Blai will try it on the strength of this explanation, nod, and then change pants. He doesn't have any parts Chris hasn't seen before.

Probably a good sign for him being able to receive medical care if necessary.

They can swing by Blai's room, grab the gambeson, and head to the laundry room, which is loud and smells odd.

Maybe it's supposed to be like that. "How does this procedure go?"

"You open the lid on the laundry machine like so, and then assuming someone else didn't forget their clothing in the machine and it's not full of water due to a problem or such, you put your dirty clothes in. You need to make sure nothing's in the pockets, and I've heard clothes hold up better if you turn them inside-out first. After that, you add a little scoop of soap to this compartment – there's a soap container with a scoop in it, use that size, and it can't just be any soap it has to be laundry machine soap. And then normally you adjust the dials and press a button, but you can't read the text next to the dials, so I'll do it. Also normally you'd set a timer to remind yourself to come back to the machine when it's done, but you don't have one of those, so I will."

"Thank you." Blai follows those of these instructions that he can accomplish.

"I'm setting this to a normal cycle, but telling it your clothes are heavily soiled, which means it's going to run longer."

He closes the lid, adjusts the dials, and presses a button, causing the machine to start making noise.

He pokes at another device. "This will beep when your clothes are done, it'll be less than two hours."

"And we wait here?"

"We could but normally we don't."

"All right." He will follow wherever Chris wants to take him.

Back to the room with tables and chairs and food. Chris gets himself a plate of food, none of it from Blai.

Blai nibbles too. Casts a Prestidigitation and starts trying to clean the nearest thing that doesn't look perfectly clean. The gravy off his fingers, if nothing else.

And someone gets Chris a book. It's thin and it has some mountain climbers on the cover.

"This is the program handbook."

"Ah, thank you." He licks the gravy off rather than continue to stare at it and casts Comprehend Languages to set about the book.

Highlights from the early pages include:

• People in the program are supposed to read the book before they deploy.
• At least allegedly, there are animals native to the continent, but no people.
• Nobody owns Antarctica. Instead there's a treaty recognized by a lot of countries designating it as a peaceful research area and they try to work together.
• Allegedly, Blai could get more information about various topics on "websites".

Blai points at "website". "What is this?"

"It's a … thing that devices like this one show to each other, when they're connected." He gestures to the book-thing.

"The encyclopedia-thing I mentioned is one of them. There are lots of web sites we can't access because we aren't connected to the big group of connected devices, just our little local one."

"Are the ones this book refers to included in the local one?"

"I don't know. It probably varies."

"The treaty?"

"I've got a copy of the treaty."

He takes his metal book and re-opens it. Types some things.

"This is showing the first two pages, let me know when you're done reading those."

(Author's note: The treaty is extremely similar to this one.)

Blai needs "nuclear" and "radioactive" explained. He wants to know if there are presently any observers from other stations at this one or expected soon and if there is policy about conduct around them if so. He would like to know the last time there was a jurisdiction dispute and how it went down. Other than that this all seems pretty straightforward.

"There are not presently any observers from other stations and we're not expecting any soon. I don't know how you should conduct yourself if any show up, usually they focus more on infrastructure but usually we don't have an alien. Nuclear explosions are a kind of very big explosion. A single nuclear explosion could destroy an entire city. Radioactive things emit invisible energy that can make people sick. Lots of things are a tiny bit radioactive but some things are very radioactive and they have to be stored in special ways. We haven't had a jurisdiction dispute yet."

"Do I count as obliged to this treaty and if so is there a procedure according to which I could withdraw if that became necessary?"

"I think you do not. It's between countries and you're not a country and yours didn't sign it."