They're on a gravel road, on a mountainside.

The air is clear, fresh, and temperate.   . . . But it smells of ash?

A string of towers strung with telephone wire hugs the road at a short distance. A little ways down-slope (maybe a dozen gross meters) there's a grey-brick-and-wooden building, smaller than a barn but not by much, overlooking a twin pair of train tracks that shoot off past distant mountains in either direction.

Up-slope, maybe another dozen gross meters - they can't quite see, it's somewhat obscured by a drop-off, but it looks like a few cabins are up there, each separated from the others by at least its own dozen gross meters or so. How many, they can't tell, but there are at least a couple pretty distant ones.

Even though it's midmorning and warm outside, smoke is evidently rising from one of the nearer chinneys. That's where the ash smell was coming from.

Blech. The ash smell is very unpleasant, and he kind of wants to stop his rhythmic-tentacle-emergence-and-retraction-to-detect-scent-instinct. But he doesn't want to do that, because he has to orient in What Is Apparently The Afterlife?

The two drones pulling them along have stopped. Understandable. 

Building with locomotive tracks down, and cabins upslope. Such chimneys would never fly in the cities: you would get sued into oblivion. They've put a lot of effort into building chimney designs that don't make everyone have to breathe in awful ash.

Hm. Where to go. Downslope seems more promising – he thinks that that building is some sort of train station, and that he could get a train somewhere. Somehow.

...maybe they'll take Imperial rupnu? He still has his wallet.

He orders Rend and Las to keep going downslope, but at a leisurely pace, rather than the brisk walking pace before. 

How does the landscape change as they continue on the path? Does the scent of the air change?

The air becomes gradually less smoky as they descend.

There's an area of gravel next to the two-story train station (the train station and the area of gravel are both this side of the tracks). There's an automobile parked on it, a truck with big tires supporting a closed rear box and a simple, but not un-aerodynamic-looking, one-seater cab.

Up close, the train station (?) is dignified, if simple. The windows - four on each floor, this side - are big and clean, offering good views inside - at least, the two (both on the ground level) that aren't obscured by heavy black curtains drawn shut. Each window appears to open into a separate, small room, about the size of a large bedroom. One of the unobscured rooms contains a plastic folding table propped against the wall, an ergonomic wobbly-stool with a bright red seat, a mini-fridge (plugged in), and a lean-and-tough, but not fancy, motorbike - all leaned up against one wall, like the room is more storage than habitation. The door from the little room to the interior of the building is closed.

The second-floor room with the uncurtained window looks empty.

The outside of the building has big varnished-wooden-looking double doors, with one-way glass reflecting outward.

There's no sound or sign of right-this-minute human activity in the vicinity.

Thank goodness. It is very pleasant to have clean air.

Ooh, an automobile. He correctly identifies that it is one, but doesn't recognize the make. Automobiles aren't really all that popular – most cities ban them because of the smoke, and if you want to travel in the rural areas, taking the steam locomotive is faster and cheaper. If you have to travel over rough ground, drones are better – they won't get stuck.

He has the two drones park the carriage off the side of the road, leaving Las to look after it. He brings Rend and Ders along with him, walking a little behind him.

Okay...the curtains are definitely not train station-like. And the table with seat and refrigerator and motorbike are also definitely not train station-like. He's going to guess that this is actually the house of someone who doesn't care much about aesthetics and wants to be Left Alone. In that case, he should probably leave. People in rural areas can get Territorial about their property – more so than usual – and he does not want to deal with that today: he might be inadvertently trespassing. Although they didn't bother to mark their land with fencing, or signs, so perhaps not? If you want an Imperial court to respect your right to use violent force against people who refuse to leave your property, you have to like, clearly mark that it's private and not public land.

The trio are going to walk to the double-door, whereupon Damin will knock thrice, but not say anything.

There isn't any answer.

There are, however, little plaques on the doors just below the windows; the one on the left door reads "SES KIVRJ RESORT | KEYHOLDING GUESTS WELCOME ANY HOUR".

The one on the right, which is in much smaller lettering, says that an attendant will be available to assist with any difficulties over a two-hour window that - and then the plaque lists out a rotating schedule that is in no time system Damin is familiar with, hours apparently translated into several different systems for the reader's convenience, and dates demarcated by the phase of the moon. The moon is currently out, and waxing crescent (judging by the sun's angle it seems to be morning, or late afternoon, or Arctic noon but these are mountains and the snow caps look pretty high up?) but unless he can tell exactly how many days it's been since it was last full, he won't know when to expect the attendant.The plaque then lists a local radio frequency in cycles-per-second and a Net server (addressed 3 ways) that are listening for customer calls, and 8 differently-formatted call-tags by which a resort attendant can apparently be contacted depending on the caller's chosen phone company.

