Arithnu turns back to Griffie with a smile "While our Captain is doing that, you have told us a lot about yourself and permitted us to learn a lot about how you work, would you like to ask us any questions or run any safe tests?"

"Uh. Yes. But right now I am really worried about you so I am not the best focused."

Griffie pauses and looks a bit calmer.

"I think I recognize your captain's species. Some of my friends are of the species your captain and Cornelia appear to be. I don't recognize yours, though. Could you show me anatomy diagrams for your captain's species? I suppose I'm not in a healer's role, right now, but I am a healer. Also, when you were asking me about the word 'plant', you showed me pictures of varieties of holly and mistletoe. We have holly and mistletoe in my world. This is very strange. Show me pictures of more plants, and maybe some animals?"

Arithnu laughs. "We felt the same way when we met the humans! Though it's even stranger in your case."

Arithnu pokes at his tablet, and images start appearing on the screen below the video feed of the bridge, with a picture of a human as one header and a picture of a mercurial as another.

Human anatomy diagrams match Griffie's expectations but are much more detailed with more color.

Mercurial anatomy looks different from human anatomy – the heart is on the other side – but not outside the range of humanoid anatomy Griffie has studied.

Agricultural, ornamental, and wild plants from Earth are shown. A lot of the wild plants are familiar to Griffie. Many of the agricultural ones are as well, though they seem to have been more optimized for food production than Griffie's world has managed. Fewer of the ornamental plants look familiar, but some do.

Agricultural, ornamental, and wild plants from the Mercurials' home planet are shown. Many bear a strange similarity to the Earth plants, despite many of them having darker pigmentation. The agricultural plants again look more optimized than those Griffie is familiar with, and of the ornamentals, fewer than even Earth's ornamentals look familiar. However, even some of the wild and agricultural plants that do not have Earth counterparts look familiar to Griffie.

Images of animals are also included. The Earth animals are extremely similar to those Griffie has seen. The mercurials' animals are less similar (their cats come in strange colors), but the mercurials have what look like flagfish, while the humans have a very different fish called a 'flagfish' apparently named for scales having a pattern sort of almost like a famous historical flag.

"Wow. A lot of these match my world. Should I say which now, or later once you figure out more security?"

"I think the Captain would prefer you wait. These aren't the only weird things either, we all seem to share sort of the same expressions, despite not sharing them with other creatures on our own planets, have similar values… there is even overlap in a famous nonsense poem between our two civilizations and we… have pretty much no understanding of why."

"The humans on your ship seem like the nicer humans from my world. And I want to ask for summaries of your values, but that's a really complicated question and I couldn't answer it entirely myself. Show me the nonsense poems?"

"Sure. They, uh, sound better in their original languages, I don't think the translator will be able to make anything but the nonsense words rhyme."

Griffie's eyes go very wide in a moment of sudden, horrible realization.

"Freaky, isn't it? Was there some cross-cultural contact long ago that only left this? Some plot by the jellies? Some strange law of the universe? Keeps people up at night wondering."

"Wow. That. Uh. Sure is, uh, freaky." Griffie forces a laugh, but doesn't sound amused at all. They probably ought to not discuss dangers. So Griffie probably should appear more amused and less concerned.

Jabberwocks have the little-known powers to manipulate vorpal swords and their wielders, and to have every society inevitably conclude that vorpal swords are important to defeating them. If you fight a Jabberwock, scrupulously avoiding those accursed blades, and kill one, then almost everyone you talk to concludes you must have found a vorpal blade by "luck" and used that one. If you point out the insane-looking statistics about Jabberwock attack victims, almost nobody cares. If you ask a person to repeat the sentence "The Jubjub Bird recommends not acquiring a vorpal sword," they will usually say "The Jubjub Bird recommends acquiring a vorpal sword.".

Griffie is so far from home that the elemental fields do not exist, but the civilizations each have a poem about Jabberwocks, which promotes vorpal swords. "People underestimate the power of the Jabberwocks," huh? Even Griffie still did, apparently. Probably still does, this isn't likely to be the deepest layer of the onion.

And they think the poems are nonsense poems. Many of the words appear nonsensical. Do they think "Jabberwock", or "Jubjub", or "Bandersnatch", or "Thrasfyr", or "Sard" are nonsense words? Does Griffie need to worry about the rest of the nonsense-seeming words?

Arithnu looks at Griffie with concern.

Why is Griffie handling information-hiding. Griffie is a terrible liar. "I maybe shouldn't talk about this right now. Ask me about it later once security gets worked out, I guess."

