"That's the other mage in attendance," Tara says, and gestures in approximately the right direction. She returns to her seat while Carey goes about saying in slightly more formal terms that Tarinda and the mages are done here.

The aforementioned other mage in attendance waves.

...Tarinda waves back uncertainly.

 The person she brought along tips her off to that. Really it just matters that Tarinda's paying attention to her.

"If now's a good time to talk we could go hang out by the liar tree on the east edge of the garden."

"I think now is fine."

Donna will go wait for her by the tree, then, and ask the person she's with to wait around for a minute in case Tarinda turns out to hate touching people.

Tarinda does not hate touching people but does not know the contact sign language.

Is it really that different? Maybe it is, maybe what feels like a simple and obvious pattern of small changes is actually really hard to guess without years of experience signing, Donna guesses she wouldn't actually know since she doesn't remember ever not having years of experience and neither does any other adult she's ever met.

"Okay. Well, what I need is, first of all, to be able to identify your world to the magic unambiguously, and second, to be able to find the right part of it. For the first thing, I don't actually know yet whether asking for the world you came from will work, but if it doesn't, I can do it from a sufficiently precise and detailed description of fundamental physics, as long as you're not mistaken about it. For the second, I imagine you know better than I do what landmarks someone could see from space."

Tarinda will rattle off fundamental physics as Page presents it to her in sign, and describes bits of Earth and Mars that could be seen from space.

"...So technically this isn't important to whether I can find it but does your world have an immigration policy?"

"You can live on Mars. You all can. I think you can probably live most places on Earth and most stations and moons too but it's not as guaranteed as Mars since you're a weird situation."

"I'd like that. Assuming our birds can move there too, and assuming we can get there from here at all."

"Your birds? Your birds can probably move there too but I didn't know you had important birds."

"I bribed mine to stay away today because he'd just annoy everyone at the meeting, but you may've seen him leave with me when I went to tell people about you. They're smarter than fish and less smart than five year olds so they're right in that sweet spot where they make good friends but wouldn't get anything out of a letter."

"Cute. You can bring your birds to Mars."

"Good. I'm thinking maybe we could move everything, so people keep their houses and stuff, but it'd be so expensive and even if you have the space I don't know what happens if you mix our bugs or our crops with yours and I'm getting ahead of myself considering I haven't actually gone and found your world yet."

"I wouldn't worry much about the bugs or crops but you could ask Sing to confirm."

"It'd be weird being able to ask Sing things and not go mad from it. Good, but weird."

"We usually don't talk directly to Sing. I've never done it. It wouldn't drive you mad though and you can get things from other robots."

"Yeah. By the way, it's gonna be a few days before I'm ready to scout your world, so if you get done talking to whoever Tara thinks you should talk to before then, you can come find me for any reason. My house has a wrought iron flower design for the front gate and a birdhouse in the yard and it's near the base of the mountains near the north pole."

"Thank you. - what are the few days for?"

"Part of it's taking notes and talking with the rest of the team, but most of it is because I don't have that much power right now and I need a longer break before I can pay for it and then another break after I do that but before I use it. It probably sounds callous that I know you're stranded and I'm thinking 'yeah but I want to read this novel first and maybe play chess' but it would not be better if I rushed."

"I'm new to magic existing for real and don't really know enough to say otherwise, but I'd like to learn more."

"If you're more than a few questions worth of curious, swing by later and I'll lend you a book, but if you just want more elaboration on needing breaks, it's not only unpleasant to make sacrifices to the magic, it's also directly mind-affecting to be in its presence. We can limit that, so instead of going mad in seconds we can spend hours with it and come out mostly unchanged, but - only mostly. If I were to, for example, go straight from the inner sanctum into a potentially fraught diplomatic situation, I'd get angry, I'd ramble without thinking through what I meant to say, I'd be bad at picking specific goals and pursuing them, and if everyone else involved wasn't patient with me and I couldn't easily get away I might hit them. It's not hard to fix but it takes time."

"Okay. Thank you for explaining."

It's convenient that she's still near the capitol; the person Tara sends can find her easily, and ask her about computers as soon as she and Donna are done.

He asks great clarifying questions.