How does he feel about her following him and laying on his feet when he sits down?

This was not in the plan. He doesn't know what to do in this situation. And normally that would be fine, but ...

There is a maybe-person alien on his feet. For some reason.

He keeps his feet still, retrieves a fidget from his robe pocket, and plays with it while he sits.

"You don't speak language, do you?" he remarks after a few moments. "You probably didn't—" His voice hitches. "— didn't even grow up in an environment where it made sense to associate auditory stimuli with someone's thoughts or desires."

Crafters don't speak, but she knows what hitching breath means. She sits back up, leans against his shins, and puts her chin on his knee.

Oh no now he's more immobilized by alien.

He's starting to feel a little unreal, as though this is not quite happening to him, but to somebody else. It's some other man sitting on this bench, under the dim red light of the train station at night, feeling the dog's bony chin on his leg.

"You know they're reconsidering protections for elephants and crows?" the other man tells her, and he can't quite tell why he's saying it. "People have always wondered about whether they were sapient, right? But 'theoretically capable of telepathy' sure seems like a situation where you want them firmly on the 'people' side of the line. There's a referendum in five days."

The train pulls up, and he doesn't move to stand.

She nudges his hand with her nose, trying to get under it.

Uh. What does she want with his hand?

"I don't understand what you want," he tells her, because this is what he would normally tell someone who was being unclear. "I want you to go away, but I don't understand how to communicate that to you because I am not telepathic." His breath has evened out, not because he feels better, but just because the tenuous link between what he's feeling and what his body is doing has frayed to the point of nonexistence.

What would he do if she were a pre-verbal child? Is that the right analogy here?

Well ... she's not wearing a diaper, she doesn't appear hurt ... she probably wants attention. Why does she want attention from him?

He puts a hand on top of her nose, but cannot quite bring himself to do anything with it. He doesn't have a pattern for this; the situation is completely unprecedented.

She waits a second to see if he'll start petting her on his own, then wiggles her head forward under his hand to move it between her ears.

Okay, you know what? The dog seems to be perfectly capable of getting whatever it is she wants here without his involvement. He's just going to focus on his breathing, on the feeling of the seat under him, on the feeling of the cool night air.

The train doors swish closed, and the train pulls out of the station.

A moment later, his phone whistles to him in their private code: "Location monitoring — Unexpected observation — Intent: seek confirmation — Intent: call Kaðer"

He starts crying. He needs to update the coding for his contingencies not to point to her ...

"Deny — Sleep one hour," he whistles back, although it takes a few attempts for him to get a clear tone.

"Acknowledged — Intent: sleep one hour," the phone replies.

The crying doesn't surprise her. She's already right where she's supposed to be and doing what she's supposed to do about it, though. She'll stay put.

Not for an hour, though; she's patient but she's not that patient. Twenty minutes, maybe, if nothing else happens in the meantime.

It only takes perhaps ten minutes for his crying to turn to sniffles, and then to silence again.

"Some fucking days," he tells her. "I need to go to bed, and honestly I don't particularly care about making a bad impression on you or Traveler at this point. I'm going to move my feet."

He sort of falls sideways onto the bench and tries to wiggle out from under her.

She backs off and lets him up as soon as he starts moving, though she stays close to him.

"... oh, you respond to movement. Of course you do. I wish I knew what I was saying to you."

He's kind of worried that if he holds still she'll try to touch him again. But he has the advantage of having thumbs.

He stands on the bench, grabs the handholds on the pillar of the station, and hauls himself up to the little spot where the beams join the pillar.

"Query: time to train," he whistles.

"Heard: query — Response: 10 minutes," his phone replies.

She looks up at him for a few seconds, cocking her head as she assesses the situation, then moves off a little ways and sits with her back to him, facing the train tracks.

Okay, cool. He will wait and take deep breaths, then. Things are ­— well, no, they are not fine. But he has a plan, at this point, even if it is basically just "avoid the dog, get onto the train, get home, collapse in bed".

He can do that.

The train is on time. Six minutes later, it returns and opens its doors again, releasing a few early morning workers. They nod to Traveler's dog and head out toward their cars.

The man drops down from the beam and hurries into the train car.

She looks at him when she spots him moving, but doesn't get up or anything. When the platform is clear again, she trots back over to her person's house.

There's another relatively large group of people that make their way through a bit before dawn, around the shift change. But otherwise the night is quiet, disturbed only by the sound of steel rolling on steel as the train makes its unceasing journey back and forth.

A bit after dawn, Vesherti and some helpers come and wait in the field outside Traveler's house. They have brought breakfast, more items to be turned into crafting material, meat, and various other items.

They have chairs, though, and are perfectly content to wait, share breakfast, and drink some ginger tea for as long as it takes Traveler to be ready to face the day.

The dog is sleeping by the door when they arrive, but comes over while they're getting set up to see what they're doing and beg for bits of their breakfast.

And the Crafter heads up to his roof to gather his breakfast ingredients not long after that; he waves when he spots them waiting and brings his and the dog's breakfasts out shortly after.

Vesherti isn't sure whether to feed Traveler's dog; on the one hand, feeding your guests is polite. On the other hand, he's spoken to some people who raise herding dogs, and they said that generally the dog's owner has behaviors they want to reward and discourage, and interfering with that is rude. And he's not totally clear on how much the dog is like a tool, a pet, a child, or an adult with a communication disorder.

He ends up just setting a bowl of water down for her. And then, after checking the ingredients for things that are known to be harmful to dogs, a mug of lukewarm tea.

The diplomatic team did bring enough breakfast to share with Traveler, but if he prefers to make his own that's fine too.

"Hello," Vesherti greets him by way of a screen on a little rolling stand when he comes out. "I hope you slept well."

She seems enthusiastic about the tea, though still interested in their food - at least until her own comes out, at which point she goes and gets that instead.

He did sleep well, and he hopes they all did too. He also got a lot of material converted to crafting material during the trip yesterday if they want him to make the ansibles or crankshafts or anything else before they head into the city.

"If you don't mind, it would be helpful to have the ansible and crankshaft designs we sent you made for testing," he agrees. "We also brought more spare things for you to make crafting material with."

He points at the grey crates they've set in the field.

"There's no rush, we just don't want you to run out and I know the crankshaft our learning people asked for is fairly large."

Yeah, they should definitely keep him supplied with material to convert, the total mass of crafting material on the planet is going to be the limiting factor for a lot of things. Fortunately he prefers the kind of conversion where he can do it all day, not the kind where it gets boring after a few hours, and the stuff they've been bringing has mostly been good for that.

Anyway. He wasn't sure what density they wanted for the crankshaft or what size or density they wanted for the other things, but if they can clear those questions up he can make everything now, to the limits of how much mass he's got available.

Vesherti has had a whole day to prepare. So he happens to have some samples with him that are exactly the density the scientists wanted for their various tests, to side-step the whole unit translation problem.

He sets the samples on the table for Traveler, and points out which one is which.