A stranger falls out of the air and lands in the middle of the street.

He looks plausibly Amentan in most respects, except for the fact that he just appeared as though by magic, and the fact that he's kind of unreasonably tall—about 6'2" to be exact. Even his clothes aren't that weird, although they're definitely weird. The other weird thing about him is his hair: it's a very very dark reddish-brown, not quite the pure black of a low-budget TV alien, not quite within the range of shades commonly seen on real people. If he's not an alien, he should definitely be dyeing it one way or the other, because it's hard to tell at a glance whether it's more red or more orange.

He stirs in the semiconscious fashion of somebody who just took a bad fall and will be groaning in pain any second now once they wake up enough to feel it.

Nelen startles. He looks around at the nearest buildings for - open windows, yelling family members -

- it's pretty quiet, as these things go. "Uh - I can call you a doctor, one sec -"

There's the pained groaning, right on cue!

After a moment he utters some garbled phonemes and blinks up at Nelen in confusion.

"I'm gonna call the doctor - where did you fall from, I don't recognize you," says Nelen, poking his pocket everything, wow, it's low charge, he should not cut it that close.

More garbled phonemes for a couple of seconds; then he rubs his head and takes a deep breath and enunciates more clearly. In a language that is definitely not Anitami and doesn't even sound related.

"...what language is that? That's - not Tapap - uh - kho unag Oahkar?"

He shakes his head, and then winces when that turns out to have been a bad idea. Tries another handful of sentences in another handful of totally unrecognizable languages.

Nelen doesn't know how to say "do you speak X" in any more Xes but he can say the names of languages?

He listens through them all and responds negatively to each one.

...

Nelen will call him a doctor anyway.

He seems generally in favour of this development, although it's not clear he even understands what calling a doctor entails.

A doctor shows up with a wheely cart big enough for a person, even a largish person, though this person's feet are going to dangle. "Nelen, do you have chalk, Skun thinks there might be a patroller -"

"Oh, yeah - you sure that's safe?"

"Safer than a patroller with his hair like that."

Nelen sprays the patient's hair with red chalk.

He's pretty bewildered about that but doesn't voice an objection.

With his hair chalked the doctor wheels him to the infirmary and motions Nelen along. "How far did he fall from?"

"I don't know, I only saw him land. I think probably the Steten building is the likeliest? Do you know who he is?"

"Not a clue. Could be somebody's visitor? Maybe he ran here to get away from some predator and was still fucked up about it and jumped, wouldn't be the first time that's happened."

"Somebody's visitor would speak Anitami."

"I think they still speak Lotsual in some little mountain towns."

"Is there good machine translation for Lotsual that he'd have a friend here?"

"Sure, it's fine."

The patient is keeping pretty quiet through this conversation and seems to be listening, but gives no sign of understanding any words.

Nelen looks up a Lotsual glossary and sounds out, "Sobi Lotsual u sa?"

Nope.

"He probably hit his head, and Lotsual's probably not the only language like that, anyway."

The doctor hauls him into a bed in the red hospital. The guy in the next bed is coughing and wearing a mask; the lady on the other side has her foot wrapped up and propped on some pillows and she's asleep. Into the bed weird guy goes.

Weird guy cooperates with this plan, although he also finds the time to look around in mild concern at the other people in the hospital.

None of his limbs are blatantly obviously broken or anything but he seems very uncomfortable anytime anything happens to his left leg.

The doctor will poke and prod at his left leg until he knows whether this is a job for immobilization or drugs or what.

Nelen posts in the community chat that somebody neither he nor the doctor recognizes is apparently visiting, who has a friend over?

The leg is mildly fractured in a few places and could probably do with being immobilized.

The patient does not belong to any locals.

The doctor wraps up the leg and checks the rest of the guy over and -

"He doesn't have enough teeth."

"Like he got hit in the face -"

"No, not like he got hit in the face."

"That's weird."

"Guy must have so much mutational load. Or his mom works in something toxic, maybe. I don't think I'm going to give him painkillers till we can ask him what he's allergic to, at least."

