Aww, that's an odd thing to say and clearly not what he was going for but it's kind of sweet? 

Merrin returns to the room and settles in to write some more and nibble some more fruit, oblivious to Antonio's frustration with her paladin-ness. (Not that she has the slightest idea what a paladin is, just yet)

She did manage to notice that he seemed to disapprove of the sense of urgency she's currently feeling? As a small child, rather too much of Merrin's attention was aimed at picking up on disapproval from adults. As an adult, she's tried to have it bother her less, both for reasons of general psychological health and because, in fact, in emergency situations now she usually has to be the authority. She hasn't lost her sensitivity to perceiving it at all, though. 

Obviously it bothers her at least a little - she's very out of her depth here and so anything mildly negative is going to get to her more - but she's also noticing some irritation. Even though what he said was clearly intended to look out for her wellbeing and it wasn't wrong advice, just imperfectly targeted. There's just...something implicit in there that rubs her the wrong way, and that's unusual, most of the authority figures Merrin has interacted with her life were very very good at giving advice in a way that didn't give off the impression that she was inconveniencing them by caring as hard as she did. 

Well, cultural differences, right, she should be expecting a much higher frequency of minor social missteps and fumbles. Maybe he's also irritated with her for an impression that she didn't at all intend to convey. 

(...Merrin is now flagging-to-herself a mild concern that she's going to be overly hasty to explain things by claiming 'cultural differences' and then moving on, even though at this point 'cultural differences' is more like a label on an opaque box than a concept with parts that she can reason with usefully; it's not really an answer. Not in the way that means she ought to stop trying to ask questions. If she wants to figure this place out enough to feel at ease - which seems pretty important for her work productivity, actually - then she needs an actual detailed model of what all the nebulous cultural differences are.) 

...How do they select Governance officials, anyway? This isn't a top-priority question to resolve, necessarily, but she writes it down. And then she returns to her paper that has 'DEATH' written at the top and the rest blank, and fills in all the details she just learned. 

And taking a step back again. Can she make any further progress on narrowing down probabilities for the various possible reasons she might have been directed here on purpose? (She is obviously going to put in a placeholder for ACTUALLY IT'S SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY and allocate it at least half of her probability mass, but other than that.) 

...Seems a lot less likely she's here to fix medicine; this world has a systematic setup where dead people end up in other worlds, they don't need a fix for True Death, and they have healing magic. Also she keeps finding out about new bizarre complications, at a rate that seems to be increasing rather than decreasing over time, and at this point she should really just update that it's likely to keep happening for a while, and stop trying to make PLANS other than gathering-more-information. 

She is apparently INHERENTLY ANTI-MAGIC which is...informative, right, it's something she would have assigned very low probability before it turned out to be true, and apparently Antonio, who has local context, also would have, and so it's a huge update. Would be great if she had any idea what it was an update toward. 

- evidence that she's in one of the worlds that was selected for her, maybe? Because it seems purposeful. It seems to Merrin that there's a large difference between she, herself, not having the aptitude to learn economicmagic, because that's something the humans of this world have and dath ilanis don't, and having some kind of immunity field to it that actively disrupts magic that was already cast. 

She is noticing that she's suddenly full of wobbly-uncertainty about whether that's true? Which is the usual point at which she would go check her reasoning with someone, ideally someone with at least some Keeper training, but she can't do that, can she. She can't even really ask Antonio because apparently anything complicated or where there's a large inferential distance between their two worlds' knowledge bases fails to translate. 

(- actually, jumping back, right, she needs to think about the translation problem and how to mitigate it, but she's going to start a new sheet of paper for that and then go back to it later, she feels like she's holding onto a lot of other half-finished thoughts right now and doesn't want to drop them.) 

Things which are evidence she can maybe use at all for the question of why she's here, if it's for a reason? ...She still needs to find out if it's possible to communicate with the dead people in the dead-people-places - or whether the instant-movement magic works to travel between them, which seems plausible and also that would be so cool you could collect so much fascinating data if you could just go meet and interview everyone who's ever died in the last however many centuries. If the only way of knowing things about them is what's communicated by 'gods', though - assuming 'gods' communicate with humans at all, but Merrin is leaning toward yes, Antonio was talking about it like someone who thought he had reasonably good information on 'Asmodeus' goals - but if that's the only channel of information then Merrin is going to downgrade her confidence in all of that. There's an argument that it would result in better information, right, if gods are something like super-Keepers, but they...sound weirder than that, they might be a lot weirder than that, and so...uncertainty. 

