"My office is just up a floor," smiles Soptan.

"Okay! I don't actually prefer to teleport, though, so if you could show us where the stairs are?"

"...we just have the elevator."

"--Oh yeah that's a thing, right. We're lower tech than you. Considerably."

"Well, the elevator still works if it's unfamiliar." He leads them to the elevator and up they go to his office.

"How does it work?" Illia asks, examining the elevator delightedly.

"There's a shaft and there's cars - big heavily trafficked buildings have more shafts - and the cars swing out to let others by, that's relatively new, used to be one car to a shaft and you could be waiting a long time."

"Ooh, okay, that makes sense. What makes the cars go up and down, though?"

"Cables. I don't know the details."

"Fair enough."

Office. "I don't already have any kids' books handy but I can download some."

"They're good for simple vocabulary and sentence structure."

"I bet." He gets an assortment. The Countries of the World, Ocean Animals, Nami Goes On A Coaster, First Day At School, The Chocolate Shop, Paint!, the Tapai original of Going To A Moon, Numbers and Amounts, Color Color!, Shapes Everywhere, Tatmi's Kitten.

Odette smiles when she sees Going To A Moon.

"You know this one? I think it's been translated into every language more popular than Erethani."

"Yeah, it's one of the ones I read in Oahkar. What's Erethani?"

"Language they speak in Ereith. Isolationalist little island of war criminals up by the arctic circle."

"...War criminals."

"- if you don't have castes you must have - I mean, I hope you have - invented some other way to prevent everyone from being dragged into total warfare, but ours is to have very strong rules against anyone other than a grey in a combat position. If a country's greys can't win a war, they can't conscript their purples and throw those at the enemy in case that works. When it's over with the greys it's over and the purples et al move on with their lives under new management. Ereith for bizarre historical reasons stopped having greys, won't import any, won't let some people become grey - the whole place has mostly grey ancestry, most of them are probably grey by any inheritance law other than Ereith's by now, it wouldn't be outrageous to let some of them act like it - and instead has the entire population supposedly grey in addition to their legal castes. Which, since they're isolationist, is usually fine, but they got invaded once."

Odette buries her face in her hands.

"- are you all right?"

"I am having problems with this situation that would probably not be productive to discuss right now."

"- all right." He moves on to the next children's book with only mild concern.

Children's books, yay.

Tatmi's kitten is pink and spotted, yay.