Naxi can't tell if the alien - Damin Bales Sertes, boss of Rend and Las, Damin Bales Sertes, boss of Rend and Las - is baiting him intentionally, but either way, Naxi is being effectively baited.

"Happy to accompany you and be your guide for the next few days if you will keep explaining things about your society to me." He may be less curious than the average person but he does have an inner child.

"After a few days I may start asking for your signature on a promise of future payment, maybe. If it better suits you, though, feel free at any time after you reach the city to put up an ad - I'm sure many gross would be happy to take my place. Or feel free to ask around back up at the resort once we get back up there - y'all can stay at my place, although I will be mad if any of y'all try to, like, eat my soul or something, no offense." Yes, they'll try to eat Naxi's soul, definitely not succeed. Naxi is, after all, so able to defend himself . . . Naxi, don't be a pussy.

"About your questions. People here know how to build more precise clocks than quartz clocks, have for dozens of years, they're called electron clocks and - I'm not sure how much more precise they are, it's not useful in much more than philosophy-of-Nature investigations, but in any case people here know how to build clocks. My question wasn't how you count time, it was how you finagle picking the same time to set your clocks to a time that is useful and memorable to you specifically, that everyone else is also somehow picking. Sundials are natural for that if you don't have train schedules, at least as long as you and all the people who need to be using the same time system as you are all in similar locations?

Um. There's a word - actually two words you said - that aren't Vaxilal and don't sound like any language I know -" he totally butchers Damin's pronunciation of 'coordination' and 'province'. "Are those - not coming through the magic language filter of yours? Can you explain what they mean in other words? If kowodarinshin - ugh, I know that was terrible, sorry - is how you set your clocks, how does it work?

People here also know about the advantages of rare useful metals as currency. People used them, ever, like I implied. It's just - why would you use gold as your everyday cash when you could use something that's actually immediately useful to you? Tea goes bad, but not fast enough to outweigh that for most use cases! Especially not if you can buy profit-share contracts to store the bulk of your wealth in? When that took over, rare metals were almost completely driven out for more perishable, useful forms of currency. At least, if I'm remembering right."

'Province' of Sranam. Kosfor City. Damin Bales Sertes, boss of - boss of - Rind and Las? Murder, he'll never remember it all. Damin. Rind. Las.

"You . . . avoid putting trains in your cities because the air gets too smoky?" Naxi wants to be sure he was hearing that right. He is not much of a speculative fiction reader but he is pretty sure that fictional otherworldly sapients aren't usually like whatever that is. Well. Actually Tella's comic books had sounded like they got that weird.

"Maybe we can both drink coffee and tea for the same effect because this is all a cruel joke being played on us by immensely powerful emotional voyeurs from outside Space."

Damin. Rind. Las. He's long since forgotten which shorter wiggly guy was which.

"We should follow me up to my cabin now, if you want to do that?"

Okay. That makes sense. Probably if an alien came over to his place he'd want to know about them too.

"Thank you. I think it would make sense for me to get oriented, and then decide if I want to contract your services for a longer term more formally, or to part ways.

...we can't eat souls? Do you have souls? We use souls in our language metaphorically, to refer to utility-functions, but it's not...it's not a physical thing? Or is it a physical thing here?" In traditional Zmavlimu'ean mythology, the soul refers to a person's desires – the part which is present in Keepers but not in drones. 

He supposes 'to eat a soul' could refer to hypnosis? You can use it to make someone act on their desires less, which is part of his job as a therapist. He's not going to mention that, though. 

"The Imperial Standards Authority publishes a standard on time notation and on time zones, which everyone follows because it's beneficial if everyone does that? Like, if everyone notated time the same way, you'd only have to learn a single one, and you'd only have to account for that notation when building machines or writing instructions and such. I'm kind of surprised that you didn't do that – I would have predicted that you would have done that at your technology level: your communications technology is even better than ours, so transmitting information is easier for you."

Wow. They don't have the words. Okay. He can work with this.

"Coordination is...what I said earlier. Everyone, or everyone in a certain group, all deciding to do the same thing or to follow a rule because if everyone does that, they all benefit. A province is a specific place where everyone living there agrees to live by a certain set of rules, which differs on the province.

Yes, we coordinate on the way we set our clocks and notate time. You're not obligated to follow what the Imperial Standards Authority says, but most people do, because it has good standards, and you can be assured that many other people would also follow it.

Hm, I think the fact that gold doesn't spoil is the main thing? For example, if I was planning on having children, I'd need to give them an allotment, which means that the store of value has to be viable for at least two dozen years...hm...how long is your year here? Calculate for me," he orders. 

Ders will answer!

"I* will now count to six seconds. One...two...three...four...five...six. Each interval is one second. There are five dozen seconds in a minute. There are five dozen seconds in an hour. There are two dozen hours in a day. There are a gross days in a season. There are a little over gross days in a year."

