"It really does, doesn't it? A bit tart for me."

"I found it just close enough to food I had before while being strange in a way I'd never encountered that it excited me."

"Do you encounter a lot of novel things like this through your job?"

"This is definitely the most novel, but I did go on a state visit to Shi Cubrio once and they had the most fascination with garlic of any cuisine I've ever tried before or since. There was a fish dish with roughly equal amounts of fish and garlic by volume."

"Sounds like too much garlic to me, but cultures differ I suppose."

"It was pretty tasty but I wouldn't want it more than once in a great while."

"Do you find novelty outside of food in your job?"

"Never so much as today. One learns about all the countries that exist on Amenta in school, you see, and then one goes there and there's a certain excitement to seeing things in real life, participating in their culture, but they're still about what one expects. Where are you from?"

"Part of the Federation actually. I can't say I'm a fan."

"What sort of schooling did you have?"

"After I turned five I went to a little academy in Shapto, barely a university, more on a tutoring model, with students on the buddy system and bopping around between various experts and specialists. Full Cenemi language immersion three days of the week and Oahkar on the classroom model as an elective, lots of history and political science, debate, rhetoric, social deduction games."

"Oh that sounds delightful! I wish I could have gone to such a school - I really liked social deduction games when I was younger and still have a fondness for them."

"Was the school for blues specifically?"

"Yes, most primary schools and practically all secondary schools are caste-specific, though there are oddballs."

Moira continues talking to the blue, asking him questions about his schooling and the caste system and offering her own comments on the way various aliens live. She's evasive about her own background.

On the other end of the table:

"What sorta science do you have? Does your hair photo-synth-esize? Do you want it to? Did you know humanoid aliens are really common and that's prolly cause of pan-sperm-ia?"

"Our hair does not photosynthesize."

"I want mine to, I could just work in the park and not have to break for lunch!"

"We have a solid evolutionary record, how does that accord with a panspermia hypothesis?"

"Why do you pause in the middle of words like that?"

"Is it green for some other reason or just cause that's how you are?"

"Oh, actually making it so you get energy from it is harder. Also I think that wouldn't be nearly nuff, less you had way way way more hair."

"Vesti-gial genetic information that somehow causes a spe-cif-ic attractor across plan-ets to ev-olve humanoids that sorta look like you, I think!"

"Cause I need to sound em out sometimes. Most species don't once they're big, but Amaliensdon't change sizes like that."

"Amentan hair comes in most colors, and most of us are green, except Pahatun, he's blue. That's metonymy for the most common natural hair color of our caste but some greens have other natural hair colors and then dye it for signaling reasons," says Chi Katme.

"I do," volunteers Yonde. "It comes in almost yellow - you could call it spring green but people can't confidently tell, so I dye it to be clear."

"Amaliens don't... get bigger, but you also don't get fluent in languages you speak?" asks Spree in fascination.

"What if you dyed it to be actually clear! What would that mean?"

"Depends what you mean by fluent. Sorta took us a while to get used to other people saying complicated things without thinking em through prop-ly."

"I don't think we have dye that can do that!

"What do you mean, thinking them through properly?"

"Mostly you just gotta filter out mel-anin and clean out dead cells that get all scrunched up and make it sorta white after that. Is hard to do without break the hair. Could do it with a really small syr-inge I bet, or maybe a ball with lots of teeny tiny pokey bits."

"Like. How sometimes people use 'um' or 'like' how I did just now when they're thinking. And then sometimes lots of people don't do that and an amalien would sound things out instead but they also don't do that."

"I'm not sure I follow," says Spree, furrowing his brow.

"So some words are 'vocal-ized pauses', that you can say in plays when you are pausing to think. 'Um' is one, 'hm' is one, sometimes 'so' or 'like' are them to. Amaliens use sound-ing out compl-icated words to auto-matically add vocalized pauses when talking about more compl-icated things. Does that make sense?"

"Oh, that's amazing!" enthuses Spree. "I don't think there are any languages on Amenta where that's standard but when you explain it that way it makes perfect sense."

"I'm not 'xactly sure that that's the reason we do it but it's my best guess."

"I have a colleague who's studied filler words as one of her special interests, she'd love a corpus to examine if you have one to offer. Though possibly of more linguistic interest is how you're all speaking Tapap so quickly, I was anticipating computer translations but it appears to be coming from your own mouths!"

"The making the language seem like the hear-ers is actually really cool! So, it turns out that for most species the bit of the brain that understands the con-tent of a speech and the bit of the brain that tells the speak-er what langue it's in are sorta separate. So if you add the right under-lying pho-netic signatures from their native language to audio then their brain automat-ically sorta infers that the language is the native one, even if it's not! That means you can make aud-io that sounds like the na-tive languages of mult-iple different speakers - though it can be harder for lots of speak-ers. If you look at lips or listen really close-ley and just pay attention to the sounds and not to the con-tent then you can notice difference. The brain also some-times hal-lu-cinates an accent to con-vey the inf-or-mation that the speaker is not speaking na-tiv-ley in your language."

"Act-ually doing the trans-lation is much harder, without enough info. Some people use brain wave scanning but we use a sentient-language that people's brains learn really easily instead. The phonetic signat-ure thing does the rest of the work to make list-en-ers think it's their language, so long as we have a little samp-le of their language first to der-ive it from."