Aliens.

"...I guess when they said we would do exposure from you to me later, I don't think they technically specified that it would be at least one expected-incubation-period later, even though for all practical purposes doing two exposures within one incubation period is effectively doing them at the same time.

...the important thing, for the medium term, isn't whether it's fully safe for me to be exposed to you: the important thing is whether sustainable sanitation practices are sufficient to protect me from you. If local microbiota are so dangerous that even wearing this respirator and showering when I go back inside is enough exposure to kill me, it makes sense to go ahead and find that out now before the loneliness does any more psychological damage to me." He'd never be alone again, after that. "If I can interact with the world by...the kinds of measures I'd take if I were a mildly-to-moderately immunodeficient person interacting with fellow Rekkans, if I can go out in your towns as long as I'm wearing this respirator, if I can hug people as long as I shower at the end of the day, it's not urgent to find out whether that's still overkill. It's especially not urgent enough to risk the only fluent Tashayan speaker on the planet, when we haven't had time to fully train up new translators yet."

(It's dawning on him, in horror, that thus far he's focused on preserving knowledge of Tashayan such that they can understand alien writing. Speaking should be pretty intuitive from there--the Tashayan alphabet is pretty much phonetic--but he's done essentially nothing with signing, and if he departs at this point they're going to lose an entire modality. He places "make a signing dictionary of those top five hundred words, and record demonstrations of some basic grammar" at the top of his mental to-do list, just above translating the PPE articles.)

"...are any of the other quarantine suites unoccupied? Can you live nearby for a while, and I come and spend a few circuits each day with you? Breathing on you," he gestures at the respirator valve, "and touching your things, and still having a home of my own to go back to at the end of the day?"

"They are available, yes. But walking over with what you might have is a risk I don't want to impose on others; I'm happy to be outside, here, and then fly off to be tested after some time to let anything you could have given me incubate. I think you're underestimating how nice a tent and sleeping bag could be, for me; I'm happy to be here for just the few days it'd take to see whether anything harmful happens when exposed to you."

He feels like he's floundering a bit.

"...yeah, that's true, it makes sense to keep things inside the birdcage right now," he says. "I can spend a while each day hanging out in your tent, then, practising a level of exposure-from-my-perspective that I could later sustain while..." he looks distant, remembering the person who came to collect the sample "...seeing the world, if exposure-from-your-perspective does turn out not to be an issue."

"...maybe we should take some time off from each other, then? I have a phone, and I'm in the mood for some reading on it by myself now." She starts sitting on the ground, tapping on her phone. "And you can keep transmitting your culture into ours."

That feels like something that might have alien subtext (offended that he doesn't want her in his house?), but given the more overt text it doesn't seem like a good idea to ask right now.

"Okay."

He gives the bird one more pat, then heads back inside, doffs his gear, showers, and settles in to make a basic signing dictionary.

Eventually, a slow flying drone comes by, releasing a package about half as big as the woman in a glider that slowly descends in a small circle. It has a very large and thick sleeping bag inside of it, together with a tent big enough to stand in and big enough to probably fit 8 or so people in it if they were cramped together. The woman assembles the tent and lays out the sleeping bag, before waving at Minaiyu and retiring to it for the rest of the day.

He waves back.

hopefully he hasn't offended her too badly

He's more accustomed to tents and sleeping bags that are optimising for being lightweight, the better for carrying in a backpack. He wonders how much cozier you can make a sleeping bag if you aren't particularly trying to keep the weight down.

With his evening meal, he tries a vegetable on which the sourceless-semantic-bleedover translation is intriguingly fuzzy. The term...feels like it's some sort of brassica? It doesn't seem to be connecting to any more specific concept in his mind.

It turns out to be sort of like tiny, bite-sized cabbages. It's pretty good!

(Are all cabbages tiny here? No, "cabbage" seems to have a separate word.)

He dreams that night of riding a larger version of the bird through the forest. It never becomes plot-relevant what level of protective equipment he's wearing.

The day after, Minaiyu can see the woman watching something on her phone right outside the tent and waving at him after he wakes up. "Are you thinking you'll mostly be doing translation stuff today, or will you be doing some different stuff as well?"

"I was thinking of spending some time doing crafts with some of the plants in the clearing? Nothing serious: just playing around with some knotwork and weaving and so forth. I think that would be fun." And a good way to start adjusting to the idea of handling alien objects out in the world.

"Well, I know nothing about crafts, so... can I see you pick up some plants, and see you working with them? We really don't do crafts for fun much, so it'd be really new for me to see what it's like."

He grins. "Absolutely! I'll be out soon."

He goes and does his morning grooming (in hindsight, he probably should have gone ahead and gotten that facial-hair electrolysis he's been considering; oh well, at least he has an emergency thattha in his bag if it ever comes down to it, and the Thomassians have very nice razors), then heads out into the yard.

Hmm, what to try first...

...oh, there's a twig with a Y shape! Maybe he can use that as a tiny loom...

He picks out a particularly long blade of grass and starts making a warp out of it.

He almost takes another blade of grass for the weft, but...hmm...

