...that's an awful lot of 'more complicated' and in particular it looks like his guess at why they aren't communicating with him might be wrong, which is - not reassuring but probably better than his guess, at least.

He should start at the beginning, though.

He's pretty sure he's from a different world; he's been enough places on his and talked to enough other travelers that he's very confident that he'd know if there were any people on his world who could fly like they can, and there aren't. On the world he's from, sufficiently clever creatures can craft, with two known tiers of crafting; using it to communicate, like he's currently doing, is the easier tier, and a bunch of different animals can do it, the clever ones, crows and parrots and elephants and things. Changing objects in various ways is the more difficult tier, and his species - they call themselves Crafters - are the only ones who can do it. He would expect this to be true everywhere and for other abilities to represent a higher tier of crafting ability in addition to those two. Is that the case here?

The apparent representative of the five gestures to 'no', then a moment later 'something else' and 'more complicated' together.

Okay, that's reassuring, if there's a species out there that's as far beyond Crafters as Crafters are beyond crows he doesn't want to find himself mysteriously transported into the middle of them. Presumably the more complicated other thing is however they're able to fly, which is pretty scary in its own right but not so fundamental a shift in how the world works for him.

Crafters are - they have the crafting, obviously, which he'll explain next, but in terms of things about them as a species, the obviously relevant part here is the territoriality instinct - each Crafter picks a color scheme that denotes things that are theirs, and they have an instinctual inability to touch each others' things or each other without explicit ongoing permission; if this happens anyway they can end up with a fundamental confusion about who the thing belongs to, and become unable to touch or interact with the thing that was theirs a moment before. This does also apply to him as a person which is why he intends to keep a solid surface between himself and them for the foreseeable future, getting confused about oneself in that way isn't very survivable especially at his age and with nobody he trusts around to take care of him. Crafters are also more solitary and less aggressive than most of the talking animals, which are the closest thing he has to compare to, and being able to craft means he can be entirely self-sufficient given the right starting resources; he doesn't have any chickens with him and only the one dog, and he'll want a wider variety of food plants than he keeps in his emergency storage, but if the best option for everyone is for him to go live alone somewhere uninhabited he's relatively well prepared to do that if he can for example trade some crafting for those things first.

The five flying people don't exactly discuss amongst themselves, in the way the previous group did with the white-clad one, but they share meaningful glances in the quiet for a while, before their representative gestures to the 'more complicated' sign with some evident consternation, perhaps at the language barrier.

He'll be able to read the dictionary to them soon.

So, crafting. There's not much more to the communicative version than they've seen; he has them at about the edge of the range he can communicate at, which he can in theory improve with practice but not very quickly. He can communicate this way with animals, even if they can't communicate back, and he can communicate sensory things, though that's a little more difficult and he's already having to put in some extra effort to communicate with them so he probably won't do much of it, not that he normally would either. Object crafting involves converting normal matter into crafting material, which he can then change the properties of -  things like shape, size, firmness, tensile and compressive strength, reactions to stimulii, all kinds of stuff. He can also copy the properties of one piece of crafting material to another, so for example once he has the dictionary printed he can copy the shape and markings of it to another piece of crafting material to make a second instance to give to them. Crafting can be used to make dangerous things but he's not in the habit of doing that and doesn't intend to start here, if he ends up having some sort of complaint about them he'll just leave. If they want tools or other useful things from him he's willing to make some for them, but not necessarily a lot. Crafting can also be used to change physical bodies - he makes most of his food by crafting food plants to grow the parts of themselves he wants to eat; other uses are more complicated and he's not well trained in it - and genes - he doesn't know how to do that.

A tension builds in the posture of the flying people's postures as his explanation of crafting continues, and their representative quickly gestures to the 'no' sign when he mentions the possibility of them wanting tools or other useful things from him, and there's an air of haste or hurry in the group of five on the landing pad as they do so. They somehow manage to look even more tense when the possibility of flesh- and genecrafting are brought up. The representative gestures to the 'something else' sign, then the 'more complicated' sign, then back to the 'something else' sign in quick succession. Then they speak in unison again with a somewhat pleading tone, before quickly flying off, down to the ground.

Another group of five peels off of the remaining flock and takes their place for now.

He doesn't know what to make of them switching out like that, he communicates to the new group when they arrive. He's also more or less out of things to explain.

