...Was that confusing? "I am the Consul of Sitlakh-ne Leĥan-awa Menit. ¿la 'I govern Sitlakh-ne Leĥan-awa Menit' la? ¿la 'Consul Restem Talset Meden governs the Zmavli Imperium' la?" (Beloved's been framing guesses at how the language works with 'la' pretty consistently.) "My name is Sarilril-au-Qatl-ne Lijhan."

There we go. "Sarilril-au-Qatl-ne Lijhan governs Sitlakh-ne Leĥan-awa Menit. Restem Talset Meden governs the Zmavli Imperium."

Hm. Actually they should cover interrogatives now. It will be very useful later.

He asks Dedan to produce a book about that, and here is one. It's about drones asking a demanding Keeper over and over what he wants, and the Keeper rejecting it, and the drones asking why. This one is drawn in the classic 'children's parable or Bible story' book style.

"Do you want to eat šimilus (dessert soup of coconut and purple yam), Master?"

    "No, I don't."

"Why, Master?"

    "I don't want to eat coconut cream."

"Then what do you want to eat, Master?"

    "I'm not sure. Suggest something."

"Do you want to eat donuts, Master?"

It continues very repetitively for many cycles until the Keeper finally decides on kucintan, a sweet lye pudding.

...Hmmm. "la 'Do you govern the Zmavli Imperium' la?"

(Beloved is, and pretty thoroughly has been, suspending judgment on how boring the aliens' books for adults to learn local vocabulary and grammar norms are. Maybe the aliens don't find this boring? The nonfiction at least makes sense that it's simple, it's good to start with basic vocabulary for common concepts, buuuuuut this is such boring fiction. Luckily Beloved is unusually good at dealing with being bored.)

"Gohi." Yes. Literally, 'the previous statement is correct'. Standard Imperial has different words that correspond to the many meanings of English 'yes'.

"Why did you come here? How did you come here?"

Head tilt. "Why did I come - ¿Al-la I'm not sure al-la?"

Pensive frown, and Beloved gestures to Beloved's krissan assistant, who has so far been standing quietly at the ready. "How did I come..." The assistant pulls out several pre-prepared images showing: krissan and spottan (the remnoids and the quadrupeds - both seem to be part of the category 'jhannan') digging in the ground with tools, a ring emerging from the ground, the ring filling with an odd color, the ring showing an eerily accurate drawing of the city, the krissan and spottan startling and jumping back, a spottan howling with some wavy lines drawn to another spottan with tan's head cocked and ear raised, standing next to a krissan dressed like Beloved.

"Why did I come - ¿la 'Jhannan don't want to come' la? No... ¿la 'I don't why' la? ¿la 'I don't how the teshren come' la?" (Beloved taps the picture of the glowing ring on 'teshren.')

Ah. It's an accident. Or at least, they're claiming it is. The technology was in the ground? Buried ruins?

He takes a moment to ask whether there have been any other portals spotted recently. Apparently there are none. That's a good sign.

He has Dedan pull up the Illustrated Dictionary entry for 'accident', which shows people spilling a drink or tripping.

"Was it an accident?"

A pause.

"We are most concerned about disease and aggression. We wear these clothes to avoid getting diseases from you, and you avoiding diseases from us. We have weapons to stop you from aggressing against us. We...do not want this to happen but it is possible and we have to prepare for it." He's having to carefully choose his words to minimize the number that haven't already been used in the books that they showed.

He gestures to Dedan some more – it appears that they have comprehensive sign language too – and Dedan pulls up the appropriate pictures. For 'disease', people vomiting and being in bed and having sores on their body. For 'aggression', people hitting and stabbing each other.

Serious nod! "It was an accident." Then: "We want to avoid disease and aggression against us and against you." (Comprehensive sign languages make such total sense Beloved would be surprised if they lacked one.) "We have - ¿la these clothes la?" (said with a gesture at the hazmat suits) "not here. We bring these clothes. We have - ¿la things to stop disease la?" Then, a thoughtful hum, and: "I do not have weapons. Sitlakh-ne Leĥan-awa Menit has weapons not here. We do not want aggression to happen. We do not bring weapons here."

Um. But your companion brought a spear? That seems centrally weaponlike. In any case it's not as if Beloved or her* companion has tried to attack them, and in any case spears aren't the most powerful weapons in the grand scheme of things. He doesn't say that, and his expression remains neutral.