That's at least five questions but Merrin will write it down and then go to a new piece of paper to start writing down a neater list. 

That's so many things. It's so many things and they're all confusing and she has to make her own checklists - not just that, she has to figure out the entire framework-of-reasoning to use in order to prioritize what goes on them - which is not, in fact, something Merrin is especially trained to do, because why would you try to make a Merrin do that. She's starting to feel like her brain is going to explode and then there will be little bits of Merrin-brain everywhere and no answers and no plans. 

....Okay, but you know what Merrin IS trained to do, and noted to have some actual aptitude for which is why she invested in all that training? Dealing with STRESSFUL THINGS. Including - especially - unexpected stressful things being sprung on her from nowhere, because it's not as though Civilization gets to have much say in scheduling Exceptions happening, they wouldn't be Exceptions if that were the case. 

It's taken her a decade of very focused effort and diligence to get to where she is in her original career, and it might take another decade of completely refocusing all her efforts to handle this - or, let's be honest, it might take a whole lot longer than that - but if Merrin were the sort of person to just GIVE UP because something was going to take decades of intense diligence and stubbornness, she wouldn't be where she is now, would she. 

Okay. Great. Moving on. Possible solutions to the translation issue:

- Merrin just learns their language. This is a bad solution because by itself it'll take months if not years and she doesn't want to spend months to years being this incredibly confused all the time. 

- ....Actually though she should probably request tutoring at all in their language, not so much expecting she can learn to speak it in a day, but at least to get a high-level overview of the differences so she can compensate for them more informedly? Not from Antonio, obviously, his time is high-value and he probably has all sorts of other work to do related to her arrival. (Merrin is suddenly deeply curious what their equivalent of Exception Handling protocols are, because wow she sure is an Exception from their point of view, and learning how another Civilization deals with that sounds incredible. She's in the middle of thinking about something else, though, so she'll put that down on the list of other questions, along with 'how do you select Governance officials.' 

- ...Break things down into smaller parts. Merrin could try explaining things as though she's talking to an injured five-year-old who's going to struggle to process anything complicated or embedded-in-high-levels-of-context. She....would not normally try to have a conversation with an actual injured five-year-old about any of her current questions, that's a hurdle, but it seems worth trying the mental attitude. 

- Use more visual aids? They've got visual aids, here, clearly, and when they showed her the planet, that as a method of communication wasn't prone to language-translation lossiness. ....Actually that's a good point. If she can just go out and see more of their world, herself, then she may not know how to interpret all of it but at least it would help her form more concrete questions? And whatever she could infer might be incorrect because of her own preconceptions, priors which were appropriate in dath ilan but not here, but at least it won't be incorrect because of translation-magic bugginess. 

- They should obviously run a whole lot more experiments to mark out the limits of her anti-magical properties. Maybe, maybe, there's something more like the instant-movement magic - which did work on her - but which would serve a purpose like the translation spell? ....Merrin has no idea if that could be a thing, she should ask about the subcategories of economicmagic here. That goes on the questions list. 

- Do they have anyone who could learn Baseline the normal way but really fast? If they have beings with 4x the thinkoomph of the average human - it's probably not a good use of Asmodeus' time to spend a day learning Baseline properly, presumably if one is a god one has a lot of other priorities, but seems worth asking the general question. 

- ......On a similar line of thought, can they somehow make Merrin smarter, so she can learn their language in less than several months to years? Merrin isn't putting high odds on that being possible, the only indication she has to think it might be is that gods exist, but it's cheap to ask so why not. 

Merrin finishes her notes on that sheet of paper and sets it aside. 

(Paper is really not a great user interface, but this is among the least of Merrin's challenges right now.) 

No one has interrupted her yet and she's not done thinking, just - at a good pausing point? 

Merrin knows what her mind needs to help her switch gears. She tidies her many cipher-covered papers and then gets up and does some pushups and jumping jacks and some sort of wall-balancing exercise, all the while trying to have as few abstract thoughts as possible. 

Antonio Agramunt is currently agonizing - metaphorically, but it's going to end up literal - about whether Merrin is successfully reading through his Bluff or just picking up on the overtones that he'd meant to put there, based on the description of her thoughts.

