"That was there. I found the book inside."

"Oh." He turns back to the buildings. "Any preference for which we go into first?"

There isn't much variation between the buildings! Slight differences in height, slight differences in architecture, but all mostly gray and rather tall. There aren't any logos or things describing what each building is, and the one in front of them has a rather large archway for a door, whereas the one over to the left has a set of automatic double doors and the one to the right has a revolving door.

"Doesn't seem to be much difference. Let's start with the closest, with the archway."

On the inside of the building: is a whole lot of basically nothing. The floor is tiled, there's a large wooden desk that wraps around a quarter of the floor plan, but there doesn't actually seem to be anything in there.

The walls are covered in… somewhat pretty and detailed mosaics depicting a wave, a forest, a little grove, and a view of a rather industrialized city. There doesn't appear to be a ceiling except for the glass dome at the very top that functions as the roof of the building.

Thario seems slightly confused by the fact this building exists. Anywhere.

Looks pretty standard to her.

"What, have you never been in a reception area before?"

"Reception area for a what?"

"Any sort of office complex."

"I'd expect it to be a lot smaller than this. Probably with less of the slightly weird yet still somewhat pretty mosaics, too, and also less of the glass roof, and also the desk–" he looks at it and corrects, "the wooden block that seems to section off a quarter of the room – would probably be a lot smaller and staffed by a person and maybe have a computer on it or something?"

"You must have small buildings."

"They're sometimes about this size but they have lots of stuff in them." He blinks. "For efficiency. And because most people don't have enough money to get a building this size all for themselves. And because– who even needs this sort of a thing?"

"Most major galactic corporations. It's a symbol of respectability."

Thario shrugs. "Then again, we don't have any major or even minor galactic corporations."

He hops over the wooden bench thing and has a look along the other side – there are some drawers and cabinets, so he opens them and starts looking for interesting things.

"Anything?"

"Shiny piece of metal?" he says.

He opens another cabinet and says, "Piece of paper? It's blank, though." He puts it on the top anyway. "… I don't think I ever got your name?"

The briefest of hesitation.

"...Elleira."

"Thario," he says again. "In case you forgot."

After a bit more looking around, he places a pencil, a graphics calculator, and wristwatch onto the top.

He stands up and looks at the stuff he's accumulated and just shrugs, sighing.

"None of that seems useful."

"I'm gonna try something," he says, then grabs the pencil and tries writing something down on the paper.

After he's done, he shows it to her! It looks like an unintelligible scribble.

"...Is that supposed to represent something?"

"It's meant to be a word in Keiruna," he says, putting it back down and writing something again.

This time, when he shows it to her, it has the word 'book' written just below the unintelligible scribble.

"That says 'book'."

"So does the thing above, to me."

He puts it back down and writes something else below that, then shows it to her again.

This word also says 'book'. It looks different from the word above.

"That also says book, but... it seems to have more letters?"

"Mm," he agrees. "It does also say book, and it does also have more letters." Headtilt. "I'm kinda curious about how, since I tried to write them both in your language, but the second one I decided I wanted to write in your language and I wanted it to look different."

She might notice now, if she looks at the two words, that neither of them is actually written how she would write the word 'book'. But somehow, they do in fact very clearly say 'book', and it is very clearly written in Basic.

Despite not being written in Basic.

"Neither of those are actually written in Basic. What the fuck."