Maybe he can use some flower stalks instead. And instead of trying to find something long enough to go back and forth across multiple rows (while still having enough flexibility), he'll try using a separate flower stalk each time, a flower on every row...

--he's broken the warp. Well, that's alright, there's more grass available...

He's more careful on the second attempt, and successfully weaves a little scrap of flower-cloth.

He beams at Iris.

She's more confused than anything else. "It seems like it'd take a vast amount of time to get anything made? But the strange things you're doing make me curious to see the final outcome!"

"Oh, I'm not optimising for speed here, I'm just enjoying the process.

I think this one's done, actually." He pokes the base of the Y into the ground, so that the loom sticks up.

He looks at it contemplatively. "Although I might wrap something around the base, decorate it a little more."

Iris keeps her eye attentively on what Minaiyu is doing.

He'll uproot the twig for the time being, to make it easier to work with.

He takes a couple more blades of grass and a dandelion-like flower. He nestles the flower into the space where the Y just starts to branch, before the flower-cloth begins. The stem of the flower hangs down against the base of the twig.

He wraps each grass blade (one layer at a time) around the twig and flower stem, binding the flower into place. He tucks in the ends, to help the grass stay on.

Then, he replants the twig.

"...do you know how clothes like the ones you wore on your home planet are made normally? Here, we have pretty magical robots that do the sewing together, and all the fabric gets made on ludicrously huge machines. I've seen the first thing first-hand, but only the second one in pictures."

"Oh, we have machines for that too, have for...probably a little over two hundred years, I think? I'm pretty sure it was one of the earlier things Amethyst Brightpath and her crew figured out how to replicate from her homeworld: it would have been a high priority, since cloth-making is so important and so time-consuming by hand.

I happen to enjoy making clothing by hand, personally, but you don't really need to gain much experience with weaving if you don't want to: I think pretty much every kid will try it out at some point to see if they like it, but most don't stick with it.

Spinning is more important because, like...places where hand looms would be useful generally already have them: if hand-weaving would be a useful skill for you where you end up, your host probably already knows how and can teach you then, and they'll know more about the intricacies of how to get the most out of the exact kind of loom that's common where they live. But lots of places get stuck in the local-optimum of using drop spindles and would find spinning wheels very useful if only they knew about them.

Even then, though, you don't have to do spinning much on Rekka these days, just enough that you're able to if you need to.

...sorry, a lot of what I just said doesn't make sense to someone who doesn't know how afterlives work, does it."

"And for someone who really only knows the basics of textiles, too! But I think anything gets interesting if it's explained by someone who really cares."

He's a little surprised, now that he's thinking about it, that she's not more weirded out by the metaphysical implications of what he said.

...on the other hand, she's talking to an otherworlder right now, so maybe she's just figuring that Rekka has had alien portals of its own.

Hmm. She's clearly not distressed about thinking her existence is time-limited, and they were already in the middle of something, so he supposes he will add it to the queue for when they're done with the current conversation.

He can infodump about historical clothing for quite a while, if she's interested.

At one point, he mentions that with some materials and hand tools he could show her how to build a spinning wheel. This is only partly because it's really cool, and partly because the poor woman must be in desperate need of some technological-bootstrapping training, if she's spent this whole time thinking that this is her only life.

...how many people have departed this world since he arrived, and how many of them knew they were dying, such that they could have at least crammed the basics

...yeah, he really does need to look into actively getting the word out on this, huh. He's not quite sure where to start. Maybe he'll start by asking his contact at the Limited Written Sources archive, who has probably read Minaiyu's translation of the encyclopedia article on walk-ins.

(He sure does keep noticing tasks that are more urgent than providing the Thomassians with information about Rekkan PPE, for comparison with their own tech. He hopes things settle down enough soon that he can get around to uploading that history-of-rubber book.)

"I wasn't aware that it could be done with such simple tools, that's genuinely amazing! I'm excited to see what the end results look like, it's probably going to be charmingly crude. We'd need to get the tools needed sent down to us, right? I was going to order a bit more stuff, so it'd fit perfectly into the order I was going to make anyway."

"The kinds of spinning wheel I could build by myself are a lot slower than full mechanisation, and that's especially true for the simplest, quickest-to-make ones, but it's still handy if your alternatives are drop spindles or handhelds. I do know things about how to build mechanised spinners, but it's not a one-person project."

He mentally plays out the building process and lists off supplies: work gloves, wood of roughly these shapes and sizes and ideally of these hardness levels, a saw, nails, a wood file or some sandpaper, some cord, fibres to test the spinning wheel with...

"...hmm, although if we're just doing a relatively quick and basic demonstration, we might want to repurpose a pre-made wheel? Last year my friend made one out of a tricycle wheel: that was pretty neat.

If we do that, we can remove...let's see...these bits of wood; we'll still need the others."

"Well, that... I'm excited to try that. I'll order it with my next shipment, although I'm not sure they're fast enough to find a wheel; the next shipment is supposed to come in, like, 3 circuits. It'd need to be sent in tomorrow, I'm thinking."

"That works!"

His stomach growls.

"I think it's time I head in for a while, get some food and all that?"