Something goes beeble-beep in the patient's pocket; he sticks his hand in and fishes out a laughably archaic device, the sort of thing that belongs in a museum or possibly poorly-researched historical fiction. It has a hinge, which he flips open to reveal an itty-bitty screen made of individual on/off pixels and a grid of buttons with incomprehensible symbols on them; he jabs a button and it stops beebling. He tries to put the ridiculous thing back in his pocket, but the required movements are too much for him and he gives up with a wince.

The locals stare at the beebling thing. Nelen holds out a hand for it in case the guy will just let him have a look.

Sure, why not.

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!

Then he can take notes on the Anitami alphabet in peace.

When Nelen has put the dishes away he checks on Eden, offers him some more scrap paper, goes and takes a quick shower, comes out in nightclothes, sits on his bed and watches cartoon dogs go to bed after their long day and review what they've learned by telling their parents about it, and then turns off the projector. "Time for bed," he says, which is the same thing the purple dog dad said a minute ago when putting the purple dog kid in bed for the night.

"Time for bed," Eden echoes agreeably.

If he's an alien, he seems to be an alien who sleeps in a pretty normal way; he conks out on his beanbag, limbs sprawled awkwardly in all directions, taking some care to keep the bad leg comfortable, and is still there when Nelen wakes up in the morning.

Nelen starts getting ready for work, trying to be quiet, and attempts to figure out who can sit with the maybealien for a day. Eventually he summons his niece, who is three, and can do schoolwork while babysitting a maybealien and feed him cereal and microwave noodles as long as the maybealien is content to watch children's television all day. When Eden wakes up the niece is already there and being sternly instructed in these duties.

He yawns and ventures a slightly awkward smile in her direction, then gets up to hobble his way to the bathroom.

"Good morning," says the niece. "I'm Tosu!"

"Good morning," he parrots back, "I'm Eden."

When Eden has come out of the bathroom Tosu has poured boiling water into a bowl of instant porridge for each of them and Nelen's on his way out the door. Learning Friends is playing on the projector; this episode is about water. The cartoon dogs with horns are counting ice cubes.

He sits awkwardly on his beanbag and scribbles on scrap paper with other scrap paper.

Tosu does schoolwork at Nelen's kitchen table, humming along to the Learning Friends theme song every time it goes by. At lunchtime she makes both of them wraps with packaged flatbread and some beany stuff out of a can.

By lunchtime he is perhaps beginning to get a little tired of Learning Friends.

He asks her, in a halting sentence cobbled together out of painstakingly acquired vocabulary and pronounced with reference to his scribbled page of notes, "Do you want more words?"

"- do I want more words?" says Tosu. "Uncle Nelen said you were learning Anitami."

"I were learning Anitami," he agrees. "Do you want learning English?"

"English? What's English?"

Selfward gesture. "I words. Anitami you words, English I words."

"Oh. I'm trying to learn plumbing right now."

He gives a fair-enough sort of shrug.

"Where are you from? Uncle Nelen says he doesn't know."

"Where from? Far," he says. "Far far far far far."

"A moon?" she suggests. The Learning Friends went to a moon once.

"Moon?" He digs through his notes. His makeshift writing utensil comes unwrapped in the chaos. "Oh, moon. No." He rolls up the paper cylinder again and this time runs his finger firmly along the seam, and the paper joins together in its wake so that no seam is visible. "Far."

"Ohhhhh," says Tosu, the gravity of her assignment dawning on her. She gets up from her chair to have a closer look at the paper.

"Hmm?"

He lets her take the paper if she wants. There's still a bit of seam left at the end where he didn't quite smooth it fully away, and the spiral of the rolled-up paper visible at the ends, but for most of its length, there is no outward sign that the seam was ever there.

She tugs at it a little, fascinated and kind of concerned. "Oh," she says softly. "...why are you here?"

Shrug. "I don't know." Where's that word in his notes... he reads out with only slightly questionable pronunciation, "Accident."

"Oh..."

"Do you want learning English?" he offers again. "Faster than plumbing."

"Faster than plumbing? I don't know if I'm any good at languages, red school doesn't really cover them..."

Hmm.

He searches his vocabulary notes until he finds a relevant word: "Build," he says, constructing a little box out of folded paper. Then he unfolds and scatters the pieces, takes his hands away, hums thoughtfully to himself, and... the paper reassembles without outside intervention, pulling together into the shape of the box. "Build faster."

