They fill quite a few buckets in this way. The Unscrupulous Sculptor flexes his hand and sighs, and nods, smiling, at her when the last bee has been claimed. Others are doing the same thing, elsewhere.

"Profitable. Now, I have little idea what to make of you but at least the language of commerce is universal. Deutsche? Latine? Français? ...Español?"

She smiles at the collected nectar, pleased with their total haul. When he starts naming languages, however, she tilts her head again in that same quiet curiosity, clearly not following him.

He shrugs and shouts at a passing singer, offering a cupful of nectar in exchange for enough empty bottles and gourds to house the lot of what he has collected, which the singer accepts and takes off at a run to fetch.

The mystery girl crouches next to him, watching the goings on. So much bustle and business, people running and fetching things to and fro. Will the nectar-paid passerby bring back something useful? No idea, but it's interesting to find out.

A thought strikes her. "Hailey," she says, gesturing to herself.

The current bustle and business seems to be a sort of return to normal after the attack, for the most part. Aside from the gleeful processing of dead bees and some redistribution of the departed's personal effects.

"...Clarence. Clarence Collier." He flips his silver coin in the air again, catching it in one palm, and points at it. "Money. Sovereigns." He gestures at the nearest bee-corpse. "Chorister bee." At the precious fluid, "Nectar. Chorister bee nectar." He sings a simple ascending scale. "Singing. Nectar for singing. Good money."

He gestures towards her batons and, though it pains him to disturb his reserved image so, makes a whooshing noise and gives her a questioning and surprised look.

Hailey nods, listening intently to his labeling, resisting the lingering adrenaline-drunk giggle that threatens to spill out of her. He's helping her out and teaching her things, don't laugh, don't laugh, even though the whoosh puts paid to that serious expression.

She holds up one of her batons and says "baton", then puts just barely enough energy in it to light the spherical crystal embedded in the end with a blue-green glow and says "Orbal baton, Orbal energy", making a sparkly, explodey, jazz hands motion with her free hand near the crystal at the second part.

She clips the baton back onto her back, holds her left hand palm-up in front of herself, and makes a tiny whirlwind, her face a small moue of concentration as she does so. With her right hand, she gestures a swirling motion pointing down at the vortex and says "wind", then points sideways at her left hand, moving smoothly from her hand to the vortex and back, saying "energy, wind energy, orbal energy."

The Unscrupulous Sculptor cannot hide his shock. He takes a step back and mutters nervously.

"...Orbal, Correspondence? Sigils? No, no... A Power of some kind... Higher piece of the chain? What mysteries the sky doth hold..."

Sigh. He does charades to get the words for 'less' 'more' 'yes' and 'no' 'want' and 'talk' across.

During this process an Erratic Linguist shows up, attracted by the sound of new words, and very eagerly demands all sorts of vocabulary and sentence examples from Hailey. She stammers in English, but handles tidbits of foreign tongues flawlessly. The Sculptor is happy to step back a bit as the Linguist learns to construct sentences in Zemurian and tries her best to demonstrate English in turn.

Hailey amusedly demonstrates numbers, strange grammar constructions, common grammar constructions, and various bits of vocab, focusing to keep pace with her new Linguist friend acquaintance. "I fell from the sky. We stand under the sky."

Doubt lurks, though. Ugh. Why isn't she better at this? She's in a whole new world and she doesn't have time to be fooling around with not knowing who's a threat what she can't say how to get around. Maybe she really is as good-for-nothing as they said.

She haltingly tries a more serious sentence herself, "I— Is... best way... learn talk? Learn... world?"

(The singer returns, and the Sculptor transfers the collected nectar from the buckets into dozens of eclectic containers, paying the singer a small amount for their trouble.)

"Red honey," Clarence comments firmly. "If you wish to learn quickly, red honey is the best way."

The Erratic Linguist's hands twitch nervously. "I-I really don't think- This l-language is etymologically unrelated to anything I have ever s-s-studied, something very strange is g-going on. Giving red honey to s-such a person would be..."

Snort. "As if this 'orbal' did not show that already? I am a connoisseur of that particular sin. The effects on the recipient do not last, and I daresay it is the most expedient thing."

"Orbal could be t-t-technology. I d-don't know enough to ask yet." The Linguist clears her throat. "Fastest way to learn, red honey. He say it is best way to learn. I say, no, best way to learn, read books and talk to people."

They disagree. They agree that it's the fastest, but disagree that it's best. Why? Cost? Risk? Idealism about learning? What would risk to her matter anyway? How does it even work? "Why not red honey? Why think not best? What is red honey?"

The Linguist grimaces. The Sculptor smiles an indulgent smirk.

"When you eat red honey, you see what others have seen. You hear and smell what they have heard and smelt. You feel what they have felt. It is an intense experience, but I feel it would good for learning in rare cases such as this."

"It hurts." She tightly stabs her fingernails into her own arm and grimaces in pain to get the word across. "Hurts. Hurts the other person a lot. It is unseemly to discuss this too openly," The Linguist bites out, leveling an accusing glare at the Sculptor.