Next to the door, affixed to the wall, there's a map showing the location of 8 other Ses resorts, and a few other resorts, along this two-dozen-mile stretch of track.

There's a keypad next to the doors, and a keyhole on one of them.

Oh, so it's like, a chalet or something. Who would go to this resort – it looks terribly drab...not important right now.

The more pressing issue is that he doesn't know what the time is. This is not the way to tell time in the Imperium. The Imperium is sane and has a single way to tell time, with adjustment for time zones. The differences between the formats are big enough for him to see that they are not time zone differences.

Which would imply that he wouldn't be able to read it...except he can.

Internal screaming.

He is going to, for a moment, act like a drone and wrap that screaming part of him with a neat red bow and push it away. That present can be opened later.

It is definitely not the arctic unless whatever planet he's landed on – he's not even sure whether he's on Zmavliterdi – has scorching hot tropics. Actually, it's definitely not Zmavliterdi because there is only one sun in the sky. 

The internal screaming is becoming harder to suppress. He grabs Rend's arm and starts stimming with it, squeezing the drone's forearm.

Radio frequency? He has no radio. What's a 'Net'? Based on context, it's another way to contact customer service. Same with the 'phones'. 

At least anyone who's here is not going to be the landowner, so the chance of him getting chased away violently simply for stepping into the vicinity is much reduced. Hm, what weapons does he have, anyway? He has an old pistol, a whip, and a knife. Not a lot. He should have taken Konrad's advice to be better armed when he goes out. Sigh.

Hm. What options does he have? He can try to go back to the carriage and travel along this path, to see if he runs across anyone. Alternatively, he can try disturbing people here to see if any of them are occupied and can help him.

The prospect of disturbing aliens is mortifying, so he's going to get back on the carriage and see if he encounters anyone along the path. He can try the 'disturb aliens' strategy as a last resort at the last resort if he doesn't come across anyone.

Unfortunately for Damin if he was hoping to get somewhere else, he'll notice as soon as he looks that the gravel road stops clean at the station building and its parking lot. If he wants to go anywhere else, it looks like he'll have to follow the tracks.

There are strips of gravel flanking and separating the two sets of tracks, but not wide enough to fit his carriage - if he wants to take the carriage up or down the track, at least one of the drones will have to walk between one of the sets of rails, or else the going is going to be very rough indeed.

Just great. If he was sure that the tracks were made for drones, then he'd happily go on them, but they could be steam locomotive tracks. Indeed, this world looks more advanced in transportation technology, what with the sleek looking automobile, so it's more likely to be some sort of locomotive. He would prefer not to get squashed under one. He supposes he could have Ders stay back and be on the lookout (and hear-out) for an incoming train, but the point of having a carriage is so that you can relax and take in the scenery. He's going to discard that train of thought.

Okay, back to the door. The keypad and call-tags both use numbers, right? If so, he's going to try one of them on the keypad. Does that work? He'll try it only once. He suspects that only controls the door and doesn't do any calling, and he also suspects that Something Bad will happen if he tries an incorrect passkey combination too many times. That's just good design.

The Something Bad may be Something Good, in the sense that it's likely to raise some alarm that causes someone to attend to him. The Bad part is that their prior will be hostile and might try to shoot or detain him, and he really does not want to be shot or detained.

He's going to circle the building to look into the windows. Are there people there now? If not, he's going to knock repeatedly on one of the windows, one that looks like it's a living room or some sort of central location in the house. 

A signal light above the keypad flashes red for a few seconds, and then the pad is quiescent.

Only one set of curtains on the front of the building (which has similar double doors to the back) is pulled back. It has exactly the same dimensions as the other two unobscured rooms from the back side, and contains a clothing dresser made of dull black plastic, a little box fronted with mesh that Damin may or may not recognize as a radiation space heater, a couple 2-dozen-packs of toilet paper, stacks of cardboard half-crates containing yellow cans labeled KIDNEY BEANS UNSALTED in little black lettering, and some other miscellaneous plastic bottles of soap and junk on the dresser.

Nothing will happen as a result of any of his knocks.

He startles momentarily with the eerie red light, but fortunately resists making noise.

He does not recognize it as a space heater and will think it's some sort of cage or container. Also, wow. For a resort room, that is a very depressing looking room...oh! It's the drone's room, of course, what with the organ meats. Wait, no. Oh. Kidney beans are legumes. 

He's half tempted to knock some more, but he thinks he's going to stop now. What to do. Hm. He's neither hungry nor thirsty, as of now, and it doesn't look like the sun (singular!!) is going to set anytime soon. Should he just wait?

He'll try both screaming and knocking.

