As he closes his hand on the fish rock, the shell cracks, something inside is squashed, and viscous goo flows out over his hand and onto the floor. 

There is not a flash of light. Almost the opposite, for a moment the fish rock seems to pull in light. Then there is a invisible pulse, which is felt in the gut, in the mind and in the soul.

It is a scream, and it carries out and echoes across dimensions.

GRYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

Everyone within a kilometer can feel it, less intense the farther away. It's not painful, nor damaging, but it's startling, and it's intense.

So everyone notices, and so does...

It is a quiet cycle. The ecosystem is at peace, and the Restorer spent most of it observing a new school which was finding its bearings.

The particular fish species has been gathering in one major population for a long time, and this splinter threathened to veer into new territory, but it seemed they found a set of landscape formations that suited them, so the Restorer could leave them to their settlement.

 ..gryaaah..

The distant echo rises beyond the background noise of what can be conceptualized as a psychic ether, only because it is a ~frequency of sorts the Restorer is paying close attention to.

The Restorer feels a moment of joy.

<Ah, the humans!>

<Wait, it's been a while. Why now? It's likely an emergency. Let's go!>

They stop in the middle of their swim, change their fishtail into bipedal legs, and disappear in a warble and a rush of bubbles.

8 seconds after the scream, in the next available space that Vornmeth is not occupying, the Restorer appears, accompanied by a warble.

They promptly inflate like a balloon. and then gradually acclimatize and deflate over a few seconds.

Then they notice the goo all over Vornmeth's hand, and they make a gesture with their hand. The goo drips off of Vornmeth and becomes a blob which eagerly crawls over to the Restorer's foot.

The Restorer looks around and takes in the room, curiously.

The room is actually a tent, pitched on the sand, because the diplomats were worried about their chances of communicating the problem with limited vocabulary.

Vornmeth turns to them and begins signing.

"Hello Restorer of Salt Water. I am Vornmeth. That is a hurricane."

He points out to sea, at the dense storm clouds crouched on the horizon. Already, the wind has started to pick up and fat raindrops spatter across the tent.

Then Vornmeth gestures back at the city, visible on the other side as a collection of tall glass and steel buildings.

"The hurricane will crush our town halls. The hurricane will crush us."

The vocabulary is, as always, fresh in their mind, but vocabulary they have not before heard remains unknown. They'll repeat back what they understand.

"I am Restorer of Salt Water. You are Vornmeth."

Oh, that is macroscopic atmospheric movement.

"That is a hurricane. Hurricane... is the crusher of town halls? Hurricane is the crusher of humans?"

That does seem like an emergency.

Time pressure, potential large scale improper death, explicit call for help.

Yes, Vornmeth will be able to bear the cost.

"I atypically-display... I am the atypically-displayer of Vornmeth? I atypically-eye Vornmeth? Vornmeth atypically-eye me? Vornmeth is a screen that displays me? I am a screen that displays Vornmeth?"

They seem like they're hesitant in which words to use.

<Wait wait wait there was a thing...>

"I atypically-link me to Vornmeth?"

None of those sentences make a super amount of sense except the last one. But it's quite promising.

"You atypically-link you to me," he agrees.

<Ok great!>

The Restorer makes eye contact with Vornmeth, and the normally quite intense eyes become multiply more so. The red of their eyes start glowing, and others in the tent can see it lightly tint the room. 

For Vornmeth it is as if the eyes pierce through him. 

He suddenly gains awareness of a pressure on his mind, which his brain conceptualizes as a

knock knock

He can feel a new affordance in his mind, related to it. Does he do the new thing?

A) This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened in his life!!!

B) Yes.

He takes a deep breath because this is actually still an emergency situation, and then reaches out toward the new mental affordance, intending to 'link' into it.

Some thing enters, or is invited in, or makes itself known. There is so much new stimulus, so the brain does what it always does, and maps it to something familiar.

He finds himself in the part of his home or other safe location where he'd eat with visitors, perhaps a dining room. 

On the walls, there is a tapestry of thoughts, memories and associations. When he thinks of the hurricane, there is a miniature of it on a desk. When he remembers talking to the diplomats, their faces appear in a painting. Deeper memories and tacit knowledge appears faintly on the wallpaper.

A being which quickly condenses into the shape of the Restorer enters the room. They walk carefully, as if wary of not stepping on anything that can't take it. They also carefully keep their eye fixed on Vornmeth, and does not look at the memories and thoughts on the walls.

Vornmeth finds himself sitting in a chair, and the Restorer sits down in a chair across from him, mimicing his posture.

What is the location his mind picked for this meeting?

They're in his tiny city apartment — small because it's on the top level, and has a view out over the city — with all the reconfigurable furniture packed in the public-facing configuration. That means his personal belongings are mostly packed away in opaque cabinets and patterned screens have been pulled down over the edges of the room, to conceal the exact details. It's a location that takes easily to being used to display memories.

Vornmeth spends a moment to take this in, but quickly grasps the metaphor. He puts his sense of direction on the table, and paints the path of the storm (past and projected) onto the resulting map. Then he grabs the memories of the briefing meeting about population numbers and evacuation progress, and layers that on top as a purple haze — sparse in the industrial district, packed elsewhere, narrowing into dense channels that run away from the city along the primary train routes.

The Restorer picks up on the intention to Show something to them, and looks down at the table.

They take this in, carefully cataloguing the information about the storm. As they sit in this space, their body language gradually becomes more human. When they get to the population numbers, they startle.

<So many!> 

The thought can fuzzily be made out by Vornmeth, as if it was an echo.

They point to the purple haze and sign "Humans?"

Vornmeth nods, and then realizes he has better options.