* Bywayean lacks drone pronouns.

"Is that similar? Anyway, that's quite some time for us, and tea would definitely not last that long. At the very least, it would have lost all its flavor. Gold can last many dozen gross years without tarnishing – indeed, it exists in its metallic form naturally.

Yes! Bad air is very unpleasant to breathe in, because it's irritating, and also smells bad.

Maybe. My translation magic has been accurate so far – perhaps our biologies are more compatible than one would naively expect.

Yes, let's."

Damin et all will follow!

Naxi starts leading them up the slope.

"People do ever use gold, silver, and copper for money, when they need to store value for a long time - especially in the past when money was stored more in cash than in contracts, because there were fewer people you could contract with so you had less social redundancy. But tea is hard enough to make, and keeps for up to a year or so - at least, one of our years, ours are two gross six dozen and five days, are yours seriously almost exactly three gross? anyway, that second was correct, and our days are the exact same length, what the fuck - and mostly people value certain personal utility at-all, over the individual cash pieces you have on you, keeping for a very a long length of time. Psystim cash nowadays lasts for 5 years minimum, because it's designed that way. Tea manufactured as cash often gets thrown out, where gold wouldn't, but it's still better money due to being actually useful to you whether or not anyone else will accept it - so more people have, historically, accepted it."

The air is getting perceptibly smokier to Damin, but not to Naxi.

"Maybe y'all have a better sense of smell. I'd never thought about increased sensory sensitivity hampering industry, but I guess it makes sense."

"Yes. This was one of the reasons we switched to duodecimal. Hexadecimal is more natural to us – we have six aftendrils and ten fingers. It's unusual, but the universe is really big. Anyway, we only have a sample size of two, so who knows whether it's unusual or not.

Green tea will lose its flavor in a year, but black tea can last several years. In any case, yeah...five years would be way too short. You need to save enough money to be able to give an allocation to your children. 

Suppose I contract your services for a longer period. Would you accept gold then?

Yes, most likely. The air is smoky. I don't like that." 'How do you live like this?' he does not add.

"Me? I think I'd accept just about anything, from you, seeing as you're an alien. I was just thinking the train ticket sale-point guy probably would have orders to only take conventional cash. Now that I say this all aloud, though, I could just look up the exchange rate and trade some cash to you for your gold.

You can smell the smoke already? Whoa - this is stupid but - what else can you smell? Sorry it's - unpleasant?"

"Really? You can access such information just like that? Yes, I would like that."

What other things are salient smell-wise nearby? Damin can smell grass, the smoke, the drones, and Naxi – is there anything else that he might pick up?

This is the kind of montane nature reserve that keeps a whole food chain in it, all the way up to wolves - can he distinguish species by scent? There are also lots of fragrant flowers. Not really any nearby industry or human activity, apart from the power/info lines and train tracks, although the air is still sufficiently polluted at this distance to possibly smell ashier and more acidic than he's used to even apart from the smoke.

Damin oscillates his aftendrils and flicks his tongue, pointing away from Naxi, of course, that would be a little rude. Or flirtatious – neither meaning he wants to convey right now.

"I can smell grass and trees. And...flowers. I don't recognize any of them. There are scents that I would associate with...animals, on my world. I can smell myself, the...workers, and you. And the smoke. It's not just that it's smoky, it's also...acrid. Very unpleasant.

Is it like this just here or everywhere? Your technology is much better than ours, no? Don't you have some sort of...filter or something?"

"Whoa, that's really cool.   . . . I hope our atmosphere isn't harmfully different from yours. It would really suck if whatever deposited you here was like, 'Yeah, you can breathe, but you're gonna get lung disease'.   . . . You do have lungs specifically, right?

Our version of the meat suit both our species seem to share isn't really smell-based. At all. We can smell a few things, like fire, closer up than this, food, skunks - that's a type of little furry animal that releases really terrible-smelling spray from a gland when it's threatened, please don't tell me you have those - and, like, whether we're outside or in, but that's about it, unless someone builds something to smell really strongly on purpose. We're mostly sight- and sound-based creatures."

"I'd hope not. If it is, I don't think there's anything I can do about it, save for remaining indoors with fancy filters forever. Yes, we have lungs."

'Meat suit' is their word for body? What an unappealing way to describe it. Damin does not say that.

"We have animals which emit noxious sprays when threatened, but I'm not sure if we have that animal specifically."

What does Naxi's room look like?

Naxi will continue asking potentially-annoying questions of Damin until it becomes clear that he is annoyed, and then lead him all the way up the slope and past several other distant cabins until he reaches his own.

The air here is very smoky-smelling! There is some smoke still emerging from Naxi's chimney, although when they enter, it's clear the fire in his fireplace has mostly burned itself out.

