"In one cycle."

She mimes nodding off... waking up with a yawn. Far-to-near, then: "Jedi."

Okay! Do they have somewhere he can spend the night, that shouldn't be too hard to ask through mime.

Of course! She gets up. (Whew, now they can stop trampling the Imperial sweetgrass.)

"Where are the distinguished visitor Rafiik's rooms?"

"The diplomat's suite with the games. A sand-table has been installed."

"Perfect."

She bows and reaches a hand to Rafiik. Can she lead him down the ladder of the nearest hole? It's not very far down, and the area below is spacious and well lit by firelight.

He'll follow her, sure!

Great, she was worried he'd get scared again for some reason. 

She leads him along a broad stone hallway. Other pedestrians pass by, glancing at him curiously. At each of the frequent intersections, a catfolk sits in a niche.

The walls are intricately engraved with people of many sorts, weaving, farming, mining, fighting, riding bicycles and things that look like cable cars, watching children, carrying stuff, eating, playing music... Most of the people are humanoid and sculpted with an exaggerated feature diverging from the basic human form. The most common species are recognizable as werewolves and catfolk, but with larger claws and pointier ears, respectively. There are also figures with tusks or hooves or horns or big round ears or square snouts or buck teeth or long droopy noses or antennae or wing-arms or big nostrils or big eyes or lots of eyes or breasts or turtle shells or webbing under their arms. A few are not humanoid: a moth and some birds.

There is a ledge along the walls at shoulder-height, holding a continuous band of flame. The activities depicted below the ledge, in shadow, are underground, with the excavated structure appearing to go many levels down.

He's paying more attention to the path they're taking than to the art, but still enough attention to notice the lack of interplanetary tech, and the absolutely bizarre number of species for both the tech level and the apparent population density. Not that he can be sure of either; maybe they just haven't chosen to depict spaceships or hovercars and they do have them, and who knows what the rest of this compound is like, or what's over the horizon.

After a few hundred feet of walking and a couple of turns, they reach a room containing:

• A bed heaped with blankets and pillows.
• A stone table painted to look like a landscape.
• A wide, shallow basin filled with white sand, with tools hanging from hooks on the outer edge.
• A table with a bowl of fruit, a potted plant, a cup, a pitcher of water, a bar of soap, and a towel.
• A chamber pot.
• Yet another table, covered in dark brown fur. Patches, not a full pelt, but neatly fitted together.
• A wooden chair like the one earlier, but larger.

It’s lit by colorful glass sconces on the walls. The rest of the wall space is covered in shelves, holding:

• Miniature houses, trees, and walls in an art style matching the landscape table, and models of people in stone or wicker.
• Sealed jars.
• Bowls of round pebbles: gray, black, white, and malachite.
• Bowls, each holding a wooden stick.
• Loose squares of leather.
• Books.
• A pair of folding fans.
• A pom-pom.
• A magnifying glass.
• Crystals.
• Wooden cubes.
• An extensive set of hairbrushes.
• A hookah.
• Dice.
• Colored cords.
• A crate of beanbags.

There is a gentle draft.

Eilha and Asrek follow them in. Eilha (the werewolf) sits on the floor and resumes playing. Asrek (the catfolk) sticks his finger into the flames in each of the sconces, showing no pain, and then sits beside Eilha and joins in with the music.

He's too distracted checking out the various objects on the shelves to notice Asrek putting his fingers in the flames at first, but when he notices he yelps and takes a step toward him to stop him before realizing that he's fine.

Oops.

Here's the sand table! She demonstrates drawing with her claw and then grabs a stylus for him. Here's a floppy squeegee thing for erasing, and a shading fork and a compass and a straightedge.

Rafiik is still pretty concerned about Asrek but sure, Mirana can distract him with the sand table. It's clever, for a very low tech datapad alternative. And convenient; he wants the words 'not' and 'more', and the first one is easy to ask for with his existing vocabulary - Mirana is a werewolf, Eilhs is a werewolf, Asrek is not a werewolf, what's the word for that - but he'll have a much easier time of getting the concept of 'more' across if he can draw a couple of differently sized collections of dots.