"Yes. The purple haze corresponds to population density. There are other creatures that live in the city, but it is primarily designed by, built for, and inhabited by humans."

He speaks slowly, speaking and signing at the same time, each word following the previous with a deliberate pause as he thinks about the meaning of these things in a way that he hopes echoes to Restorer of Salt Water in the same way that a fuzzy thought came to him.

The Restorer squints and focuses through this. Then they interrupt him with a very human shake of the hand, palm toward him.

"I am the... atypical-pusher of Vornmeth."

They reach out a hand as if to give him something, and a glowing ball materializes, hovering over their hand. They nod invitingly and gesture to touch it.

Might as well pay for the full hour, as the saying goes.

He reaches forward to touch the orb.

As soon as he touches the orb, images flash through his mind. He experiences a series of concepts tied to hand gestures, one after another, in rapid succession. Then a set of templates of how these are allowed to be combined. And then it ends.

If he's studied the records of the first contact, this list very closely matches the complete known vocabulary and grammar of LCTL sign language of the Restorer, 

There are some areas in which his understanding of the sign differs from the conveyed one. For example, the intuition behind "town hall" seems to be closer to "nest". It seems the new, constructed meaning of "atypically" is consistent between the þereminians and the Restorer, it's indeed the supernatural things the Restorer can do, but there is added context of them being "gifts" as in literally gifted, as well as a sense of "channeling" or being the conduit. The grammatical construct for "if .. then .." seems to not imply any causality, it's just a list of events in sequence.

This rapid transference of information blanks out his sense of the mind space. He comes to in the apartment, now with a complete understanding of the very few words the Restorer knows.

"Vornmeth is the atypical-pusher of me!" they say, with a sense of invitation and reciprocity.

Ah! That's really cool!

Vornmeth spends a moment working to isolate LCTL, since sending a mixture of languages sounds likely to confuse things. With determined focus, they pour their understanding of the language into the same kind of abstract glowing ball.

It is bigger than what Restorer of Salt Water shared. Maybe too big. A whole grammar, thousands of words ... but Vornmeth has trusted them so far, so he continues to trust that they will not ingest an energy field big enough to harm them.

The Restorer doesn't seem concerned about the size of the energy ball. They reach out and touch it, and then relax back in reverie as they sort through the large collection of concepts.

Unlike Vornmeth, they seem able to continue to be present in the mind space while experiencing the transfer, and they gaze out over the landscape outside the apartment window. As they do, they seem to borrow a bit of the space, using the landscape to place word-concepts upon, so Vornmeth can follow along in the progress.

It still takes a while, and Vornmeth has a moment to think while the Restorer absorbs.

How is Vornmeth's own understanding structured? Or, which artificial structure did he create as part of collecting LCTL, if any?

Is he providing the spoken mode as well, in addition to the signed mode?

Vornmeth learned LCTL as a second language, his native language being SCOL. So, he has the regimented, explicit understanding of someone who learned first by rote, and only after that became fluent.

LCTL's signed, spoken, and written modes aren't really separate. The grammar corresponds exactly, and he learned all three forms of most words at the same time. So the Restorer gets it all, a wibbly-wobbly pile of pragmatics layered atop a more structured framework of grammar and semantics.

Utterances are made out of statements, statements start with relation-words, the arguments to a relation have marked cases, here is how converbs work, here is how reparenting works, ... And then here are the words, as they are defined, and then as they are used, which is almost but not quite the same. Here are the phrases that are in the middle of lexicalizing but which have not yet been rendered down into vocabulary. Here are the rules for inventing new words.

He was going for thoroughness, over purity. Some fragments of SCOL come through as context, no matter how much he has tried to get LCTL and only LCTL. There are still gaps in his technical vocabulary. But it is, by and large, complete.

(And now we arrive at the moment where the character knows more about a conlang than the author, which means there is bound to be mistakes in the text, that a deep sea creature specialized on learning to communicate with anything would not make. You have my condolences, though not my regret. I made this bed very consciously, I'll lay in it snugly. :3)

As they make their may through the vocabulary, they start signing along, very quickly. Relation-words, statements, utterances. Words, sentences, grammar of increasing complexity. They pause with some amusement when they arrive at words they learned wrong the first time.

Then they examine the written and spoken modes.

<Oh that's how the noises work!>

They go back to the beginning and try the new modes out, by doing all three modes together. The written, by summoning text on the landscape, letters flashing by. The spoken, audiating sourceless words out loud to the mind space. The sounds are all in Vornmeths voice, or in the voice of the person he associates the phrase most strongly with.

When they've done a pass through the corpus a second time, no more than 2 minutes have passed.

They look back at Vornmeth and summon noises (mouth closed), images of written wordand sign along at the same time. Sometimes stopping to search for a word or to correct themselves, they say:

"Thanks you... Thank you for the gift of your patterns, hm, language. It is a beauty of experience... It is beautiful to experience.

The noises. The spoken.. mode of the language, you make the sounds with your... Mouth, yes? Do you have an understanding of the shape... Of the anatomy of the.. vocal apparatus? Would you be willing to share that understanding? I have opportunity... I have the ability to change myself, if I know what to change into."

"Oh, certainly!" Vornmeth agrees. "Here —"

He recalls basic anatomy, a cut-away diagram of the human airway appearing on the curtain behind him. He quickly runs through the phonemic inventory of LCTL ("pa, ta, ga, na, ..."), the diagram moving along with his speech and the points of articulation labeled.

"The trickiest part is probably the voice box," he adds, tapping his Adam's apple and creating another diagram, this one a close-up of a voice box. "There are folds of muscle that stretch like this to change pitch, and you can use that to alter the quality of the sounds. But using only the signed mode is also acceptable — there are some humans with broken voices who just sign, and that's fine."