It is! Though sometimes Sesati doesn't even have the vocabulary they want.

Understandable! They can make up compound words or loan some Tapap, whatever. The Sesati are not going to exhaust the enthusiasm of greens explaining science to aliens.

Well, in that case, Elu starts angling for information Sesat can immediately use or at least start laying the groundwork to be able to use soon.

Do they have germ theory? That's useful on an arbitrary tech basis!

They already had idea that something to do with uncleanness has something to do with the spread of illness but not the specific insight that the causative agents can multiply in the absence of further contamination.

Well, it's useful to know! On Amenta it has been discovered that microbes can infect people via water, open wounds, inhalation, mucous membranes, etc....

It's close to impossible to absorb an entire intro-to-epidemiology course at once with no particular scientific background and without having brought notetaking materials but Elu does not know enough to realize this and does know enough to realize how useful it would be to do it so she is going to try.

Nobody here is planning to stop her. Other people can move off to look at other stuff if they want.

Their unwillingness to split up outlasts her determination to learn infeasible amounts of new information, though one of the soldiers takes the opportunity to ask someone who isn't immediately in the process of explaining epidemiology what they do for fun.

This is a purple bringing the scientists lunch! "Oh - um -" He fiddles with his device for a while and very slowly reads out the translation it gives him. "I like to... watch... stories, and do a kicking balls game."

"Oh, like theater? Theater's when people pretend to be in a story and you watch."

"Yes, but theater saved for later watching."

"Huh! Like an illusion of a memory of a theater?"

"Like -" The purple frowns at the translation and then instead navigates to a video player app and shows a clip from a drama. Someone with goldenrod hair is saying something very emphatically to someone with lavender hair.

"Huh... an illusion that you can just tell is an illusion, you're not even trying to make it convincing..." But it could be convincing if they wanted it to be, he's pretty sure.

"It isn't to be convincing, it is to be stories."

"Yes. I can tell. Um, what kind of stories do you watch this way?"

"This one is about this person -" He switches away from the translation interface for a moment to point out the paused face of the purple in the drama - "and her life. She has romances and jobs and babies and things."

"I guess most people do."

"Yeah. There are a lot of stories, I just like this one. Probably everyone here watches different ones."

It is determined after some conferring that the greens who happen to be in this room at the moment are actually all caught up on something called The Epafka Laboratory but otherwise they mostly don't have shows in common.

"Maybe later you can watch Sesati theater. I don't have any on a magic thing like that to show you, but people do it."

"Maybe! The translation would need fastering."

"...You mean speeding up?"

"I guess," says the purple, looking helplessly at his translation app.

Before the locals are likely to get hungry - since they don't know about eating each other's food yet - they will be ushered back into the shuttle, and this time the blue will accompany them.

On the way down Elu takes the opportunity to talk about Sesati and Tapai etiquette with the blue.