"I heard you're a great and brave worm catcher, is that true? I've never caught worms, maybe you could teach me sometime!"

"..... mebe."

This seems to be the entirety of the interaction this small child wants to have at this time, because he then departs. They now have a cage of small insect-like creatures on their table. One starts trying to reach for Zash's food through the tiny bars of the cage.

"Bye! It was nice meeting you!" he calls after Tonis.

Sure, the little critter can have some of his food, he doesn't mind.

Nibble nibble nibble, goes the little critter. It even passes some food to its fellows shortly after eating some.

"Aw. How prosocial of them," says Yvette, of the creatures, amused. "Add that to the list of nice things about worms, I guess."

He lifts both eyebrows. "You have a list of nice things about worms?"

"I guess I hadn't been thinking about it in a direct list form, but... I do actually admire their adaptability?" She fishes a tiny bit of crust she doesn't personally want to eat and offers it to one of the critters. "A bunch of aliens crashed out of the sky onto their planet, set up shop and declared the whole place actually theirs, built cities, started terraforming it, so on, and. Instead of the mass die offs like on Old Earth, they went, 'Yeah okay, we can eat this.' And then did. Their biology's changed over the last hundred and fifty years, did you know? I mean the bones of it are ultimately the same, but when we first landed there was just nothing of them humans could digest at all. Which I guess makes me sound a bit self serving, 'I like that we can eat them now,' but. You know. Casually and easily adjusting to a strange new thing like it's nothing at all. Pretty cool." Pause. "Also the swarms of them are very pretty in the night sky. All bright and glowy and almost magical. While we're on self serving things I like."

"Ah huh. That's... an interesting way to see it. Very you."

"... Thanks?? I think??"

He grins. "You're welcome!"

Yvette's original assessment about the difficulty of the task was roughly correct; gathering the necessary data does take days. Probably fewer days than she'd expected, though, because Zash can in fact get the answer to the question "What's wrong?" directly in a way she cannot. He's not exactly advertising this fact, but he's not doing a ton of work to hide it either. The couple of extra times she prods him gently about it he dodges the question equally gently and she doesn't do it again. However it is he can communicate with them, to whatever extent they have their own form of intelligence, his contributions continue to make this work be less time-consuming than it otherwise would be, and surer of success besides. Zash is in fact very adamant about the fact that they absolutely can fix everything, here.

So they progress, slowly and steadily and reliably, until on day 4 their little peaceful time is interrupted by the arrival of the Julai Military Police, fronted by the same police captain who stopped Vernon that first day. "Haven't seen him, huh?" asks the captain of Vernon, loudly, pointing his gun at Zash where he's seated at one of the tables in the diner. Two police officers are flanking him and also pointing their guns at Zash, and two more are outside the diner for potential support.

..... Yeah, he was afraid of that. He didn't want to shake the happy couple out of their efforts to save a town full of people, because they really needed the help, but uh. In retrospect he probably should have pressured the red and yellow half of it to keep moving. Instead of staying near where the Julai Military Police had been sniffing around.

"Well, I hadn't, but then he just showed up. Decided I didn't need the money, though. 'Specially not from some trigger happy punk from Julai. You really want it to get out that you came in and shot up a whole town after one guy?"

Yvette is currently sitting next to Zash, her now habitual array of proofs and equations taking up approximately half of the table. She looks nervously between all of the variously armed people, and wonders if it'd be dumb if she shrunk down to hide under the table. Maybe? Maybe. She's just going to try looking like wallpaper.

(At 'need the money,' someone at the bar twitches a bit. She'd been reaching for a weapon, before, but the prospect of a reward gives her pause....)

Zash finishes chewing his food, puts his cutlery down, then turns to look at the three men pointing guns at him with mild interest. "Gentlemen, would you mind if we took this conversation outside? I believe we're disturbing the locals."

"This isn't a conversation, Zash the Stampede. You will come with us, and you can choose between doing so after a lot of shooting or not."

"The reward is for delivering me alive," he points out.

The captain smiles. "We can make sure not to hit anywhere important."

"--Uh," oh fuck she's talking why is she talking does she want to die why is she so stupid sometimes, "even if you shot somewhere unimportant, he could absolutely bleed out before you got him anywhere you could patch him up. Unless you have a med kit stashed somewhere?"

She's clearly trying so hard, and she's even pretending to be dumb like a proper smart person, and yet. Still so far to go.

".... Implication's that he could shoot other, less important people," sighs Vernon.

"Oh."

Zash sighs. "Very well. I'll come quietly, if you promise not to disturb these people."

The man's smile widens. "We're only here for you."

He gets up, slowly, lifting his hands above his head, making sure to make no sudden movements that will spook these people, and he starts making his way out of the diner.

"But--!"