"Fair enough. The stuff we've had at cheaper places here is not quite as good as everyday stuff on a developed planet, I think, you've got less ingredient variety and fewer weird kitchen tools."

"What sort of weird kitchen tools are there?"

"...blenders?" he suggests. "...those aren't very weird, I just doubt they work very well without electricity and some of the first things I thought of you could probably do fine with crazy knife skills. Uh, sous vides."

"I'm not getting a lot from the word there but I also don't know much about cooking.  - Comparatively.  It's not especially important, in any case; what do people normally talk about when making friends where you're from?"

"Uh, shared interests and current events, but inconveniently we haven't been able to read local media."

"That would put a bit of a damper on it, yes.  . . . Anything interesting from before you got here?"

"Interesting what, current events? Uh, there's a native Outer Sohaibek animal that's a pest in cities but all the native wildlife is protected by conservation law so it's hard to deal with them and people were talking about that a lot..."

"Conservation law?"

"To prevent species from going extinct or otherwise being adversely affected by human activity."

"I suppose it makes sense that that's something which could happen."

"It doesn't actually take that much tech level... are there any animals with internal skeletons here that don't obviously and definitely fall into the categories of mammal, reptile, fish, amphibian, or bird, which might be native as opposed to showing up whenever humans did?"

"I don't . . . know.  Hm.  . . . Bats?  - You have a word for bats.  I'm failing to immediately think of animals you don't have words for already, at least, but that's not necessarily conclusive; I don't have much information about them at the moment."

"We have a word for dragons, too, but if you had those I'd be impressed. I don't know if you can tell from the language which animals are mythical."

"I think so but I wouldn't count on it.  You could list some mythical and real animals and I could try to guess which each was?"

"Oh, sure. Uh, pixies, glitterbugs, red pandas, jackalopes, carp."

"Fake real real - fake, real and we have them."

"Cool, well, if you think of an animal Kularan doesn't think is real, let us know."

"I shall.  - What's unreal about jackalopes; I can tell it's just a rabbit with - something - "

"Antlers!"

"Ibyabek only has plants and bug-type things and fish, natively," says Kyeo.

"Yeah, how far along a planet is in evolving its wildlife when someone gets there varies a lot. People do sometimes pick up mythical names for alien life, there are Xeren sea-serpents, but nobody's ever found something that looked much like a rabbit with antlers."

"Hm!  - I wonder why there's such a split between plants and animals with regards to available vocabulary."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, trying to think of weird edge cases is hard, but if I just go off food - you have words for cows, chickens, goats, every type of fish I can think of, eggs - and with the default assumption that they're chicken eggs - and pigs and whatnot.  And you also have potatoes and carrots and squash and artichokes - and apples and peaches, et cetera - but not moreds, piral, catests, letmis, or vouros!  If there's native wildlife that's just not good for eating I suppose that makes sense, but then why so many plants."

"Well, ambulatory and especially land animals tend to come after sessile life and stuff in the ocean and you apparently don't boat much here so I'm not all that surprised if it turns out you have native vegetables and not native meat."