Wow, Othrem seems really tense.

Inga's training led her to believe that new arrivals would be dysregulated, upset, sad, grieving, fragile, in need of comfort... but Othrem looks... afraid, maybe? Some kind of threatened? His shoulders look tense and his eyes are open wide.

Good thing they're back at Arrival team headquarters, where she can hand off to someone older and wiser!

She'll lead him into one of the houses.

"Xandra? You around?"

Xandra emerges from a doorway and into the living room of the house, where Inga and Othrem are standing.

"I am around! I wouldn't miss Othrem's arrival! So pleased to meet you, Othrem, and welcome."

"I'm Xandra. I oversee the Arrivals program. It's my job to help you acclimate here."

"How are you?"

She asks this with a steady and direct gaze, emphasizing the second word. It's clear - or at least, it would be clear to anyone in Xandra's culture - that it's a real question. She really does want to know how Othrem is, and is ready for any kind of answer.

...there are unreal questions?  In non-Conspiracy contexts?  Isn't it hugely impolite to ask somebody a question, if you aren't going to make use of whatever effort they put into answering it?

This tone is going to be lost on Othrem, but he's going to arrive at the correct interpretation by blind coincidence.

"Dealing, though I believe successfully, with a wide variety of uncertainties and potentially threatening environmental features.  Ah, to be clear, I think I'm very far off from any sort of internal failure, things would need to get a lot more confusing and threatening before it became an actual problem for me.  I'm mostly feeling the need for more information."

"I'm glad to hear you're feeling stable, and your curiosity makes sense!"

"What would feel best to you? Do you want to ask me questions? Do you want to browse our Handbook Library? If there are specific areas you're most curious about, I can arrange for specialists on those topics to come and talk to you. But please don't get your hopes up too high about specialists. There aren't that many of us, not yet, so we're all pretty general, compared to our standards back home!"

"I can field a variety of questions, though. I've been running the Arrival program for a while, and if I don't know the answers off the top of my head, I'll probably know where to look or who to ask."

"Meanwhile, let's sit down. Do you want Inga to stay? Inga, do you have more time, or do you need a rest?"

"Browsing a library sounds efficient.  I think I need quite a lot of orientation, and I'd hate to burn a bunch of people's valuable time to get it."

"I currently have a preference for fewer people over more people?"

Somebody from some completely other planet, if they might shortly announce that they were Foreigners, might decide to do that in front of multiple friendly people to avoid being suddenly disappeared.

This is not the usual trope in dath ilan fiction, however.  Dath ilan fictions tend to assume that the Others are themselves well-coordinated or have at most a small dissenting faction.  If the Others are going to turn on you in the first place, having more Others in the room won't help.  So the polite thing to do, if you're announcing yourself as a Foreigner, is to announce yourself privately in case they deem you an infohazard or want to classify info about you -- as sensible Governances may well want to do for any number of perfectly well-intentioned reasons.

Any de novo reasoning about this here new nonfictional experience, which would suggest that Othrem behave in some other way than a fiction protagonist, is not something he has consciously reasoned out at this point.

Inga will take that as her cue to go for now.

"Okay, I'll leave you to Xandra, then! But if you decide you need some girlfriend time later, don't hesitate to ask!"

Should she remind him that he's allowed to ask for sex, if that would make him feel better? Sex is a pretty reliable way to make people feel better, after all, and he's had a rough day!

Nah, he seems too freaked out, and anyway everybody knows that by default, you can ask your girlfriend for sex, even if she's your government-assigned Temporary Starter Girlfriend. (She might say no, of course, but you won't be in trouble for asking.)

And with that, Inga's out the door.

Girlfriend time?  Did they accidentally end up mated somehow, due to his utterances of significance unknown to himself, that he unintentionally said during a previous part of their conversation?

Because if so, that is worth +20 trope points.

Eh.  He'll work out that part later and after he's confessed to somebody.

"And if you just want to go straight to the library, never mind about the sitting down. It's right this way."

She leads him down the hall and into a medium-sized room. There's a desk with something that even Othrem can recognize as a computer, even if the gadgets attached to it look pretty funny. There are several floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and on those shelves are many hundreds of not-quite-book objects. They don't look mass-produced. And there are some cozy padded chairs, that you could sit in, if you want to curl up with a good manual.

If they're going to offer him THAT much information he can look at before he has to confess his Foreignness, then yeah okay maybe he will gather a bunch of information and THEN confess to somebody.

"This sure looks like the place I need to be inside right now!"