He wonders if she feels like she has to, or just wants to contribute. The second thing seems more like her, in which case he appreciates it.

"It doesn't need two people, but you can do it next time if you like?"

She nods, and helps collect the dishes to be washed, and then watches him wash them because she has not washed very many dishes in her life and it is not an area of expertise.

It's not a particularly complicated process. The clean dishes go into a drying rack set into a cupboard above the sink, and the clean pots go back on the stove, since there's plenty of room there for all of them. It has definitely not occurred to Marek that anyone, especially a girl, could be unfamiliar with washing dishes.

The walk takes them back past the train station and up a short steep bit of road from there, set in a sort of canyon with buildings a few meters above on both sides. "That's the church - the new one, I wonder if you'd like the old one - and that on the other side is the high school. Used to be a noble manor - that's why they had a private bridge over the road to the church, see?" There is indeed a strange little walkway over their heads. "The bit of forest with the bunker is up past the school that way - if you go up the stairs and right, there's a trail. It's a pretty narrow strip of forest, you can't get lost." He figures it'll be a good place for her to explore on her own when she feels like doing that - even if she wasn't a strange serious child, eleven is considered a reasonable age to go all over the place on your own, here.

She takes it all in very thoughtfully, nodding along at the assorted landmarks.

They walk up the road to a larger and flatter one - still empty of cars, but there are some people walking around, and some more normal-looking buildings, stores and the like.

An older boy waves to Marek. "Dzień dobry! A to kto?"* He nods to Wednesday and looks her over curiously.

"Nowe dziecko z sierocińca. Mówi tylko po angielsku, i nic poza tą sukienką nie ma, pojęcia nie mam skąd się wzięła. Co to się dzieje na świecie... " Might as well be clear about her not having anything else, fancy as she looks. Not that people around here steal very much, but with an American, someone might get ideas...

"Po angielsku! Bóg jeden raczy wiedzieć. Mnie tylko rosyjskiego uczyli. I co, do szkoły przecież nie pójdzie?"

"No nie pójdzie. Może przynajmniej jakieś książki uda się dla niej znaleźć. Odezwij się jakbyś miał pomysł skąd. Albo gdzie pożyczyć rower, albo maszynę do pisania."

"Pomyślę. A teraz nie będę wam przeszkadzać, po co ma mała stać i nic nie rozumieć." Also her stare is getting a little unnerving, to be honest.

"Tak, miałem jej okolicę pokazać. To cześć, i odwiedź mnie kiedyś."

"Jasne, do widzenia!"

They exchange nods and go their separate ways.

"Did you understand any of that?" Marek asks Wednesday after a moment. Might as well get started on figuring out how much Polish she managed to pick up.

*"Good afternoon! And who's this?"

"A new child from the orphanage. She only speaks English, and doesn't have anything except this dress, I have no idea where she came from. What's going on in the world..."

"English! God only knows. I only got taught Russian. And now what, surely she can't go to the school?"

"Yep, she can't. Maybe I can at least find her some books. Let me know if you have any idea where. Or where to borrow a bike or a typewriter."

"I'll think about it. And now I'll stop bothering you, no point in the girl standing here not understanding anything."

"Yes, I was going to show her around. Bye, come visit me sometime."

"Sure, goodbye!"

"'Good afternoon', 'orphanage', 'English'... after that I was mostly lost until 'goodbye'."

"Mhm. Did they try to teach you much of anything?" It really doesn't sound like they did. Not that he knows much about fourth grade education, but immersion is supposed to work faster than this, isn't it?

"People mostly didn't speak to me. I know how to recognize the orphanage's meal calls and I have an extensive vocabulary of the sort of things angry teenage boys shout at people they don't like, but I don't know what most of it means more specifically than that."

He does not look happy with that information. "That place sounds worse every time I hear about it. I try to tell myself they're doing what they can without most of what they need, but..." He sighs. Maybe one day he could think about fixing that. Once the politics calm down.

"Anyway, most of the village is that way," he points behind them along the main road, "the school, the library, the doctor, the old church, most of the stores." But he thought it might be better not to inflict everyone on her at once on the first day. Or her on everyone, maybe. Either way.

"But here's the main graveyard." It's a big old-fashioned type, with plenty of trees and a lot of graves varying in age and appearance, most with flowers and grave lanterns on them. It even has several small mausoleum type structures near the gate, and she'll see more if they go further in.

