"- yes. Why is that so surprising?"

"I don't think it's very comfortable to live in my body or think my thoughts?"

"It's possible it won't stick, if it's - physically painful or something - I don't think Yeerks are usually that bothered by host thoughts, or it would have been much more difficult for them to operate by kidnapping people back when that was standard."

"...Hm." Shrug. "So, who is it?"

"Their name is Ashkon. They want to study magic music - like the sleep song."

This delights him so much he doesn’t have canned body language for it and stands frozen grinning for a moment before figuring pulling his hair is the least wrong of the ways he knows of reacting to feelings that strong.

"Why would anything that nice happen to me?"

"- I think you have a lot to offer a Yeerk! You're available for much larger chunks of time than most voluntary hosts and you need less maintenance and quid pro quo. Ashkon's next best option would probably be someone who gave them much less time to work on music."

"...Huh. Okay. What do I do about that?"

"If you want to go meet Ashkon I can conduct you there on the bus, it'll double as a bus use lesson."

"...That sounds like the kind of thing that might be a good idea?"

"All right. Are you ready now or do you want a few minutes to take a shower, drink coffee, finish reading something online, anything like that?"

"...How do I shower here?"

"There's a bathroom in these apartments, over here." She leads him to a door beyond which is a bathroom, weirdly fancy for a free lodging but not unrecognizable by American standards, and it's equipped with some no-name unscented soap and shampoo.

"I don’t suppose there’s also a free change of clothes that I’ve been overlooking?"

"The replicator at the commissary can also do clothes but you will have to let it scan you for your size."

"...I guess I'm probably going to keep you waiting for a minute, then? Sorry, you can, uh, use any of my stuff if you want?"

"- thank you but I'm fine. I'll come back in an hour?"

"Sure."

In an hour he's clean and dressed in whatever the replicator thinks he should wear and more caffeinated and playing a tile-matching game with monsters.

The replicator's default outfit for humans is a blue t-shirt and loose black yoga pants and fuzzy moccasins.

Nocawe returns when expected. "Hi! All set?"

Why is it so hard to tear himself away from playing games? It’s ridiculous.

"I guess so."

She leads him out of the building and to the nearest bus stop. She can show him how to pull up bus maps and schedules on his tablet. "We're here," point, "and we're going there," point, "so we'll take the local line to the city hub, here, and then switch to the Coaster line which will go through these two worlds to land us in Cube. Then we'll get on the Gleet line to get to Tide, where you can meet Ashkon."

"...Okay." He’s still kind of cringing a little.

"Is there something confusing about that?"

Shrug. "I don’t know. I don’t think I have questions yet."

"It is a lot of buses, there are so many places people might want to go that you can't have a much simpler system. This app will calculate a route for you and there are competing versions if you don't like this one. I'll be with you the whole way."