"Am I going to wind up triggering your rise to power, because that would make me feel kind of responsible for what you did with it."

"...Probably you won't actually enable me that much."

"Under the circumstances I suppose I'll take it. What's the best way to convey, uh, 'I'm in kind of a hurry and for safety reasons it might behoove me to temporarily own parts of those of you who were sick, but I'm not from this cultural situation and don't plan to do anything skeevy to you, and if it's important to any of you particularly I will make reasonably unintrusive efforts to disown you in particular'?"

"Probably... There's people who are - sort of community leaders. You could convey that to them, they can convey it to everyone else concerned, and they'd also be able to contact me if something changed here after we left."

"How would they do that?"

"...There's communication technology."

"Sounds important. I will want to know more about it." He writes this down; he's been writing a lot of things down.

"I can describe how to use it but I don't know how it works."

"A user-level knowledge will be fine for now."

"Okay. Is later alright? Or now?"

"Later's all right. I don't know if you're all recovered yet, different stuff takes different amounts of time to fully clear once the infection's been killed."

He shrugs.

"Does the translator work on writing?"

"It has a setting for that, yeah, though it can be a bit slower."

"I'm willing to get my context from books if you can recommend one."

"...Yeah, there's writings on technology and stuff. That'd be a reasonable thing to work with on the train ride, too."

"If we can walk off with the books uncomplicatedly sure."

"Wouldn't be physical books. There's - technology that can act like a book. I'd connect mine to the translator, and it'd display anything loaded on it or accessed from - sort of a shared library - in your language."

"...huh, cool. If we can walk off with it."

"We should be able to."

"Where do we get a techno-book?"

"I've got one at my house."

"Can I see?"

"Sure."

He leads the way. His house is pretty small, on its own bit of land separate from the rest of town.

Cor looks curiously at anything interestingly technological they pass.