"Do you have letters and… syllables?"

"Of course we have syllables. Not letters. I guess I could reproduce something I saw written in letters that way if I wanted to for some reason."

"I assume you wouldn't somehow say something twice if there were two people speaking different languages? So you probably… don't use the syllables I hear?"

"I have no idea what I sound like to you," she shrugs. "But I wouldn't have to repeat myself for anyone at all to understand me."

"If you say the same word twice, do you say it the same way? … And actually, how did you learn to plain speak?"

"Yes. And I didn't, I started able to do it, I'm not a breeder kind."

"… Okay, well, I don't know what that means because I'm pretty sure mortals are– breeders?"

"Yeah, that's my understanding. I was never a child, I don't have any parents, I just started one day."

Well okay then.

He thinks he'll just be quiet for a bit now, on account of the running. He probably doesn't desperately need to know about the weird translation magic right now.

Promise doesn't see an overwhelming need to hold a conversation. She just paces him a little ways ahead.

Eventually: "Where are you going to want your gate to?"

"Description or name?"

"Description, as grounded in geographical features as possible."

"North-east of the main continent on my planet? It's a huge city, I was by a lake that was a similar size to Yellow's, plenty of trees around, a few blocks away from the fifth-tallest building there? I don't know much about the geography since it's a city?"

"Anything else you can tell me about the lake? Altitude? Climate?"

"Temperate, it's currently summer so we don't have much rain? Doesn't get much below like 5°C in the winter, extremely rarely snows, doesn't get droughts, isn't very far above sea level. The lake I really don't know much about. So long as I'm anywhere near that city, I should be okay, I mean, I've been missing for a bit already so it doesn't matter how precisely I'm back where I came from?"

"Aiming for a city would be harder than aiming for a lake. What's the lake shaped like?"

He decides to opt for a lumen diagram for this instead of trying to describe it.

Apparently he can move the lumen with him as he runs, and he's able to do a relatively accurate depiction of the area he came from.

"Is that better, or do you need it, like… zoomed out?"

"Wouldn't hurt."

So he tries to get the overall shape of the other features of the park for her. It's a bit fuzzy; he's not sure of the details and he tells her as such.

"This should be good enough, I think."

He nods, leaving it available for a few moments in case she's still looking at it.

"Is there some minimum distance we need to get, or some place we going, or…?"

"I'm going to stash you in a reasonable hiding place that it will probably take Yellow more than a week to find even if he looks very diligently and where no one else is likely to stumble over you. You'll have to camp out there while waiting for the gate to settle. I'll come back later to close it but in the meantime I need to get a cutting of my tree and go plant it somewhere Yellow and my last master aren't likely to close it; you'll probably want to block off the gate on your end."

He nods and keeps running.

"… How common are masters?"

"'Masters' aren't a specific thing. Any fairy can do that. It's just motivation and opportunity that varies."

"Okay, but… how common are people who actually take other fairies hostage and order them to do things?"