"Help! Help! Help!" He tries to say the Imperial special phrase to indicate a true life-threatening emergency. It is not a criminal offense to utter it even when one doesn't believe that, but people will be very mad at him if they feel he misused it. The sanctity of that phrase is a public good, and indeed, there have been some proposals to criminalize (albeit minorly) its utterance in cases where the speaker doesn't actually believe they're in one. These proposals were rejected with wide margin, since the Imperium can only judge actions, not beliefs, and it would be dangerous to permit it the power to decide what was an emergency and what was not – this is something for individual people to decide.

In any case, being transported to an alien world after your seeming death does constitute a true life-threatening emergency to Damin, so he says it, although hearing the words he's now uttering – which he is sure is not Imperial – he can tell that what he's saying doesn't have the sanctity of the Imperial phrase.

A 5' 7" person with short black hair, wearing a black sweater-and-jeans-and-bulging-plastic-trash-bag-slung-over-his-shoulder, sprints-half-slides down the gravel once he reaches the inside of hearing distance.

"What?" he will yell, to the tentacle-having guy that is screaming Help help help into the lodge.

A person...alien...child? The person's body structure looks eerily similar to remna. But he has hair. He's not going to pattern-match remna bodies to this person, since clearly his life cycle must be different.

"Hello. Please help me. I am lost." He is very quickly doing the rhythmic-extension-and-retraction-of-tentacles thing, unconsciously – it's an expression of high excitement or arousal.

What does the person smell like? He's half tempted to flick his tongue at him, but in Zmavlimu'e – well, not that any social norms would transfer – it would be considered either very slightly rude, or flirtatious. Neither of which he wants to convey.

It's giving creepypasta, to Naxi's senses.

Naxi is already here, but he can at least come out of this more Tezh The Caver than Beh Drowned.

"Sure you are." He drops his trash bag, darts off the road, breaks a branch off the nearest tree, and brandishes the sharp end at the thing. "Please give some sensible explanation of who you are, why you're here, and what you want from me."

How did it even think that would work.

Sigh. Damin highly doubts that the alien would be able to take all three of them, especially since, apparently, he is unarmed save for the stick. One assumes that if the alien had a gun or something he would have brandished it already.

"My name is Damin Bales Sertes. I live near Kosfor City. This is going to sound crazy to you, but I appeared near here after I died. Yes, this is not what I thought I would have gone. I would appreciate directions to the nearest large settlement where I could find help."

He realizes that this language lacks imperative strength and desire strength markers. He would have wanted to use [highly recommended] and [I really want this and would be extremely dismayed if you refused but do not wish to/cannot inflict force on you].

The two drones behind him now stand in front, but they don't approach any farther than a pace in front of Damin, nor do they speak. The gun is with Las, but the whip is with Damin – not that that's going to be terribly useful in an actual fight – but Rend has his knife. Much more useful than a stick, he'd reckon.

Well. Naxi hadn't noticed the other two wiggly guys. Also, the screaming guy's story sounds too weird and un-optimized-for-controlling-him, to probably be false. Naxi drops the stick to signal his sanity.

"Nearest town is three dozen miles that way -" he jerks his head right down the railroad tracks. 

(He smells ashy, because it was him burning his burnable trash up at the resort.)

Should he just go that way? He thinks not. He has no government papers, and doesn't know how to navigate the local Culture, Which Is Clearly Very Different. So it would be good to have a guide of some sort.

"Would you be willing to act as a guide to the local culture for me, and perhaps accompanying me to the town? I know virtually nothing about this place.

Am I correct in saying that you are an alien? Relative to me, at least. You have hair, and you do not have back-tentacles, or head and shoulder shell-plates."

. . . Ugh. He's tired and he came up here to get away from the feeling that at any time someone's emergency could get sprung on him. This is just. Ridiculous. He tries to levitate, that's how he's trained himself to test for being in a dream. Nope. The world does appear to be spinning a little, though.

"Yes, I'm an alien. I've never heard of Kosfor City, and I obviously don't know for certain but my best guess is that it isn't anywhere on this planet, whether or not it is in fact anywhere else. You won't find anyone who looks like you here, I'm sorry to tell you. On this planet all the reasoning creatures look like me, pretty much. It's weird as sin that you look basically like us, actually, except for the back-tentacles and head-and-shoulder plates. I would suspect this of all being some kind of prank by people with access to secret biotechnology, but my instincts are actually telling me otherwise."

His instincts are also telling him that his best choice here is to do something totally insane.

"I have a two-seater carplane, with room in the back of the cab for two more. If y'all want me to take y'all to town, the one-way trip should only take twelve minutes or so."

"Oh, I see." Tragic. And yes, it is eerie how similar they look.