Asking to be relieved of duties that might be unpleasant, in Cheliax, is something painfully discouraged, so people won't go around asking to be relieved of unpleasant duties just because they're unpleasant; the resulting punishment, from a Chelish perspective, must be severe enough and extended enough to discourage that as a calculation.  Of course failing in those duties is much more severely discouraged, especially in a case like this one, and if you think you might fail and earn that punishment, you'd be wiser to take the lesser one.  Forcing your superiors to relieve you by looking incompetent, but without you having actually failed at that point, is a discouraged intermediate between the two.  Ideally, of course, one can just take on the unpleasant duty and perform it perfectly, and then not be punished at all aside from the duty itself.  The question is whether Antonio Agramunt is sufficiently confident he can do that.

Excellent. She has some PLANS to communicate better. 

...No one's interrupted her yet, and she doesn't actually feel done with her thinking, since she still needs to figure out what she wants to use that communication to learn more about. 

Right. Skimming through previous notes (wow paper continues to be a terrible user interface, there's no longer enough space on the table for all her notes and Merrin swaps to sitting on the floor surrounded by a semicircle of papers):

Topics to ask questions about 

- Gods: she needs to go more concrete on this. What human-visible activities do gods take. How do they communicate. Do they...trade with humans? Do they trade with each other? How do they come into existence? Are they like a species that can reproduce? 

- Dead-people-places: what does each of them look like, visually, assuming this is known? (Seems less fraught to ask for the showing-images magic than do battle with the translation issues.) What do the people there actually do? Can dead people who now 'live' there have children who are born there? If children born here die and go there then do they continue to age or are they children forever? Do they have economies? Do they have magic users there as well and are they the same people who were wizards in life? 

- Magic: what can it do, what can't it do, can be it broken down into categories, how long does it take to learn to a certain skill, how rare is it, how is it used in the day-to-day operation of Cheliax? 

- The non-magical economy and logistics and Governance and legal system of Cheliax: agricultural production, metalwork, transport (how broadly do they use the instant-transport magic versus non-magical methods), how do they select leaders, what are the divisions within their government with different spheres of responsibility, she's probably forgetting twenty other important aspects but hopefully the questions will start occurring to her as she learns more.

- The culture of Cheliax (Merrin isn't expecting this to be easy to explain, she's pretty sure it's a trope in encountering-aliens fiction that 'culture' is hard to perceive directly by the people within it, like fish in water, but she can break it down into a lot of specific questions and compare to dath ilan and maybe noting a lot of specific differences will make this clearer).

- Their education, and not just magical. This is informative both from an understanding-the-culture standpoint, and because she...has a sense that a great deal of dath ilan's progress in pedagogy happened once they had less resource scarcity than this world apparently does? Education, too, is a kind of technology. Merrin is incredibly unqualified to be a teacher unless it's 'teaching six-year-olds basic first aid' but she at least went to school. (Also she has a very vague recollection of reading some encountering-another-civilization serial fiction where the other civilization couldn't afford to educate all of their children, what with all the resource scarcity, and she should...check. If that's the case here.) 

- Their history, if it's not screened off. She...is going to guess it's probably not? She isn't sure why she has that sense, presumably there's some kind of input going into the anticipation but it's not legible even to herself yet. But she thinks history is less invisible-to-the-locals than 'culture' and should still inform it a lot, and inconveniently she won't as easily be able to compare differences with dath ilan, but by getting it from both angles maybe she can come up with an actual model and then she'll...be less confused, and be able to figure out more easily how to work with them and fit herself in.

Interrupting this with a thought that Merrin is not going to write down because it's WEIRD and KIND OF TERRIFYING and she needs to think a lot more about whether it's an infohazard: what if the history being screened off is that dath ilan ALSO had magic and GODS and the Keepers didn't want anyone to know this?

...Seems weird that they would try to screen off the existence of dead-people-places and - maybe?? - prevent almost everyone from going there by instead cryopreserving them? Oh, right, and also Merrin didn't. (End up in a standard place-where-dead-people-go, that is, she ended up somewhere but if they're being honest with her then it's the place where living people are.) So it doesn't especially fit that dath ilan could ever have been exactly like Golarion, and maybe the entire hypothesis is just overactive pattern-matching on her part. She...is going to put it aside for now until she has more information to assess it, and try not to freak out excessively about it in the meantime. 

