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The capital is boring.
Why is the capital boring? It's the capital! It should have interesting people in it! But noo, everyone she's met so far has been an idiot. Mostly not even an entertaining idiot, just a boring idiot who thinks she should be impressed by their whatever, like, no, in order to impress her you can start by not being an idiot.
On the plus side, the party has free booze, so that's nice.
"I have made progress on my Ansati and would like to not end up with a terrible accent because I only ever practiced it on paper."
"Thank you!" she says in Ansati. "I made--some of the progress, though, not all progress, I--say some things but not most things?"
"Well that's adorable," he says. "What do you think of finding a nice sitting room and a book I can read to you?"
"How about one of my favourite books, then—"
The book in question turns out to be one of the lesser-known epic poems from the very early days of the Ansati Empire. The rhythm is complex in places but very pleasing to the ear, and Serik reads it well. There are a lot of descriptions of bloody battles which he is probably getting more out of than the author intended. He happily pauses between stanzas to translate any vocabulary she hasn't encountered yet.
She hasn't encountered a lot of that vocabulary. It's beautiful poetry, though.
And even when she doesn't recognize the vocabulary she can tell where the gory bits are by the tone of his voice.
He has a great time translating all those passages and unpacking the idioms and metaphors.
See, this is the kind of living language thing you just can't get from solo study. Or...almost anyone else she could have ever learned Ansati from, she supposes.
It is! He makes such delightful faces when the subject has to do with the myriad ways a human body can be damaged!
He'll never know what she would've said, at least. He may be getting the idea that some temptation is occurring.
She is definitely making tempted faces. But she won't say anything. At least not until the poetry's done.
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