Iris tries to dance to the music, although she's struggling to come up with fitting dance moves.

...oh. Oh, of course.

The sight dredges up an old memory of history lessons. When he was a child, he read a book about the last great influenza pandemic. The book's cover showed a contemporary photograph of two people dancing on either side of a window, neither daring to enter the other's airspace.

There was a supplementary activity where you learned to do the dance, which had become something of a fad during the plague. Does he still remember how to do it...

...mostly, yes, and after checking a couple encyclopedia illustrations he thinks he's got it down again.

"I don't know any dances for that song," he says, once the song has finished, "but I do know a dance designed to be done in quarantine. I can show you?"

She nods. "I'm happy to see it if you want to show me!"

He sets the computers well aside--it could be catastrophic to bump into them--and he dances.

You can tell, looking at it, that there is a sort of phantom partner. You reach out to them, sometimes, brushing against the glass.

The twirls are slow, in case you are well enough to stand but sick enough to be prone to dizziness.

Once he's run through a demonstration, he says:

"Would you like to join me? You pretty much just mirror me, I think."

(It's a little disorienting, right now, to speak in the alien words of this clean world.)

"Absolutely, I'm happy to try that." She does an impressive job of replicating Minaiyu's dance moves.

Minaiyu is having complicated emotions about this.

He's...having fun, and he's relieved to be physically interacting with someone again which he has barely done in a ten-day, and he's acutely aware that she is still on the other side of the glass, and he's scared that even that is too close for her to be safe, and he's worried that if today's exposure goes badly this might be the closest he gets to another person for a long time, and he's connected to the many people who have danced like this in the past, some of whom were probably worrying about leaky windows also...

He wonders if any of the people who departed from that influenza pandemic have landed yet. Maybe, elsewhere in the multiverse, other aliens are learning to dance.

He grins at her, maybe a little shakily.

"I'm not a big dancer," he says, "but I do know another dance that I learned for my cousin's wedding. That one is, like, properly partnered. Maybe I can show you, once the new respirator arrives."

"I'm excited to see it! Hopefully it won't be too long; everything tends to be shipped lightning-quick, these days. I'm happy to wait."

It's a few circuits before the package for Minaiyu, with the closely-fitted respirator, arrives carried on a robot within 2 layers of plastic.

Partway through the wait for pakige, Minaiyu sets aside his typing practice.

It takes him a few more moments to bring himself to disturb the silence, but before long he says:

"So...what made you decide to volunteer, if I may ask?"

(He's aware that it's potentially a very awkward topic--after all, one of the likely answers is "I'm terminally ill, and I figured if I was going to die soon anyway I might as well make it useful"--but it seems like it might be important to know.)

"Well, I... I really haven't been finding much joy in life. I'm perfectly healthy and everything, but I don't very often feel that I really want a moment to last on forever, or that my life must continue? I am... comfortable with never feeling anything again, if that's the end of my life, and I've volunteered because I still want my life to do something good for people. And giving you the opportunity to see this world, and letting us meet you ourselves and learn from you, would be a wonderful thing for me to have done for people."

Out of habit, he makes the Tashayan gesture for "I don't have a ready response to that, please pause the conversation while I think it over". But no, she's probably not going to understand that, that one's not even mostly intercultural the way nodding your head for "yes" is...

"...huh. I, uh, I'll need to think about that, I think there's some...layers of alien implications there...

...but I think upfront I can say that...I hope things get better for you, one way or another."

(He hopes that's not...offensive, or something, to say to a melancholic (let alone an alien melancholic). He's never actually met one before: it's very rare, and almost unheard of in towns on the train grid (when it does happen, it seems to mostly be people from isolated areas).)

"This will be very new for me, so I'm spectacularly excited! Things are already getting better, truly. Maybe they'll stay better, too? If talking to a real-live alien is really what's happening to me right now!"

(So. She does indeed think that she's going to cease to exist when she dies, and she's melancholic enough to be fine with that.

It...hadn't really occurred to him that melancholy might be a reason to volunteer to risk your life, because obviously departing won't help melancholy, departing just dumps a new set of external problems on top of your internal problems, and at least with your current life you already have experience in how to cope with it...

(...is she melancholic enough to be disappointed when she departs and realises that she still exists? Even if she isn't, someone probably is. Is that more or less horrible than someone who does want to exist thinking that they're going to cease to exist? He is not sure he wants to think about it hard enough to decide.)

