Stalling for time

The bookworm just looked up from its book and looked right at me.

As it looked at me, it pushed up its glasses as if it was taking a closer look at me.

Then after a while, it said, "Now that I've shown myself, will you turn that light down? I want to have a talk with you before anything else happens."

I was taken aback by the words that the bookworm said, but I eventually weakened the flames that were around me.

It wasn't as if I was able to keep those flames up, but this invader didn't have to know that.

So as if I was agreeing to talk, I lowered the intensity of the flames and moved some of the flames to the front so that I would still be able to see the bookworm while I talked to it.

The bookworm didn't seem to mind that I had the flame in front of it since I had lowered the intensity of the flame.

After the flame was moved between us, I looked at the bookworm and asked, "Alright, what do you want to talk about?"