This does seem like an important thing to work on. She's willing to spend two or three hours trying to absorb more words. It'll be fairly haphazard, based primarily around whichever ones she figures out how to mime effectively, but it's progress. Eventually she places another helping of fish in her sort-of-refrigerated pocket and gets ready to leave the building again.

Saikirei makes no move to impede her.

Then she'll go back to her sleeping corner to sleep, because it seems like the appropriate place to go for that.

She'll return once or twice a day for food, fresh water, and additional vocabulary. The rest of her time is spent exploring the ruins, despite the fact that they appear to contain very little of value. Maybe she'll find a table she likes and be able to drag it over to her sleeping corner and pretend that she has her own house.

It's sort of nice, not having to do anything. She'll be sad, if she has to live the rest of her life down here without ever seeing Taz or Ves or Mathrael again, but she won't be as sad about it as Saikirei is. Not that she's given up, exactly, but she won't be able to figure out her options until she's either thoroughly explored the ruins or figured out how to properly talk to Saikirei.

One day, when she comes into Saikirei's building, he is sitting on the floor in front of his chair, arms wrapped around his knees, cloak spread out around him in an ominous pool, looking even more depressed than usual.

"Saikirei?"

"Sad," he murmurs.

Hmmm.

She does not really know how to deal with sadness in ancient superpowered not-Liars who are mourning the loss of an entire civilization. She's not sure anyone she knows does. Maybe nobody in the universe knows how to do this.

She sits down beside him, hesitating when she gets to the cloak and then forging on ahead. She pats his shoulder. She wants to say that it'll be OK, except it won't be. She wants to say that it probably wasn't his fault, except it absolutely could have been. She refuses to say something as contentless as "there, there."

So she sings a song that she used to sing when Ves was very small, a song where the singer wishes the stars goodnight at the very end of the universe, when the stars will grow cold and everything that depends on them will die. It makes no promises and offers no hope, but at least there's someone still trying to wish them goodnight, even after everything, and maybe that's something?

It's what she's got.

The cloak is oddly warm, but doesn't misbehave when sat on.

Saikirei is tall enough that it's slightly awkward to reach his shoulder sitting beside him, and when she pats him he goes still for a moment, and so do all the eddies of shadow rising from his cloak.

But it isn't until she sings that he curls up on the floor with his head resting against her leg and cries.

Well, the rules of lullabies are quite clear on this point. You keep singing until the person who needed the song has calmed down. Good thing there are a lot of stars out there to say goodnight to.

She pats his head and sings for as long as it looks like that's necessary. 

He cries for a while, but runs out of tears before she runs out of stars.

Up close, it's more obvious that the cloak is... actually a part of him. The shadows blur and merge into his skin without a clear edge between them.

The pool of darkness on the floor huddles inward to form a sort of nest around them, and a blanket of shadowsmoke lifts up to drape itself over Imrainai's shoulders in a gesture not unlike a hug.

Wow her life is super weird now. Arguably better? Definitely weird.

"OK now?"

This is apparently a difficult question to answer.

She pats him again. "That's OK."

Sad curled-up shadow-man with sad cozy shadow-hug-blanket.

Pat pat pat.

She's hungry, but she doesn't exactly have anywhere else she needs to be. She can wait maybe an hour before boredom or hunger spurs her to actually ask for food and water.

He sits up, and takes her hand, and squeezes it very gently. He looks... still miserable, honestly, but maybe less so? Or differently?

She is not immediately sure what to do with this.

She squeezes his hand back.

He spends a while sitting there like that, trying to say something. Occasionally he gets half a word out and then frowns and cuts himself off and goes back to struggling silently with their limited vocabulary, and after about two minutes of this he drops her hand and curls up and his cloak escapes vaporously from underneath Imrainai and pulls in to wrap around him, and it keeps wrapping tighter and tighter over the course of a few seconds until finally it disappears entirely.

Um.

She does sort of need food and water to live, still.

She supposes it is maybe time for her to solve this problem herself.

She returns to the building that contains her sleeping corner, since that's where she's been keeping all of her gathered materials. (It is not the same building as the one that houses her pee corner, because she may be living in her own filth, but she knows enough about sanitation and germ theory to at least attempt not to get herself killed via infectious disease.)

She has rocks! Lots of rocks. Some unidentifiable pieces of wood that used to be furniture. Some corroded metal bars she pulled out of the rubble. Some fish bones that are unfortunately too fragile to make anything useful out of. Most importantly, she has a series of large glass bottles, since Saikirei's just been giving those to her when she asks for fresh water. She also has the tools she brought with her, which fit comfortably in her various biosuit pockets or are tethered to her waist. Screwdriver one, screwdriver two, sad little pocket knife, flashlight, more-or-less paracord, set of wipes, adhesive rolls that are duct tape in all but name, and, obviously, her biosuit itself.

She can't really tell how far away the edge of the air bubble is, and she has no idea what's keeping the air in or whether it will insist on keeping her in, too. Supposing it doesn't, though, it's probably her best bet (or second best bet, depending on how whatever just happened shakes out) for reliable food and water. Assuming the edge is less than two or three days away from here, she can probably make it there and back here without actually dying of starvation. Three of the bottles still have some water, so she won't die of thirst in that time, either.

She consolidates most of her water into one bottle. She ties the metal bars and an empty bottle to the back of her suit, checking that they're secure. She puts her favorite weirdly sharp rock in one of her pockets. She picks up the mostly-full bottle in her arms, and checks over her other possessions to see that she isn't forgetting anything important. Doesn't look like it.

She heads for the edge of her world.

It's a longish walk to the outskirts of the city, but if she picks the direction where the bubble-edge looks closest, she'll be able to tell after about an hour that she's definitely getting closer.

Also at around that time, the ground underfoot rumbles slightly, and fountains start sprouting from street corners like highly improbable weeds. Each one is a stone bowl wide enough for a person to climb into, with clear sparkling water pouring inexplicably out of midair into said bowl, and then draining out again via openings in the stone near the edge. There isn't any sort of pipe up top for the water to come out of. It just... appears, and falls two or three feet in a continuous stream.

Well. You don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but you do quietly remember that you don't understand how his city works and that he may not have brushed his teeth. 

She half-fills her empty bottle with magic water, strips off her biosuit, fastens the bottle to the inside to make use of the suit's airtight seal, and prepares to wait for evaporation to do its thing. The inside of most of the suit is getting pretty filthy, but whatever condenses on the inside of the helmet should be OK. Assuming it's going to do that, because she's not really sure how humidity levels work when you're in an air bubble at the bottom of the ocean. It occurs to her that she can take something resembling a shower and wash her hair, too, so she does that.

She grabs her suit and her existing bottle of verified-safe water. She continues to head toward the edge of the bubble, now barefoot.

It's about another hour, maybe a little more, before she gets her first clear view of the air-water boundary. It comes down just past the last scattered piles of rubble at the edge of the city, looking very much like the edge of an ordinary air bubble in ordinary water expanded to an outrageous scale and held in place despite the complaints of gravity. Beyond its faint silvery shimmer, the dark water is mostly still, but disturbed by an occasional curious fish.

Huh.

She sets her stuff down and pokes at the barrier with one of her corroded metal sticks, checking whether it's the sort of thing an object can pass through without anything very unfortunate happening.

The object passes through. Nothing very unfortunate, or indeed particularly interesting, happens.

She sticks a finger through, just to make sure it's not some kind of forcefield that only works on stuff with water in it.