"Good morning, good morning - here are the prototype safety razors, they're the only things which are ready so far; Colley will be dropping by this afternoon and she's free to work with you on your voice then if you'd like; some people with brain damage can be copied from and some of them can't."

"Oh, you checked, interesting - these look potentially usable, though, uh, it's possible someone who can heal if they nick themselves should copy our expertise and try them? Wouldn't do to get some sort of infection. - there is a bread mold that is also a decent antibiotic, but I don't know how to figure out which bread mold. I mean, 'see if it kills bacteria in a petri dish' I guess but you'd need a petri dish and a way to put bacteria in it."

"Work on my voice how?"

"I don't know how she's specifically going to go about it, but if there's anything that can be done, without copying it better and at our level of medical knowledge, I'd expect her to be one of the people able to make progress on that front.  - Bread mold, really?"

"Really. It's called penicillin. Some people are allergic to it but I'm not, Kyeo probably hasn't been tested."

"Fascinating, I'll get somebody on that - they may have already tried using the razors - or other copies of them, but I'll check up on that before you use them.  I have more detail on the brain damage if you'd like to hear it."

"Sure, why not."

"People who only get knocked out for a few seconds or minutes and make a full recovery afterward are always copiable-from; people with more lasting unconsciousness varied.  In particular, some of them were people up until they died, and some of them started out copiable-from but lost it at some point before they stopped breathing.  And the person I talked to swore up and down that he saw at least one case where the patient was still copiable for a few minutes after they appeared dead, and had heard of another where someone woke up a bit after several days unconscious, but wasn't copiable-from even when awake and did end up dying.  Though he didn't see that one himself and accordingly couldn't be as sure of it."

"- huh. How do you measure death? Heart stopping?"

"I got the impression it was whether they were breathing?  I think they check for heartbeats when they're seeing if someone is already dead but it would be harder to tell when it stops unless you happened to be checking right when it did."

"We have the concept of 'brain death', which takes a while after breathing and heartbeat stop and before which you can revive people. The threshold changes as medical technology improves."

"Hm.  He didn't know very exactly how long it was, since - it's possible to watch somebody with your citrelièv while looking somewhere else with your eyes, and apparently he'd been taking some notes or checking something else; he didn't remember - and when he physically looked up they appeared dead, and further checking confirmed that they were."

"Yeah, if only we could get one of you guys in a developed hospital..." He shakes his head. "But that doesn't seem likely to be in the cards any time soon."

"Probably not, no.  - Oh, and about your legal status; you're currently being modeled as foreign citizens, which means you're not obligated to take on any traits.  They may want to revisit this in, hm, twenty or so Earth standard years, or if you break other laws, but in any case they're not going to exile you or - lock you up about it.  Since that would be such an obviously-terrible way to handle first contact."

"I'm glad to hear it. Why twenty years?"

"That was rounding on my part; they said fifty citreliac years.  At a guess, it's - long enough that if you're still here by then, the situation's probably fairly stable such that you're likely not getting back home for quite a while, and would functionally be Cretari citizens."

"I guess that's long enough to find somewhere to go if we pop up with the power and feel the need to do so."

She nods, solemnly.  "Would you like to do the more in-depth testing for that now, then."

"That sounds good if it's available now."

"Certainly; I didn't have anything else specifically planned for this morning.  Can either of you already - " and she takes a coin, holds it in one hand, and has it glide over the backs of her fingers, flipping over each one.

Kyeo shakes his head.

"Seen it done, don't know how."

"Good."  She slides another two coins over to them with her free hand, continuously repeating the motion with the other.  "Try to take the ability.  Don't look at the specific actions of what I'm doing and try to figure it out on your own, although I picked this specifically because I don't think you'd be able to without me slowing it down for you.  Just think about this as a discrete skill, which is right here being demonstrated for you and which you could also have, and copy it."

Sarham does not know exactly how to think about taking this action, but he tries on various methods. He could do that if he practiced for years and he is going to Somehow condense all that practice? He is being offered something and has to - grab it? He is downloading the skill?

Kyeo mostly just stares at the moving coin and tries to brute-force it.