Naxi's main room, the one with the fireplace, looks like a small, fairly barren exercise room with a bookshelf. There's a treadmill, a bench press, and a punching bag, which punching bag is suspended from the ceiling by one out of two heavy-duty clamps that were intended for guests to hang a hammock by. The bookshelf seems to contain mainly medical textbooks, and a couple equally thick adventure novels. There's a window A/C slash air circulation unit, and two doors to protrusions in the back of the cabin, which Naxi clarifies go to his bedroom and the bathroom.

There is no other apparent furniture.

Naxi gestures vaguely and nods at the whole setup, closing the door behind him and flinging the knotted plastic bag with all his nonburnable trash (that he still has to go back and deposit down at the station) into a corner. "I have an air mattress for guests, and I can set it up out here for tonight. Um. Are you, like, us, diurnal, sleeping for six to nine hours out of the day?"

A fireplace. Right, they're not sensitive to smells. Houses in Zmavlimu'e have underfloor heating so the smoke doesn't enter the house.

The room is giving 'the absolute depressing state of Konrad's apartment', what with there being no decoration or aesthetic unity at all. Someone else might call this a living room, but to him, it is just 'exercise equipment and appliances put in a room'. There is no life in it! He purses his lips to suppress any stronger reaction.

"What's an air mattress?

Yes, although diurnality is just a custom and a habit for us; we can change when we go to sleep and when we are awake. And that is the general time range, but it can be longer or shorter depending on how active we are. We can sleep up to a dozen hours a day or more if sick or did extremely physically tiring work, all the way down to two or three hours if all we did was relax and lie or sit down the whole day."

Naxi will go into his room, grab the air mattress, and show Damin! It's self-inflating; literally all Naxi has to do is press a button, and the mattress, fit for one person with a little extra around the edges to be safe, will whir loudly and start puffing itself up. Once fully inflated, it stops.

Naxi plops down on it, demonstrating that it sinks in a little but not far, then gets up and tosses a pillow and several blankets on top.

"Try it!"

It's actually okay for something that's not soft all the way through. It's not absolutely ideal, but it's reinforced with several internal air pockets and cushioned so as not to hurt your back over an extended camping trip or whathaveyou even if you have a bad back.

Amazing! He will be appropriately impressed.

How big is it? Will it be long enough to fit Damin?

"I've heard of people making rubber containers which are filled with water to be used as mattresses, which find some use in the very hot tropical places. Nothing like this though. Certainly, none of them are self-inflating."

It's long enough to fit Damin, because the designers were as paranoid as is normal for designers on Byway! But only just.

Naxi starts flipping through his medical library. "Do you want to read some of these?" He shows Damin covers - diagrams of dissected human bodies, mainly. "The ones that go heavier on medtech might help you with context as to what's commonplace here in terms of technology, or at least give you the right questions to ask me. I'm an EMT," he adds.

We love paranoia. Damin is very happy to see that it fits.

Damin winces, initially, but sees the medical books. 

"What's an EMT? And yes, I would like to take a look. Thank you." What's the content inside the books, skimming them?

"Someone who gets called to go out and triage people who've had some sort of medical event that they can't currently handle themselves, or get themselves to a hospital about. What . . . do people where you're from do, when something like that happens?"

Naxi gives Damin a book on surgical technology, a book on staying prepared for medical emergencies, and a book on human anatomy and physiology just for variety, and keeps scanning the books on the shelf.

A random page in the surgical technology book gives an extensive list of different shapes of needle tips used in suturing, and contains a detailed flowchart for deciding which tip shape to use (several currently used tip shapes should never be used, according to this author, but he does give the arguments for them before discarding them.) There's a reference to the composition of medical-grade stainless steel (which if he flips to that, is an alloy of iron and chromium with the rest of the composition having some degree of freedom) and a list of nonstandard materials for surgical needles including titanium. If he then flips the page, there's an even more exhaustive list of materials that can be used for professional-grade medical sutures, divided into absorbable and non -. The absorbables include collagen and a *whole* bunch of artificial organic compounds; the non-absorbables include silk, steel, and a whole bunch more artificial organic compounds. Relative prices are listed in this table; author seems to be working with the assumption that his reader will be able to buy all of this stuff in prepared form on the free market.

On a random page in the preparedness guide, the author is giving advice for avoiding motion sickness as a passenger in a moving vehicle. There's a little illustration of the vestibular nuclei and their I/O and some explanation of why motion sickness is a thing. Then he lists the mechanisms of action, and pros and cons, of several medications - diphenhydramine is cheapest if you don't anticipate much of a problem; there's a more expensive and reliable behind-the-ear patch, but for that one he warns about more severe side effects, including possible loss of temperature regulation, and it's going out of fashion anyway because - and he goes on to list even more effective stuff. If you can't get pharmaceuticals, the primary thing is to not move your eyes or head around too much, this actually will help.