And then once he has those, he can comment that he is a Jedi but Mirana and Asrek are not and ask through mime how Asrek, not being a Jedi, wasn't hurt by the fire. Even Rafiik would be hurt if he stuck his finger in a fire, you need to be more Jedi than he is to do that.

Mirana draws a stick figure, and then a picture of a table with a stick figure drawn on it and a stick figure with claws standing next to the table doing the drawing. The latter is "Mirana", see her claws? 

And then here's a stick figure with pointy ears playing the harp - "Asrek" - and some wavy lines in the air; she points and them and hums along with the music. 

So, "Mirana created" the drawing and "Asrek created" more humming and...

Rafiik is himself a "Jedi"?! He's clearly not a typical male, though.

Did the males of that species, in the past, have Jedi magic, which they sacrificed to give the females [Ansaf-]human magic? That's bizarre but there are lots of bizarre creation myths.

Or maybe he's misunderstood the word "Jedi." Maybe Rafiik was asking if there are any metahumans around, expecting them to be around, and he's going to be upset that they're gone. (Also, if something bad happened to the metahumans, it could happen again... But that's not split-second urgent; that's a problem for the wise elph and cunning catfolk minds of his superiors.)

So, Mirana is about to say that the Jedi created catfolk. Is that okay? What's the worst that could happen? ...Rafiik was not part of the metahuman project; upon learning of it, he finds it abhorrent and slaughters them all, which he is somehow capable of doing.

They need to learn more about Rafiik. They need to delay.

"Say" a different word that Rafiik hasn't heard yet "breeders."

"Breeders created catfolk."

Breeders: stick figure with breasts.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (he can fit a luxurious amount of mental screaming)

Okay actually that's brilliant, presumably metahuman females look like that too; it's arguably the defining species feature so they could even pass it off as an artistic mistake later, if they need to claim that Mirana's stick figure was intended to represent a male. It's possible Mirana might genuinely not even know what male humans look like.

Anyway. "I humbly suggest that the [Ansaf-]human train with a whisshopper to mimic Rafiik's abilities. Also, what happened to the metahumans? Prepare for a repeat."

...okay? That doesn't answer his question though.

...are Breeders Sith? Inquiring Rafiiks want to know. Since she recognized the word Jedi and all.

She furrows her brow...

Oh illthrift, a third word they don't know.

Jedi: Rafiik; the people Rafiik wants to meet. If you have 'enough' Jedi-ness, you become resistant to fire.

[The Basic word for 'human']: Also Rafiik.

Sith: Not Rafiik? Metahumans? Someone's got to be the metahumans.

The theory that he thinks is most likely to be true is that [Basic] humans are various powerful beings, divided into two major groups: Sith, who created breeders, and Jedi, who didn't. Jedi hoard magic over time, somehow. Sith give other people magic. If you had to call one of those 'good' and one 'evil', it's obvious which is which.

There's a chance that if Rafiik learns that Sith created breeders, everyone dies. Or at least all the breeders die, plus anyone who gets in the way.

So, should Mirana recognize the word? No. Someone else can recognize the word later, once they know more, but there's no going back. "Don't know."

Shrug.

"...hm."

He considers asking some clarifying questions, but it seems like Mirana hasn't personally met whoever that is, so she's unlikely to know, say, what color her lightsaber is. And as weird as it'd be for this to be a Jedi project, it does seem just as likely that someone went rogue at some point than that a Sith pulled it off in Republic space.

Anyway.

"Asrek?"

What about him? "Catfolk, catfolk, catfolk" - she draws a flame in the sand, touches it, and scoops up the sand and holds it. "Catfolk created" flame...she points at the real flame too since the drawing didn't survive getting scooped.

Yeah. It's not going to be possible to hide the entire phenomenon of species magic.