As they enter the graveyard, her precisely even stride relaxes just a little. She's still far more serious and composed than any normal eleven-year-old, but there is perhaps something of a sense that she feels at home here.

Marek notices and looks quietly happy. It does, of course, continue to be somewhat creepy and baffling, but he's already managed to get pretty accustomed to leaving that in the back of his mind, and... look at her. She looks like she'll be all right.

He stops talking for a while, to let her look around and relax - and to see where she wants to go and what she pays attention to.

(And crosses himself belatedly, having been too distracted to remember it when they walked in.)

She reads the inscriptions on gravestones, and studies the architecture of mausoleums. She looks at grave offerings with respect and is careful to step around them without disturbing them.

She is so good. He really does appreciate her, and gives her a fond look as he trails behind.

The inscriptions are mostly in Polish, but some in Latin, if only religious phrases - maybe she understands those. The mausoleums are mostly not very architecturally interesting, but there's really quite a lot of them, for families who have lived here for centuries.

Marek goes down a side path to briefly kneel at his uncle's single and much simpler grave and re-light the candle on it.

Further in there's a little sectioned off military graveyard, filled with identical simple iron crosses, many of them nameless. He kneels and prays there too.

She mostly ignores his detours, focusing instead on the stylistic details of the graves and mausoleums, the differences between graves for the rich and graves for the poor.

There's plenty to look at, every grave different from every other one.

Marek, detours finished, is content to keep wandering around for most of an hour. He might translate a few of the more interesting inscriptions for her, if she seems interested. They see a few other people, but everyone is quiet and absorbed in their own thoughts, and even Wednesday's dress doesn't seem nearly as out of place here.

"There's an old Jewish cementary fifteen minutes up that hill, if you want? Or we could leave that for another day." Something softens his voice, whether it's the somber location, or the time spent quietly side by side, or the way she looks like she fits here.

She is glad to see the inscriptions translated—and also pronounced; she mostly hasn't been encountering Polish spelling and Polish pronunciation at the same times for the same words. Being able to get both at once and at her own pace helps a lot.

An hour is plenty of time to soak up the ambiance. She considers, when he asks, and then says, "I think I'd rather leave it for another day. Thank you."

"All right." He's quiet during the town portion of the walk back, and waits until they've passed the train station before asking: "So, how did you manage to tie an older boy to a chair?"  It's not as if it's outright impossible - he can think of ways to get it done despite a size and strength difference, and of course she could've made it much easier by knocking him out first (or poisoning him? or possibly witchcraft?), but how she went about it will be useful information. ...Hopefully more useful than confusing, anyway.

"He was unconscious at the time."

"Mm, that did seem like the simplest option." He really shouldn't look approving, she's eleven, but he's never been much good at hiding his feelings. "And how did you get him that way?"

He only now notices that she keeps answering his questions, and he's fairly sure telling him the truth, even when she could just not do that. It fits with what she said this morning - she refuses to be afraid of the consequences of telling the truth. God, what a child.

"I ambushed him in the dark and choked him out."

"Impressive. ...And honestly less confusing than I expected." A bit of a smile. "Where did you learn to do all that?"

"My uncle Fester taught me," she says, with a smile that is fleeting but genuine.

A smile! That's at least five Wednesday Points, surely. "He must be very good."

And now for the less fun half of that set of questions... "And, ah, who taught you how to electrocute people?"

"Well, Uncle Fester gave me the idea, but he doesn't need tools for it and I do. In that respect I'm mostly self-taught."

"Also impressive, if kind of worrying." (His subconscious word processing looked at 'he doesn't need tools for it', decided the literal interpretation made no sense, and seamlessly spliced in an assumption that he has a fancy device instead of needing to make do with what must've been the electric wiring. Speaking a foreign language makes that kind of smoothing more likely, because he's half-guessing the exact meanings of sentences anyway.)

He looks at her for a moment, thinking. "You know, when I think about it, it sounds strange and bad, but I don't think it was worse than throwing him down the stairs. More pain, but less damage, probably. More scary, but you wanted to scare him." And that's the right way to end that sort of escalating conflict, really. "You keep doing that - you sound like you're doing something bad, but when I think about it, you aren't."