"Do you mean you can teach me English by magic?"

He nods, but also asks, "Magic? New word."

"Magic is - what you're doing with the paper. I think. Maybe it's not magic. But Uncle Nelen said your pocket everything looked kind of old. - can't you teach yourself Anitami by magic?"

He shakes his head. "I learn by magic slow. I you learn by magic fast."

"...I think I have to ask a grownup about this."

Agreeable nod.

Tosu sends Nelen a message on her pocket everything, but he's at work, so she doesn't get a reply till twenty minutes later. Then she follows his instructions to delete the messages entirely, and then she asks Samfek, the retired organizer, to come over soon please.

Samfek is over a few minutes after that.

Friendly smile. "Hello! I'm Eden."

"Hello. I'm Samfek.

Tosu, you can go."

Tosu gathers up her things and skedaddles.

"Is the magic dangerous?" Samfek asks, speaking slowly and distinctly with pauses between words for his benefit.

...hm.

"Learn by magic not dangerous."

"Is it obvious? Can someone tell who has had this happen to them?"

His vocabulary is not exactly up to this task but he is going to try his best.

"Magic person can tell who has had magic happen. Soon after magic, can tell easy. Later after, harder. Long after, very hard."

She thinks about this very gravely, and then says, "You may magically teach me English."

He nods.

He concentrates for a moment, then says in English, "There, that should be a start. It won't be perfect but you'll at least understand what I'm saying, I hope?"

(The words are perfectly comprehensible, but trying to answer back in the same language leads to a sort of tip-of-the-tongue feeling, like she could remember the words for what she's trying to say if only she thought about it for long enough but they just aren't coming to her.)

"- ah. Yes. Thank you."

"The type of magic I'm using for this works better the longer I've known someone, and I can use it in reverse but in that direction it only barely lets me understand what someone is saying to me in the moment. Still, it should let us have a conversation, and the longer we spend at it the better you'll pick up English. The traces are obvious to magical senses for a few hours and fade out to the point where they're completely undetectable after a few weeks, but as far as I can tell there isn't any magic of a kind I can detect on this planet, so I don't think you need to worry about anyone noticing them."

She nods along. She looks very concerned, but fairly chill about it. "What brings you here?"

"I didn't exactly mean to come here," he admits wryly. "I was experimenting with magical transportation and being rather more reckless than I should have. I did not expect to end up on another planet. If I'm right about what happened I should be able to travel back and forth at will eventually, but it could take me a while to work out a reliable method and I'm not eager to repeat the experiment anytime soon lest I land somewhere less hospitable."

"And being in - this neighborhood - was coincidence?"

"Yes, entirely. I'm lucky I didn't land in an ocean. Why?"

"Just checking.

Does your magic let you read Anitami?"

"Not unless someone I've met is reading it to me. I can only magically gain understanding by borrowing it from a specific person; I can't pull it out of thin air."

"So no audio recordings either?"

He shakes his head.

She chews her lip thoughtfully. "That will make it harder to get you out of this neighborhood."

"Oh?"

"There is a procedure that visitors are supposed to follow when they leave. There are instructions in the rooms intended for the procedure but if you can't understand them that won't help."

"Ah, I see. I should be able to learn the language much faster than normal by borrowing your understanding in conversation, or any other volunteer's, like we're doing right now; but that won't help me if the instructions are very complicated. I don't mind staying here for a while, though, if you don't mind having me here and if having me here won't cause trouble."

"I am worried it will cause trouble. Not - by itself, but if it were widely known."

"I see. Is there anything I can do to help with that?"

"...possibly. Nothing like this has ever happened before, so it's hard to be sure."

"Your neighbourhood has been very hospitable to me so far and I wouldn't like to cause you any trouble."

"I'm glad to hear that you feel that way. Is there anything else you need? With your injury, the doctor was unsure what to do since you're slightly different from us."

"There are ingredients I could use to make myself heal faster by magic... pure distilled water is probably the easiest to come by. I can also use similar magic to heal other people but I don't know whether magical healing is a service you'd find useful, and the traces would linger much longer than the traces of the magic I'm using now. Potentially permanently, depending on the method."

"- hm. Only detectable by other magic users?"