What's a carplane. Oh! A flying automobile. Wow. Their transportation technology is way ahead of Zmavlimu'e. 

This does not bode well for his prospects for self-defense.

"Hm, that could work, although I have three –" this language doesn't have the word for drones. A pause.

"My three...workers...I want them to come with me. Only having space for two extra could work, if I have them fold up very efficiently, although they don't have specific training in being transported. I also don't want to give up my carriage, since it has my luggage in it.

One of them is guarding my carriage, which apparently survived my death intact. I was planning to take the carriage to town, but I didn't want to risk the possibility of a locomotive coming down the tracks and flattening us. How fast do your locomotives travel? If they're slow enough, I would risk the trip."

Naxi appraises the carriage (how big is it? will anything stand out to him?), then looks up and down the line.

"I'm not sure if any on this line go this fast, but it doesn't go any faster than eight dozen miles per hour. It's just diesel, and not very optimized diesel."

It's an open air carriage with two benches seating two each, although given that Zmavlire'a are bigger, you could potentially seat six humans comfortably provided they're not too big. The back seats fold up to double as extra storage for luggage, which is currently its current configuration. There's only two luggage bags, though.

It's elaborately decorated in a rococo style, although blue rather than white is the predominant color. It's made of wood with plaster and paint, and has brilliant blue cloth curtains and cushions.

Plans.

He and Ders could step off and have Las and Rend pull the carriage off the track, but it's three dozen miles away – an unusual unit of length measurement, which apparently the Mysterious Language Granting Entity has seen fit to give him intuitions for. That will be an exhausting twelve hour walk. He and the drones will definitely be very hungry and tired after that. They'll probably have to take a break three quarters of the way through.

He's not sure they can eat the food here anyway...but considering that possibility is pointless: if the food here is inedible, they didn't have long to live anyway.

He, Ders, and Rend could board the carplane – still unbelievable that they have flying automobiles that go that fast – and leave Las to guard the carriage with the pistol, but that would mean splitting up, and also losing their strongest weapon. Leaving Las with the knife or nothing would make leaving it to guard the carriage pointless. Also, while they could take on the alien with the three remaining, even unarmed, that assumption goes out the window the moment they step on the carplane, which could have all sorts of weapons or other trickery.

He'll probe for more information.

"The town is three dozen miles away, but are there any settlements or shops in between? Are there any non-track roads that also lead to the town?"

In the initial shock, he hadn't noticed how trippy the carriage was. For that matter, their clothes. Kaleidoscopic fractals . . . It's deeply unsettling, like something conceived by a sick sadistic fiction author from a more broken universe where fiction is routinely written for the sole purpose of making the audience unsettled. 

"There's a rest stop about twelve miles that way -" he points toward the town "for hikers and such, trails branch off it into the mountains - and a service road wide enough for the carriage goes between the rest stop and the town - Washa - although there'll be automobiles on it too - but it seems counterintuitive to take that route when you could just - wait until tomorrow morning, when the next train stops here, and buy passage. Even if the seats are all taken, you could get emergency passage in storage. I think it's more likely than not they'd have unbooked space to take your carriage as far as town, too, although I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Oh.

Unless - do you have any cash* on you?"

A thought occurs to him.

"If you're an alien, how do you know current Vaxilal**?"

*Literally, physical money

**Most dialects on Byway are named after their locality, although the particularly fast-changing language spoken wherever the Heart (Center City, Nexus, etc.) burns, has in recent tradition donated its working title to the planet, for those who speak it. Over the last grossyears most dialects have converged to become mutually intelligible to some degree with the Central Language, now known to itself as Byway, but lack of perfect mutual intelligibility, to those of Byway, bears the same degree of cultural markedness as total mutual unintelligibility might in some other places. In large cities, failure to demonstrate proficiency with this year's set of idioms and colloquialisms is generally perceived as imperfect speech by those who know better - although the standard of articulateness expected can vary wildly between urban/urban-coded microcommunities separated by but short geographical (and today, in the age of the Net, informational) distances.

A few people in Zmavlimu'e deliberately wear patterns that have optical illusions on them, but this is generally considered to be an annoying thing to do.

Oh, right. He had thrown away too much of his old priors, and failed to realize that a train station would have to have trains regularly pass through it. Fortunately, his facial expression changes only slightly. We love having tutoring from politician parents.

"I thought that there wouldn't be space on the train for my carriage. At what times does the train stop here? You have multiple ways of telling time here, right?" Which makes no sense, knowing the time is supposed to make it easier to coordinate, not harder, and unless people here are moving at relativistic speeds, it can be safely assumed that time is passing at the same rate for all of them.

