...right then.

Well. Jasmine sure does have someone she sits with at lunch now.

Who would be a good choice for the earnestly foreign charms Kedri can bring to bear?

...you know what? Kedri is going to go sit with the robot spider. Maybe they can share tips on dealing with aliens or something. And an outside-context person is more likely to correctly interpret it as a well-meaning accident if Kedri ends up stepping in some cultural quicksand.

(Also she might get to learn about what being a robot spider is like, which would be very cool. She would be happy to share information about what being an otherworldly walk-in is like in return.)

The robotic spider is sitting in a corner, nibbling at a plate of what appears to be paperwork, looking sort of wilted - whatever it is, it does not appear to be a terribly athletic biomechanical spider.  

Kedri is not the only person to have approached it - there's also a noble kid with an awed look, taking notes and asking intrusive questions about the spider, which looks, probably, glad for a reprive from the barrage.

"Hi!" It says, in a voice that combines insectile buzzing with the strange pitch of bad vocaloid. 

Possibly the spider should make a FAQ sheet to hand out to people for when it doesn't feel like infodumping. She's heard about people with prosthetics and such doing that. Maybe she'll make one for herself, once she gets a better sense of which questions are frequently asked.

She smiles. (Probably someone who speaks Imperial will also know what a smile means. And she's presumably not physically capable of the spider equivalent of a friendly smile.)

((...yet? The Head Archivist mentioned shapeshifting magic was a thing. She wonders how that would interact with body-sharing.))

"Hello!", she says, using enough of her native accent to sound noticeably foreign but not enough to be difficult to understand. "I'm Kedri, and this--" she does the gesturing-above-her-heart again "--is my host, Jasmine.

I have been in this particular universe for all of two days and--" her eyes flicker over the scene "--you kind of look how I feel right now."

(Well, except for the ways in which it kind of looks the opposite of how she feels right now: on the whole, people have done surprisingly little barraging her with (xeno)anthropological questions, really. Her FAQ sheet might end up being a lot shorter than the spider's.)

"The Bank has done me and my home a great aid by taking me in. I've always heard good things about them, and while everything is very primitive, the people have been very kind. In what respect are you being hosted?"

Can biomechanical spiders too big for their chairs project polite formality? This one is trying.

"I'm possessing her. We're both awake, but we take turns controlling the body." she can neither confirm nor deny any particular level of difficulty in taking turns

"When my original body died, my soul drifted through the worlds, and Jasmine's was the first compatible body I bumped into. Or so I assume, anyway: I wasn't actually conscious for that part, just one moment I was on my deathbed wondering where the journey would take me and then I was waking up in here during Jasmine's induction ceremony." She winces a little. "Awkward timing, but it couldn't be helped.

I'm...very grateful they took me in, too, once they determined it was safe to and that I wasn't some malevolent demon. Partly for Jasmine's sake--it would've been awful if I'd prevented her from having this when she'd been looking forward to it all this time--but also for my own: there's such incredible opportunity here. I didn't even know cultivation was possible before, and now here I am, learning to overthrow nature.

What-- may I ask what brought you here, or is it a sensitive topic?"

"I didn't die when I was supposed to, and it was disrupting the celestial order, so they sent me to somewhere outside the celestial order, where being heaven-defying was, uh, less of a problem for my friends and family."

"...I'm...uh...missing pretty much all of the context for that, but it sounds unpleasant and I hope things go better for you in the future.

What's..." should she ask this question? well, she already reassured them it was okay if they didn't want to talk about it "...the celestial order?"

The noble who had been asking questions before will cut in before the spider can say anything. "That's what they call the Immortal of Insurance's world-body! An entire world, where everything occurs according to the procession of financial instruments of tremendous complexity. It's fascinating! My grandparents once ran a trade mission there and made a great fortune, but we have so little contact, even though the Immortal of Insurance was based out of this very fortress once upon a time!"

Being interrupted by whoever is most excited about the conversational topic is just a fact of life in conversations involving more than two people. Though she does worry that the noble's excitement might clash with what the spider is feeling about their...exile, by the sound of it.

The phrase "die when I was supposed to" is...concerning, but...it's good at least that the spider got to keep their body, when the time of their death came and led to them being exiled to another world. And...might have gotten to stay in contact with their loved ones? That one really sounds like too emotionally fraught of a question to ask right now.

(Emotionally fraught for whom? Yes.)

(She's glad she remembered to phrase the demon-checking in a way that acknowledged that not all demons-in-the-Imperial-sense are malevolent, given that apparently the spider is themself technically a kind of demon.)

