He can start wherever she thinks it makes sense to start. Shouldn't be that much harder than learning Ereli, right?

It's pretty easy, for a language - without a spoken version of the language to encode phonemes of, the glyphs are all little drawings, and there's usually a pretty clear logic to how a drawing relates to the concept it's referencing; even the ones that refer to things that can't be drawn representationally have a fairly consistent 'grammar' to how they're laid out.

The book of general-use words is the shortest of the set, and she gets through it fairly quickly. She can probably get about a third to half of one of the others done tonight; she's inclined to start on the crafting book, but perhaps one of the others would be more useful to him.

...Maybe the one with words that have to do with interpersonal relationships.

Sure, no problem.

The vocabulary in this book covers general relationship categories like friends, neighbors, parents, children, and romantic partners; they also have terms for households and heads-of-households, the people who claim the territories that households are in and are ultimately responsible for keeping them running, and household-member, which can refer to both crafters and animals - the chickens and pop-runner, the black-and-blue themed crafter he met earlier, are both members of her household, but the local crows and wildlife aren't, even though they come through regularly, because they're doing their own thing. There's also a concept of guests; being in a household's territory as a guest is like a much less intense version of being a member of that household, where the household is responsible for your well-being while you're there, mostly in the form of helping with freezing-instinct problems but also including things like offering food and other amenities during longer visits.

With inter-crafter relationships covered, the book switches to giving vocabulary related to the freezing instinct; from the explanations he can gather that crafters have a real problem with interacting with things they perceive as owned by another person without that person's direct permission, including not being able to enter each other's territories or move around within them without an escort. The color-coding is related to this; it makes it clear who owns something, or who the owner intended to use it. There's a concept of public-use objects, and she notes that a grey like she used on parts of his cottage is the usual sign of that around here, though she hears that other places do it differently.

As she goes to start on the next glyph, pop-runner shows up with a tray of food and asks to be let in to drop it off.

...Okay, definitely not just agerah, not that he really thought they were.

...Is this one species? He can sort of see how that would work.

He looks to her to figure out if he's supposed to let them in.

She goes to get the door herself and brings the tray in - dinner is scrambled eggs, roasted corn, purple asparagus, and a slice of chestnut-flour cake topped with dried cherries - and then goes to eat her own dinner, pausing first to clarify that she probably won't be back tonight but he can use the call bell if he needs anything.

He won't need her tonight anyway, probably.

He probably shouldn't just eat their food, if these people are all one species that he doesn't belong to and just think he's one of them. On the other hand, humans can eat a superset of things all other people he's ever met before can eat, and the foods from before were fine. Also where else is he going to get anything to eat. Also it's really good! Would poison taste this good? 

It doesn't cause him any obvious problems, at least!

He's left alone for the rest of the night; the bed nook turns out to be quite comfortable, if he turns on the fan or leaves the sliding door that closes it off open a bit for ventilation. Pop-runner returns in the morning, with breakfast: two hard boiled eggs peeled and sliced into wedges, an apple tart with maple syrup and chestnut crumble, and a small bowl of mixed melon chunks with finely chopped mint on the side; he wasn't sure if Val would like the mint, some people don't. He'll take last night's dishes while he's there, if Val would like, and he passes along the message that his head-of-household expects to be by in a couple of hours and asks if Val needs anything in the meantime.

He does not need anything before that and will try to make himself presentable. He's still missing anything to hold a ponytail with and it still doesn't really matter much; since he has the luxury of so much time to prepare this morning he bathes and puts his hair up in a French twist.

The mint is fine. The melon is edible. The whatever that is with syrup is cloying and he doesn't finish it. He recognizes eggs! Eggs are nice and definitely not poison.

His host is a little late, and apologizes when she gets there - she got called away from her chores to handle someone's accidental burn. Was his evening all right? Is there anything to address before they get back to the dictionary?

His evening was fine and there isn't anything to address.

They can get back into it, then. (She knows it's probably getting annoying that she keeps asking him that kind of question, but since he can't just tell her, it's that or possibly let something go unaddressed, which is obviously worse.)

They were near the end of the section about public-use objects; there are also ways to refer to group-owned ones and abandoned ones (the example sentence describes a suspected-abandoned territory marker as metonymy for a suspected-abandoned territory), then pivots to talking about things-people-do - they don't actually seem to have the concept of careers, and there's no mention of anything related to formal paid work or for that matter money, but productive things like hunting, building robots, breeding animals, and maintaining public utilities like pebbleclinkers (complicated machines that do things with information; she doesn't understand them well enough to give a better description than that, though she does mention that she got this dictionary from the library's pebbleclinker) are mentioned, along with various hobbies, including producing various kinds of art and participation in recreational groups for things like writing or playing games, and going on journeys to do things like picking up skills, answering questions, or collecting things. Farming isn't mentioned, though breeding and crafting plants and animals specifically to change their traits and breeding animals for food are; building construction is only mentioned in the context of making robotic walking ones; government, law enforcement, and retail shops aren't mentioned at all.