Arithnu looks concerned, and more than a bit torn, but eventually settles on "All right."

"Can I get a time estimate for security being resolved? I am starting to wonder if almost any conversation we have is going to end up touching on some topic that should maybe be considered sensitive information."

"I will ask. And yes, if I can't even share cultural trivia without it apparently being a huge security issue, I am left uncertain about what topic could possibly be safe."

"You could play me some music without lyrics, and I could cover myself so that you can't see if I react strangely to it? You could get me another tablet that isn't connected to your systems, with more color drawing options, and I could draw things for talking about once we figure out security? You could have me fill out translation tables between this language and the other languages I have used, but you'd want to avoid picking words in ways that reveal lots of information I could react to? But all of this is less important than figuring out security and I am willing to stare at a wall for hours if that lets you figure it out faster."

"Music, blankets, tablet features, even furniture are all options that shouldn’t make a difference."

"I want to do useful things. If you can figure out how I can make translation tables without causing potential problems for you I would like that."

"That I'm not sure about. The people who would know about that are busy."

"Alright. …How about I hide under a blanket and you talk about things and then if I make faces that reveal interesting information you won't see them? I was in the void recently and there weren't any people."

Arithnu laughs a bit "All right. I'll get you a blanket. Any other items you want? As you saw from the containers collection, we can fabricate a lot of things pretty quickly."

"Paper and pencil, or an image tablet that doesn't connect to things? A pencil that actually draws on the paper. Not a tool for poking tablets that is pencil-shaped. Oh. And maybe dice and a clock."

Griffie would like to have some samples more useful for research, but it probably is the wrong time to do research. And randomization should hide some timing information if it's necessary to hide timing information.

Arithnu sends over all of those things.

The image tablet is simple to use, with some buttons and a help button that explains things in Sylvan.

The pencil has an extremely good eraser.

The paper is very pure white, like the fanciest alchemically cleaned papers Griffie has seen.

The dice are six sided, with dots to count by.

The clock contains both Griffie's units of time (with corresponding numerals) and the units of time used by modern humans and mercurials (with corresponding numerals).

Well, their technology is very good.

Griffie gets under the blanket and, using the pencil and paper and the light of their Continual Flame necklace, starts diagramming a spell somewhat like Life Bubble that can target objects. It doesn't need to create an actual atmosphere at some desirable temperature and humidity, just maintain the elemental fields. It's probably going to be useful for experiments.

Arithnu talks some about his favorite human media. He prefers Star Trek to Star Wars, but thinks the Star Trek with the 'Prime Directive', before they added mercurials, was deeply disturbing.

He talks some about history and subspace developments.

Mercurials and humans classify societies as being in one of two categories: pre-jelly and post-jelly, referring to contact with the jellyfish-like aliens they haven't managed to initiate communication with, but got subspace technology, the technology they use to travel between stars, from. Mercurials and humans classify lifeforms as 'intelligent', 'animalistic', and 'pre-animalistic', and classify planets as either not bearing life or by what the most behaviorally advanced lifeform on them is. They've only found two planets with native intelligent life, the homeworld of the mercurials and the homeworld of the humans. When the mercurials and humans encountered each other, both of their civilizations were post-jelly.

The only known way to begin subspace technology development is to find it. Some star systems have large quantities of the raw materials needed for subspace technology. The jellies used to not guard these fiercely, but after mercurials tried colonizing a star system the jellies were occupying, the jellies developed weapons and now guard star systems rich in subspace-relevant materials fiercely. This incident occurred when humans were pre-jelly.

Subspace travel is really tricky, but Arithnu doesn't know the full details, he mostly follows Silvia's directions. Griffie would need to ask Silvia for the full details. "After security is set up, maybe?" Arithnu awkwardly notes.

The details of whether subspace travel is easy, difficult, or even possible are determined by structural features of subspace, which the jellies seem to build and manipulate, using technology neither mercurials nor humans understand. The mercurial and human homeworlds are very far away from each other, in separate collections of collections of stars. Arithnu frowns and calls this a terribly uninformative translation. The collections of the stars have about 2 to the 36th power stars in them. The collections of collections of stars have about 2 to the 6th power to 2 to the 10th power collections of stars in them. The closest star to the mercurial's homeworld's sun is about 2 to the 46th power miles away. If it weren't for convenient subspace routes, it would be very hard for mercurials and humans to find each other, but by subspace for a standard transport ship, their homeworlds are about 140 to 320 hours' travel apart. The Stopping By Crashing Into Rocks is faster, though, and can take more and better shortcuts, and could make that trip in 8 to 40 hours.