"As far as I'm aware, only magic can detect this type of magical trace," he confirms. "I think your technology is ahead of ours in a number of ways, but the technology I'm used to has tried several ways to analyze magic without directly using magic and failed at nearly all of them."

"Can we learn magic?"

"Yes, and I'd be happy to teach it."

She looks perhaps surprisingly annoyed by this answer. "Hm.

Perhaps I should - explain our complicated situation."

"Perhaps you should."

"Tosu informed me that you've been watching Learning Friends. You might have noticed, if your color vision is like ours, that the cartoon dogs - probably, I haven't watched an episode since my youngest great-grandchild was two - probably are shown to come in various colors. And not red."

"Yes, I did observe that."

She has loosely braided blush-pink hair, and she picks up the end of her plait by way of illustration. "Amentans also come in various colors. Including red. Reds live separately from everyone else, and you landed in a red neighborhood."

"...hmm. And you're—likely to be troubled—by the rest of the colours?"

"It happens. Not constantly. Enough that it's a serious concern whenever something unusual happens that the other castes - they're called castes - might be interested in."

"I see. And you're concerned that... if I leave the neighbourhood and teach magic outside it, someone might later find out that I healed some of you, and they'd trouble you about it?"

"They might trouble us about having interacted with you at all. The more evidence of interaction the more likely trouble is."

"How might I help you with that?"

"You are - unprecedented in an important way - and the other castes will be very interested in providing you with whatever you want in exchange for your magical help and general goodwill. It may be - very hard to explain to them, quickly enough, convincingly enough - that you would like us to be let alone."

"I think I see what you mean. Hmm. How difficult would it be to conceal me here until I can learn the language well enough to leave on my own? It should be... from the progress I've made since I got here, probably between sixty and ninety more days before I can puzzle through complicated written instructions without help. But then once I get out I suppose I will have to explain where I learned the language, and that could bring troubles of its own."

"We can probably find copies of the instructions online and have someone explain it to you here, which hopefully would let you get through without serious mistakes. If you can be on your way before it's implausible that we only kept you long enough to fix your leg - does your healing magic not work on your leg? - that would be better than lingering for months."

"The magic I would use to fix my leg is natural alchemy, which requires ingredients, and generally more specialized ingredients the more complicated the desired result. I'm a good enough alchemist that if I had close to my own body weight in distilled water to work with, I could cut my recovery time from most injuries in half; to do any better than that, I'd have to start experimenting to find out the properties of local materials, and by the time I'd figured out a better method my leg would probably have healed by itself. I have other methods available for healing other people. In a catrastrophic emergency I could heal myself or someone else very quickly, but the magic would leave traces that would trouble me when I eventually found my way home, for reasons that... well, I can explain my delicate situation to you if you'd like. It would be only fair, since you've explained some of yours."

"There's probably some distilled water somewhere, but I don't know if there's that much... go on?"

"The planet I live on is called Earth; its inhabitants are humans. The place where I was, for lack of a better word, born, is called Hell; its inhabitants are demons. Demons are much more innately talented than humans at many powerful kinds of magic, especially transmutation, and for that reason among others, humans are generally afraid of us. It's normally very easy to detect demons on Earth using magical senses, because the substance of our bodies has distinctive magical properties and so does our innate magic. I prefer to live on Earth, for a number of reasons, so I figured out how to construct a human body for myself using only natural alchemy and terrestrial materials; it has no detectable infernal signature because nothing about it is infernal. If I used infernal magic to heal myself, I would have to rebuild my body from scratch again when I got home, or the first person with well-developed magical senses who saw me would assume I had the worst of intentions and sound as many alarms as they could."

"I can try to get you distilled water."

"Thank you."

"- I suppose you might have a magic way of cleaning yourself? I'm not an expert on what the other castes would accept, but I think for a magical alien they'd be inclined to generosity of interpretation. The process for leaving the neighborhood is a very thorough shower."

"Oh. Yes, I can do that. I suppose it depends on what exactly they want me cleaned of, but for just about any mundane showering process I can probably get myself cleaner than it's intended to get me using less water than it's intended to take unless the water provided is especially alchemically inconvenient."

