Another slow nod.

"OK! Thanks again!"

And now to see if any of the other buildings have anything potentially useful inside them.

The other buildings seem to have...

...a whole lot of nothing. Sometimes there's a few sticks of furniture left. More often there's nothing but bare stone. It's rare to find a door that's even in good enough shape to be hanging off its hinges in pieces.

Well this is certainly non-ideal. She picks through lots of buildings, occasionally picking up some small piece of trash before later deciding that it's not worth the cost of carrying it around. She eats her remaining grilled fish. She takes a nap in what looks like a moderately hidden and defensible corner. She checks that nobody's contacted her and then circles back around to Saikirei's building.

There he is, in his chair, being sad. Exactly how she left him.

"Hi! I didn't find anything."

He says something. Maybe it's a greeting.

She repeats it and adds it to her mental list of words to finish memorizing. 

"Food?" she asks, but that sounds rude to her. "Please?"

The grilled fish from last time is still sitting on the floor. He peers at it; it does look less appetizing than it did when he made it. His cloak pours across the floor to cover it again, and when the cloak retreats there is a grilled fish of a much saner size lying in the same enormous platter.

She gives another tiny bow, thanks him, and eats. She reviews the words they shared yesterday, occasionally getting stuck and waiting for him to repeat his words for her concepts.

She thinks about what words she can add to their shared vocabulary. "Big," she says, and spreads her arms wide. "Small," she says, of the space between her fingers. Some miming should get them "happy", "sad", "angry", and "afraid".

Yes. He is capable of providing translations for all these words. Though thinking about emotions doesn't seem to be doing him any good.

"Saikirei sad?"

He hesitates, then nods.

"Saikirei big sad," she pronounces, as if she is an expert in these matters. "Imrainai small sad."

"...Imrainai... not afraid."

She makes a wobbly gesture with her hand. "Small afraid."

Nod.

"Imrainai small afraid. Saikirei... Liars big afraid."

"Imrainai not afraid Saikirei," she says, and then considers. She makes a very small space between her fingers. "...Imrainai small afraid Saikirei. Imrainai medium afraid - " she makes another gesture with her hands, somewhere between big and small " - no Liars."

He considers this recitation for a long moment, then lets his cloak pool on the floor again. It bunches up into a tallish lump. When it recedes, there's a marble pedestal there, with a marble island or continent surrounded by a blue glass ocean. The cylinder of ocean rests atop the pedestal with its sides open to the eye, showing the sides of the continent as they descend all the way to the ocean floor.

"Meraiyu," he says, pointing at it.

Smoke and shadows gather on the stone surface. Tendrils of darkness push and tug at the stone, shaping it like clay. He builds exaggerated stylizations of cities.

"Liars, Liars, Liars," he says, gesturing illustratively at the cities. Then: "Saikirei," and a point of darkness grows from the center of the largest city and sweeps outward, shattering the whole surface of the continent, destroying everything in its path. The continent is dragged beneath the surface of the ocean, collapsing down until it's level with the ocean floor. The water closes over it, leaving a bubble of air. And the point of darkness collapses inward until it's back where it started, though considerably lower. "No Liars," he finishes.

He does not appear to be proud of this accomplishment.

She considers this. Then she nods, accepting it. She has a lot of questions - how, why, is it going to happen again, what happened to the Alteri in Meraiyu, were there Alteri in Meraiyu, where did Meraiyu come from in the first place - but she has no words to ask them.

"Imrainai small afraid Saikirei," she says, and the space between her fingers is bigger this time, but can still be measured with one hand.

He makes an incredulous sound that is not really a word but can probably be translated pretty readily as 'what??' or 'why??'.

She doesn't have the words necessary to explain herself properly, and she probably has a whole lot of reasons that go into her gut's calculations here, but -

She tears the fish open and digs out the bones. When she has enough of them, she arranges the ribs in little x shapes scattered across the floor, little constellations of fish bones that match the star positions from Yahi. When she's done, she stands and names her star systems - Aldara, Kessria, Tlax, Fen, Ni Nare, Makath, Hhof, Kunakt'kits, Mihi, Ologro, others, more names than he can possibly be expected to remember.

"Aldara, Liars. Kessria, Liars. Tlax, Liars. Fen, Liars. Liars, Liars, Liars."

She gestures to herself. "Alteri."

She stomps on the bones that make up Aldara. There's a crunch beneath her boot. She adds her own rather theatrical explosion sound. "No Liars, Aldara." And then she travels around to the other star systems, gets ready to stomp on them, and pauses, thinking. Four or five times, her foot comes down and she makes her explosion sound. The other worlds remain in suspense. 

She travels to one particular star, no more noteworthy than the others, and names it Earth. "Imrainai, Earth. Liars, Liars, Liars." And she gets ready to stomp on Earth, and then thinks better of it, and then decides to stomp again, and then thinks better of it, and then decides to stomp again, and then -

"Imrainai afraid Alteri. Alteri - " she makes her explosion sound " - no Earth, no Earth Liars. But Alteri no - " she may be having a little too much fun with the explosion sound " - Earth Liars happy."

She travels back to the marble pedestal and gazes sadly at the remains of Meraiyu. It's sad that Meraiyu is gone, it doesn't stop being sad just because other planets have been destroyed. She pats the representation gently. "Meraiyu no Liars. No sad, no happy, no angry, no afraid. Saikirei..."

The explosion is perhaps a bit more somber this time. It is pointless. No one will hear it. She shrugs.

...He absorbs this narrative thoughtfully.

Then he nods, acknowledging the point.

She is pleased to have made her point. She gathers up her broken fish bones and makes a pile of them at the edge of the platter, because that seems like the polite thing to do after smashing fish bones on someone's floor.

Saikirei stares meditatively at the fish bones, pondering questions that are beyond their mutual vocabulary at the moment.