They can find a hotel that has TVs in the rooms and book a room - here, he can have the key card, maybe that will help him be free to act in the hotel room? - and put on an arcball game.

Getting him into the hotel room is a bit of a process, though giving him the keycard beforehand and tasking him with getting the door open helps with everything up to the point of walking through it. (He's very sensitive to architectural choices that divide up the internal space of the building, seeing each instance as a threshold he needs permission to approach and pass; he's very patient about it, at least, and seems to relax about it a bit over time even separately from having the keycard task to propel him.) Once he's settled in to watch the game, though, he's rapt.

Greys throw balls and run! Greys whose team has scored whoop and high five and hug each other and one pair of them start making out before half the couple is called up to the field!

Um!

Good for them!

One of the making out greys has a softcore porn sideline in the off-season.

They have a what?

What?

...are they doing that on purpose?

Meep!

Doing what on purpose? Is he okay?

He was really not expecting to be attracted to the aliens but apparently that's a thing that's happening. Maybe put the example porn away and give him a minute.

Okay. It doesn't seem that weird that some members of either species would be mutually attractive? They look pretty similar and honestly Amentans get pretty out there and you could find some who were into tentacle aliens.

It wouldn't've surprised him for it to happen at all but among crafters it usually takes a while, and at least having met the person.

Huh! That's pretty rare among Amentans, needing to meet someone before being attracted to them, though they do need to know each other pretty well before moving in and having kids together or anything.

Well, it might have something to do with crafters not having video or photograph tech, but he doesn't think so.

Seems to be likely a species thing.

Most likely, yep.

So what else should he see today? More TV, since he's here with it?

Sure, if he likes TV! There are a lot of fictional TV shows, and there are nonfiction ones about stuff like cooking or cleaning or ancient times or whatever?

How about a little of all of it, focusing on whatever they think he'll find most surprising?

Sure! They can flip through a gymnastics contests which is doing an episode on human towers, and a cartoon about a magical princess and her friends, and a cleaning show where somebody restores old rusty cookware very patiently until it shines like new, and a how-it-works about the manufacture of crayons, and a thriller with a lot of special effects and, lo and behold, tentacle aliens in it.

Gymnastics are great. He has trouble making sense of the cartoon, both visually and in terms of plot. The cleaning show is nice to watch - he comments that complicated crafting is a bit like that - albeit slightly confusing in its subject matter at first. The manufacturing show is fascinating; he hadn't imagined that their methods took nearly that much work, and there's probably a book or two to be written about it at least, in order to properly explain the situation to the rest of his species. The thriller is a bit concerning at first until he gets clarification that it's not even supposed to resemble real events, and then it's kind of a mixed bag - the special effects are incredible especially given their manufacturing problem but he's not really a fan of scary stories. He does take note of how the tentacle aliens are portrayed, that seems worth knowing.

There are several factions of tentacle alien and one tentacle alien who doesn't belong to any of those and is a member of the protagonists' starship crew ensemble and sometimes drapes his tentacles over the ship's tactical officer.

Reasonable.

Has it been mentioned to them that fleshcrafting can do things like tentacles?

Gosh! No it has not! There will be a market for that. Crafting is really really marketable and if he sees anything he likes he can certainly afford it with a little work.

He doesn't personally do fleshcrafting that complicated but he has a friend he bets he can talk into visiting who does. He might be interested in having a TV if it'd work in his house? The helicopter was cool and he bets he'd have fun playing with something like that but he doesn't spend much time in places remote enough to use something that loud without bothering anyone. -do they have any interesting technology for babies, his eldest grandkid isn't expecting their first yet but it could be any time.

A TV would work in his house if he could power it there, though if he goes very far afield his reception will be worse so he might want hard copies of whatever he's interested in watching. They have stuff for babies! They can go visit a toy store right now if he wants. And a bookstore, which will be less applicable for language reasons but some baby books just have pictures.

What's involved in powering a TV? And sure, visiting a toy store sounds like fun.

The blue can look up and have his everything translate some basics of electrical code standards while they head out to the toy store.

The toy store has kids in it and the greys have a bit of a time keeping a perimeter. It has a train table where the kids can try out possible train related accessories. It has things to sit on and spin in, and stuff that hangs from doorframes and pre-walking babies can bounce in, and it has thirty kinds of blocks, and it has puzzles and stuffed animals and dolls which blink or say "nuna! amu!" in recorded voices, and it has cooking playsets and board games and magnet tiles and toy trucks and playmats with the alphabet and digits on them and ruggedized music players and kidsize instruments and a section of everything games and everything cases so the devices can survive a toddler. There are arts and crafts supplies and hard plastic turtles of assorted designs and tie-in cartoon merchandise from the kids' show they saw and a few dozen others. There are toy spaceships, some of which are inert and some of which actually spin little rocketry-themed propellors and can hover. There are remote controlled creatures on wheels. There are ribbon wands and bouncy balls and chewing beads and dressup sets permitting children to garb themselves as anything from birds to queens.

(This is the first Amentan colony on a new planet, and nothing says "SPACE" like a well-stocked toy store.)