"I'll arrange it then," says Mal. "What do you want to do in the meantime?"

Sasuke glances at Hashirama.

"I'd like to work on learning your writing system," Hashirama says.

"That will benefit us both, then, I suspect," says Mal. "Do you wish the same, Sasuke?"

Sasuke just nods.

Mal arranges basic instruction - it's an alphabet. There's fewer vowel-shapes than vowel-sounds, but these are the most common sounds associated with these vowels... The consonants, at least, have a closer to one-to-one correspondence, though some consonant-sounds rely on combining two other consonants...

Sasuke's able to memorize it rapidly, and with his sharingan he can actually learn to read faster than to speak - though a phonetic alphabet means he'll be learning the latter quickly, too.

Hashirama struggles a bit more - but he's still clearly intelligent, and good at language-related tasks.

Mal seems to find this comment-worthy - she's not used to people catching on so quickly, at least not humans or even most aliens.

Sasuke shrugs. "I have a good visual memory."

"I haven't really seen foreign languages before, but I loved learning to read and write, since it meant I could talk to people in far away places and read about foreigners..."

"There might also be differences in how your people learn. I wouldn't be surprised, from a divergent population..."

Sasuke shrugs.

"I don't know a lot about civilians, unfortunately..." Hashirama says. "So I couldn't compare the two groups. Samurai seem about as smart as us shinobi, though."

"An interesting thing to measure sometime, perhaps," Mal says.

"Yes! I'd really want to look into getting our worlds in contact, and that'd be a good aside while we're setting up educational systems..."

"We don't often encounter worlds in need of intervention - or that aren't already past us - but I've contacted some other ships, so even if we don't have time to take you two by somewhere official, someone might come out to us, and we could coordinate a response there."

"And an uplift guide was mentioned, too?"

"I'd like to start working with you on that, yes, but - it's often not enough on it's own. Still, usually better than nothing."

"Makes sense it wouldn't be, yeah. Where do we start?"

With ascertaining what technology level his world's at, and how magic interacts, which is a long and tedious process that'll strain their shared vocabulary. (Next is politics.)

Sasuke's helpful in that, being more visually oriented and better able to produce and identify images that different phrases refer to.

Then they'll proceed very quickly; Mal can also start organizing a better dictionary of the local main human trade language for them.

Of course, they don't get extremely far before the lunchtime meeting the Captain had requested. He thanks Mal for her help, though, when she indicates it's time to start heading over.

He's very welcome, of course.