I have Imperial rupnu, but I intuit that it won't be accepted here. Hm. I have gold coins – each one gram in weight. Would that be acceptable? Would someone else trade tickets for it? How do you buy tickets, anyway?" He has five of them, each minted six years apart – there's a design competition every six years over what design gets to be placed on them. He could also trade some of the stuff in his luggage, but that seems even less likely to be accepted as currency.

"I don't know," he confesses. "Whatever process transported me here saw fit to also give me knowledge of Vaxilal, to the extent that teleology can be applied to it. My last memories were of the bridge we were crossing collapsing, and of all of us dying. Do you know of anyone here who has arrived with their last memories being their death?"

. . . Yeah, Bywayeans don't generally pattern their fabric at scales smaller than bold stripes and patches made to flatter the form of the human body itself. Naxi has never seen anything a sixth as dizzyingly ornate as rococo.

"Time?" Naxi's eyebrows pucker, like the absurdity of what Damin's said is impeding his thought. ". . . Generally people tell the time by the schedule of a local train* they're familiar with. If they move too far away from their longitude of residence, they'll switch to using a local stopscore**, or if there isn't a very nearby station big enough to have a stopscore, and you'll be staying a sufficiently short time for it not to be worth bothering to learn the nearest - such as now, for me - or it's your permanent resisence but the nearest is sufficiently far away, you'll just count hours from a local stop you keep track of. Although that last method is less common now that we have the Net." He glances back up the road. "I don't have my device on me, but I checked not long ago, and it was around 3:00 counting from the time the train stops here, and 5:00 by the train-schedule-time-convention under the Ect station in Washa." He side-eyes the alien. "Do they tell time somehow else where you're from? Sundials? But you seem to know what a train is. 

I guess maybe if you're using gold for currency trains're not that widespread yet. I s'pose you don't have psystims*** then. You don't have coffeeboxes, or anything?" He stifles a semi-hysterical laugh. "Tea bricks? Most people don't take that stuff these days, you have to carry around bigger scales and do more random testing since the brands are so little-known now, and of course plant material is just bigger, but I've been surprised in the past by what people can get away with carting up to counters." Frown. "Once or twice.

No, I have emphatically never heard of anything even vaguely like your story happening. Was stuff in the range of sudden death-based teleportation normal where you're from? And why do you know about relativistic speeds? Again, if you don't mind answering." Naxi has no clue what could possibly be going on here.   ". . . Where are you from, if you don't mind saying?" He strains his memory through the impression of ADRENALINE. "You said your name was - Dalim? And - what were you guys's?" He looks at the two drones. "I'm Naxi Ashtego Vaxilal."

*This word in Vaxilal covers both aboveground and underground trains.
**Meaning 'train-schedule-time-convention'.
***Meaning 'small-individually-dosed-stronger-than-natural-psychostimulants'.

...how do you develop flying automobiles without having coordinated time? Coordinated time seems so...basic...compared to that.

Is their society in fact currently collapsing. Are they a group of people using the remnants of the technology left behind by a more advanced race which has now gone extinct, and which they cannot reverse engineer.

"Why don't people coordinate on a single time zone scheme so everyone only has to learn a single one, and you don't need to specify which one you're using?

We used to tell the time with sundials, but that was more than a dozen gross years ago. Nowadays we use mechanical clocks, though there are prototypes for quartz clocks which exploit its very stable vibration when electric current is passed through it, which have the potential to be much more precise than mechanical clocks.

Trains are widespread where I'm from. All major cities have one, and many smaller cities link up to the tracks between the major ones. However, their spread is hampered by the fact that trains emit terrible smoke because of the fuel they burn, and no one wants that near them. So, train stations have to be placed well away from the cities proper, until or unless we develop smokeless train technology.

We have tea and coffee too...I'm surprised that our biology is so similar that we experience the same effects from them, and indeed, even have the same species...but maybe we're referring to something different. We do not use those for currency – tea bricks and coffeeboxes degrade over time, and gold does not. Gold retains its commodity value even when exposed to harsh conditions such as violent forces, moisture, many chemicals, and oxidation from air.

No! Definitely not normal, which is why I was asking. I know about relativistic speeds because people figured out that time and space are related, did experiments about it, and validated it. And then I read the paper they published. It's a relatively recent discovery, I think about a dozen and eight years ago.

I'm from the Imperium, near Kosfor City. That's in the province of Sranam. My full name is Damin Bales Sertes, but 'Damin' will be fine. The...workers' names are Ders and Rend," and he points to each one as he says the name. Each drone bows when pointed to.

"I would like to reiterate my request for a guide to navigating your people's culture and civilization correctly," given that it seems to be laid out so illogically, "and if you are unable to render this service for me, I would appreciate being directed to someone who can."

