"I'm a healer."

"And I'm a politician. How do you become a healer?"

"Flowers."

"Do non-healers in your world have this limited corpus of responses problem?"

"No."

"So it's something about the process of becoming a healer that causes it? Did you know in advance about that?"

Confusion. Lots of it.

"Not-healers talk and think like me? Well, not very much like me, but more like me than like you? And healers are like you?"

The healer is upset and turns around and folds her arms.

"Sensitive topic? Can I go get you anything from the bar, or from the demons?"

No answer.

So he sits down and starts singing.

Eventually she turns around and listens peacefully to the singing.

"Have any favorite songs?"

No reply.

"What's the place you're from called?"

"Claree."

"Would I be safe there?"

Shrug.

"How old are you?"

"Fifty-two."

"How old were you when you became a healer?"

"Twenty-six."

She can answer factual questions like that pretty well. She gets unexpectedly emotional around a couple of topics - how she got here, when her shift ends, who her friends are - and seems oddly unable to navigate that when it happens; she wipes tears off her face with her sleeve with the same reflex motion she might brush spiderwebs off her arm. She stops answering him entirely or falls back on "I'm a healer", if he confuses her too badly. She never asks him anything.

She doesn't know why he's asking questions, even on the level of 'he's curious or inquisitive', and he can't get anywhere by telling her. Her world doesn't seem to be in a state of emergency that she knows about, and she's not badly informed, exactly. He can make her upset, can't seem to get anywhere on 'happy'. 

Cam comes in, holding napkins. "Asked Bar what her deal is, got - not much but some - world has almost no publications Bar can access, isn't that fun, just enough to indicate that it's not that they've never invented writing. I don't think we're going to wait her out and get a shift change even if we want to, either, she kind of just lives here, her - caretaker - left her for Bar to look after and never came back."