"My what?"

She looks down at her body, then back up at him.

"I was referring to the conversation I had with a disembodied voice upon touching the statue. It seemed highly unwilling to answer my questions, despite its apparent command of powerful magic."

"Perhaps if it transforms you into a kitsune as well you will finally achieve heights of splendor normally reserved for portcullises."

"How are you so calm about being a fox??"

"From my subjective experience of the transformation, I suspect that I have always been a kitsune, and had simply forgotten this fact. From this I conclude that my species is of little personal relevance to me. I am far more interested in the magical effect associated with the statue, and the entity behind said effect."

"Were you expecting a vocal statue associated with this lot," he gestures to the unhelpfully loitering mystery people, "to be more forthcoming for some reason?"

"The disembodied voice was somewhat more conversational than the mysterious masked strangers! Admittedly, this is an extremely low standard."

"....well, what did it say? We couldn't hear it."

"It inquired as to who I was. Merely stating my name was insufficient to satisfy it. It then provided a brief philosophical discussion of the nature of identity before returning me to this location, now in what I suspect to be my original form."

"...what manner of entity do you think it might have been?"

She considers this. "I am uncertain. However, it did not appear to be hostile, considering that it made no attempt to harm me while I was incapacitated, and it has provided us with the answer to a puzzle we did not know existed." She gestures at her fox form. 

"Hasn't anyone ever warned you to be wary of that sort of creature?"

"I do not recall."

"Did any of this shed any light on these fellows?" He gestures at the Unhelpful People.

"Regrettably, it did not." Pause. "Perhaps we could investigate these statues further—"

"Please don't touch the statues again."

"It may be possible to gain more information without touching them! They appear to have some form of inscription carved into them. Furthermore, touching the statue produced no adverse effects, so there is little reason not to repeat the experiment."

...do the Bracers of Comprehend Languages want to help with the inscriptions at all?

I am the void and the emptiness. I am the starting point. I am infinite.
Tear my mask off and let it fall at my feet.

I am the unknown. I scare cowards, but reveal my secrets to the brave.
Tear my mask off and let it fall at my feet.

I am the impetus to act. I am a reason for torture, and a cause for insomnia.
Tear my mask off and let it fall at my feet.

I am the end of the road. I am superiority. I am loneliness.
Tear my mask off and let it fall at my feet.

If he looks closely, there are depressions near the statues' feet, which could in principle be the right shape for a mask.

As he's reading the inscriptions, Woljif looks around the ground for clues. 

"...Look, there's a little sand here. We're in the middle of the Worldwound, there's not supposed to be sand!"

"I think there's a Prestidigitation variant that when employed to render things less clean may have sand as a product but it's not a great explanation. I can read the inscriptions -" He recites them aloud.

"What a fascinating puzzle! It seems likely that it will require us to gather the relevant items, and considering the age of this structure they may be very distant from here. Nevertheless, it is highly reassuring that the entity has an interest in puzzles."

"...Why?"

"It shows that they are interested in the pursuit of truth. If they wished to do us harm, they could simply replace all of the writing with several dozen castings of Explosive Runes."

"They'd only do that if they wished relatively indiscriminate harm. I take it you do not think the answer to the puzzle is to literally remove any masks from any of the people standing around here with masks on?"

"That seems improbable. Their masks appear largely identical, but the inscriptions suggest that there will be four masks with distinguishing characteristics."