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.

"Interesting. The article seems interesting but I don't know whether it would be productive to look at that now – I'm no physicist."

Damin gestures in the air with both hands and aftendrils. "My language install gave me some idea of what a 'moirail' is, but I'm not sure if we have a congruent concept. We have the concept of committed sexual partners, and coparents, and of friends and allies. Yes, my species reproduces sexually, but also asexually. I was produced sexually. My workers were produced asexually.

Hm. I wasn't really prepared to become a celebrity. My two parents were popular but I deliberately shunned pursuing the same line of work as them in favor of running a farm, because I don't want to be forced to interact with people I don't feel like. But like, being an alien necessarily means lots of attention being put on you. That was an aside – I should give you my answer."

Thoughtful silence for a dozen seconds.

"I don't mind you doing the interview. You getting to ask me questions was what you wanted in exchange for helping me, right, at least until I manage to acquire money. Which I suppose I'll have to do soon, given that all of my knowledge of agriculture and psychotherapy wouldn't transfer."

"I'm no economist, but my naive expectation would be that your knowledge of agriculture and psychotherapy will better than transfer, seeing as how they're miraculous second data points for how those things work in general as opposed to just on Byway. But . . . that sort of implicit nonverbal knowledge isn't the kind of thing people usually pay money for directly, so you might be right about having to earn money some other way.   . . . But surely you'd pull huge consulting commissions with - well, with just about anybody!

Moirails are - yeah, a sort of crossfade between coparents and allies. Somewhere in human evolution - actually, I should be recording this. One hour, please.*"

Naxi disappears into his room and emerges two minutes later holding a little silvery recording device. "Is it alright if I just - start now? Or - your workers, fuck, I completely forgot! I don't have extra airbeds - anyway, yeah, we should probably figure out their sleeping arrangements before we start this . . . ?" It occurs to Naxi how strange it's been that Damin's workers have expressed no apparent curiosity, or any kind of independent desire.

*Polite-idiomatic requests for patience on Byway come prepared for the planning fallacy.

"I suppose."

Damin is surprised at it taking one hour, but he doesn't feel upset about it – he doesn't have any calibration as to whether this is a long or short time with regard to preparing recording Bywayean recording equipment.

He's surprised again when Naxi arrives after only two minutes.

"You haven't said yet whether this interview would be kept by you only, or whether you plan on sharing it. I'll be much more reticent in answering questions in the latter case.

My workers can just sleep on the floor, it's fine. Better if they have bunks or beddings, but it's not necessary."

Oh, right. Naxi'd heard that question, just, it got lost in the shuffle.

"Right, sorry." Naxi wonders why there are ways Damin might be reticent to answer an ethology-interview question to an alien society, that he wouldn't be reticent to an alien he doesn't even know. Naxi was definitely planning on distributing the interview transcript to some extent, because that's just what you do with momentous interview transcripts, but Naxi is a pretty private person and if Damin will elaborate more in a private interview and this gives Naxi an excuse not to go to the trouble of distributing and just have secret private knowledge about Damin's species forever, well.

Naxi is in and out of his room, hastily setting up three pillows-and-blanket-piles beside the air mattress.

"I'll make a reasonable effort to keep the records private - not an effort you can actually rely on one gross per gross, though, just because I don't have the resources. The main thing in that case will be being careful not to let people know the record exists, because if any decent number of people finds out, someone will hack it out of sheer burning curiosity, and then it'll be everywhere."

"What does reasonable effort here mean? Hack...oh, acquire by electronic means. We can have my...workers write a transcript of our interview instead, if you want. It seems that our language install also have us literacy, although they won't know Bywayean shorthand the way they do Imperial shorthand. Hm. I could have Ders and Rend write out your and my words respectively, to divide the work, and then you can review the pages to ensure that they wrote things accurately.

It's not that – right, I should assume that the cultural gap between us is very wide, and that I should explain things as though you have no context. It's not exactly that I don't want it to be made public, but that doing that...touches on basal instincts regarding feeling exposed and vulnerable and out in the open? If you share the interview with close friends of yours, I wouldn't mind that. I don't think I would share with you what I wanted to keep truly private, since we just met, even if you were to take very careful precautions not to let that information get out."

"I didn't particularly mean hacking by electronic means, the word is for all sorts of deliberate access to secrets, although I can see why your language install - one of the freakiest part of this to me - gave it those connotations. I was planning on just keeping this recorder in the mini safe I carry around with me."