Now to reassess her priority list–

....Actually she should probably think some more about what kinds of things could go wrong if she just starts taking actions toward the obvious-to-her-right-now priorities. Merrin is fairly sure that there are lots of examples of this in fiction. If only she had read more of it. 

There's the 'unintended consequences of rapid change' side, that's obvious in principle but predicting the actual problems in advance is not. There was some plot she remembers where giving the aliens steelworking technology had...some kind of political consequences? There was clearly a model-of-the-causality there and Merrin did not mostly follow it (she might, possibly, have been skimming a lot of sections that weren't medical-related) but that can go on her list of Things That Might Happen. Which social equilibria are stable is affected by a lot of factors. - oh right that was the same novel where someone taught the aliens how to do reproductive control and that caused some kind of major social shift? She should find out if Cheliax has reliable birth control. 

Merrin is fairly sure those aren't the only concerns or even the only categories of concerns, but trying to predict any others just on general knowledge and, like, five facts about Cheliax is not working at all. She doesn't feel as though she has a generative model of it at all, just - a handful of half-remembered examples that other people who did have models came up with. 

It feels like the obvious solution is to sort out the translation issues and come to fully understand Cheliax's culture and then she'll be able to just talk to people like Antonio about her concerns and they can fill in the context she doesn't know and then she won't be trying to juggle all of the considerations ALONE and everything will be FINE.

Merrin...isn't actually sure if 'fully understanding Cheliax's culture' is a solution to as many problems as her emotions think it is, though, or if she just has some motivated reasoning to conclude that because she really really really really hates social awkwardness. 

Anyway. Priority list for problems that she should be directly working on, or knowledge from dath ilan that she should be trying to convey: actually still really unclear! 

Also Merrin is already feeling very tired and slightly despairing and sort of wants a nap, less because she's sleepy and more because she desperately wants a break from having thoughts. Ideally a fun break but she can't have everything. 

- really, Merrin's brain?

On reflection she should have flagged that sooner. Maybe when Antonio advised her to be careful about rushing headlong into solving problems, except that the way he said it was really nonspecific and also didn't land quite right with her. (She feels a little bad about being irritated with him, now.) 

But: it's not so much a matter of 'why shouldn't she have fun', it's that - she's in a legitimately terrifying situation with a whole lot of potential for things to go wrong that she didn't see coming, and also likely full of things she's going to find upsetting, and she's already having to put significant mental discipline into not freaking out. She can't maintain that indefinitely without having any leisure activities. This is a very predictable basic fact about Merrins.

The thing she needs to stay on an even emotional keel about all this isn't even rest, so much. If she wants to be at her best when she's working then she needs downtime, when she isn't responsible for tracking all the things that could go wrong all the time, and can have fun. 

Normally she would see her friends and play games, or have a girls' night and talk about their romantic lives, or plan a date with one of her boyfriends. She doesn't have those specific options here but...presumably...people in this world take breaks and have social lives and do leisure activities just for fun? She can get to know some people. Maybe some of the wizard students; they're younger than her, but that's fine, it's not like she has colleagues here yet. The language thing is awkward but they can understand her, and probably in a day with heavy use of flash cards she can learn to recognize a few dozen phrases in Taldane. (Merrin is basing this off her previous rate for learning new medical terms; it should if anything be easier if it's not a new concept, but she's never tried to pick up a conlang so she isn't sure how long that would take her.) Probably there are leisure activities in Cheliax that aren't as language-dependent, maybe something more athletics-based? Do people go swimming for fun? 

This is a next-couple-days priority, not a literally-top-of-her-list priority, but Merrin writes it down and adds it to her summarized list of topic-handles to bring up with Antonio or whoever talks to her next. (She feels only a very tiny amount of unendorsed self-consciousness about asking senior important Governance officials for help arranging her a social life. It's obviously in their interest to arrange a maximally functional Merrin.) 

...In the meantime, she doesn't feel quite ready to dive back into either Priority Reassessment or Anticipating Horrible Unintended consequences, so she will take a break for a few minutes, flop in the chair, nibble some fruit, and enjoy a quite pleasant and detailed fantasy about the date that she should be having right now, if not for an unlikely disaster with a plane. 

