"Could be educational, as long as our guests are fine with you it's your call."

And then she turns to Alyssa. "Can you understand me now?"

Well, the fact that she's translating all this for Val might be a hint.

Yeah, she'll go slowly. "This will last 24 hours. If I wanted it to include you and Val someone would have to cast it twice, or use a higher-circle spell and split the duration between you two. You should be able to speak aloud now and I'm going to stop understanding your sign language in the near future."

Val doesn't have a very expressive face and his body language is all built around a kind of alien set of contexts and conventions but it may nonetheless be legible that he's unamused. He's not going to deign to comment on his unamusement right now, though.

Alyssa is probably more legibly overwhelmed. Nothing feels worth it to say two ways at once and she keeps working on coming up with equivalencies between Zoriana's language and her native language and it's kind of eating up her ability to generate words.

…right. This is these people's first time running into people while adventuring. They probably have had zero conversations where someone diplomatic is trying to walk the party wizard through talking to kobolds because only he speaks Draconic.

"We can get a second casting if translation is taxing."

"...That... would be helpful?"

"I don't know your constraints well enough to confidently tell you that it is or isn't worth it, and I could try saying 'I bet it's worth it if it costs less than this or that' but I don't really know what anything at all costs for you. It would be helpful. Neither of us is a real diplomat but Alyssa is here in her capacity as someone with eyes and I stayed in school through the age of twenty one so I could understand our world and our people's needs."

For this she can sign on Val at least to start. "Alyssa magic attend, Alyssa attend people speak people. Val magic attend, Val attend people speak Val."

And then she'll get out a gold coin and a platinum piece. "How hard would it be for you to get these metals?"

"Easy. If I left one of us here I could leave this much with them." He gestures to indicate the amount. It’s a lot.

"Big," again signed on Val. (If true.)

"Zoriana want Val magic attend speak." And if he doesn't suddenly come up with an objection she'll tell the junior cleric as much.

He doesn’t object.

Then he can wait another 15 minutes, a duration which Alyssa can actually describe to him because she can describe it to Alyssa. "While we wait, should I ask Alyssa questions that might be simple and save explanations for when she won't have to translate?"

"Sure."

"How long ago did your lost world become lost?"

"Five hundred years ago."

That's during the Age of Enthronement. What even happened in the early 43rd century, anyway? Nothing relevant springs to mind.

"What do you do on a normal day?"

"I play the harp or spin yarn. Sometimes a bunch of us spin together while someone tells a story. I like running. Uh, I... eat? Drink? Hug my parents? Sometimes I read? Sometimes I go for walks with friends and talk and maybe share some chocolate? Some days I do laundry or clean a room but not every day, I mean, the whole family doesn't need laundry done more than once a week and one person can do the whole week's laundry so I don't really do it that often. I dunno. I do stuff. I'm not a very good cook but I cook sometimes. I dunno, I don't do the same things every day."

"My ordinary routine changed pretty dramatically recently. I get up a couple hours before dawn when my wife goes to sleep and I wear my infant son - my wife can hear if he cries but if I'm on call I have to keep touching him - and insofar as I have any ability to multitask, I read or garden, but honestly I spend a lot of that time just rocking the baby and saying inane things about our surroundings. After a few hours, our housekeeper arrives, usually with something for breakfast that we all share. Except the baby, who is mostly fed by my wife but I'll do a little bit of conjuring if it's my shift and the baby is really hungry and my wife really needs sleep. Our housekeeper handles all the cleaning and sometimes does some of our shopping. Meanwhile when my wife gets up and has eaten, she takes responsibility for the baby. We cuddle or talk sometimes, and sometimes she paints, and sometimes I go climbing, and both of us sometimes garden or go shopping or read. I'm on paternity leave, so I take a sacrifice shift about once a week and all of that goes to my personal magic, not to maintaining the world, and I could just skip it entirely if it wasn't worth it to me. In a couple of months, either I go back to work or we stop getting free housekeeping services and free food, because that's a perk I get from being a mage. Anyway, we do pay for a sitter to give us an hour or two of not being on call for the baby at all most days, usually right before I go to bed, but that's eating our savings pretty quickly since neither of us is bringing in much income right now.

"Before our marriage, I would do multiple sacrifice shifts per week and I lived in a dormitory in the temple. I would get up at a basically random time. I would visit the kitchen and get something to eat - it's free there, if you're a mage. The dorm is also free. Basically all the money I made I could spend on luxuries. So when I did a shift, I would go down to visit the magic and sandpaper my skin off and irritate the raw flesh for a while, and then eventually I'd heal myself and take a shower on the way out, and then go sit on a beanbag chair and read for a while. I'd do about an eight-hour shift, which is longer than the bare minimum, so I had some power available for personal use. I'd spend that power on odd jobs like conjuring stuff or making minor cosmetic changes to people who weren't satisfied with how they looked. And I'd read a lot and discuss with other mages and representatives of the government whether we wanted to try to expand the world, how the atmospheric composition was doing, and so on. I would sit out in the front courtyard under the liar tree a lot. I like it there."

Alyssa seems to have a pretty good standard of living. She's not going to jump to conclusions about the chocolate, it's presumably local to the demiplane.

It's not particularly weird for a man with a newborn baby to be adventuring. It is weird for a man with a newborn baby to be adventuring and to spend the rest of his time at home often caring for the baby, to the point of spending pain-powered magic to feed him. Does the world they're from not have wet nurses?

Eight hours of that multiple times a week is a lot, but it probably doesn't feel like dying and being in control of it probably helps.

"Do you have a name for your world? How many people live there? How many are mages?"

"Sathend and a few thousand people live there and, like, less than two hundred are mages, right? Depending on how you count retired ones and kids."

"Yeah, it depends on how you count."

"Sathend small." Plausibly around a tenth of Magnimar, but she said she's trying to spare Alyssa unnecessary translation work.

"What decides who is a mage?"

"Parents give their babies to the temple. It's not ideal, we keep trying to schedule a time for the government to meet and discuss better alternatives. The meeting would have happened by now but it was postponed. I'm planning to go and tell them we should wait until the kids are old enough to make choices before we dedicate them."