Naxi is confused about what exactly Damin means by the exposure stuff - there are things he wouldn't share with anyone except his moirails, lots of things, actually - but they're not the sort of thing he'd say in an interview about Bywayean culture after isekaiing to an alien world, or be comfortable saying at all to someone he'd just met. Naxi wonders if Damin will ever be okay with people wanting him to make some sort of public-record interview for the general populace. He keeps all that to himself, though - it serves no interest of Naxi's to prompt Damin to think about that stuff right now, and it's not Naxi's business anyway.

"The recorder seems fine to me. My world does have audio recording equipment but we only use it for music. Transcripts are easier to search and quote.

I suppose I shouldn't be too concerned about the fact that I exist leaking, since that's going to be inevitable, given the alien biology and all."

"Right, okay then, if you don't have any remaining objections" - Naxi turns the recorder on and picks up where he left off.

"Moiraillegiance mainly draws on instincts that originally evolved to help humans' ancestors conduct long-term coparenthood, but early on in human evolution, most of those instincts were also stretched to cover close non-coparent allies of either sex - essentially, someone with whom your interactions are net-positive-sum. All coparents are moirails, but not all moirails are even potential coparents, seeing as you might be of the same sex, or one of you a postmenopausal female or something."

Damin looks abashed.

"Ah, I forgot to ask you whether you want the style of interview where I only answer direct questions posed to me, or the more conversational style where you want me to comment on anything in particular I find interesting."

Naxi looks similarly abashed!

"I was assuming this would be less of a dialogue-between-an-important-person-and-a-skilled-interviewer and more of a dialogue-between-two-important-people, at least in terms of the rhythm - just because we're both aliens to each other and I assumed it'd flow that way most naturally, not least because you'd be curious. But it's low-friction for me to switch to just interrogating you if that's easier for you for whatever reason."

"I wouldn't call myself an important person." And Damin doesn't think Naxi is a particularly important person either, but he's not going to say that. "I am fine with either format, and besides, I'm agreeing to do this formal interview as payment for you helping me get set up in this world. Which do you prefer?"

"I weakly prefer the dialogue-between-two-important-people format - if your language install is telling you two people have to be important in order to have a dialogue-between-two-important-people, it's wrong! It's a part of childhood development, making little dialogues-between-two-important-people with your friends, even though everything you say is horribly cringily misguided. Well. Most of it. How do kids where you're from learn to congeal their ideas and express themselves, if not in that way?"

"Alright. In that case we can have that. I'm mildly confused about what it means to be an important-person if being important doesn't factor into it. 

Hm. I'm not sure exactly. Just by existing, I suppose? Consuming content and introspecting and writing and telling...employees what to do. I very rarely meet children."

"I don't frequently meet children either - at least, not in a get-to-know-each-other context. I just remember my own childhood and have osmosed a sense of which parts of it are considered standard. Children where you're from regularly have employees?" Naxi acquires a fear that Damin's species may partially consume their own brains as they sexually mature, thus resulting in a norm of the young working in supervisory positions over the old!

"The style of dialogue is so named because you're talking as if you were an important person, and important co-podcasters actually do talk that way, but so does everyone else, from time to time, about what they feel like they're an expert in."

"We have children rarely – the vast majority don't have any before twelve dozen years of age. Our years, anyway.

Yes, everyone does. I've employees since I was born. I inherited them from my parents.

I'm – so – I'm confused about that? How does speaking as though I was an important person be different from me speaking as though I was a person of average importance? Also wouldn't that constitute misrepresenting yourself? I don't want to present myself as something that I'm not, unless it's LARP or a hypothetical-thought-experiment or something."

"Twelve dozen - Vaxi. Humans can in principle have kids at a dozen and three, earlier for females, and females can't have kids at all after age four dozen or so, and it's considered unwise for multiple reasons but primarily genetic deterioration of the gametes for either sex to try after about three dozen. Lots of people do it anyway though, especially with recent genetech, and fair enough. Baseline humans senesce to death around seven dozen, but recently we've pushed that out quite a bit. Not to mention we started preserving our dead as glass statues in tanks of liquid nitrogen a while ago, so maybe dead they are not.

How would you inherit an employee?

To talk as if you're important is - to talk as if you have something to say, something of substance, not just a request for clarification or a status report, that you think your audience should listen to, as if they were your apprentice, or your child. It's an awful look if you end up doing it out loud in a context where the other person actually knows better, but in private, no one gets hurt - except for possibly you, if you're unnecessarily deceiving yourself about how much you know."

Surely Damin will go 'Ohhhhh, that's what you're talking about!' any minute now, about what Naxi's saying about importantness.

"I'm sorry to hear that. We do not senesce and do not lose fertility as time passes. We become capable of having children between a dozen and two to a dozen and four of our years old, but no one has children that early.

Were I to have children, I would assign some of my employees to work for the child. That's part of why no one has children that early – you want to make sure your child has enough employees to sustain themselves. I inherited three dozen from my parents.

