"How long is it?"

Kevin looks at his device. "1 hour 49 minutes, but we could watch part now and part later."

"If you think it'd be educational. But maybe after I've made some little headway with books."

"If you want maximally educational you should not start with that moving picture."

"I will take your word for it. I would like books that will be informative about the state of the world."

"Thaaaaat is very open-ended. Do you mean, like, what countries there are, or how our machines work, or what landmasses the planet has and where we are in space, or some other thing?"

"More along the lines of the countries, and also the local religions."

"We can get you books like that."

"Thank you."

"Shall we go over the alphabet now, and then once we have books I'll show you how to look at them on the machine and you can use your Comprehend after that?"

"That sounds good, thank you."

Then Kevin can go over the alphabet! The letters in it have names but sometimes the name of the letter does not match the sound the letter makes, and sometimes letters make multiple sounds. Letters have both 'upper case' and 'lower case' forms.

It has an associated song. The last part of the song translates to 'Now I know my ABCs, next time won't you sing with me'.

All the letters in the alphabet do appear on the button section of the book-thing but not in the same order as in the song.

Well, that's confusing but he has learned Infernal, it is not the most out-to-get-you trait a language can have. He writes notes on the alphabet for himself.

And eventually Kevin says that they have a book about countries and he can show Blai how to look at it on the device.

He casts Comprehend Languages and starts in on it.

Wow there are a lot of countries. Golarion has possibly this many but he's never seen them listed, they don't all talk to each other all the time...

Most of them are members of an organization called the United Nations and they tend to have pretty high populations, too.

It's not like Blai knows accurate population numbers for anywhere but they do sound quite numerous.

He reads and takes notes in a Taldane-English mix till the spell runs out.

A few minutes after Blai stops writing, Kevin turns to him again.

"Did the book work well for you?"

"Yes, thank you. There are certainly a lot of people on this planet."

"Yup. Not the case for yours?"

"Well, I don't have an accurate count, but the numbers in the book did sound high rather than normal or low."

"Fair enough. Any plans for the rest of the evening? I can help you get set up with machine chess again, you could try for a very simplistic English conversation, you could watch a moving picture without understanding the language, you could go to the bar but I hear you don't drink … hmm, maybe chess would combine with English practice, actually, if we write down the names of the pieces and bring in one of the other human chess players it gives you lots of stuff to say, like 'knight to A4'."

"If someone would like to play with me I would enjoy that."

"I would be surprised if nobody wants to."

Soon enough Blai can be set up with a chess set, a list of chess terms, and an opponent.