"Good . . . morning?" He peers out the window, wincing at the head-turning required for this. "Yeah, morning." He looks over Maturin and the snowdrift of papers like a frat boy trying to recall if he made any bad decisions after the sixth beer.

"I assume those papers are full of exciting philosophical discoveries that will cement my position in the Assembly."

"I hope so! I don't know everything you've invented so there's got to be a lot of redundant stuff in there, but there's also a lot of stuff you definitely don't have." Including some of what his world calls philosophy, in case anyone wants a collection of otherworldly thought experiments and a history of human rights.

Clarissa looks through it. 

"...you oppressed women?"

"We did a lot of stupid shit. I mean stuff. Um, sorry on behalf of my planet."

"Some of this is not going to work at all. Of course submissives don't need autonomy, they're submissives."

"They might like it if they tried it. But I haven't actually had a conversation with one, so I dunno."

"Good thing your debut is next week."

"Ah, yeah, I should really be studying for that. Er, not studying. You know what I mean. Are there books of advice or should I ask your brother a lot of questions?"

"Let's see here..." Clarissa digs through the library and pulls out a couple of mostly-unread etiquette books. "These will help. Can you dance?"

Bruce accepts the books and recalls school "dances" that were just a crowd of people jumping up and down to music so loud he could barely hear himself think even from his hiding place in the bathroom. "I can't, sorry. If you have instructions anywhere I'll practice."

"We'll say you're from another world and can't dance, it'll make you exotic."

"Okay." That's a relief; if local dancing is like any other activity requiring physical coordination there is no amount of practice that will take him past "lousy" and a week would barely be long enough to get even that far.

"A debut is basically a party, right? What does it involve besides not-dancing?"

"People are going to drink and gossip and flirt and joke around. Several people are going to try to steal you away from me, although my hope is that my brother is so charming that you won't let them. You'll meet people and then they'll call on you later, or come to dinner, or go on a promenade with you."

"By steal me away do you mean, like, try to get me to collaborate on their projects? Should I not collaborate on projects with multiple people, is that rude? Also your brother is awesome."

"Currently, I'm your patron and you're my client. I will feed you and house you and give you an allowance, and in exchange you'll publish monographs and thank me in the dedication. Having a client who is literally from another world is a major social coup that ought to increase my social status and influence tremendously."

"I'm glad there's a system for that that I can integrate into and I will definitely write a lot of monographs and thank you in the dedications." He doubts this setup would scale to the level of massive projects his world goes in for, but it beats the pants and the underwear off writing grant proposals every six months.

"But, you see, other people would like to receive status instead, and so they will steal you away with promises of beautiful country houses and higher allowances. --If you do get tempted by one, bring it to me and I'll see what I can do to match it."

"Okay. Um, I don't actually know how much you're planning on paying me. Or what the traditional arrangement is for turning inventions into money and how we would split any resulting money." (This is not really less awkward than talking about sex.)

"--oh, goodness, I'm not going to get involved in trade, don't be absurd."

"So should I just make everything public and let whoever wants to try to turn a profit on it?" Fine by him, that's probably the most prosocial way to get stuff widely adopted and it's not like any of it is actually his intellectual property.

"Of course! I'm not in dire financial straits, I don't gamble, and even if I were I'm unmarried and I could simply marry for wealth."

"I'm glad to hear it. Anything else in there you'd like to ask me about before I start studying etiquette?"

"About payment-- I don't know that you understand our financial system, so why don't you try buying whatever you want for a bit, and then if you are running up unsustainable debts I will encourage you towards thrift."

Blink. "I appreciate the trust that implies. Okay." It's a lot more nerve-wracking than having a known budget but he can start with the cheapest things to make demos of and hope he successfully makes the Maturins happy before he needs anything more expensive.