"I promise not to touch anything! Where are you making things?"

"There's an Engineering Bay! It's where all the fixing and making robots and water recyclers and fuel systems and everything go." She gives directions.

He follows her directions and goes to look around. He doesn't try to touch anything.

Here's her android, and a large, hall-like room with quite a lot of machines doing mysterious things and making loud noises.

"Good morning again."

Loud noises aren't great but he'll stay with her anyway, she'd be all alone otherwise.

"Hi! Thanks for making me breakfast! What're you making right now?"

(Not that loud, his hearing could get damaged!)

"Some synthetic yarn and dyes in nice colors. Some extra robots. More food. And solar panels and little generators."

"Those all sound like good things to make. People will be happy to have dyes, especially. Do you like watching the machines work?"

"I suppose so? It's satisfying? You think they would like computers that can see all the things I showed you? Those aren't as easy as dyes but I can make some."

"Yeah, those would be so useful! Can you change the documentaries so they have your translation instead of the original narration?"

"Sure! Takes a while but sure. I should learn to write in your language too and I can change all the writing."

"If you've got something for me to write with I can show you that now."

A robot fetches paper and a pen!

"We can do this outside if it's too loud here. I just thought you might want to see all the machines."

"It's fine, I wouldn't want to make you leave here if you like watching the machines. So we basically have eleven consonants and five vowels," he says very quickly trying to keep her from having an opening to be nobly self-sacrificing. "Here's what they look like." He starts writing the alphabet. Oh no, what if she takes this chance to suggest not doing things she likes again while he's busy writing, she had better not.

"Oh, I can watch them from wherever. Cameras, you know. But sure."

"It's fine here. So the consonants you can't say by themselves but the vowels you can. They sound like..." Vaayo points to each letter and pronounces it.

She's running everything low and slow to not make too much of a din, but she's not about to kick him out.

She repeats the sounds. "Is it all based on sounds or are there special rules for writing? English has lots of those."

"Special rules? Uh, at the end of a sentence you write this thing if you're explaining how something is and this one if you're asking a question, is that what you mean?" He adds the punctuation marks as he talks.

"Oh, punctuation. No I mean like, 'knight' an armored fighting person is pronounced the same as 'night' when the sun is behind the earth." She writes these two words down to show the example. "So, do words always get spelled how they're said?"

"Not always, sometimes I say 'and' too fast when I'm not being careful but if you're writing you write it like you're being careful to say the whole word. Like you'd do in a song or a lecture."

"That makes sense! And it's convenient. Okay, I want to try it. Anything you want to read?"

"Someone said there were some books written by the gods a long time ago but I'm not sure if I should believe that. Do you know about them?"

"There's kind of a lot of books that people say gods or prophets and priests wrote? The information I have on them says that most people didn't think they were real. But a lot did."

"Do you think there were any gods still around when you were supposed to wake up? Did they leave a long time before that?"

She doesn't want to upset him and this is likely to do that. But she also doesn't want to lie.

She looks thoughtful for a while.

"I don't see any evidence gods, things greater than people like that, ever existed. Just stories. I don't see any evidence that they didn't either, though."

"I'm going to have a hell of a time going home and being a priest after people stop believing in gods! We'll probably keep the priesthood, though, I just don't know what it'll be like."