Kvothe laughs, an easy and full thing. "Then I'll just have to avoid it." And he breaks down the partition, letting the other two parts of his mind come back and share the lyrics: one set to translation from Aturan, and the other trying to invent new ones with these new words. And with a lightning smile he starts playing Tinker Tanner in Auradonian. Older than god and as easy as they come if you've got even half an ear for music. But he's already demonstrated that he can play: now he needs to demonstrate that he can sing. He ends with a verse he's particularly pleased with.

"I once saw a fair farmer's daughter
On the riverbank far from all men.
She confessed to me once when I caught her
That she didn't feel clean
If her bathing was seen
So she washed herself over again."

Prince Asher is laughing in delight part of the way through the first verse. 

"You translated that while you were playing?"

He decides to, well, lie would be an ugly word. He prefers tell: tell the truth as best it favors him, and not reveal too much. "Yes. I've always been good with languages, and I picked familiar songs. You mentioned you play as well?"

"Nope, I dance, and it's not going to look at all impressive next to yours."

He pulls up a video on his smartphone. There's a brightly colored and elaborate float, designed by a person who briefly considered the concept of "enough sparkles and glitter" and then decided to multiply it by ten to be on the safe side. On the float is Asher, a little bit younger, wearing nothing but an elaborate feather headdress, sparkly gold underwear, body glitter, and a smile. He spins around a pole performing stunts that rather suggest that he is capable of defying gravity, alternating with some very suggestive pelvic thrusts and crotch grabs. Midway through the video, someone throws what is recognizably a pair of underwear at his head. Asher doesn't flinch. 

Kvothe is very impressed. That is a really unusual level of artistic talent for a noble: he could perform with an Edema Ruh troupe and not be outshone. Somewhere very, very, very cosmopolitan. And where they didn't mind leaving after a few days and not returning for a few years. "Are all your nobles so talented?"

"My parents run a restaurant. I would say I am unusually talented at dancing among the children of restaurateurs."

He realizes that the boy in front of him had not explicitly said that he went to Auradon Prep. A prosperous merchant's son, ambitious enough that his reaction to a visitor from another world was to try to make him his client. Likely spending time near the school to build connections among potential patrons of his own, perhaps a second or more likely a third son whose parents could tolerate the eccentricity of becoming an artist, particularly if he could be a gifted one. And Asher was indeed gifted: Kvothe could tell that. He had never been one for holding positions, precisely because he knew how much strength it took. Likely sensitive about his position, and trying to appear more powerful and important than he was. It wasn't as if Kvothe wasn't doing the same, to be fair, and he likes Asher. He has ambitions beyond being patronized by a single restaurant owner, but he could do much worse as a first person to meet in a strange new world. It wouldn't do to charge, though. Asher hasn't mentioned it before his error, so they're likely not in a desperate hurry for musicians, and Kvothe does not want to seem needy. He is confident in his ability to find a place somewhere.

Restoring his lute to its case, he tries to recover: "You certainly would be by the standards of my world. How could I use the laptop to find more videos of your dancing?" Dancing has never been Kvothe's interest. While better than poetry, motion without words is doomed to never communicate ideas, and without stories and memories that there are only fleeting feelings. But it never hurts to flatter someone, and make clear how helping you can help them. There are very few artists, and even fewer good ones, who don't seek praise like a moth seeks light.

"Seems like a bit of a waste, since your world no doubt has fine dancers and does not have lightbulbs, but I appreciate your interest."

"You don't talk as if it is easy for people to go home. It seems I will stay here a while, and art is always worth my time. My world has fine dancers, but none who focus on a single prop like you do." He hopes that prop is the right word: he fears to offend, but has no better language.

"If you chose to take up throwing yourself down wells as a hobby, you'd be home in no time. But I take your point. --I'll be off getting you a laptop?"

Dying does not seem like an appealing path to returning home, whatever the beliefs of the locals. "That would be appreciated. I'll do more traditional practice here. Thank you, Asher son of Tiana. May your roads be smooth and short."

"And yours as well."

He practices diligently, waiting for Asher to return. He tries to put everything else out of his mind. He may not be able to return, but the anti-magic field is a useful goal in any case.

Asher returns with a larger rectangle which is apparently a laptop. (Auradonians seem very fond of rectangles.) He shows Kvothe how to use it and where he can find information about science. (He does not show Kvothe where to find more of his videos.)

Kvothe enthusiastically gets to work. If this potential patron wants him to learn about science, he will learn about science. He wants to look up King Ben, but figures that that can wait until after Asher is gone: openly trying to insinuate himself with a more powerful person would be rude, if nothing else. The description of lightbulbs leads him into electricity, which helps him understand how the people of this world can make the smart phones be so small: they've managed to identify an individual unit of iron, which apparently exists, and then find something even smaller from there, and it is that which produces lightning. He aches, but is well-aware that he shouldn't do sympathy with it: that was one of the lessons Ben had focused on hammering into him, after the lung-binding incident. It isn't clear why, but people who attempt to do sympathy with lightning or static shocks die, or end up in the Rookery if they're lucky.

Asher does not appear terribly inclined to go; he gets out his own laptop and starts typing enthusiastically. 

He can happily spend hours reading about this, letting himself fall into holes about these new theories about how heat works. If a thaum is just a very very small amount of kinetic energy going in random directions, that could explain why the conversions work so easily. But that doesn't explain chemical energy bindings: something else must be happening there.

Eventually Asher gets up and starts doing things in the kitchen, and a little while after that there is a delicious smell, and a little while after that Kvothe is presented with a bowl of some sort of brown soup.

"Eat."

Kvothe is more than used to going hungry, and was not particularly planning on asking for anything, but this was possibly not the wisest of potential plans. "Thank you." He takes a sniff. It is good! Really good! "How did you make this? Perhaps more importantly, how do people cook here? I'm used to a campfire, which I am assuming is not how things work here." He takes another bite. The spices are very very strong compared to what he is used to, but it is very good and there is no chance he is going to say anything negative to this wealthy restaurateur's kid. This is probably just what the food is like in Auradon, though he's not sure why there's such an excess of flavor.

"You can get a very small contained fire with a stove"-- he gestures-- "the refrigerator keeps things cool, I imagine the oven works similarly to your ovens in broad principle, I think everything else is going to be pretty similar. --We have dried yeast for bread, that's novel."

Asher adds a squirt of some liquid to his before eating.

"We have, well, they work on different principles, but things equivalent to refrigerators. Yours would require a source of electricity, right? What is the liquid you just injected to your soup? I'm aware of words about packaging and canning, but my family was never involved in that process" 

"Hot sauce. Makes it spicier. I would not recommend it to people who aren't Louisianian."

Asher makes eye contact with Kvothe and holds it for three beats too long. 

Kvothe feels he's being challenged. "I'd like to try some, if you don't mind."

"Sure." Asher hands the bottle over and brushes his fingers rather unnecessarily against Kvothe's wrist. 

He pours in as much as Asher did, then half again as much, and mixes it in thoroughly. Then he takes a bite. Asher seems very focused on him: he doesn't want to risk losing this challenge.