"I think there is actually a step with distilled water but we don't have a way into that plumbing system for you. Anyway, that would help cover any errors in following the standard instructions. Is my guess; again, I'm not an expert on what other castes would accept."

"Understandable. So you'd rather I stay here as quietly as possible until I can walk unassisted and then leave? I can do that if it seems best. I'd appreciate... any advice you have on how to approach the other castes in ways that won't lead to them troubling you, though."

"You can take the crutch - there's a separate washing machine for objects." She sighs. "Reds are understood to be 'polluted', do you have that concept?"

"...I don't think so; can you explain in more detail?"

"Each caste has separate jobs - I don't know how that's covered in Learning Friends, it's aimed at an age where most information it's educating the audience on is fairly generic. Red jobs are dealing with wastewater plumbing, corpses, and garbage, as well as any functions internal to the neighborhood, like the doctor you saw."

"I see. And 'polluted'," he echoes the word, "is a shared property of wastewater plumbing, corpses, and garbage? I'll admit my first instinct is to treat the problem as an alchemical one..."

"A shared property of those things and also us."

"A property of you because you interact with those things?"

"And have for generations."

"...as I said, I have an alchemist's instincts about this... would it help you at all, do you think, if it turned out that alchemy could remove that property from you, without otherwise affecting you?"

"...probably. That is, it would help in a - vacuum, but it would leave it unclear where we would go on from there."

"How so?"

"If we were still members of our caste, we'd continue doing red jobs. It'd need more magic as maintenance, or at least we'd have to learn procedures for getting ourselves clean after work every day. If we continue doing red jobs, it's not clear if the clean attitude toward us would change much."

"Not even if I could prove to them that the alchemical procedure to remove the property was effective?"

"I don't have enough of a working model of how their thought processes on the subject work to be sure."

"Well, fair enough. And I don't even know if I can do it, I'd have to find out if the property is alchemically detectable or not first. Quite a lot of properties are, though."

"How would you find out?"

"I'd need alchemical tools—the same kind of glassware that works for chemistry is usually fine in a pinch—and some samples of things with and without the property, ideally things that are otherwise very similar to each other. The classic example in introductory alchemy is to leave out two trays of sand under the sky for a week, covering both to begin with and then uncovering one during the day and the other at night, and then alchemically process them to reveal the day-nature and night-nature respectively. Finding 'polluted'-nature will be harder because it's never been done before, but the basic idea is the same. I could do it very slowly using only natural alchemy, or much faster using infernal magic if you didn't mind the tools and samples ending up slightly infernal."

"Is there some reason to mind that?"

"Not in my opinion. It would be inconvenient for you if you ever had to bring those specific objects to Earth, but it seems very unlikely that you'll ever have the occasion to do that."

"We don't have chemistry glassware but the other castes - greens, specifically - will."

"Hmm. I'd like to verify the principle before I leave... I've done alchemy in a mundane kitchen before, in a real pinch, but given the nature of the property under investigation I don't really want to inflict it on anyone's kitchen... even if you all already have it, I imagine you still don't want some of those materials interacting with the tools you use to prepare food...?"

"We keep it away from the food, yes. We're not immune to disease transmission."

"I thought as much. Well—I'll leave it up to you, I think. If someone wants to lend their kitchen to the cause of finding out whether 'polluted'-nature can be alchemically isolated, I'm more than happy to try. I'll clean everything afterward as best I can, of course."

"There may be someone about to update their kitchen, or merge two apartments and repurpose one kitchen. I can find out." She taps her everything.

"Thank you, I appreciate it."

"How long should we expect you to stay in the neighborhood?"

"I'm not sure. Depending on how difficult it is to fix my leg, I might be walking unassisted within the week, or not for several."

"The doctor was reluctant to give you any medicines in case you had an unexpected reaction."

"Logical, since I'm an alien. I don't know what effect your medications would have on me."

"You can bring the crutch out with you if you want to leave before you no longer need it."

"I think I'd rather wait. Being able to stand up without it will probably also make the procedures for leaving easier to follow."

"All right. Should I find you an accommodation that is not Nelen's single apartment?"

"That would be appreciated but I've managed all right with worse; I won't be upset if no one else volunteers for an alien houseguest."

"It would tend to be nervewracking. I can at least get Nelen another mattress."

