"All right. Griffith, go ahead."

"Well. I realized I didn't tell you about what one of my friends has nicknamed the 'Day of Three Suns', though there might have been more than three? So. There's a lot of background to this. My friend Zita Imbrex had damage to her soul restored and was raised from the dead. However, restoring the damage was actually illegal. So then the Outsiders of… I need to explain Outsiders."

"The short version is "Outsiders are the people who aren't native to the Material Plane, where Suaal is". So. Deities and their servants are quintessence-based and are one kind of Outsider. They mostly live in the Outer Planes. Elementals, pure samples of an element given life, are another kind, and mostly live on the Elemental Planes. There's lots of other kinds, like Ethereal-plane and Shadow-plane creatures. Anyway. Psychopomps are a kind of Outsider. They're formed by … the philosophies dead people have around their deaths? They split from the soul during death."

"The psychopomps got really mad about Zita not having soul damage, and about … a quality of my species I don't want to discuss until I've gotten more information about your views. It's the quality that makes us in violation of the treaty with Charon. The psychopomps wanted to kill Zita and me. They attacked us, so we called for help from the Upper Planes, so then there were a bunch of powerful armed people in my friends' living room. And then an Outsider from Axis, the Plane of Law showed up and told everyone to go home and that there would be a hearing about Zita later. And then we went to the hearing, and Axis said that they would kill my species but that Zita was allowed to persist as she was. And then the psychopomps got really mad that Axis was saying Zita was allowed to live, so they gave a speech about how people should stop working with Axis, and then they attacked Axis, but we managed to escape."

"And it turned out some groups were persuaded by the psychopomp stuff! They included the Unravelers, who dislike it when the four elements are mixed, and tend to kill mixed-elements people such as myself by disassembling their elements, and Visilights, who are a manifestation of the conflation of truth and beauty and might, say, kill a scarred servant of the Upper Planes for being a 'blemish on the Upper Planes'. So then psychopomps and their allies, who they'd talked into breaking from Axis, tried to do something on the Positive Energy Plane, plausibly to mess with the flow of positive energy throughout the world. But what actually happened was a bunch of them exploded."

"And the explosion caused a surge in positive energy to the sun, so it split into multiple suns, and they collectively emitted more positive energy than usual, though not more heat than usual. There were reports of spontaneous healing. So. That's the day with lots of suns. It raises more questions than it answers, really."

"All right… can you go over the major factions of your world? You keep mentioning some, and some information about them, but…"

"Okay. So. The Outer Planes are where the quintessence-powered factions live."

"The Upper Planes, an alliance of almost all the good-quintessence-powered factions. The Upper Planes include Heaven, who are focused on doing good things in an orderly way, and are the ones I'd want you to get in touch with first, if I get everything I want. The Upper Planes has deities including Dai-Kitsu, the rice goddess I mentioned, Iklena, the wolf goddess I mentioned, and have lesser Outsiders, collectively called 'celestials', including angels, agathions, azatas and archons. Archons are particularly linked with Heaven."

"There's Hell. Asmodeus, who I mentioned earlier, rules Hell. His servants are called 'devils'. Hell is evil, very organized, and very good at keeping commitments. They buy and sell souls."

"There's the Abyss, full of demons, including ones who are lesser-deity amounts of powerful and are called Demon Lords. Demons are evil and very disorganized, but there's more demons than devils. Demons pretty much all hate everyone, and if they're working on projects together it's usually because a more powerful demon is forcing them to. They have a language, Abyssal, and if you try to learn the whole language you go mad."

"There's Abaddon, associated with death. That has the Four Horsemen: Apollyon of Plague, Trelmarixian of Famine, Charon of Death, and Szuriel of War. Charon is also known as 'The Boatman'. They're allegedly all lesser deities, but we think Charon is more than that. There are also deities even lesser than the Horsemen. The non-deity Outsiders in Abaddon are called daemons, and they eat souls."

"There's Axis, the Plane of Law. They enforce rules like 'don't do things that cause there to be multiple suns'. They like it when things are orderly and predictable and people aren't fighting, but not because they value people being safe and alive, just because fighting is messy. Axis doesn't have Axis deities. Instead the plane collectively has the power of a very strong deity, but there's no leading individual. Outsiders from Axis include axiomites, who do more decision-making, and inevitables, which are built for specific tasks. Axis, Heaven, and Hell often work together to enforce the laws that they can all agree on."