It's really annoying that he still hasn't run into a generic word for "magic" or anything useful for describing where he came from.

Fortunately, he can now attempt to ask. He kind of painstakingly consults his notes and attempts to construct the question, "What kind of thing is crafting?"

It's... a thing you do? To creatures with minds, that's what the communication is, or to living things, that's how she healed him and grew the food, or to crafting material, to make things that aren't alive, or to other objects, to make crafting material. It's not really more specific than that; like how uh... fishing, you could say fishing was a type of gathering or trapping, but walking is just walking, it's a kind of movement but that doesn't tell you much, crafting is like walking and not like fishing.

It's confusing that he asked that, and really everything about him and crafting has been confusing so far - if he doesn't want to take the time to read the dictionary of crafting-related words, maybe it'd help for her to write out what she's been confused about and read it to him, and then he'll have those words specifically?

Yeah, that seems like a good idea.

All right, so...

• At first she thought he wasn't communicating normally because of his freeze instinct. That's been looking less likely as she's seen him do more things, but some people do have really specific problems like that, so she wasn't going to rule it out, but at this point she's thinking it's not that.

• The obvious other way for it to happen is brain damage, but he doesn't have brain damage, she already checked that.

• All the less-obvious communication-related issues she's heard of would leave him unable to communicate by writing, too.

• She's confused about his physical differences, too, and it's just barely possible that it could be related to that. She's not sure how or why someone would end up with a dozen mostly minor and obscure aspects of their physiology working differently from the rest of the species in ways that are mostly completely functional, but it could be a side effect of someone doing highly unethical genecrafting to a fetus, and that could maybe in theory have not being able to communicate as a side effect, except, like... that's not how genecrafting works, she's pretty sure. (She can write about the physical differences she noticed if he wants, but there wasn't anything alarming.)

• His non-communication crafting is also weird, - it looked like he wasn't able to craft the knife into the shape he wanted and had to do it by hand, and she doesn't know that he can't change the color of crating material but it's weird that he didn't. On the other hand he did obviously change the crafting material's stiffness or he wouldn't've been able to use it as a knife at all. She doesn't know what to make of that; it'd be less weird if he hadn't been able to craft a knife at all, that kind of freeze-instinct problem is very common.

• His being malnourished is very strange and could be crafting-related, if he's not able to craft himself food; that's actually the most obvious explanation of it.

• He also hasn't crafted his clothing clean, which may just be personal preference but she's including it here in case it's related.

• It's also weird that he didn't have any crafting material besides his clothes with him when he came in; she's been assuming he had a walking stick or something that he dropped in the fall, but she'll mention it for completeness' sake.

...If his magic is a strict subset of crafting he absolutely needs to keep them from finding that out, but it didn't seem like it was, before, it seemed like doing his hair startled one of these people... but his hair is up now and she's not startled. Maybe she assumes he tucked some pins in invisibly.

He'd like to do something casual-seeming, here, so that it's not obvious he thought he was communicating anything important if he turns out to be wrong about what crafting can and can't do, but he can't think what would work for that.

He picks up the writing slate and then sets it back down two inches up in the air.

.....what. That's not... a thing that can happen? What?

She peers concernedly at him and pokes it with a tentacle, then sweeps underneath it to check for invisible bits holding it up.

It cannot be swept underneath. There is definitely some kind of invisible bit holding it up.

Okay that's less utterly baffling, you can craft something to be partly invisible, it's just that changing the shape and the color so perfectly and so quickly without disturbing the rest of the object in any visible way isn't really a thing people can do.

Which is probably the point, either he's demonstrating something about how he can craft or something weirder is going on. Is she on the right track?

Okay, now it seems safe to go ahead and write that he can't craft.

Okay so that's definitely 'something weirder is going on'. Well, first things first, is he okay in the short term, is there anything he needs?

He's fine and just hoping get started as quickly as possible on figuring out what people here will want from him so he can do that and pay people back for helping him.

She puzzles over this message for a minute, until it occurs to her that trade is potentially a solution to not being able to craft, if his neighbors are amenable enough. It'd take some unusually sociable neighbors to source all his meals that way, as he seems to have maybe found out, but it's a clever approach.

Trying to draw inferences - she thinks he's either not from around here or kept to himself up to now, and he's at the age of wanting his own territory and trying to figure out how to make it work; he's had the clever idea about it but not knowing the common writing system is a problem with that, you need to be able to communicate with people somehow to trade with them. Plus, as he says, he'll need to figure out what to trade and who to trade it with. She's not sure how that leads to falling down bluebriar's cliff, but that's kind of beside the point, most likely. Is she on the right track? (She crafts a second writing board to write this out for him.)

She is on the right track!

He also isn't sure how that leads to falling down bluebriar's cliff. It seems like maybe someone somehow caused him to be in a different place very quickly? In the place he came from, they use a different writing system - here's a sample - and there are twelve kinds of thing-that-crafting-and-his-thing-are-types-of so people trade a lot.