He plays with it for a while and thinks the little locks that keep it fully extended or fully closed are really clever because they're so simple but still do the job, and would like to add 'springs' to 'sound waves' on his tutor's docket!

Who was that other person?

"Our housekeeper! She keeps things clean and manages the staff."

He has Several Questions, none of which he manages to think about coherently. Eventually he settles on:

...Why?

"- why what? Why keep the house clean? Why have someone to manage the staff? Why does she want to do those things for us?"

Yes. All those 'why's. And why did she leave so soon?

"We keep the house clean so it's pleasant to be in, and have someone to manage the staff so they all have all the tools they need and keep to an appropriate schedule and get paid on time and know if there's anything irregular they should know about going on and have someone to report that to without needing our attention every time, and she does it because we pay her - she's also been working for us for a long time so she might be fond of us but she wouldn't do it if we didn't pay her. And she left because she isn't supposed to hover unless we've asked her to be especially accessible."

Clean is better than not clean. And you can pay people to do things. Those two points make sense. And liking people but not enough to do stuff for them for free, that makes sense too.

...So, her job is to take their money and use it to get other people to do other jobs? How many other people work for them?? They must be very important if it's more than one.

"It's not uncommon to outsource cleaning and cooking and gardening and things like that. Blues like us are more likely to have dedicated household staff, but lots of people buy food at restaurants that someone else cooks at, or hires a few hours a week of a maid's time. Our gardener isn't full-time, for instance, and when we need repairs we don't have a single purple for that. Sometimes we have extra help when we're entertaining and she manages that, too."

...He should learn everyone's names. It's probably hard to keep track of them by 'piano one' and 'not piano one' if there's more than two people he needs to know about.

...Also castes seem strange. He's not a blue, is he? Is Draak a caste?

Draak don't have castes but he'll probably have a lot of the advantages of being blue just by growing up around blues.

"I'm Tish Ahtemik and my wife is Haemi Fanu and the housekeeper's Kadta be-Miyon Tusan - she's Voan, she moved here when she was a little girl - and the cook is Siuno Pip and the gardener is Theton Sahamte."

I will try to remember. I need a name. I just don't like any of them yet.

I don't know what Voan is.

"The country we live in is called Tapa. Voa is another country, one of our neighbors. They do names differently but she still uses her parentonymics even though she has a job name now too."

...Well it doesn't not make sense that different countries do different things with names, since they don't pick their own names anyway.

Am I Tapai or Draak?

"Both! You're a Draak with Tapai citizenship. I don't know how to predict other Draak will relate to that."

I feel like they will expect me to behave like other Draak and be confused and alarmed if I don't.

"If you like we can bring you to meet more Draak but I'm not sure socializing is actually how Draak learn to act like Draak."

I'm not sure either. I just know some things and it's confusing because I'm not sure if I'm wrong.

"Hmm. If you start out just knowing some things you were never told, they're probably normal Draak instincts, but they might not be normal guidelines for actual adult behavior. They could be vestigial. And even if they are normal Draak behavior that doesn't mean they're right. It used to be normal for Amentans to have a dozen children or more but we learned that we couldn't do that without making the world much worse, and now we have to disobey that instinct, even though we still have it."

...You smell tasty. If I was bigger and didn't like you and didn't know Amentans think eating people is bad I might want to do it. But I'm not and do and know.

"I'm glad you know that. One important thing about people is that we can understand the reasons we need to disobey some of our instincts. Animals can be trained to do all kinds of things, but they don't know what's going on when they're trained, and people can."

That sounds slightly wrong. I just realized that I know animals have ways of being and can understand some things if you explain it using their way. But that might be wrong.

"Hm, I think animals can understand some things, but pretty shallowly. Maybe with telepathic help they can understand more, but they don't do it by themselves."

You have to explain it in a way that lines up with how they think!

"They don't generate those explanations to explain things to themselves."

Headtilt.

...Sounds wrong. Maybe Draak planet animals are all people.