Antonio Agramunt has by now cast his own Detect Thoughts and seen how Merrin's thoughts on multiple occasions have gone terrifyingly precise and organized and directed by multiple concepts he doesn't understand, which the 7th-circle confirms he doesn't understand either, in order to arrive at systematic lists of questions about Lawful Good Cheliax, whose answers Merrin is clearly planning to relate to other unknown principles.  Which places Cheliax very much in the position of an illiterate village guilty of tax evasion that needs to suddenly make up consistent stories that can fool a literate tax collector.  One with a lot of accounting knowledge and experience in the big city, who doesn't know very much yet about how farms work, who doesn't particularly expect the tax evasion yet, but who is already drawing up organized lists of questions to ask.

Antonio tells the 7th-circle Security to relay upwards that Agramunt doesn't think he's competent to pull this off, Agramunt doesn't think his immediate superiors in the diplomatic corps are competent to pull this off either, Agramunt is not sure who is competent to pull this off but they need crazy stats and serious education, and whoever is taking over this operation might need to take over fast.

It's a slightly better look on his career record than just asking to be relieved himself, if he's right.

Merrin spends somewhat longer than she had intended fantasizing about volcano lair dates, which is...probably actually an indication that she's more mentally tired and overwhelmed than she had realized, and should probably not make any decisions until she's slept, unless they seem really incredibly overdetermined and also genuinely urgent. She should probably have a high bar for considering something 'genuinely urgent' though; even if she finds out about something that would be an immediate-response-with-a-significant-fraction-of-Civilization's-resources scale problem in dath ilan, most problems here will be long-term and would have continued to be if she hadn't arrived and also UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. 

(Anyone trained in Exception Handling is used to some amount of 'having to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, including uncertainty about the number and scale and importance of the unknown unknowns'. Anyone trained in Exception Handling also, generally, has quite a lot of reasons to hate doing this. To Merrin, it's always felt a bit like the metaphorical equivalent of balancing on a narrow wobbly bridge of uncertain structural integrity over a very deep pit, and it might be easier and less stressful to do this by avoiding looking down but that's a great way to miss all the warning signs that one is about to do something superficially clever yet really, really stupid in context. Merrin has been in training scenarios where she did things that were really stupid in context. It was embarrassing, which given who she is as a person was possibly more motivating than the actual simulated consequences. Freezing up and refusing to take actions would also be easier. Balancing on a metaphorical tightrope and looking down and trying to juggle a thousand different uncertainties, and deciding which of them she can ignore in order to simplify her reasoning enough to make any decisions at all, is the hardest possible way to do this. It's probably a lot easier if you're smart enough to be a Keeper but Merrin isn't even sure, maybe you just end up tracking ten or a hundred times as many complexities and it feels exactly like this.) 

She will write down some thing that she might want to decide to do later once she has any idea how to prioritize, and then that's probably all the organizing-her-thoughts she's actually up for in a single session. Merrin isn't sure she's ever spend this long trying this hard just to understand a confusing situation. Generally emergency response medicine does not actually give you time to do that. Which, Merrin is starting to conclude, possibly made her job EASIER because wow this is exhausting. 

Things she might want to do, in the medium term: 

- Show Cheliax how to build some specific technology. 

- Attempt to teach some of them whatever concepts are taught in dath ilani schools even to someone a standard deviation below median intelligence, if they don't have those as part of their schooling here. 

- Start a research project with one of their magical healers to see if there's a fruitful way to combine the two areas into super-medicine. (She sort of hopes it's that one. It would be really fun.) 

- Talk...to a god...? (Does NOT sound fun.) 

There is no way that's a complete list but she has time to add to it as she thinks of other options. She needs to get answers to a very long list of questions before she's going to feel ready to pick which item to put first, anyway. (Presumably in the end she's going to just ask their top Governance leaders what they think is most valuable, but she needs to be sure she can explain all the considerations first, and then also be tracking whether they're about to fall into one of the unintended consequences pits that she really needs to dig around in her memory to list more of.) 

Merrin takes another ten minutes just to close her eyes and picture relaxing scenes of sunsets and nature, which is the best way she knows to quickly reset her verbal-processing-loop, and then she gets up, sorts her now-rather-thick bundle of notes with the questions to ask and the translation-troubleshooting-ideas on top, and ducks out into the hall to inform Antonio or whoever she happens to see first that she's actually done organizing her thoughts now. 

