She repeats herself, smiling. Then, a pause, and: "Do you want me to just talk naturally?"

They pause for a few moments and make a few aborted gestures then stop and go back to their computer. They demonstrate and solicit words for several other astronomical terms. They also provide the name for their species "Hearthian" and try to solicit a name for what sort of person Zenith is.

Human!

She does record words on her paper - good to leave them with a dictionary, and she tries to write neatly though she's not very good at this - but she also continues pulling up images and words on her visor, and she starts seriously prodding towards technological compatibility, sketching out diagrams, pulling up relevant textbooks for reference sometimes. She has a ridiculous amount of media in her storage, mostly text, but some music, comics, and movies and the like - if they have a program that can analyze languages, and they can get their computer to talk to hers, she can dump so much on them.

The taller Hearthian returns, and with them is a second shorter Hearthian. This one has some sort of strange device which they link to the larger computer with a cable. It sends out beams of light which play over the screen of her device. All three aliens are talking quickly to each other and taking turns typing things into the computer or fiddling with the device. They might be at this for a little while.

She patiently tries to nudge them toward illustrating some of their technology to her - do they have the concept of wireless networks, maybe? Obviously their protocols won't be directly compatible, but that might be the easiest to make compatible...

It takes them a little bit but they grasp her request. It seems that their technology is a mix of native design and reverse engineered tech from some other civilization. It takes still longer to get across the idea of wireless networking. They bring up what seems to be a control console for a satellite orbiting their planet and take pictures to demonstrate their wireless networking. It doesn't seem like they've invented things like network packets yet though.

That complicates things... The clunkiest option is probably just flashing her screen through everything as fast as they can scan, but that's also an easier option for their apparent technology gap... Of course then she needs to know how quickly they can scan.

After a bit of experimentation it looks like they can handle a block of text every three seconds or so. Two of them are working to backfill bits of translation from the associated images using both consoles in the room and manually ferrying storage media back and forth.

The tall one holds the scanner and sometimes contributes to the other two's conversation. While that's going on they introduce all three. The tall one is Hornfels, the one who stayed is Halite, and the one who came later is Sylvite

She makes sure her pronunciation of their names is right, grinning, and introduces herself as Zenith.

She even makes a little illustration to communicate what her name means.

Hornfels attempts to reciprocate. As best as they're able to communicate Hornfels is named after a type of rock while Halite and Sylvite are both named after crystals. If she's particularly interested in geology she might recognize the specific types.

She knows just enough geology to know what weird crystals are worth collecting samples of, so doesn't recognize the types.

"It's nice to meet you," she says, grinning.

Hornfels does their best to keep Zenith entertained and interested while the other two work. After a few hours of work and several dozen local 'days' with no sign of any of the aliens looking to go sleep, they get a translation system working. The initial version involves Zenith's device translating her speech to text and then a Hearthian device scanning the screen. In the Hearthian to English direction a cobbled together Hearthian device let's them type messages which are translated in the other direction and displayed in English for Zenith to read.

"I think this is working now." Sylvite types.

"I think it is too!"

"It's wonderful to meet you. We knew from the Nomai that there had been other sapient species but you're the first sapient beings we've been able to meet."

"We haven't met any other aliens, either! Sapient or not. We don't have records of others, though we've sent out messages to nearby stars. Just - guesses and hopes."

"How did you get here?"

"A teleportation accident," she explains, pausing to translate 'teleportation.' "I was trying to return to my home planet, but my equipment malfunctioned."

"Fascinating, I wonder if your teleportation functions using the same principles as ours? So far we've only used it to retrieve probes."

"Ours is powered by a sort of machine attached to specific people, which does different things for different people. We didn't actually make them, and we're unsure if they're natural to our species or if they're the result of extraterrestrial intervention. Mine allows me to teleport with whatever I'm carrying, but other people get abilities specific to them. I can use equipment to make my teleportation work better, though, which we invented, and that equipment is what malfunctioned."

"What other sorts of abilities do people have?"

She hums. "There's a wide variety. Most of them fit into a classification scheme, though not always neatly."

"The most common overarching categories are based on what a power affects - personal, external mental, or external physical. Personal powers can affect your resistance, your capabilities, or your physiology. 'Resistance' is a bit of a weird category and generally covers advanced healing, resistance to powers, and resistance to damage. My teleportation is a personal capability power. External mental powers can influence perception, thoughts and memories, or control actions. They're fortunately really rare. External physical powers are the broadest category. They can control substances, items, the biology of others, fields, or the environment, or can temporarily create things, or can project what would normally be personal powers onto others."

"Everyone seems to have the same... We have a technical term for it, but - 'scale' of power for their primary power, with no real limit on 'secondary' powers. Secondary powers always support and activate with a primary power, and are basically just the things required to survive using it, like my ability to adapt to environments I teleport into. You can have multiple primary powers if they're related, but each will individually be weaker than if you had a single power."

"There's also powers that all supers have, which are considered fairly minor. When we manifest, there's a wave of 'perfection' that cleans and fixes everything in our immediate vicinity, including anyone injured or sick. The perfection wave reshapes our bodies to our ideal. It has... Sort of echoes? So if my ideal body changes, my actual body would slowly reshape to fit. It's possible the perfection echoes get weaker over time, but we don't have enough data to be sure."

"I wonder if we'll ever find out how that works? Probably not any time soon, I guess. Anyway, now that we've got working translation what would you like to do next? Do you need to sleep soon?"

"Not in the next few hours."

"I wouldn't mind looking around some, actually. Part of my mission is exploring new worlds - and it'd be really excellent to start getting records on things like cultural exchange to take back to my people. It'd be the sort of thing everyone would get very excited about while follow-up missions are organized."