at the former injury. "Magic."

If Val wants his vision fixed she is going to have to awkwardly explain that she can heal damaged eyes but not missing eyes, but she is at least on speaking terms with someone who can cast Regenerate, it's not a completely lost cause.

"Magic. You have magic. I have magic. You have magic and you have eyes and ears." Strictly speaking, he also has ears, but that’s not the point.

"Yes."

Is that surprising? She's met one blind spellcaster for whom it was supernaturally important and unhealable, but even she had more eyes than Val.

There are also spellcasters who hurt themselves for power – troll augurs, bloatmages, some orc wizards, people serving gods who like it – but Val doesn't really quite look like any familiar type of those? He's not an orc or a troll, his scars are well-healed and tidy, he doesn't have a mask, he isn't armed or armored, and he's not heavyset. Also, those spellcasters don't tend to blind themselves, because being blind is really inconvenient for targeting spells and reading scrolls and such.

Maybe he'll just explain what's up with his magic. Or she can watch him cast a spell and figure out if it's arcane or divine, at least.

"Zoriana magic, Val magic, Alyssa no magic?"

"Alyssa no magic," Alyssa agrees sadly.

Now, how does she introduce an abstract word like 'question' here? Probably the answer is that she doesn't.

It's sketch time again. This person has a lot of extra arms, sort of, and they overlap and are making different gestures. "Speak."

This person is watching the first one. "Attend."

"Zoriana magic attend. Zoriana no magic speak. Alyssa speak, Val speak, Zoriana attend?"

"Holy shit."

"If I tried to do that with the magic I'm using, it would do worse than kill me. Hi, I'm Val, this is Alyssa, and we're here looking for other descendants of the Lost World and for living space that doesn't need constant maintenance. We come in peace and we don't want to hurt you. I have questions about where we are now, but it sounds like I'd have to turn them into very closed-ended questions to get answers. Is this a good place to try to open diplomacy with?"

It's an entire planet. There's plenty of individual places that would work, but.

Zoriana makes a face. "Yes. No."

And then she frowns briefly, and pulls out a map. It seems to match the planet. She starts pointing at symbols on it. "Yes. No. No. Yes. No."

She'll keep going with that until someone cuts her off. Which they may want to do, this might not be the most informative.

"The world we came from is small. It has one government. It sounds like this world has a lot of governments. And it sounds like some of them are hard to deal with. Are there - there are definitely going to be other things we should be aware of before we get involved in anything. Hmm. Our writing is more closely modeled on the language we inherited from the Lost World, but not so closely that I'd expect you to be able to write so we could read it. Do you want to... draw trade proposals? Hear about random things in case something I say includes useful vocabulary? Something else?" He gestures in various directions so she can point to whichever of these answers she likes best.

"Yes", the world has a lot of governments.

She'd most prefer to do something else, and indicates such.

She'll start by explaining time, actually, she doesn't have an eternity of Comprehend Languages but she'd really like to be able to speak to these people with Tongues later, not have them leave once she stops understanding them. Val and Alyssa aren't dressed like they live in freefall normally. Do they recognize a sundial, an hourglass, an incense clock, a clock tower (with tally marks for the hours), or a candle clock?

"Time?"

"Yes! Time." (She still hasn't copied a single one of their words.)

"Zoriana magic attend." She makes a smallish gesture. "Time. Zoriana no magic attend." She makes another one. "Time time. Zoriana magic speak attend."

"Will it take long enough that, uh... that we would need to sleep while we wait?"

"Yes." She holds up one finger.

"I don’t know if we can aim well enough to get back into this vessel if we go home. We’ll have to check sooner or later, though, and maybe I can bring a real diplomat back later. In the mean time, I guess we should probably explain some things to you - where we come from? our magic? something else?"

She'll point to both of the first two options.

She doesn't need them in this vessel, she just wants to meet up with them when she can talk. She has a decent tuning fork collection, if she goes with them she can Plane Shift back later, but they do seem pretty power-limited so they possibly couldn't bring her home.

Maybe the explanation of their magic will help her understand their operating constraints better.