They help him handle the checkout, then show him where they're beeping their handcomp to borrow the shopping cart. "I can return it any time in the next 24 hours."

He can whisper again now. "Thank you."

"No problem. Do you want a throat-inflammation-treatment-candy or somewhere quiet or both or other?"

"- there's candy for that?"

"Yes. It doesn't work against everything that could give someone throat problems but it's easy to try and I have some. What does the future do instead?"

"I don't know. It's a medical side effect. I can try the candy."

"Oh dear," they say, fishing in their pockets. "One you got yesterday or an old one, if it's an old one probably you've already had it looked at by medical science better than we've got--aha." They find a little packet of candies individually wrapped in waxy paper and offer one to Kyeo. "I doubt it'll fix anything future medical science can't but I do expect it'll feel nice."

"Old one." He unwraps the candy and puts it on his tongue.

It tastes very similar to but not exactly like honey.

It's nice even if it doesn't help.

"Let's go back to your apartment; I'll try not to make you do any more talking."

Outside the grocery store, someone has wrapped elaborate webs of colorful yarn around three consecutive streetlight-posts. One of the webs has a gap in it to avoid obscuring a Lost Cat sign.

He kind of wants to ask what it's for but he's not sure he could cope with whatever the answer was. He does photograph and translate the lost cat sign.

The cat is black and white and answers to Chirp and has a microchip with the owner's address but just in case here is their message address.

Kyeo's apartment is as he left it.

He starts unloading the food and clothes and toiletries.

Tazz helps and they get it done quickly. "Do you want me to go away and come back another time, or help you look over job postings and placement tests in the areas we talked about, or other?"

"I think I could take tests today."

"If you're too tired to do your best on them they won't be accurate. I was just going to show you what they were so you could take them tomorrow. But you're the best judge of your own preferences." This last is pronounced like a proverb, said a thousand times in the exact same way.

"If you think I should take them tomorrow I can."

"Everyone does better after a good night's sleep than after a long day. That reminds me, we should get you sheets. We can get a set sometime in the couple days and in the meantime I can lend you my guest ones; does that sound good?"

"That sounds good," Kyeo agrees.

"Okay, I'll be sure to go and get those this evening. Anyway, here are the tests I think you'd get useful information from."

They show him the descriptions for an intelligence test and a cognitive reflection test and a logic test and a quantitative skills test and a probability calibration test and a spatial reasoning test. The same site has a verbal reasoning test but Tazz says not to bother until he gets either fluent in Convergentlanguage or super curious, since "It hasn't been validated in machine-translated form and might be total garbage, and none of the jobs we talked about for you need most of these anyway."

"I should learn the notation for math here even if the words will all translate."

"Ooh, yes, good idea." They pull up a page on basic math notation. From the simplified language it looks to be aimed at children, but the design is similar to every other page he's seen: black text on white in a monospace font, with the amount of formatting that will make it readable on arbitrary shapes and sizes of screen and no more.

The math notation is pretty simple. They have symbols for addition and subtraction and multiplication and division and exponentiation and logarithms and binary operators and modulo and integration and differentiation. Set intersection is the same as binary and and set union is the same as binary inclusive-or and they resemble the first letters of the words for and and inclusive-or but with diacritics. Operations that are each other's inverses are the same symbol flipped vertically.

"Will I be able to look at this during the test?"

"For the quantitative one you can look at your own notes app but not at the network."