Colley glances back at Zarian.  "Ammunition is - "

"- in ranged weaponry ammunition is the part that goes from the weapon to the target."

"Hm!  Anyways yes, I'll definitely keep that in mind.  Do you play anything, Sarham?"

"I took cello lessons a little when I was a kid but didn't keep up with it at all."

"If you ever felt like coming over and letting me see how fast you can pick up an instrument it would make me very happy.  And-slash-or if you wanted to help us reverse engineer cellos and any other instruments you know."

"Sure, I can come over sometime - now?"

"That would be delightful!"

Sarham pecks Kyeo on the cheek and follows Colley out.

Colley looks expectantly at Zarian from out in the hall.

" - Kyeo, would you prefer to go back to the music building or do something else?"

Kyeo gets up to follow Sarham and Colley.

Colley continues not to go anywhere until Zarian comes out too, at which point she hops into her arms and begins moving towards the music building only by virtue of being carried.

Her office contains the same instruments as when she left it.  "Any of these strike your fancy?  Reeds are in there if you'd like to take a look at those."

"Cello's a bowed instrument but I'm happy to start on something totally different if that will be more informative." He will pull out a relatively less intimidating-looking reed instrument and give it a whirl.

He can get some pitches out of it!  But the fingerings are not entirely straightforward.

Well, he'll fuck around with various ones and get confused by the ones where there's a discontinuity in the progression of which fingers are up and down till he tries more experimental fucking around.

" - I'll give you at least one hint and it's that even though that position is producing a note, it's always going to be a little breathy and flat and the official one is this."  Colley has assembled another woodwind which appears to be approximately the same as the one Sarham is using but bigger; she demonstrates.

Then he will play that note correctly, except when he forgets! "Which one is the strekenbort or whatever it was called?"

"It's that one!  When you're at a pausing point perhaps Kyeo will want to show it off."

Sarham gives up on the reed instrument presently and puts it back.

Kyeo demonstrates the bonking of the instrument.

"Oh, that's Anthem of the Bright Way, isn't it."

Nod nod.

"It might be meaningfully harder to pick up a thing that has unintuitive fingerings than one where the notes are all laid out like that, let's see -" Anything more celloish in here?

There's one.  It has too many strings and isn't tuned to what Sarham is used to but at least the latter is fixable.

He will experiment with various approaches to the fingerboard and bow the strings reasonably okayishly. He can't tune it well by ear, but he does his best to figure out a scale and then Amazing Grace.