He does not, in those hours, propose they take a break to sleep.

He thinks Yahivi is so cool.

She thinks Yahivi is so cool, too! Yahivi is her first language and it's not as widely spoken as the others, but she really likes translating oral poetry between Yahivi and Etra La. It's challenging to get the connotations and the flow right between languages, even more challenging than re-composing poetry is in the first place. She's probably not any good at it compared to anyone else, but she does think that it's, like, fun.

It occurs to her that she really should admit to being a wuss at some point, but she's having a really really hard time working up the nerve to do that.

"I'd love to read some of your poetry translations - you could explain the artistic choices you're making -"

"- oh wow I can write them down now," she says, like this has never previously occurred to her. "I'll need some time to actually, uh, do that, but once I've done that then yeah, definitely!"

Bounce bounce bounce!

Awww man does she have to write them down now.

OK. Well. She has most of the Song of Kalo legitimately memorized, so writing down the traditional Etra La version should be a mindless enough activity that she can do it fairly correctly even on no sleep and with a foreign alphabet. She sounds the words out as she goes and hands her pages off to Fëanáro as she finishes them. A story takes shape, over the course of six hundred lines of complicated poetic form that she's still figuring out how to organize on the page. It concerns a woman named Kalo, a Liar pilot who fought in a war between two Alteri houses. She betrayed her master when she learned that the father of her children had been sold to the other house and was being made to fight against her. The two of them were ultimately captured and executed, but their children survived and went on to have other adventures.

By the time she gets to line two hundred, her brain has pretty much given up on sleep. She's going to get another eighteen hours and then probably she'll just, like, keel over unconscious unless someone makes a point of threatening her with death or something.

"What a beautiful story, you've got to publish it, everyone will want to hear it - why'd you use this word instead of the other one you taught me-"

She laughs at this suggestion and hopes that it's only very slightly more hysterical than usual. (Liars do not get published. She's a better storyteller than most people but she doesn't think she's, like, very good.) She can totally explain her word choices and give background on the poetic form.

Her brain is screaming now that it'll give her the end of the poem and then it is QUITTING, OK, it is going on strike, it is going to sit down and it is not going to give her any more mentally costly things no matter how much she screams or cries or begs for them, not until she sleeps, not unless Fëanáro threatens her life or something, which he's not going to do because they're on a spaceship away from his planet specifically so that he can prevent her from being killed.

She gets to line six hundred and twenty six and that is the end of the traditional Etra La form of this poem.

"Are you willing to do a stage performance? Only I think people should see it live - once they've learned the language - it's exquisite -"

Part of her brain is cackling madly every time he compliments her writing and part of her brain is yelling stop stop stop, no more things, you were at the end of a fourteen-hour shift when you arrived here and you've slept ONCE in that time, he's not going to think it's unreasonable -

"Huh, maybe! There are - not stage versions, really, I've never been on a stage before, but - there are versions where different people play the different characters. I don't have one memorized but I could probably write one if I knew more about the form. The traditional form for these is oral recitation by one storyteller, or sometimes one storyteller and a chorus, and I can totally do that if you think anyone would want to hear it."

"I think they definitely would."

Eeee! (Aaaa.)

"OK! Did you want me to translate it now so you could compare?"

(Noooooo.)

"Yes, definitely!"

She gets out another sheet of paper, over her brain's protests. She chews her lip and attempts to force out a stanza. It's a bad stanza, she hates it, it's ugly and imprecise and if she's going to do this she needs to do it better than that.

Her brain is screaming that it can't do better, it can't it can't it can't.

So she bites her hand, without really thinking about it, because sometimes that gives her a few more minutes of sort of acceptable work. It doesn't seem like it's doing anything right away, and so she bites down harder and she pulls her hand out of her mouth and now her hand is bleeding.

She stares mutely at her injured hand, as though faintly puzzled by this entire string of decisions.

" - are you all right?"

"So!" she says, still staring at her hand, doing her best to sort of ignore the fact that her heart rate is elevated and her breathing is shallower and her hand is bleeding and she's way less sleepy now but no less fragile and yes that would be the adrenaline.

"So this is a bit of a tangent, but on the subject of differences between species, the different species I've met all have different amounts of sleep that they need. Like, Alteri don't really pass into a state of altered consciousness, they just sort of rest for a few hours most days and then they're fine, and then they also hibernate for several years between the different stages of their lives. If they put off hibernation for too long then their total lifespans will be shorter. And Sluggards and Carthons don't really sleep at all - Sluggards really don't, I've just heard that about Carthons, I don't know if it's true. And, uh, Liars have to sleep for between five and nine hours out of every twenty four, roughly. The Alteri want us to stay awake and working for as long as possible, but conventional wisdom is that you can't push people beyond fourteen hours of work at a time or have them working on fewer than five hours of sleep, or else you get short-term impairment and lower efficiency, and if you do it for a long time then you cause long-term health problems, and - this is all to say that I'm really bad at asking important people for things because I'm not allowed to decide when I eat or sleep or do anything else really, normally, but I think maybe I have been doing this for more than fourteen hours and think that was maybe not intentional on your part and I may have at some point made a mistake and I am sorry for bleeding on your table."

" - so you should sleep?"

She nods.

"Okay! When you're ready to do more poetry you can come find me up here."

"OK!" she says, sort of excessively brightly. No obvious disappointment or indication that she's given terrible offense and needs to hide in a closet for the rest of her natural life, that's cool, she can handle limited decision-making under these conditions, probably. She gathers up her notes and goes back to her room, where she wraps her injured hand in a towel and collapses on her excessively comfy bed for the next ten hours or so.

At some point someone brings food again. 

Food is such a good thing! She is still kind of creeped out by having people who appear to be domestic servants hanging around giving her really tasty food, but she's trying her best to ignore that.

She thanks them for the food and asks them what else they do around here.

"I spend most of my time playing games, honestly. Makes the trip go faster."

"That makes sense!" And it does. As long as they seem... happy. That's all right.

She finishes her food and reviews her new alphabet a couple times and attempts to rinse the blood out of her towel (it does not work), then goes to find Fëanáro.

As promised he's sitting where she left him. He greets her in Yahivi. "Did you sleep well?"