The new group of five all point at the 'more complicated' sign. Perhaps further explanation will have to wait.

Fortunately, the previous group returns fairly soon, with what appears to be something like a straw hat in one of their hands, except it's woven out of verdant, possibly even still-living vines (and consequently rather floppy). The newer group departs and the previous group takes their place on the landing pad again, with the representative holding up the vine hat in one hand and pointing to the 'something else' sign with the other, before levitating the vine hat out of their hand and up against the outer surface of the bubble.

He's relaxed considerably but still flinches when they tap the hat against the bubble.

He's guessing that they want to give that to him? Presumably for magic-related reasons?

A spot on the outer shell just under where the hat is extends inward, forming an enclosed chute that ends in a smaller bubble a little ways from him.

The hat retracts a little from bubble when they observe his flinch, and carefully floats down the chute with touching any of the sides before seemingly being 'dropped' by whatever force is lifting it in the smaller bubble.

The chute extends a little farther to drop the hat-bubble into his hand.

He looks at it, then looks up: He's not entirely sure how he'll react if they move something while he's touching or wearing it but that could be very bad. He's kind of expecting that if they want him dead they're not going to have much trouble doing it but he wants to be clear that that's the risk they'd be taking. Also other kinds of magic might be similarly bad if they have more than the movement kind.

Should he put the hat on?

The representative points to the 'something else' sign, then sort of gestures at the ship in general, then tries to point at the hat specifically.

Do they want him to convert the hat into crafting material?

The representative gestures to the 'yes' sign, and seems to consider pointing to additional signs but decides against it.

All right.

The conversion process doesn't look like much of anything, at least to mundane senses - he doesn't even take the hat out of  the bubble - but after a minute of staring at it he looks up and wonders whether they'd like him to make any other changes before he gives it back.

The group of five are all watching the process with intense scrutiny, but don't actually seem to be able to tell when the process has started or stopped except by his communicating that he's done it.

The representative points to the 'no' sign, before they make an inquisitive sound and seem to consider gesturing to another sign for a moment before again deciding not to.

He'll reattach the bubble to the chute, then, and adjust it to slide the hat back out to them, mostly by way of making the inside of the chute slippery rather than by giving it much of an incline.

The flying people will catch the hat once it's fallen free of the chute (or pluck it carefully out if it stops short of exiting entirely), bring it into the midst of the group for detailed inspection, which will last for at least a few minutes. The representative remains attentive to him in case of further communication, though.

He is curious about what they're doing, but doesn't communicate that except by mundane body language.

Eventually, after having inspected the converted hat with various simplistic physical tests and perhaps additional more obscure means, the representative points to the 'more complicated' sign again, and the group take off back to the ground, replaced by the same secondary group of five a moment later.

...well if they're going to be a while he's going to make himself a mug of tea. This involves going downstairs for a minute to get a mug of water and a drizzle of sweetener, which he warns them before he does, and then growing and harvesting some leaves from the tea plant growing in a pot by the top of the stairs. He doesn't do anything obvious to heat the water, but it spends a couple minutes steaming anyway before he takes a sip.

It will indeed take a while, maybe half an hour, before the previous of group of five return and relieve the secondary group and return to the landing pad. They seem a bit calmer at ease than before, and no longer have the hat with them.

The first section of the dictionary is ready by then, if they want to get started on it. He has a stack of grey copies ready to send down the chute for them and one in his sparkly indigo.

The flying people seem excited to receive the dictionary section, and will retrieve the stack in the same manner as the hat. They'll quickly flip through the pages to get a basic idea what the general form of the crafter writing system is, how the symbols vary from one another (likely determining that this appears to be a logography, which in retrospect seems natural given the evident absence of spoken language), before flipping back to the beginning holding themselves ready to either receive the meanings from him, or the next section, whichever it is that comes next.

And he'll go through the dictionary. This is less boring than it would be for some dictionaries; a lot of the glyphs have variants with their own internal logic about how they're constructed, so he'll have something to talk about a fair portion of the time rather than just reading off definitions.

The dictionary comes in multiple books, with the first one containing a very basic stripped-down subset of the vocabulary; when he comes to the end of it he takes a break to stretch and make them a big temperature-sensitive signboard and some big temperature-based markers for them to write on it with, if they'd like to try to communicate anything while he picks up the next installment of the dictionary from the printer and makes copies for them.