"It's a lot to get used to, being in this world instead," she says.

She turns to the noble, now that they've addressed her.

"How about you? What brings you to the Bank?"

"Family recommended that I go for the finance track here, we have too many Marketeers in the family already, and my mother wanted a son who would be able to visit her regularly. It was pretty hard getting in, the exams aren't anything like how the Market does things." 

Oh so this guy's absolutely a spy, huh.

Her role in the response, for now, is to be generally friendly and welcoming and help him feel at home here, while not giving the game away. She will leave the more specific counterintelligence efforts to the people who actually...know things...about local social mores.

(Someday, she will know things about how to do intrigue here, and have more mental bandwidth with which to plot. She looks forward to the capacity, if perhaps not to the necessity.)

"My kith-sister was a payables clerk for a shipping company. It'll be interesting to see what's different and what's similar about the financial structures here, even if my knowledge is kind of secondhand.

I think I'll be going scholar-track in the future myself, though I'm starting off with Practical Resource Extraction.

How were the exams like?"

(It's risky to ask about exams and potentially make him jealous of how she didn't have to go through them, and indeed she didn't dare ask Lark, but this guy sounds like he actively wants to talk about them. Or maybe she just couldn't contain her curiosity anymore. Who knows how mouths decide what to say, really.

...she wonders if there is a technique that gives you finer-grained control over which words come out of your mouth.)

"Ah, they were - tricky? Surprisingly holistic. Some theory, some interviews, a martial arts tournament. I thought I'd shot my chances entirely there, I was eliminated after two matches, but it seems it wasn't that important? At the Market, anyone who can pay the entry fee in money they've earned themselves can get in. Much simpler."

Kedri nods, wondering quietly how many loopholes there are in the definition of "money they've earned themselves". (It wouldn't do to say something arguably disparaging of Marketeers in front of him.) It might be that they close obvious stuff like "interest on gifted principal" and "selling to family members for way above market value" but deliberately leave others open, to--how did the Bank's intake packet put it--"teach students subtlety": they'd probably think it all the better if you were able to find a particularly clever loophole.

"Maybe the martial-arts tournament is more one of those questions where the thing they want to know isn't whether you'd win or lose, but how you'd go about it."

"Or maybe any one form of excellence is sufficient to prove that you're competent enough. I could probably look it up, now that I'm in, but. Well, I have more important things to do right now. My mother always said first-mover advantage is a big deal when it comes to cohort market share."

She must not acknowledge (where he can hear her) that there was anything suspicious about what he just said. Come on, mouth, you can do this.

"Yeah, there's a lot of priorities to sort through. I know I have more things I want to read than I'll have a chance to anytime soon."

Okay, she thinks she made it.

(Even in the scenario where he's not a spy, talking about competing for cohort market share with a, uh, fellow seller in the cohort market feels kind of ominous. Unless he's trying to...metaphorically(?) collude with her?)

He will make vague affirmative noises through a mouthful of stir-fry.

Kedri eats a steamed bun.

"For the record," she says, while she is busy chewing and so will probably not have her internal conversation interrupted by external conversation, "if anyone asks, I'm experimenting with letting some of my accent through the language-borrowing in order to make it easier to tell which of us is speaking. *Privately*: that, but also...

...I've noticed sometimes--especially when I was talking about ship enchantments with Crane--like...like she was expecting me to know things that I couldn't possibly have known, given how little time I've been here. And I thought about what you said about how talking wolves usually just know Introduction to the Empire the same way they just know how to talk, and I thought that maybe sounding like a native is giving people...unrealistic expectations of how much background knowledge they can expect me to have, and then when I fail to meet them that makes me look bad."

"That makes sense. I do think it's genuinely a good idea to make it clear which of us is speaking, normally? Though, I should see if I can fake your accent sometime - if we're making a point of me being the fighter and the stealth specialist, it sounds pretty valuable for me to be able to spoof that signal. But I also agree that it's probably for the best that people have a correct apprehension of how foreign you are."

"Indeed."

She chuckles a little. "Usually what I hear about is walk-ins learning to pass themselves off as their hosts, in situations where it isn't safe to admit that they're there. But I see your point in turning the tables on that."

"What do you think of him?" she asks, mentally gesturing at the noble. "I'm not sure if that thing with the first-mover advantage was him considering an alliance with me or considering a *rivalry* with me or remarking on some unrelated plot he's doing on behalf of the Market or what."