("Being in an external situation that's bad enough and intractable enough that you commit suicide to escape it" is a more familiar concept--Tashayan even has an idiom for it, "taking the last train out"--but...well, the way she initially described her problem sounded more fundamental, but it's possible that her situation is illegibly bad and not-very-tractable, and that's why she's trying desperate measures to improve it like going to meet an alien.)

She's called herself "happy" kind of a lot, in hindsight. For a moment there he thought perhaps she was trying to convince herself, and maybe she still is, but that second response does sound like a positive sign.

(On the other hand, Circe has said "I'm happy to do [thing]" a lot too, come to think of it. Maybe it's just a standard phrasing in Singleton Literate Language, and he shouldn't read anything into it.))

He grins at her. "It really is!"

"Maybe, in time, you can learn to speak a real alien language!" he says in Tashayan, and then translates it for her.

"It's going to be so incredible to learn an actual, real alien language! Not just one that people make up. Could you maybe teach me a sentence or two, just to get started?"

The first sentence one should learn in any language, of course, is "I don't speak [this language]."

He will also do "my name is", "where can I refill my water bottle", and--remembering a foreign amusement park he once went to--he throws in "please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times", laughing.

After the language lesson, they go back to parallel play on their respective phones for a while.

Oh, the respirator is here! He steps out in his Rekkan respirator to get it, waving at Iris.

Okay, now to switch over...

He heads out into the yard, his nervous excitement visible through the transparent faceplate.

"Here we are!

It's-- it's been a while since I've been this close to someone who wasn't wearing a hazmat suit. ...well, maybe not really that long a while, objectively, but-- it's been a lot, you know?"

"I'm not even gonna ask. So, how are you liking this place? Like the trees, and the grass?" Iris smiles to Minaiyu as he walks into the yard. "I bet you'd be a grade-A tailor for protective equipment like that, I tell you what."

He winces a little at the chastising that...was subtextual and she is an alien and she may not even have meant, but even if she didn't intend to tell him off for (at least skirting the edge of) venting at her, she would have been right to do so. She volunteered to risk exposure to his dangers physically, not mentally: she has done less than nothing to deserve it. (Especially if she's melancholic to start with.)

"It's a very cozy place!"

it would be more cozy if he were allowed to touch it

...well, at this point there's no reason not to touch the plants inside the birdcage, is there. He sits down near Iris and places a hand on the grass, smiling.

(Speaking of which, he will look around and see if the bird is available for petting. He doesn't want to interrupt it if it's taking a nap or something.)

He taps a small blue flower growing next to him. "I especially like these ones."

"Oh, quite possibly I would be! I worked at a hospital before: I definitely appreciate a good respirator, and the power of keeping people healthy."

The bird is simply walking casually around Minaiyu, not seeming to notice him much at all. Trying to pet it results in it slightly leaning in and cooing.

"You worked at a hospital, you say? I barely know anything about how health works and I've never actually done anything more than show up in a normal mask for a Pandemic Awareness Week, so I have 0 ideas about what kind of respirators there are or what would make them good. Can you teach me about it?"

Awwww, what a good birdie. A bit too big to sit in his lap, but still an excellent choice for his first alien animal to pet.

"Here, just a moment, I'll get some examples to show you."

He pops back into the house and gets his Rekkan respirator and one of the spare masks from his bag.

"So, this is a pretty ordinary day-to-day mask," he says, holding up the latter. "They're not all pastel blue like this: there's lots of colours and patterns.

It's made of melt-blown fabric rated to filter to about 99.5 parts in a hundred: that's about where the tradeoff curve falls for a basic melt-blown mask, it's not substantially harder to make a 99.5 filter than it is to make, like, 90. And here's the ring of silicone around the outer edge to help it seal to your face, and these straps go around the back of your head.

It's pretty comfy--although not quite as comfy as what I'm wearing now, admittedly--and it's relatively simple to manufacture once you have the tech level for melt-blown, plus it lets your voice through very well without having to do anything special to it. The main downsides are that it isn't very durable, and in particular it can't handle getting wet. Some people don't bother with these disposables and just get something more durable for day-to-day use, but there's something to be said for not having lost much if you damage or soil it, and for being able to give a spare mask to someone else without it being a big deal. And some people like to switch up what colours they wear for different outfits and occasions, which is easier with cheaper masks."

He holds up the respirator. "This one is part of my hospital uniform, though you'll often see similar respirators outside of hospitals too. It's got a slightly more complicated head-strap system to support the additional weight.

