"Well, I'm glad you like being a kid. What kind of science is involved with studying portals?"

Talking for a while (during which Combing Sorrow is speaking somewhat slowly and carefully), then: "Mom says that depends on if you wanna do them safe. Safe's a lot of math and cosmology and figuring out patterns in how - a thing I don't know the local word for - moves."

"What's the thing that moves like?"

This requires a lot of really careful translation back and forth.

"It's a - energy thing? And a - thing stuff moves through? That's not like matter or energy or actually fully in this universe I think though I might be translating that wrong."

"Hmm, maybe later you can talk to some physicists or cosmologists about that and see if we have an idea of what you mean."

"Probably once mom knows more words."

"That makes sense. Is there anything we can do to help with that?"

"Me translating a lot of stuff like this is helping, and she's getting a lot from just listening too. Eventually she'll wanna figure out reading though; mom likes reading."

Another green pulls out his pocket everything and pulls up the Voan alphabet for Combing Sorrow and says the sound each letter makes for her.

She repeats the sounds. (Her accent's already less noticeable.)

"Thank you!"

"You're welcome!" He finds a kid's reading game on his everything for her and offers it to her.

Another thanks, and she sets to splitting her attention between Bright's conversations, the translations, and the game.

Hadri's pocket everything, meanwhile, rings.

She picks up and listens with increasing alarm, barely replying.

"Is something wrong?"

The other greens don't seem to know any better than Hadri. Eventually Hadri puts down the pocket everything and, rather pale, says, "Yes, something's wrong. Uh, that was Governor Avalor."

"Avalor?" says another green.

"Uh, and she thinks we might want to break the news about aliens soon. Maybe today."

"Why, what happened?"

"It's nothing to do with you, but it would be better if everyone were excited about aliens instead of thinking about it a lot."

"What happened," Combing repeats. Her tone is not that of someone who will tolerate fooling around.

The other greens look like they'd like to know the answer to that too. Hadri says, "I'm not sure you have all the concepts, but someone on the government went on television and announced that he's been having reds get way too close to some food supplies. The Governor thinks that since we've found you, we can convince him this didn't go the way he wanted, get him to tell us exactly where and when so we can contain the damage instead of having every food source considered suspect, and then announce that there are aliens."

"Reds are...?" She saw the people with red hair that other people don't like but she doesn't know what that means except a general sense of 'gross' that isn't actually very helpful.

"Reds are one of our castes. It's very bad for them to touch food other people are going to eat, because they aren't clean." Hadri's having a liiiittle bit of trouble staying pulled together.

"Are you okay?"

She decides to consult her brain dictionary for 'clean' and all its antonyms. She doesn't wanna keep asking distressing questions, so.

"We don't know yet where the reds were so it's hard to know if we've run into any of it. I can have someone call the hotel you stayed at and the stores you got snacks from to find out who their distributors are for you."

Clean: free from pollution.

Polluted: contaminated in apparently specific ways that she thinks don't apply to shoggoths.

Some other words suggest ways to make stuff not polluted, so...

"I can just make my whole body super acid if that gets rid of polluted things?"

"...that would probably work, but it would also probably damage the truck."