He will still take it for a spin around the block, picking up speed and confidence with the machine till he returns to the origin point.

"Better than walking?"

"Uh, I'm looking forward to the second draft? Right now it might be a little better sometimes."

"I'll pass that along."  She waits for Sarham to dismount, hefts the bike across her shoulders, and starts inside and up the stairs.  "Do you expect the best bikes to be better than running around for citrelians?"

"Uh - great question, I think that depends on how good your roads are."

"Well, if it were going to be much better I imagine we could improve them.  Heartland cities have better roads than here because they just leave carts everywhere for anyone to use and people there rely on that, I know, and of course the trade wagon routes are kept in good maintenance . . .  I suppose your standards still might be higher than anything we can produce yet."

"It might specifically be an improvement in situations where you can't copy not being tired, since bikes are more efficient per mile, but I could imagine it helping even over shorter distances. I'm not sure though."

"Hm!  It seems like it would take a bit of a coincidence for people to be near well-paved roads - or places where well-paved roads could be put - in those cases, but we'll have to see about the shorter ones."  Zarian's office door has a couple people waiting outside it; she greets and has a short conversation with them in Cretari before turning back to the aliens.  "These people are going to copy some aspects of your biologies and take a drug apiece, unless you object."

"Sounds like a reasonable experiment to me."

Then the five of them (plus the bike) can all file into Zarian's office, and the pair of drug-tryers can hang out for a few minutes while Zarian interrogates the aliens about their civilizations' medical knowledge!  There's a nice big stack of paper so she can take notes and Kyeo can talk and anyone who needs to can draw up clarifying diagrams.  Another ten or so test subjects pop in at various times over the course of the morning.

Kyeo very responsibly doesn't say a word out loud, just scribbles things he has to say.

Sarham is not actually accustomed to handwriting but he can just talk.

One of the notes Zarian makes is to ask him about that later.

"If we were to try these on someone with either strong masochism or no pain awareness," she asks in a conversation about stitches, "would that defeat any of the point of doing it at all, do you think?"

"Uh - I don't know, would this just be for practice or something?"

"And to test the adequacy of our materials, our understanding of the process."

"No pain awareness at all would probably leave them unable to report if the stitches were - I don't know, pulled too tight or something? And I guess make unrealistic predictions about how easily one of me or Kyeo could hold still if we needed stitches. As far as I know masochism doesn't have that problem."

She nods and notes that.

Today she remembers that lunch exists without Sarham needing to mention it!  Possibly only because they're wrapping up a conversation about refeeding at the appropriate time.

They can go home for lunch unless she's planning to treat them to a restaurant again.

She doesn't seem to be.

Then they will go home and eat eggs and veggies and come back. (Sarham has been keeping an eye out for ingredients he could use to reconstruct his favorite things but eggs and veggies are easy and nutritious so they have them a lot.)

Zarian has her legging scrunched up over one knee and is in the process of securing a bandage around her calf when they return.  "Hello; incidentally, I expect you'll want to wait for the next model of the bike before doing any more riding."

"Gear munched your leg or something?"

"'Or something'; I healed off the rest but keeping this much seemed convenient.  I didn't actually take any of your biking skill; you might have been fine."

"I'm not used to hungry gears, my bike was electric and had all kinds of fancy casing preventing the moving parts from grabbing my pants, let alone my me."

"Mm, what I mean is that there was a collision."  She stretches her pantleg out and back over the bandage; on closer attention she's wearing a different wrap-y tunic-y thing than she was this morning.