"That is good. Bring the clothes [highly recommended; I would be upset if you didn't comply]. I want to learn your language. I want you to learn our language. We will give you books about it. Is this good to you?"

* Standard Imperial pronouns are not inflected based on gender (because they do not have the concept), but are based on the first sound or sounds of the referent's name, as well as whether or not the referent is a person or a nonperson. However, pronouns have been translated into English style for ease of reading and writing.

It isn't Beloved's fault all the pictures of weapons were guns, which are clearly Things You Can Kill Many People With, which is definitely not the same category of object as a spear.

"This is good to me." She turns and gives the krissan with the spear some instructions; spear krissan goes back through the portal. "We will give you books about our language and the jhannan."

Dedan will place a bunch of books near the portal for them to pick up. There's the previous books he's shown, Walk through the Forest, The Picky Keeper, What is the Imperium, and the The Illustrated Standard Imperial Dictionary, but also the latest edition of The Standard Imperial Reference Grammar.

They'll also place a Standard Imperial parser with inbuilt dictionary with an e-ink display and a keyboard. It looks like a tablet with an attached keyboard that folds neatly like a laptop into a notebook sized thing. The keyboard is large and broad but it wouldn't be impossible for Krissan to use, if somewhat uncomfortable for the Krissan with relatively smaller hands. There's a pamphlet with operating instructions that talks about how to input sentences into it and how to interpret the results, and how to activate or deactivate this or that setting.

On another pile will be a few microbiology and disease textbooks, Grusil's Anatomy, an illustrated anatomy textbook, and sections from My Diary, which are portions from the late Imperator's personal diary that he made public. It's written in a very casual and conversational style, akin to Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. It's one of the closest things the Imperium has to 'the classics'. This version has faithful reproductions of the drawings and diagrams in it, but the text is printed in regular font for easier reading rather than having the original handwriting, as well as being translated from the original Towaň, a natural language spoken during that time, into Standard Imperial. This is one of the older sections, and Standard Imperial, which is a constructed language, hadn't been invented yet.

The selected sections contain the Imperator's reflections on the wastefulness of war and how he wishes that people would choose to negotiate rather than aggress against each other to get what they want, because that's less destructive to value. It also references his predictions about technology and various scientific hypotheses (which are explained and either vindicated or rejected in the annotations), and his wishes about technology and science being shared freely rather than being hidden to be used against each other in Scrolls That Are Copied.

They'll provide: 

-The cave novel, the absolute first novel ever written, which supposedly caused the invention of reading, and was integral to the founding of Sitlakh-ne Leĥan-awa Menit, the oldest state in the world - originally a site of pilgrimage for the novel (which was, as the title suggests, written on every surface of an extensive cave system) and then for all knowledge. It's been rewritten in the formalized academic register Beloved has been speaking in, with hastily included notes that this is a common text for learning new sets of vocabulary since nearly everyone has the story memorized. It's extremely richly illustrated.

-An extensive book on the history of Sitlakh-ne Leĥan-awa Menit, used as a companion for introductory lectures and so also written for students still getting used to the formal academic register. (It seems from this that their world doesn't have a single unifying government, but that Sitlakh-ne Leĥan-awa Menit is very often 'the leader among equals,' one of a single digit number of major polities and very widely respected.)

-A book of illustrated poetry in a simplified form of the academic register, primarily about the sharing of knowledge and dreams of the future of all peoples. This is the closest Beloved can match to the children's picture books the Imperium is providing. 

-A set of introductory medical textbooks for pre-adolescents, including anatomy (of krissan and spottan), pathology, bioethics, and communal health management. (...This is not clearly labeled as for pre-adolescents and a reader could be forgiven for thinking it's for university students.)

-A slice of life autobiography/ journal of a well known polymath from Sitlakh-ne Leĥan-awa Menit.

-A very thick introductory comparative anthropology textbook, covering the major geographic regions. 

-An introductory (and richly illustrated) astronomy textbook.

These are provided as hard copies, and mostly taken from nearby libraries or personal collections of volunteers. 

Sadly they didn't bring as many physical books along as the Krissan. They do have books stored on readers but maybe they wouldn't like that? They'll see how they react to the parser first, so they won't give them an e-reader with books right now. In any case the priority right now is ensuring they don't inadvertently (or advertently!) kill each other – cultural exchange is a very far second on the priority list.

