Kyeo nods. Thinks for a minute, goes over to watch him cook. "I assume you need to do laundry as often as we do," he remarks after a moment. "Since the clothes can't copy being clean from other clothes."

"Right.  We can go clothes shopping later today if you want."  They finish with the greens and take out and start slicing - what at least looks like - a completely ordinary potato.

"It might help us stand out slightly less, and give us longer before we need to figure out how to wash the clothes."

"Mmhm!  There's people whose jobs it is, and we can take your clothes to them, but only once you have other ones to put on."

Oh thank goodness he doesn't need to learn to do laundry. "Shopping with - money?"

"Yep!  - The government's going to reimburse me for the expenses, within reason."

"Oh, good, I wouldn't have wanted to put you out for it, even if you don't need to buy food and such like people on most money-using planets."

"I still would have done it, just.  Maybe slightly less.  - If it'd been a lot I probably could've asked my friends to chip in a bit; pretty sure a lot of them would think it was cool to have the chance to help out an alien."

Sarham yawns and rolls over and sits up. "...is that a potato?"

"It does look like a potato..."

"Yep!  Potatoes are r - huh.  It is kind of weird that the word matches that closely, isn't it."

"Your language also says 'potato'?"

"Kularan is a creole of a bunch of Earth-derived languages, if you're some sort of lost colony that might explain why we look like the same species."

"No, our word sounds different, it just - yours means the same thing as ours.  Like, um, these are greens in general, but I'd have to loanword them to specify the individual ones . . . except chard, apparently??  Huh."

"That also suggests a common origin, if we have some of the same plants."

"Huh!"  Bounce five: return of the bounce.

"I can't figure out how your ancestors could have originally gotten here, though, faster than light travel was invented less than two hundred years ago."

"I'm not a historian but we definitely have at least a thousand years of recorded history - our years are shorter but I think not by enough for that to be the difference - "

"Maybe somebody or something else brought you here, then, there were humans a thousand years ago, they just didn't have much technology."

"How long are your years - ours are a hundred and fifty-six days - our days; I haven't worked out the exact conversion for those yet - "

"Earth standard is three hundred and sixty-five twenty-four-hour days. Since all planets have different day lengths everybody learns Earth ones too."

"That makes sense - can you please explain everything about the phrase faster than light travel now - "

"...stars are very far apart, so to get between them without it taking years, we have ships with a special kind of engine - I'm afraid we don't know the engineering details - which allow them to go much faster than the speed of light, which is around three hundred million meters per second."

"I didn't know light had a speed!"

"Oh! Well, it does, it's just very fast so it's hard to tell without particularly good measurements. The speed of sound is easier to notice, because of how lightning precedes thunder by more if you're farther away."