"Yes."

He shrugs.

"And I don't think you can be sure. But you can talk to Dalvor about it if you want."

"I don't have any better ideas," she admits.

"I think you can save the world with these flowers but I don't think you can save it today. Are you tired, do you want to sleep? Are you hungry, do you want to eat?"

"It wasn't very late when we left...I'm not terribly tired, anyone else?"

"Not really."

"Yeah, me neither."

Cass shakes her head.

"What time is it here?"

"What do you mean?"

"...Um, you have a cycle of sleeping regularly, right?"

"...ah. Not in Aluvanna," she says. "Twice a day there is taiva, like now, when we see the sun for a short time. The rest of the time it is dark. So Ceirene sleep at night, but Aluvai sleep when they want to. It's the second taiva of the day now."

"Huh. I think humans benefit from a regular sleep cycle, even if it's set arbitrarily, but that wasn't exactly my area of study, and in enough time to evolve tails and so on you could probably evolve away the circadian rhythm...of course, that's assuming that humans here evolved the same way I'm used to and that Aluvai evolved from Ceirene, which isn't necessarily the case..."

"Evolved?"

"Oh you don't know about evolution here yet, okay--or, no, maybe you do, the word hasn't come up before--okay, so you know how people will take animals and make the animals have babies who have the most of a specific trait they want, and then over time there are more of that kind of animal who have that trait?"

"Yes?"

"So animals do that in the wild, too, only it's not the traits that humans like best, it's the traits that'll let them have the most surviving babies, and over a very very long time they can even change into other species that way, and that's evolution."

"Hmm. I see the logic," she says thoughtfully.

"So since humans evolved as basically Ceirene on my planet it seems most likely that humans had a very similar evolutionary path here, although it isn't necessarily safe to assume that Aluvai evolved from Ceirene instead of some common ancestor."

Nod. "Well. I sleep the Ceirene way, for most of the second dark time every day. But you can sleep when you're tired and no one will say it's the wrong time. Although most people try to be awake for taiva."

"Makes sense. So, um, what would be a good time to try to get an audience with the king?"

"I can talk to him now, and you can see him before next taiva."

"Okay, that works."

Smile. Nod.

"...we should maybe be speaking our language, not yours," Ashras realizes.

"Presumably your king does not speak it!"