The filters attach to the base unit here. These filters are a bit higher-grade than the ordinary masks, missing more like three parts in ten-thousand, and these specific ones are also designed to filter out smells: there are some situations where scent can be a useful indicator, but in a lot of situations it's more of a distraction than anything else. Plus it makes it very obvious whether your respirator has sprung a leak: if you can't smell anything, you know you're good.

Inside the faceplate here, there would normally be a glasses mount--I'm a bit nearsighted--but right now I've stuck my glasses mount into the respirator I'm actually wearing instead. You can also get a custom-made faceplate with a built-in corrective lens, but it's more expensive, and you won't be able to, like, let a family member borrow your respirator if theirs has broken, and it's more of a pain to replace if your vision changes and you need a new lens...and, uh, as we're seeing here, it potentially means not having a glasses mount on hand to stick in a respirator you borrow. I'd been thinking about maybe getting a custom one anyway, but I hadn't decided yet, and it sure does seem to have worked out for the best that my respirator's corrective lenses were more portable.

Over here--" indicating a sort of cartridge on the chin "--is where it catches breath condensation: you don't want that building up in the main mouth area. There's an antimicrobial lining on the inside, to discourage anything growing in there in case you don't get a chance to clean it quickly enough.

And this--" a circle on the front of the mouth area "--is the speech diaphragm, which makes your voice less muffled. Older or low-end models don't have these, but they're standard in hospitals these days because they give you more options for communication: like, you don't want to have to sign to someone while you're doing surgery, you know? Not that I'm a surgeon, but still, sometimes you have your hands full or your back turned.

Some models have induction ports that let you stick a straw in to drink, but not this one. I normally just go outside for water breaks when I'm at the hospital."

"And as for appreciating a good respirator, like...one time, we had a patient who had come in because of a growth in his mouth, so he spent a lot of time maskless while we were investigating, and we figured out hours later that he was also coming down with influenza† of all things. Apparently he'd recently been on a trip to Mentath††, and they're struggling with animal reservoirs. Anyway, uh, that could have been a disaster, but everyone around him was wearing a respirator and nobody contracted it.

Even when stuff like that doesn't happen, it's a comfort to know that you'll be protected if it does."

---

†He thinks the SLL word he's using actually means something more like "influenza-like illness", but it'll do for the time being.

††Oh hey, the additional phonemes from the sourceless-semantic-bleedover mean he can actually pronounce this now! No need to approximate with "Mentaf"!

"Wow, hearing all that was really fun! I bet the PPE tailors are going to think you're super-cool, and there are probably tons of cool ideas from your world we haven't heard about yet." She smiles at him. "You said you were working at a hospital, right? Do you think you'd want to see inside one of ours some day?"

"Yeah, I'd love that. Well--" he laughs a little, slightly awkwardly "--not as a patient, of course, but...maybe, when things have settled down, it might still be possible for me to become a paramedic someday after all.

I wouldn't want to become a hospital apprentice again yet, even if the interplanetary disease risk were taken care of. I'd still want to focus my work efforts on archiving and translating the alien books I had with me: it's an important job, and right now I'm in a better position than anyone else in the world to do it. But we're making good progress: one day there'll be multiple copies of my books in this world, and multiple people fluent in Tashayan, and then I won't be so critical to that project anymore."

He smiles. "In the meantime, I think I'll do encyclopedia articles on protective equipment for my next batch of translations, maybe see what cool things the PPE tailors can find in them. And-- oh, I should scan in that book on the history of rubber I got a couple months ago and haven't read yet, I bet there's some stuff about protective equipment in there."

"Learning from a genuine alien civilization is going to be so fantastic!" Iris slowly strokes the bird. "That said... do you think you'd be comfortable letting me into your house later today? Of course, I'll stay in the upper floor until you feel comfortable risking getting sick by me, but it's starting to feel a bit awkward to be sitting out here on the grass."

Uh.

"Hmm..." he says, because he still can't actually communicate his meaning by making the give-me-some-time-to-think gesture. (Part of him wonders if he should teach it to her.)

"...what's the plan for, like, where you're going to sleep while you find out whether you're incubating anything dangerous?"

"...the plan was actually for me to sleep in the second story of your house after I've spent most of the day out here with you, but if that's not comfortable on your end, I can get a very nice sleeping bag and tent and sleep out here with the bird. Eventually, I'd be flown out and tested at a real quarantine facility, but then you'd never know if you would be safe around us, would you?"