"It depends. About eight hours if I can?"

"...wow. That's a long time but it's still short enough that you can have my bed if you want, I won't need to sleep in that time."

"I can sleep maybe half that if I need to." Less if he draws on the force.

"It's fine, I won't need to sleep for the next twenty hours, you can use my bed. It's just unusual." She waves him in to show him where her bed, presumably once belonging to Shimyamei the Second, is in a little closet of a room beside a few other similar rooms.

. . . sleep?

There's important questions about the universe and also he's been running off anger for so long now.

Sleep.

A sleep broken by dreams of fire and pain, lightsabers pressed so close to skin it begins to scorch, and the overriding humiliation of being surrounded by a living force that won't stop pretending his clone is the better him-

He wakes with shouts, but he'll put himself back to sleep after.

He alarms everybody else in the house with the shouting but they will leave him alone if he waves them off and goes back to sleep.

Then eventually morning comes, or at least his wakefulness. He'll take a little longer to sleep if nobody interrupts him then roll out of bed after nine hours.

He's going to seek out food, then something useful to do, in that order.

Shimyamei's in the house by then, sitting in the common room - it's got a fireplace and a food prep table and it looks like people maybe eat off their laps sitting at the various chairs and couches in the room - with a woman who's old enough to be going grey. Shimyamei looks up at Briseadh. "Feeling better?" she asks.

"Yeah."

He's cleaned some of the dirt off his face and the dark circles under his eyes have shrunk some. The bruises have actually grown larger and multi-coloured and one of the cuts has some concerning fluid, but he's standing fully upright which is new.

He looks at the new person. "Hello. I'm Briseadh, what's your name?"

"- Briseadh, I'm the only person around who speaks Basic, she can't understand you."

He points at himself. "Briseadh." Points at Shimyamei. "Shimyamei." Points at the third person and makes a confused expression.

To Shimyamei: "I'm planning to learn your language soon, I don't know how much you're willing to be a translator."

"Zay," says the older woman.

"It's pretty hard to learn if you don't start knowing it but I certainly hope you'll pick some things up. Do you have a plan for making a living?"

"Nice to meet you Zay." He knows they don't speak Basic but hopefully the sentiment comes through.

"I don't have a plan to make a living yet but I agree it's important. What kinds of things do people do for a living around here?"

"Well, this is mostly a farm round, but here in town we sometimes have sails docking and then there's money to be made trading for their cargo and selling them things people want on other rounds - this round's known for paper, though a lot of the paper is made in Treehills and there's another sail dock there so we mostly don't produce or sell paper here in Oatsfield - or people have restaurants or shops, or weave or sew or make furniture or look after old folks or make sure the roads are all in good shape..."

Well, he can be a farm hand, but he doesn't expect to be unusually good at it or happy about it.

"I can fix machines, but it sounds like you don't need much of that. How does someone get a farm? I can work for someone else but I'd rather not do that if it's a long term plan." Specifically the only times he's worked for someone else and been happy about it, the way you got promoted was by murdering your boss. Briseadh has only ever had one boss who was happy about that promotion plan, albeit in a way where they tried to opportunistically betray and murder Briseadh first. Something something it's nice to have open and honest communication at work. 

"For the paper- that comes from trees, right? Is cutting and hauling lumber a way to make a living?" If these people still weave by hand they probably don't have better cutting implements than sharp pieces of rock, maybe metal. "Or. . . uh, what do people do if they have a problem with each other?" That's about as tactful a way to ask if Assassin is a job on offer as Briseadh can come up with.

"There's lumber work in Treehills and you could sell firewood here, sure. If you've got a problem you go to the wise folks and they'll sort it out and if you don't like it you leave town or hop a sail."

"Then I'll try lumber work in Treehills unless something better comes up. If you have advice on what would be better I'm interested in hearing it, and I'd owe you a favour if you let me learn some of the local language from you."

That sounds like a conflict resolution system that doesn't involve hired assassins. Or she doesn't want to tell him about that option and he'll have to find it out from whatever passes for a seedy underworld this place has.

"Sure, let's figure out what phrases you'll need -" Numbers, colors, a few kinds of tree, "timber", "here" and "there" and "cut" and "let this one stand"...

Briseadh has much more positive feelings about learning a language when they outnumber him hundreds to one and also he's the one who came here. It's also his third or fourth language and this is the thing that gets easier with repetition. He's still not going to be fluent by the end of a few hours, so he's asking a lot of questions about grammar that are going to be hard to figure out later and he makes sure to get "what is the word for-" and "I'm sorry I'm still learning this language."

At some point he asks if there's something he can use to take notes. Is a dozen sheets of paper and a pencil an expensive ask?

Not so much that they won't let him have it but perhaps it'd be polite to pay the household back one day.

The language is ferociously complicated, like no one ever has to learn it ever, not even native born children. She's not even trying to teach him to read.

Well he might wind up working for papermaking organizations so maybe this specific thing he'll be especially able to pay back in kind.

Basic is easy and Mando'a is kinda hard but it's not like he has a great sense of what the range is like here. It's at least pronounceable with a human mouth and throat, so this is going better than his abortive attempt to learn Xaczik. He'll keep at it with little natural aptitude which he makes up for with the kind of work ethic you get when the Sith Lord was only your third harshest teacher.

Apart from words for trees and the cutting thereof, are there words for important social concepts he's missing? The whole thing around spawning new people for instance, or whatever role the Wise Folks have.

Sure, he can learn the word for the wise folks, and also the local timekeeping (it's by "wakes"; they are on twenty-four-hour cycles, though not all the same one as there is no night and they all sleep less than he does), and the words for being made and for one's maker and the persons one has made (on average this is only slightly more than one person per person, though it's not evenly distributed).

Then he will diligently keep learning words and trying to have conversations in the local language (what's it called anyway?) until Shimyamei gives some indication of wanting to do something else.