Nelen investigates the device.

"Doc, anything weird besides the teeth?"

"He's tall and hairy and his hair's a weird color but those can all happen sometimes. Slightly weird kneecaps."

"And the language."

"I don't think much of what you're implying."

"It's important!" says Nelen.

"...I'll get him a bedpan and see if he starts weeping like an extra on a medical drama." The doctor does this.

The device sure is some weird technology in some weird language that looks vaguely like it might be an attempt at a pocket everything by a society that has only barely thought of the concept. Text recognition, if Nelen tries any, is deeply bewildered about the labels on all the buttons.

The weird man does not weep about the bedpan; he does look mildly concerned by it once he guesses what it's for, and attempts to get across 'are you sure it's that bad an idea for me to get out of bed?' using incomprehensible words supplemented with gestures and facial expressions.

Nelen does try text recognition. "The everything doesn't know this alphabet."

The doctor puts the bedpan away and finds him a crutch mostly on autopilot, experiment having been done. "Well, fuck," he says.

The patient attempts to express gratitude for the crutch.

The doctor waves the bedpan at the door leading to the bathrooms. Starts checking him over for other abnormalities and injuries.

He does not immediately make a move for the bathrooms. He's mostly fine although in addition to the leg he also seems to have a couple of unhappy ribs.

He's... still in that grey area where he could be an alien but he could also be a regular person with outrageously high mutational load and a weird archaic pocket everything labeled in nonsense symbols. Nothing about him is outright definitely not Amentan but, overall, he seems kind of... plausibly not Amentan.

Ugh. This is terrible.

When the doctor has him basically stable he gestures at the crutch, wanting him to try getting around with it.

He manages a respectable hobble after a few false starts.

In that case he should free up this bed. "Nelen, can you take him? You live alone, right?"

"I - yeah but -"

"You're not going to make things any worse."

"I don't know what to do with him!"

"Good for you! Neither do I! I'm a fucking doctor! Get him out of here and - teach him Anitami or something."

Nelen sighs and beckons to the becrutched maybealien.

The becrutched maybealien is content to hobble after him.

Nelen leads him back to his apartment. It's up some stairs - he does try the elevator but it's broken. Can the maybealien manage the stairs, perhaps by sitting on them and pushing up them one at a time with his good leg?

He's a bit grumpy about this but he scoots his way up the stairs one step at a time. It's slow going.

Nelen is only up one flight. He shows the maybealien his apartment. It's roughly a studio - bathroom with its own walls but everything else in one space, a kitchenette that is basically just an electric kettle and a microwave and a sink and a minifridge and some cupboards, a quilt-draped mattress propped up on some nonmatching wooden slats so some things can be stored underneath, a lumpy beanbag, a rug made of scrap fabric knotted onto other scrap fabric till there was a big circle of it.

The maybealien is going to plonk himself on that beanbag and celebrate the end of the stairs segment of this journey by not getting up again, if that's all right.

Nelen doesn't object. He switches on the kettle and puts some cupboard ingredients in some bowls and when the kettle boils he pours water into the bowls and stirs them and offers the maybealien one.

He says some words that are probably 'thank you', accepts the bowl, eats bowl contents without complaint.

A few minutes into the meal he attempts to introduce himself: "Eden," with a selfward gesture.

"Nelen," says Nelen, pointing to himself and sighing. He plugs in his everything to charge. He visits the bathroom, emerges, counts on his fingers and recites all the Anitami numbers from one to ten for the maybealien.

The (maybe) alien dutifully repeats these.

Nelen can identify other objects in his apartment too!

The maybealien is thoughtful, quiet, good at echoing sequences of phonemes, and really reluctant to get off that beanbag. He also seems to have a pretty sharp memory for all this vocabulary; he never needs to be told the same word twice.

Then Nelen will turn on a dim but passable projector and put on an episode of Learning Friends, a show wherein multicolor cartoon dogs of various breeds learn words and spelling and counting and basic science and geography facts. Cartoon dogs - they have horns - gambol across the wall dividing the bathroom from the rest of the studio.

He studies this spectacle intently.

The cartoon dogs go to a zoo. They learn where various animals are from and how to pronounce and spell their names and what they eat and what colors they all come in. They have a colors song.

When spelling becomes part of the picture, he pulls some scraps of paper out of his pockets, uncrinkles the least already-written-on of them and spreads it over his good knee as a makeshift writing surface, rolls up the most already-written-on one into a tight little cylinder, and... somehow?... uses the rolled-up paper to scribble down a haphazard approximation of the spellings in question.

Nelen is doing the dishes and doesn't super notice that this is weird!