"It doesn't count seconds visibly in sleep mode, but I can wake it up for this." He pulls out his lens. It thinks that it's 11:22 in Starport.

Lornell watches extremely intently, but manages to refrain from asking a dozen questions about the lens itself.  If only barely.

"A minute isn't very long, like sixty seconds, do you want me to wake it or just wait till it's 11:24 and figure from there?"

"It depends whether it's - more costly, to wake it up and have me look at it for less time, or - oh - "  It switches to 11:23; they diligently start counting under their breath in the local units.

Kyeo attempts to figure out about how long a local unit is, though he doesn't count seconds audibly.

Seems like less than a second but not by dramatically much.

"Okay," they say when the time rolls over.  " - How many minutes in an hour?"

"Also sixty."

"Alright."  They do math for a few minutes; this does not involve a pen and paper and does involve cartwheels.  "Our days are about twenty-six and a fifth hours.  Our years are not quite half of yours, and so you'd be - between forty-two and forty-four, about, and that's old enough you'd be able to do at least some drugs; the first cutoff is forty.  And that would make me . . . right around sixteen Earth standard, maybe still fifteen but pretty close."

"I suppose it stands to reason we couldn't guess by looking."

" - Please tell me about lenses now?  - Right, no, I guess you would be used to using that, wouldn't you - um, if you had any other questions first I can answer them but - "

"It's fine," says Sarham. "I can tell you about it without using up its charge. Though I should use up its charge on something useful in the next few months, it does slowly lose power even if it's not doing much. On a planet with skylace access, all the lenses can talk to each other, and we can use them to call for vehicles to come pick us up, or to order food or other stuff we want, or to look up information that someone's written about, or to talk to people far away, or to get directions from where we are to where we're going. Without that it can still record images of things I point it at and do math and play music I had stored on it and stuff like that."

"Wh - that's so many things!  It's so tiny!"

"Yeah! It takes a lot of development to get to this from the first invention of electricity but it's really cool. It's all running on a subcomponent that does a lot of computation, and some other bits that read and send signals - I think in the radio band."

"Can you - get the pieces of it - into bigger, separate things - faster than that?"

"Yes! - I don't personally know how but I think radios and telephones were both pretty early."

"Which of the pieces are those ones - "

"Early radios let you send sound through the air for hundreds of miles and pick it up on the other end. Phones require a wired connection between both points but can go farther and are private."

Bounce bounce bounce "It - doesn't actually make sense for me to ask you lots of questions about this, for the same reason it doesn't make sense for me to tell you about citrelièv, but - "  They laugh.  "I mean - I definitely take back that you're the worst aliens?"  Bounce bounce.

Snort. "Thank you."

"You're welcome!  - Oh, let me write down my address for you, while I'm thinking of it - "  They get started on that.  "Let's see - what sort of things can we get you for entertainment; it's probably not super fun sitting in a trade wagon for a week - hm, you won't be able to read books - I can make sure you have paper and writing utensils?"

"It might also be hard to write in a wagon but it can't hurt. We can, like, catch up with each other, Kyeo can sing -"

"I can't."

"- you can't?"

"Something's the matter with my voice. Doesn't work if I try."

"Well. We can talk."