"There's the Maelstrom, which is less a plane, per se, and more all the most chaotic but not evil or good parts of the Astral lumped together. Chaotic outsiders people call proteans hang out there. Proteans like breaking things in the hopes that interesting stuff will happen. They aren't evil, but they cause a lot of problems, including problems they don't actually value causing. The Maelstrom and the Abyss kind of blur into each other."

"There are the Elemental Planes, of the Four Elements. People doing interplanar politics probably need to account for them but it hasn't come up for me much? Unravelers hang out there being terrible to people in cross-element relationships, there are some empires there, sometimes water and fire elementals or air and earth elementals fight each other."

"Well. That's… very different from our politics. I will think on this. Also, Art wanted to see you about a gift. Would now be a good time?"

"Thank you for your consideration. I ought to ask more about politics here at some point, but you've been being credibly nice such that I think the risk that you'd go conquer other groups here is an acceptable cost of preparing you to handle my world, which has a lot of terrible people. Which makes figuring out your politics seem a lot less urgent than introducing you to my world. And now is a fine time for Arithnu to come over, thank you."

Arithnu comes over with some other humans and mercurials. He's holding a tablet, thicker than the one's Griffie's previously used or seen other people using, with a ribbon tied around it in a fancy bow. The ribbon is, by Griffie's standards, surprisingly sparkly.

"Griffith? We put this together for you." Arithnu holds the tablet near the slot for adding items to the quarantine box.

Wow that's a sparkly ribbon, especially for people who can't use magic or just turn miscellaneous objects into light sources. Is using such a sparkly ribbon as a decoration for a different item a conspicuous display of willing to spend resources on a visitor from an uncontacted species, like they've clearly been doing at other times, or do they just have a nonmagical cheap means of making things really sparkly?

"Arithnu! Good to see you in closer proximity. Is this another kind of image tablet, or something else?" Griffie asks.

Arithnu nods. "So, I don't know if it has been explained to you how the tablets around here work?"

"Not the principles behind them, no. They're touch-sensitive, they communicate with your infrastructure, they're seemingly made of non-elemental glass and metal, they emit light which I guess means there's a special light-emitting technology in there since you can't just do light illusions?"

"Correct. The way we run a lot of the tablets is that they are just interfaces to the machines on the ship. That way we can easily reallocate resources between tasks and don't have to worry about damage to the tablets causing data loss. However, this isn't always what you want. Sometimes you want a tablet that can go anywhere, or… at least anywhere it isn't destroyed, and still function. This tablet is one of those."

"We also got together and pooled our compute credits to make a distillation of the language model. Uh, basically we said that we wanted some of the time we get deciding what the machines do to have them sit and think about your language, until they figured out how to do it as a habit rather than as a big complicated thing that needed the bigger machines. So now, it fits on this tablet, and we translated the interface as well. So even if you decide you don't want to be on the ship, either for a little time or just to leave, you can still have this. It is sort of a belated 'welcome to our world' gift to give you independence."

Arithnu puts the tablet through the slot.

Griffie takes the tablet. "This is really nice of you! Thanks, everyone. While I do plan on staying on the ship for now, the logic of the gift makes sense."

"So you said the language-understanding fits on the tablet, which suggests that the structure is more general-purpose than mere translation. Is that correct?"

"Yes. The key principle of general computation was invented by the trio of Eothe, Tyilim, and Aelical long ago. Much of the data is processed as two-state information, with some analog processing for a certain kind of reasoning. Your dictionary included the word 'computation' but not a word for the general device, our machines have been translating it as 'machines' or 'systems' depending on context, I believe."

Griffie looks like they have just developed an exciting hypothesis. "Tell me more about two-state information?"

"Well, I'm not an engineer in the area, but the basic concept is mathematical. Any number that can be expressed at all can be expressed using a series of parts each of which have only two states. In fact, any data at all can be expressed as such. There are often ways that are more or less efficient, but you can imagine doing it by imagining all the ways that data could be, and putting them on a list, and then the number that represents that data is simply where it appears on the list, which can then be expressed as a series of of parts each of which have one of the two states, so everything can be handled uniformly."

Griffie looks excited and flaps their hands. "Wow! So you've gotten translation effects done with general-purpose discrete information handling! My friend is going to be so excited! Uh, my friend invented what he calls 'Discrete Storage', and it also uses two-state information for storing data, but all we've really done with it so far is store books more compactly and automate looking for a word in a document and simulate some stuff about rotating pieces of paper relative to each other and drawing on them in a very simplistic way. Apparently it has a lot more potential than that though?"

