"At home we have a - learning things thing - called 'nutrition'. It's about what humans need to eat. There are books about it."

"Learning things thing? A magic?"

"No. It's... Science." Surely they have science. Lack of vocabulary is so inconvenient. "You say 'I think it works like this. Therefore, if I do this, I think that will happen.' Then you do this and see if that actually happens. If it does, you're right. If it doesn't, you're wrong and you think 'I think it works like that instead' and try again until you're right."

"Oh! Experiment. That's the word you want. How many humans did you test it on?"

"People other than me did the experiment. They wrote books. Thousands and thousands of humans, a long time ago, I think. I don't remember all of it. Eating right is important. You think better, you feel better, you don't die of being old as easily if you eat right."

"Did it take a long time to find thousands and thousands of humans? Here that would be hard."

"...Humans are the only people in my home. I think it's very strange the Hari Empire has more than one kind of people."

"Learn more Hari as fast as you can. I want to know all about a whole society of humans when you know more words. I'll leave you to your studies and go bring back more food. Oh, and..." Valanda hands over another ring.

Slavery is illegal and extremely evil in my society of humans, she doesn't say.

She doesn't even know the words for 'good' or 'evil'. If they even have words for that.

"Okay. Want to take the cold-box I made and put food in it? Cold food stays safe longer."

"People would wonder where I got it if I took a construct with me. I can put food in it when I come back."

"Okay. Goodbye."

Her thoughts are going very dark again. She almost forgot that this person who trapped her in a tiny room is a slaveowner, of her for a minute there.

He doesn't say goodbye, just walks out.

Mahan continues to not teach any words for good or evil.

She can't actually focus on learning very effectively. She tries to learn for a little while, then pokes at the calculator a bit.

When Valanda told her to do something, she felt nothing. These fucking bracelets cannot, apparently, compel action. Even so, Valanda is playing nice for now. Complacent? Surely she can't believe I still don't realize I'm a slave.

She starts designing... Something to threaten Valanda with. She's only thinking, not doing, so she can do that. Various objects are invulnerable, she has to assume Valanda herself is, too. Defense magic. Even if she can set something up that Valanda walks into and has, say, a timer of ten minutes before it shrinks down to nothing, that might not be a credible threat. And she'll only get one try, probably, before getting a lot more restrictions.

(Suffocation might work when blunt force doesn't but that's very gruesome - except, she won't actually do it. Valanda will free her rather than die. Right?) 

Valanda can't read her notes, not the ones that aren't in Hapi. She writes them down in an obscured sort of way anyway.

Valanda brings back food. Lots of food. Several handfuls of berries, a bag of apples, a pound of almonds, a couple of bird livers, three tiny jars of honey. He makes less effort to keep the fruit away from the raw meat than she might be used to.

"I brought food! Tell me about human societies!"

"Need the bathroom first... Wait a sec, can you use magic to not get sick from food? You aren't supposed to put, uh, raw, meat next to not-meat."

"Yes, you can use magic to make food... I don't know if you know all the right words. Sickness is small animals you can't see that eat your insides. You can kill the small animals with magic. You can kill them in the food. You can also kill them inside you. They killed the sickness in the food before they sold it. If something bad grows in it again and makes us sick magic can fix that too. Go ahead and use the bathroom."

She goes.

"We get rid of small animals in food by... Burning food but only a little bit. I want to do that to this meat. And by keeping it cold so they don't grow fast."

"Sure, go ahead. Heat also works, redundancy's good."

(She brought back some water in a little construct cylinder.)

She nibbles a few almonds (picking ones without meatjuice), and takes five minutes to make a simple stove thing and lays the livers on them. They sizzle.

He notices what she's doing and eats the ones she doesn't want.

"Tell me more about your society."

"I don't know where to start... There's more than one government. There are... At least twenty, probably more."

"Do you have a government that tells the other governments what they can do? Like here, we have states and the imperial government."

"...Not all of them? Some governments work together like that, some don't."

"Your world must be dangerous. Do you have to fight often?"

Oh, not really. I didn't get randomly enslaved at all.

"Never. The last war my country was in was sixty-five years ago. There's a war between two countries on the other side of the world and nowhere else right now, I think."