A random page in the human anatomy and physiology book is a heavily labeled and color-coded illustration of Lis's Circle and surrounding brain structures.

"That very rarely happens. People almost always go out with..." he can't say 'drone', it will come out in Standard Imperial..."their workers or attendants. Attention can be given immediately if they get injured. Attendant workers usually receive first aid training. People don't go to the hospital for acute injuries, generally. If you're bleeding out, the nearest hospital is likely to be hours away, and you'd die before you got there. People only go to the hospital for diseases, or for physiotherapy or psychotherapy."

Damin will graciously accept the books with both hands.

Damin will show the needle tip page to Naxi. "I'm confused. This author says that these tip shapes shouldn't be used, but implies that they still are. Why is that?" He has several hypotheses, including: 'the author is stupid', 'other people are stupid', or the strongest one, 'people here have never heard of what a standard is and have just been doing their own thing since forever'. He's not going to say those, only think about them.

Wow! Their materials science is way better than Zmavlimu'e's. For what it's worth, their lack of standardization sure has made them have many many materials to work with. Konrad would have loved these...

The prices are unsurprising to him. Of course you want to be informed about prices of medical supplies! Where else are you going to buy them from? Hospitals have their own pricing scheme, but you want to buy some supplies for yourself too.

Huh. He hasn't heard of motion sickness, but maybe that's because they don't have any vehicles that go very fast. Presumably at their tech level they have things that go faster than trains?

The illustration of Lis's Circle is beautiful and it's the sort of thing he would keep in his art collection. A little too gruesome to display openly, though – he doesn't like animal biology drawings that much, even though they're quite popular in Zmavlimu'e.

Naxi leans over the book and reads the section Damin is pointing out.

". . . He thinks he knows better than the cumulative effort that's gone into producing the current needle-tip distribution. He could be right. He could be wrong. I myself don't know enough about this particular thing to even begin to form an opinion.

Do you not ever encounter people who think they can beat society at something? But then how would your culture move forward . . . ?"

"We do. I just wanted your opinion on it because like, no coordination. If someone said that 'X is better than Y, which was the default' and showed intriguing but significant evidence to prove it, but not enough, people would probably invest in him to do more research, or the government will conduct an Imperial Inquiry on it. If more evidence shows that X is indeed better, then basically everyone will switch to X. Well, assuming it's a strict improvement. Usually it's not, and there are tradeoffs, which will let Y continue to persist."

Damin makes a thoughtful noise.

"Where do you buy or get food? Oh, and water."

Absently: "There's a reverse-osmosis faucet at the kitchen sink, the supply train brings our orders tomorrow, and there's a self-checkout shop with lots of basics down at the station."

Something about all that Damin said has tripped a critical threshold; Naxi is spurred to Think, beyond his customary level of deliberation.

After half a minute: "I really want to understand how your world works, firsthand from you, and not have to hear about it from my anthropologist moirail-once-removed in a month. But it's becoming clearer and clearer that I won't understand the first thing about it without the kind of deliberate dialogue that feels wasted if it isn't recorded in some form, for other people to use. Is recording that kind of interview - with me, rather than the person in society who is most qualified to conduct it - something you're interested in? Of course I'd also be game to do the reverse interview, where you grill me about Byway and I elaborate as much as I can."

"What's reverse-osmosis? And thank you. I don't have any money yet, but is there like, a catalog I could look at?" What is the food situation.

Moirail? His language install is giving him...like a romantic relationship, but it's not romantic? So friendship? But there's something else behind it. 

"What's a moirail? 

Will the interview be distributed? 

Why do you feel you're not qualified to conduct the interview?

I'm not really interested in recording you save for having my...workers write down information you tell me so I don't forget it."

Naxi pulls out his device and looks up how reverse osmosis works. "I'd honestly forgotten how it was different from regular filtration, but - according to the TechBeacon page, the difference is that it uses chemical-scale potential differences instead of mass, physical-scale ones. So it can catch smaller particles, I think? I'm not sure, though." Naxi makes a motion to put the device away; then something seems to occur to him. "Do you want to look at the article?

Hold up, how -  " how do you not have the concept of a moirail??? Naxi is experiencing vertigo " - sorry, it's just - you are an alien, that is the sort of thing that would be true of aliens in Tella's -  my moirail's, incidentally - favorite comic book series - but, damn. Um, does your species - well, first, does your species reproduce sexually?

I could conduct the interview, I'm just not anywhere near the most qualified person to do so on this planet and I expect you'll have at least a slight aversion to giving such an interview more than once, and I also expect you'll want the interview or interviews you do give to be as high quality as possible." The fantastical absurdity of the situation smacks Naxi upside the face once again.