Wilfred answers them promptly. There are a few differences in which amino acids are common.

Fascinating! The representative seems more in his depth, talking about biological and medical questions, though he has to admit to a few gaps in his world's knowledge of their own biology.

And, soon enough, a selection of medical textbooks starts arriving - currently just the ones that're more local, but they're all fairly good textbooks. Still, the local library doesn't keep medical journals or anything.

The basics are what's most important, Wilfred keeps talking while other members of the team do the digitization work. Once the digitization is complete Wilfred gets out a tablet and starts doing searches through the text, pulling out answers to questions and honing in on particular differences. There are shockingly few.

Which does imply there's a greater chance of cross-world pathogens being able to exist.

It does, Wilfred is fairly concerned about this possibility. She starts digging into their literature on the Krissan immune system and tries to speculate about whether Human vaccines will be effective.

Vaccines work as described for them, at least, so their immune systems seem similar enough in the broad function, if not the details.

Wilfred makes a note to have certain vaccines brought in. "Do you have an infrastructure for running clinical trials like this? We can do initial testing exclusively with dead vaccines and blood tests but eventually we probably need to test effectiveness, assuming we want to be able to do without these suits."

"We do - not every nation has that kind of infrastructure yet, unfortunately, but ours does, and the International Science Association will be able to bring far more resources to bear once they're up to speed."

"I've made a note to have certain vaccines brought in once we have teams going back and forth regularly. It'll have to wait until then. It's good you have infrastructure this would be a lot harder if we had to build from scratch. Do you have vaccines for most common ailments?"

"Yes! There's a few viral diseases we're struggling with - we don't have all of the vaccine development tools we'd like to have, so we might need to borrow some technology to incorporate into our systems for developing future vaccines."

"I think I can say with confidence that we'd be willing to share that technology. Or at least most of it, some of it's pretty dangerous because it can be used to create novel viruses."

"Understandable; hopefully by the time we incorporate the rest, we'll have had chances to prove our trustworthiness there."

"Agreed, I think part of it is just ensuring you have the infrastructure and plans to be mostly ok if the technology falls into the wrong hands."

"Yes, definitely - we'll want better and faster vaccination development before we risk engineered pathogens, for one."

"I think the other possibly important thing to cover for coexistence purposes is if we can share food but that's pretty difficult to figure out. Enzyme mixtures are complicated."

"And even if we technically could share food, our immune systems might react poorly to new proteins."

"Indeed, it will have to be approached very carefully."

He chuckles. "I know it's a potentially serious problem, but - I can't help but be excited for this new horizon we're opening. New problems mean new opportunities."

"They do, that's why we explore."

He nods, and starts poking at areas where the Krissan's knowledge might not be complete, but local conditions might conflict with what the humans are used to.

She answers to the best of her ability.

He starts making lists of things they'll have to investigate.

Lists are important for big projects like this.

Definitely. He doesn't know how some people get by without them.

On the point where the explorers first arrived a second group appears. This group has four vehicles and more people. They start off by sending a data burst. "Explorer teams 12 and 13 requesting status from team 3."