Restem produces the last book which is another richly illustrated children's book about numbers and mathematical notation, and also an analog and a digital clock. Both of them tell twenty-four hour time.

"Please take these. These are clocks. Clocks measure time. The time now is 1155h. This is twelve seconds. One...two...three...four...five...six...seven...eight...nine...ten...eleven...twelve. There are five dozen seconds to a minute. There are five dozen minutes in an hour. There are two dozen hours to a day. I want you to meet us in one day [suggestion/proposal]. When the pole of this clock," and he gestures to the analog one, "has done one full rotation, that is one day. When this clock," and he gestures to the digital one, "displays the same numerals, that is one day.

Do you want more or less time?"

The parser is usable, just strange, and Beloved can figure out how to use it with minimal poking.

Beloved does some math on being asked about the time. "A day to learn the language?"

"It is not enough to speak the language fluently. But it is enough to learn some. Enough so that we can talk about avoiding disease and aggression. That is very important. We cannot talk about other things or do other things until we talk about avoiding disease and aggression."

Serious nod. "Do you want more books? Books about disease and aggression. More books are not here. More books here in... Three hours. These are the books here."

Ugh taking a day to learn the language is going to be very obnoxious, because Beloved is going to forget the vast majority of what Beloved has learned of the language as soon as Beloved stops actively channeling it through a working memory shard, let alone after Beloved sleeps. Perhaps Beloved can record the contents of the working memory shard before the headache from doing that gets too bad, though... Or this might be important enough to create a longer lasting shard, but that takes time to get an ingrained one, and will require Beloved understanding more...

Well, Beloved will have a headache either way. Beloved will simply request some painkillers.

A day is important time for convening a meeting, and travel, and securing this site, and setting up contingency measures, though, and Beloved can repeat the language lesson tomorrow to refresh the working memory shard... 

"A day is good." 

"Yes. We can get the books from you in three hours. Do you have anything you wish to speak about before we meet again?"

There is going to be a lot to do in a day but he can delegate a lot of it to the other people. He'll definitely want to try and figure out as much about the Krissan from what they show. A lot of it might be carefully crafted deception – they were the ones who opened the portal here, even if they claim it's an accident – but even lies can be revealing.

He hopes that it really was an accident and that they're dealing in good faith but. It's his job to be paranoid for his people.

" - Can we message through the portal if we want to speak early?"

"Yes, but we cannot guarantee that we-exclusive* will be ready to speak with you. Speak with you for a long time about the important things. However there will be other people who are not me who will be near the portal who can be messaged by you. We have recording – we have tools that can hear what you say and say it to us later. It is useful if you want to message us."

He produces a voice recorder, presses a button and says, "I am Restem," to it, and then presses another. It repeats the sound with exactitude. He holds it out to Beloved with both hands along with a pamphlet that describes its operation. He guesses that the Krissan are more comfortable with speaking than with writing? When learning a new language Zmavlipre learn writing and reading faster than speaking and listening.

* Standard Imperial distinguishes between we-inclusive which includes the intended recipient of the statement, and we-exclusive which does not.

Beloved makes an interested noise and takes it. "Can we send writing as well?" Beloved asks, though. "Most will learn that faster, so I will not need to be near portal to translate. And we have tools for the spottan to write, since the spottan cannot speak our words."

(Beloved is very, very weird in many ways.)

The dogs are people!! This does not show on this face because Restem is excellent at impassivity.

"Yes."

Ah, so he was mistaken about his earlier hypothesis.

He repeats a line from one of the sections in My Diary. "I wish for us to have many interactions-of-mutual-gain now and in the future."

Bright smile! "I wish for us to have many interactions-of-mutual-gain now and in the future."

Restem and Dedan will bow, to a forty five degree angle, and then leave the circle. They do so synchronously. In the background a more substantial cordon has been placed around the area, and people are currently setting up opaque plastic curtains around the original chalk circle alternately colored yellow and red. 

Beloved executes an identical bow and then return through the portal, the spottan leaving after Beloved. 

Okay. There's a lot of work to do. They need to inform the residents of Kosfor City and the Imperium at large about what just happened. They need to make headway on understanding the Krissan language. They need to try and learn about their culture so as to figure out treaties as soon as possible. They need to analyze the surroundings to see if the Krissan have brought contagious diseases.