Antonio turns aside from the conversation he's having with -

- a woman who has horns growing out of her skull, curving in to bracket her face; who has yellow eyes with slitted pupils clearly visible below her fancy forehead-wear; who aside from that is pretty enough that no reasonable amount of faceblanding could possibly let her walk around in public without her being a standards-escalating attractiveness infohazard; and who's dressed in a way that doesn't make her even slightly less hazardous -

- to inform Merrin seriously that this is Albe, a much more powerful economicmagic-user than himself, who's going to confirm that instant-movement economicmagic does in fact work on Merrin, and then try a few other things to see if they can figure out what's going on there.  Albe is a trusted highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultant-with-considerable-autonomy-and-authority (three syllables in Baseline) for Governance, and she has hopefully been successfully instructed not to be too sociallyweird at Merrin who just got here from another causal-continuum.

Antonio probably will not end up permanently in charge of Merrin's case.  He was just the person on duty in the negotiating-with-other-factions section of Governance when Merrin showed up, and it's been confirmed that this ought to escalate higher.  Antonio is however for now charged with setting up Merrin's immediate living quarters, and arrangements for anything else Merrin needs or wants tonight or the next morning.  Any requests there?

Wow. Okay. Merrin is not even very susceptible to the attractiveness kind of infohazard and is mostly asexual and that's still distracting. The horns do not really detract from the effect. It's so doompunk. 

Merrin introduces herself to Albe as politely and professionally as she can manage, though if Albe needed to be instructed not to be sociallyweird at her then really Merrin wishes Antonio would have taken her aside and warned her and told her how to not be sociallyweird back! 

"I'm not that fussy about living quarters?" she says to Antonio. "I mean, all else equal I sleep best in a cold room with heavy blankets, but it's fine if that isn't readily available here. ...I did have the thought, since we last spoke, that something I usually need in order to function at my best is - some off-work leisure time with friends - and it seems especially important that I'm at my best during my work time, given the high stakes here. I don't actually know what it does to my psychology if I don't have a social life and fun downtime. But obviously I don't actually have friends here yet. I would probably enjoy seeing the wizard students I met again, um, if they...were interested in that." She should not assume they want to befriend her or accidentally pressure anyone that would be rude. "Otherwise, um - what do people in Cheliax of around my age usually do for fun and to meet people?" 

"If your world is truly as sophisticated and advanced past Golarion as it's been suggested to me," Albe says in Baseline, speaking noticeably faster than Antonio does, not quite at the speed of Merrin's boyfriends talking to their intellectual peers, "I would expect you to find all of Egorian's entertainments to be paltry things.  The poor folk of Cheliax are among the wealthiest in the world, and their wealthy folk among the poorest; you will find no symphonies or plays on offer in this palace, I fear, at least not tonight, and I am probably better in bed myself than any sex-worker who would prowl this place rather than somewhere wealthier.  I suppose they might have a selection of books, two-dimensional-gameboard games, and economicmagic-users discussing finer points of mathematics.  Perhaps if instant-travel magic works on you I could take you to Absalom -"

"That sounds like a terrible idea pending a lot of Security review."

"- some other evening, I was about to say, Agramunt!"

What? Literally what about what she just said made Albe assume she was angling to hire a sex worker– okay fine that would be a halfway reasonable assumption for a lot of people, who are not Merrin, but that's based on information that Merrin hasn't actually given them. 

- it occurs to her belatedly, five seconds later, that that might be flirting in which case ????????!!!!!! how is she even supposed to respond. This is a trusted highly-paid-Security-cleared-consultant-with-considerable-autonomy-and-authority and Merrin was therefore expecting the interaction to go a particular way and this is NOT IT. She will respond by ignoring it. That seems least likely to cause a diplomatic incident or something. 

"...Yeah, I mean, I wasn't really expecting Cheliax to have movies or games nearly as sophisticated as dath ilan, I'm - I can't say I'm zero upset about it but it's not my top worry and probably wouldn't make top ten. I...don't normally think of myself as someone who would desperately miss hanging out with people and talking about the finer points of math but I sort of can't avoid it in dath ilan, maybe I would miss it if it stopped being everywhere all the time. I...think I can actually manage fine without the quality of fiction or games I'm used to as long as I have people to do things with, it just occurred to me that I might need to put some actual thought into meeting people socially." 

"We will not lack for people who'd wish to meet a traveler from another world - though it may take some work upon our parts to find those who would not bore you.  Contrary to what Albe seems to think, there are parties from time to time in the palace in Egorian; we could have one of those to welcome you here.  With a professional-musician."

Elaborate sigh.