:Yeah, she grew up there and her sect is there. But she married grandfather, so she lives here now. She taught me a bit of the language, hopefully enough to get on if I ever met anyone from there or travelled there.: 

:That must have been some culture shock for her. I suppose we have that in common, in a way.:

Hey, wait, does he...

...he prods again at the semantic-bleedover / mysterious-alien-translation-magic, to double-check, but he doesn't seem to have gotten any other languages. Normal semantic bleedover shouldn't be that limited, but he already knew this wasn't normal semantic bleedover.

Well, Marcus has some Wastelander and Minaiyu has some technical jargon, and hopefully they can translate for each other if need be.

:She doesn't seem to have been troubled by it. That's the sort of thing adventurers have to deal with.:

The mental image of a homesick Adiaratou hugging a giant bee certainly contrasts very strangely with the memory of her sparring.

:Do you think the chief weaver would be awake yet, or should we read some of that book now, or something else?:

:Chief weaver perhaps overstates the position, but my aunt does a lot of the weaving in the household these days?:

:Relatively chief, if you prefer. Council member, perhaps.

"Wise elder" weaver, I think you put it?:

("These days" strikes him as ominous, albeit in the mundane way where the previous elder weaver probably departed from old age or something. He decides not to pry.)

:Wise elder, sure. Don't call her that, she'll think you're buttering her up. Call her "auntie". We can go talk to her before we get stuck into whatever the day?: 

:Noted.:

:Yes, that sounds good.:

:Okay.: 

Marcus will get them out of his cell, then, and go looking for his aunt.

He does not have to go far to find a middle-aged woman who is sitting on the edge of a cell, setting up a spinning wheel in the morning light and watching over some children as they peer at the wax combs and try not to disturb the bees. 

"Greetings!" 

"Good morning. What brings you here this morning? I think my husband was looking for you." 

"My guest was hoping to talk to you about some matters relating to weaving, where I wasn't able to give him adequate answers." 

"Well alright then. What do you have to ask about..." She pauses. "I don't believe I have your name?" 

(He makes some mental notes on the spinning wheel.)

"Minaiyu, auntie.

Um, if it's alright, I wanted to ask about some cloth for making protective gear? For blunting the impact of air-borne contagions, smoke, and perhaps some other miasmas."

He could be 40% less cursed by enchanted dust clouds for all he knows.

"The design my people taught me calls for a pair of cloths, about like this," he gestures the 25x15cm rectangle again, "with one woven horizontally and the other vertically, so that they lie perpendicular when layered together. The thing is that it needs to be as tightly woven as practical: the tighter it is, the better the filter. We might even want to include a layer of felt, if it's thin enough to breathe through.

It'd also need some cloth strips that we can use to tie the mask on once I've sewn it together, but density isn't important there and there might already be some repurposable rags and such around. But Marcus was saying that he doesn't think there's much call for especially tightly woven cloth around here normally, so I'm not sure how big an ask that is."

He is very nearly certain that there exists a locally more polite way he could have said all this, but he has no idea what it is. It probably involves some particular twitch of your eye muscles or something.

(It's a pretty nice spinning wheel, considering it was made with a bare minimum of wooden parts and without the aid of a lathe, and compact enough to not block the entirety of the walkway.) 

Helvia nods along with the idea. 

"Nonsense deary, I won't have anyone walking around with a mask made of rags and scrap cloth. I'll have to put something together specially. Felt thin enough to breathe through shouldn't be too hard if I make it specially. Good beekeeper colours, and I know you young men will want something nice and intimidating. Yes, yes. A nice project to keep me from going stir-crazy." She trails off into thought. 

"Oh, but I'm going to have such trouble getting all this year's wool spun up before the shearing. You kids don't do half as much spinning as you should, you know. Why, when I was your age, I was spinning half the year's wool along and giving my poor old grandmother a good long winters rest." 

He hasn't actually told her how old he is, but he supposes his awkwardness is probably coming across as young.

"...I guess it does make sense for combat armour to look intimidating? But not all armour is for combat, and in particular Marcus was actually concerned that wearing a mask when just walking around a city might come across as too spooky, in nearby cultures.

Maybe we should have one that's aiming for intimidating and one that very much isn't, so we can switch between them as the situation calls for? It would be good to have a spare, in any case."

The subtext here is both sufficiently obvious as to carry across worlds, and fails reasonably safe if she didn't intend this as a trade offer.

(It actually comes across to him as more rude than if she had explicitly framed it as a trade offer. Is she annoyed that he didn't bring up an offer of spinning help without prompting? He wasn't sure what a good thing to offer would be!

Well, hopefully they can forgive each other their respective rudenesses, regardless.)

"I'd love to help, if--"

'If I can fit it in around Marcus's schedule' is ruder to her and 'although I'd have to negotiate with Marcus about the scheduling' is ruder to Marcus, but overall the first one is probably worse.

"--although I would have to negotiate with Marcus about the scheduling. The individual quirks of local spinning wheels will need a bit of getting used to, but I do have--" she's not going to know why it isn't obvious that he'd have spinning experience "--even with the cloth-making machines my people have, I do have some experience with spinning wheels, in part to be ready for situations like this one."

As for the other part, he is biting his tongue about how cool fibrecrafts are until he can figure out a way of putting it that doesn't come across as making light of her work.

(His happiness at the prospect of helping with spinning does appear substantially genuine, though.)

"Aren't you a dear? Yes that would be a great help. And I'm sure we can make something nice and cute for you if that's what you prefer." 

He is feeling very aware that he has only been speaking this language for one day. He thinks the term "cute" could be patronising in many contexts, but he isn't entirely sure whether this is one of them?

"Thank you, auntie.

I think the three of us will need to workshop the appropriate impression to give and how best to achieve that with the available materials. Wearing a mask is...unmarked, where I come from, and also we don't really have the distinct social category of 'adventurer'? So the subtext at play in this society is very foreign to me, and I'm not a good judge of it."

"Well I'm sure it'll work out fine." She says in a faintly confused tone of voice. 

"I certainly hope so," he says, with a smile that does not reach their eyes.

"Probably the discussion of exact details should wait for another time, though? I don't want to keep you from your current plans."

(And they will have plenty of time while spinning to talk about local cloth-making setups and whether he knows of any feasible improvements to them, he expects.)

"Oh yes. I'm sure you have lots to do." 

Hmm, yes, in hindsight he can see why she might interpret that statement as projecting. He wonders how you actually go about conveying "not wanting to disrupt someone's schedule".

"What would be the best time for you?"

"Oh you know. Any time there's enough daylight to work by. My eyes aren't what they used to be." 

...right then.

Well. Doing it immediately would still be rudely disruptive of her current task, even if the rest of her day is open and even if the present timeslot was open when she woke up.

And Marcus said he also had no specific plans in mind for today...

"...would after breakfast work for everyone?"