Hailey's mouth opens and closes soundlessly a few times. This is a terrible idea. She's not sure she processed that correctly at first, and rechecks what she heard in her mind. "Takes their..." she fumbles for the word and resorts to Zemurian briefly, "knowledge? Takes their mind? Hurts giver when eaten?"

This. Is a complicated question to think about.

"Yes? I-I fear not full knowledge, about this, hard to talk."

"Why, the artists here step forward willingly for extraction and are paid richly for the trouble... They even seek it out, some of them. Privation drives inspiration."

"Hurt makes better art, he says." The Linguist wrings her hands together. "Red honey is bad."

"It is only pain, and temporary. Not the loss of self some of the exotic horrors out there can cause. True, a few never quite recover, but they all knew what they were signing up for."

"Red honey is also illegal." How to demonstrate that word? She charades handcuffs.

"In Albion, perhaps. Not here. Do you see any inspectors here? Besides, you're only saying that because you want to extract a whole entire language from her."

"Wouldn't you??? But no, you should go away from this man, Hailey. Take your nectar and come with me."

Hailey looks back and forth between them as they argue. Not permanent harm? That's better. Especially if people volunteer. But she shouldn't be considering this. She is though, she really is. One more way she's awful. What's that gesture? Handcuffs? Does she mean it's illegal? But he says not here? Is this some kind of frontier?

What are they saying at the end there? Are they talking about her language? Is that why the Linguist is concerned? "Would still teach you, even if not need you for this," she says to her.

"Would red honey teach other things? Risks, small things, not seen easy... What word..." Hailey is clearly struggling with the language, and when she grows frustrated with this she rattles out in Zemurian, "I don't know what I don't know. I don't even know what questions to ask to figure out what I don't know. You don't know what I don't know either. Would this fill in those gaps, the ones I don't even know exist because I don't have the context to even see them until I fall into a trap?"

She stops, breathing a bit hard.

The Linguist mutters and scribbles notes.

"I don't know-" Sigh. "Maybe? If someone asks for your soul, don't agree. Don't stare at the stars if you're away from land... But I sincerely doubt I could list all such dangers. And there are many."

"My... soul? What is soul?"

The Linguist looks uncomfortable. "Soul is... You. Soul is your happy, your sad, your... Know what is good and bad."

"My... me?" Oh no she probably means soul.

Giving away her soul is a thing? When did that become a thing? Oh, right, just after she got eaten by a mirror-snake-thing — which is nothing like any of the monsters she was training to fight, why couldn't it have been a normal monster, even the Chorister Bees were closer to normal — and wound up in this bizarre place.

"And you know these things, these danger? Can't list; can bring to mind in context?"

This place could kill her inside of a week if she wasn't careful. Or worse, apparently. Souls. They're a thing.

She fixes each of them in turn with a look. "Would red honey teach me these things?"

"I believe so," the Sculptor nods confidently.

"...I- Maybe. If you get it from a worldly one."

She turns to the Linguist. "I need this. I can't let myself die when I've only just gotten here, and your world will kill me if I don't know all these things. I'll still take time to teach you Zemurian. I'm so grateful for your help already, and you're one of only two people I know in the entire world."

Turning back to the Sculptor, she asks, "Can you make sure honey from one who knows things?"

"Yes. We can get it from someone particular. To know the subtle dangers inherent in the world... Red honey from adventurers and sky-sailors is rare, precious. Perhaps a settler would do?"

"Ah, so you're involved in that business, not just a user." The Linguist's disdain is obvious.

"I won't argue about it with you. We each hold dear our opinions on this matter," he replies serenely.

"I will follow you to make sure this man does not do strange things to you."

The Sculptor starts gathering up the bottles of nectar that surround the group. "Two of three of these are yours, by the way."

Hailey takes the bottles appreciatively, then frowns. "Hm. Where do put these for now? Where find bag to carry?"

She also gives the Linguist a nod. "That is good, please do."

They can acquire various artful and stylish bags and other containers from hungry artists trying to sell their work easy enough. Chorister bee nectar sells well. 

After that, the Unscrupulous Sculptor leads the pair of them across Titania's massive top petal to a staircase down to a lower frond, and from there a short ways further across the artist-colony, to a glass-roofed greenhouse that is rather pretty but seems almost unremarkable compared to all the other architecture.

The sculptor explains how they sell it as he goes over. "For those who wish to consume red honey here, for inspiration, we provide a comfortable room that locks from the inside." He charades 'lock'. "You should have a drink of water," (gulp-gulp) "And be generally rested, then find a comfortable position before your first spoonful. Each spoonful lasts half a dozen seconds, but it will feel like longer."

Lock. Huh. She's not going to be present enough to look after herself for the duration, is she? Being seated and hydrated makes sense enough. She nods firmly.

The Unscrupulous Sculptor lets his small, stiff smile expand a bit. He selects a small, neatly labelled jar with a deep, almost bloody red color from a cleverly hidden shelf full of other small, neatly labelled jars, accepts a somewhat larger jar of nectar from her share in return for it, and leads her to the 'private sitting room'.

The Erratic Linguist says, "...I will stand in the hall and review my notes and wait."