"Thank you."

She taps her pocket everything more. "Is there anything else I can answer for you?"

"I think I am all right for the moment. Is there anything else you want to ask of me?"

"There are... many things it might be valuable to know, but I think we have covered what would be more urgent than not being concerningly knowledgeable when cleans come by."

...he nods slowly. "That makes sense. All right."

She departs. A mattress is delivered to Nelen's apartment a bit later.

That's more comfortable than a beanbag! Eden is accordingly appreciative.

And then he is left alone with Learning Friends on in the background till Nelen gets home from work.

He will Learn so much from the Friends.

The Friends teach him about deserts and vegetables and clothes and the four seasons. The yellow cartoon dog sprains her arm and her Friends visit her in the hospital. They are too young to go to school yet but they tour various schools to demystify them for the audience. The Friends sing the alphabet and they sing numbers and they sing months and they sing colors. The Friends go on an airplane. The purple cartoon dog opens a snack stand and the green one wants to help but is gently redirected by adult cartoon dogs into painting a sign for the stand instead. The grey cartoon dog loses at peewee arcball and his friends have to cheer him up.

It's moderately inane but at the same time kind of fascinating, and it sure does teach him the language. He and his notes can identify so many nouns and describe so many activities and recite so many cartoon animal social interactions.

Nelen comes home while the cartoon dogs are having a sandwich invention contest judged by their parents. (The purple dog is the favorite to win all around but the yellow dog might score highly in structural composition.)

"Hi," says Nelen.

"Hi," he says, accented but comprehensible.

"Where's Tosu?"

Did no one tell Nelen...? "Samfek said go. Tosu went."

"Oh. I should - check my messages." He does this. "- okay. That explains the mattress."

"Yes."

"Do you want me to leave the show on?"

There's a phrase for this—he consults his notes— "Yes, if that's okay."

"It's fine." Nelen makes them dinner.

Eden Learns from the Friends and eats dinner and is a fairly boring houseguest apart from being an alien.

He runs out of Learning Friends episodes later that evening and Nelen puts on a different show called Reading With Apna, which has a lime-green puppet who likes to read and tell stories, doing those things; other puppets act out the stories she is reading and then they all talk about how the story made them feel and how else it could have ended and who wrote it. There is still some emphasis on the written word, as most lines from the stories are also printed on the screen while they are being enacted.

He diligently records vocabulary on the seemingly endless supply of scrap paper he seems to have about his person.

It occurs to him to ask Nelen, "What is a hair colour people never have?"

"Black?" suggests Nelen. "Or brown, or, uh, naturally multicolor except if it's changing when you grow up from one to the other and you have it long."

He nods thoughtfully and writes this down.

"Why?"

He consults some notes and in fairly short order constructs the sentence, "I can change it."

"Yours? That will work better than the chalk."

Nod nod. "The chalk is why?"

"We have to make sure ours looks red. And thought you were a red, who had jumped off a building."

"Ah." He nods comprehendingly. "Yes. I will change it," a quick consultation of the notes, "before I go."

"Not to red," Nelen clarifies, "you shouldn't look red when you go."

"I will change it to black."

"Black's good."

Nod nod.

Nelen looks at his pocket everything again. "Samfek says there's no spare distilled water, some machines need it for cleaning and apparently we're running tight on that."

He nods acknowledgingly.

"She says she can find you an empty apartment but it would be a little risky because you might be noticed and the more people who notice you the more chance of a leak, so if you don't mind staying here she thinks that's best. I don't mind."

"I don't mind," he agrees.

"Okay. Do you need anything? Or want the bathroom before I take a shower?"

Headshake headshake.

Nelen goes and takes a shower, and switches the projector to a musical and watches that, and then goes to bed.

Eden sleeps on his lovely new mattress which, whatever its failings, is more horizontal than a beanbag.

It's not a great mattress but it does have horizontalness going for it!

In the morning Nelen goes off to work again and Eden is left with Apna the puppet.

At some point during the day he does in fact run out of paper and has to do some very jury-rigged minor transmutation to reorganize all his language notes into a smaller, more neatly written format so he can keep taking notes on new vocabulary.

Apna the puppet is oblivious to his struggles.