"Help doing what?"

"Learning facts like 'most people have blood' and sourcing potion ingredients and foods and interacting with architecture designed for taller people and identifying what kinds of things are worth your time to learn and getting introduced to other people who might want to hire you or might have things to teach you. Also, I'm not completely sure you're not a child, and human children benefit from having adults who help them think through how they want to grow up, on a personal level."

"Those sound like good things to have help with but I'm not actually clear why you want to offer them to me."

"Well, at the cost of sounding extraordinarily mercenary, no one else I have ever heard of has healing powers and I don't know why you're here and I'm worried if you die there will go back to being no people with healing powers in contact with any humans I know about."

"Oh. Okay, that's a great reason. I would like being able to heal lots of people!"

"This would have been so much more annoying if you'd been evil. Well, got any idea what you eat and if you sleep?"

"I eat... food? I guess I don't know if you eat food. Maybe you eat rocks or dead animals or something. I think I sleep."

"I eat one kind of rock and lots of kinds of dead animals and eggs and milk and lots of kinds of leaves and stems and fruits and flowers but mostly I eat seeds."

"Wow. I don't think I eat any rocks or dead animals, I don't know what the next two things are, and the rest of it sounds fine."

"When you get hungry, if you know what being hungry feels like, someone can round up some plant foods for you to try. Eggs are where some species come from - like seeds for animals - and milk is something animals feed their children."

"I will recognize being hungry. I'm not right now."

"That's good. Anyway, I think with all this excitement we may have forgotten to introduce ourselves - I'm Tema, these are Chanai and Velya, and you might also meet another person here whose name is Tyela."

"I can't remember my name."

"I'm sorry. Do you want an extra name while you're waiting or do you want to wait in case you remember?"

"An extra name to use at least for now, I think."

"Where my parents and Velya's are from people have names like Divna and Iskra, and where Chanai's parents are from people have names like Aran and Oma. If it ends up making sense for me to formally adopt you you could take my surname, Miara, for the second part of your name, but you'd still need a given name even then."

"Iskra's pretty. And so's Miara."

"It's nice to meet you, Iskra. Anyway, since you are at least very confused and possibly young, I'm inclined to think you probably want Chanai or Velya to spend some time getting you up to speed - if you demonstrate that you can be gentle with them and keep your hands clean you can also borrow my books but I'm not sure if they're the right sort of thing to be helpful to you - and if you need anything else, you can ask someone."

"I think apart from my little injury my hands are clean."

"Yes, but they need to be consistently clean any time you touch any of my books."

"Where does one clean one's hands?"

Chanai feels like taking the lead on this one. "We actually keep some clean water and a towel by the library door, and in other places around the house, and when we need more water we get it out of the fountain in the courtyard."

"Okay. I can wash my hands before touching books. Gently."

Chanai smiles. "If you want I can show you to the library now."

"Yes please."