Arithnu, along with quite a few of the other people around, blink. "Yes, it is a very potent path. Though actually I believe for efficiency the translation actually uses some non-discrete components as well. I'm not an engineer though, so I couldn't tell you exactly what the balance is. Your home has only recently begun on this path, and your friend invented it?"

"Well, I don't necessarily know it's never been invented before, but it seems plausible to me that this is the beginning of the path for my home. And yes, my friend did. He got frustrated about wanting to copy a lot of books but not having a way to carry them."

"Well. Good for your friend! I hope your world honours him accordingly! Would you like me to show you how to use the tablet? It sounds like it probably has a lot more features than you are used to."

"He got paid pretty well for making the system operate with a base chunk size of 16 information-units, which had some religious significance. He's sold some models since then and I think there's a librarian who's a big fan, but the technology is definitely in its early stages. And yes, I would like you to show me how to use the tablet. Since we can talk now you hopefully won't need to use a parchment texture to mean 'write here'."

Religious significance? Arithnu can wonder about that later. For now, it's time to help out the new alien!

Arithnu and his friends demonstrate the tablet features. The translation software can currently translate between Sylvan and any of the 77 most common mercurial and human languages, "though you shouldn't actually need most of those, it's just there are already compact models of them in the ship library". There's a system for adding vocabulary from other languages, "but it won't form a high-quality model of those languages on its own, you'll need to connect to a bigger machine, like the ship systems, for that". There's also language-learning software, designed to teach a user who already knows one language the tablet has a model of any other language the tablet has a model of.

The tablet has a many-function calculator, using notation Griffith finds totally unfamiliar, many of them representing mathematical functions Griffith doesn't recognize. "There's also math textbooks and encyclopedia articles on there, and you can copy mathematics-learning games from the ship's library if you like. The humans were hesitant to show you our most advanced mathematics, but we insisted. Honor demanded it."

The encyclopedia and textbook sections also cover some basic physics, chemistry, biology, law, and regulations. Appropriate spaceship behavior, and the contents of a spaceship, are also a major theme. (A bit bluntly-passive of Boyd, but understandable for a human. Arithnu should really show Boyd some more elegant and honorable movies at their next media night. Perhaps Alliances in the Eternal Night?)

There's also a media library, featuring selected episodes of the human children's show Launch Into Literacy and the mercurial children's show The Vital War on Ignorance and Confusion, a few episodes of the new Star Trek (Arithnu insisted and personally paid for the time of the content inspector), carefully selected to be classics without the issues of the early purely-human versions, some episodes of some cooking and gardening shows (Boyd considered these among the most practical media options.) A wide range of instrumental music is present. "The humans found filtering the more story-focused media to be more difficult, though I payed them to inspect a few of my favorite stories."

The tablet also has cameras and microphones, and can take photographs, videos, and audio recordings, including integrating them into note taking software.

The notetaking software includes a handwriting option, an option to handwrite and have the system transcribe it as printed Sylvan characters matching the dictionary's print, or an option to type, with a reconfigurable Sylvan keyboard currently optimized based on letter frequency in the dictionary. Learning-to-type software is included as well. The keyboard currently has raised keys, using the texture and elevation emulation, but this is a higher-power feature which Griffith should turn off if Griffith is away from mercurial or human infrastructure for an extended period.

While Griffith doesn't have full network privileges on the ship, the tablet is currently connected to the ship's network, and can send messages to any of the people Griffith has met thus far, who appear in a directory with portrait photo, name, title, and a short description.

The tablet can be charged wirelessly from a power supply on the ship, or in a pinch by inserting the glowing portion of Griffith's necklace into a very black slot. Arithnu offers to have someone design and augment the tablet with other charging methods later, as Cornelia learns more about Griffith's capabilities, not that the tablet should run out anytime soon.

There are various options for securing the tablet which Arithnu proudly explains. "And this is your tablet. If you configure it as I instruct, we will be incapable of viewing anything you do not choose to share."

Griffie thanks the gift-givers once again, configures the security options, and experimentally photographs the gift-givers. The camera is so fast and so detailed! It would have been nice to have one while adventuring.

So much to learn, but their most focused time probably should still go to teaching the humans and figuring out the sample-stabilization spell they've been working on. Though appropriate ship behavior may also be urgent, so that can get priority too.

Arithnu reemphasizes that Griffith can call him, and leaves with the rest of the gift-givers.

Griffie begins looking over ship law.

Cornelia says that Griffith can call her as well, but she has things to work on that involve not being right by the quarantine box if Griffith is all right being left alone for a bit.