...I think I'm just going to speak normally and let others decide whether they think I'm worth listening to or not. In my world people talk in the same manner to apprentices and children as they do to experts and adults – it's just that the content is different. Well, I suppose that the manner of speaking would be different for young children, since their minds aren't fully grown yet, but that only lasts a short while."

"My return condolences, it sounds very boring for everyone to talk the same way to everyone else! Although, yeah, not a tenth as bad as senescing to death at seven dozen."

Naxi thinks for a long moment.

". . . If people on your world don't have the prospect of earning more respect from other people, then why does anyone ever do anything difficult or counterintuitive? Also, why do children need so many employees?" Naxi is now imagining that they're born adult-intelligent but physically frail.

Damin doesn't think it's boring but he's not Naxi, so.

"Some people do desire to earn the respect of other people and so will do difficult things to earn it. Not many, though. Other people do difficult things for the material reward, such as money. For example, venturing money and effort into research in the hopes of finding something economically profitable. Many people are like that. Alternatively, they may simply like testing themselves and pitting themselves against challenges, and feeling good when they defeat them. Fewer people like this compared to the second desire, but more than the first. People generally have a higher opinion of people who have successfully surmounted challenges, or at least tried but failed, but only by a little bit, or those who failed but whose failure-analysis and notes allowed other people to succeed.

Babies need many employees because like, they kind of can't do anything themselves? Children also need lots of time to study to do anything economically worthwhile, which can take a dozen to a few dozen years depending on the type of work, which can only begin at one dozen years old because before then their minds haven't developed enough for them to understand more complex concepts. You need employees to tutor them, to feed them and clean them and do this and that for them. It's also important to introduce them to the basics of employee management at a young age so that they can manage their own businesses or companies when they come of age at two dozen years old."

Naxi ignores Damin's description of his peoples' motivations, as it doesn't make any sense.

He tries a line of inquiry where he does know where to start, even if he suspects that he won't like the answer.

"Where do the employees come from?"

"I'm...confused by your question? What do you mean by 'come from'? Like, are you asking about our biology or evolution? Or asking about how our world came to be?"

"Like - logically, if all kids start life with employees and then become bosses of those employees right away once they mature, that implies that they must be deteriorating into those employees later in life - sorry if that's offensive - anyway, Bywayeans don't do that. We start adulthood as employees, and then some of us acquire employees of our own later on, but many don't."

"No, it doesn't? Employees remain employees forever." Ah, their word for 'Keeper' is 'boss'. 

"Bosses are bosses and employees are employees. Can your people transition seamlessly between the two? We don't work like that."

Wow. So Naxi was an employee before he became a Keeper, er, boss?

"Do you have employees now? Are you a boss?"

"No, thank money. I can't stand having to worry about what other people are doing. 

'Boss' and 'employee' are natally separated castes in your species?" It's a lot better than what Naxi was thinking, but a little worse.

"Yes. We call bosses 'Keepers' and employees 'drones' in our world." He says the other words in Standard Imperial. "Given your question, I assume that with you you can switch between the two states at will? For us we cannot.

Hm. Are you a boss without any employees, then? My boyfriend is – was – one too. I don't think you're an employee because your behavior is very far outside the employee behavior expected-range-of-variance."

". . . For us, it's not the case that any given person is either a boss or an employee. I mean, some people aren't bosses in that they don't have any employees, and some people aren't employees in that they don't work for anybody except themselves, but socially, it's more that - in any given two-person relationship, one person will be the boss in that relationship and the other will be the employee, unless they're moirails or strangers.

Actually I'm perverting those words, 'boss' and 'employee' only really apply to work relationships, the more generally applicable words are 'sir' and 'apprentice'." 

That makes no sense.

"How can you be neither a boss nor an employee. How does that work."

"We almost always are either the boss or employee, in any interaction, like I said. But to us - without any biomarkers to judge by - it would be presumptuous to think you were the boss of somebody you didn't even know, and moirails are basically an equal relationship."

Finally, Damin is indignant. It's weird that they're both apparently around the same intelligence level, but what about Damin isn't weird.

"...so for us, it's totally possible to have boss-boss and employee-employee interactions? Someone in my world would classify this as a boss-boss interaction. My two workers talking to each other would have an employee-employee interaction."

Well, that's just wrong.

What would be the point? Naxi guesses he can see the point of Damin's employees talking to each other, if they're anything like worker ants, but what would two bosses talk about? Cult stuff, he guesses, just like two Bywayeans not at work. Their ancestors had to find mates, after all.

"Humans would, I think, classify it as a mentalchild-mentalchild interaction, when you're both just trying to be creative and make friends and you aren't worried about whose boss is whose."