Bookish

A lot of questions, but understandable ones. He knew what Gask would want. He wanted books, so all the questions were about how to get books.

"You get a card automatically when you become a student. You pick books you want to take out and then you speak to the librarian at the front, and they'll help make sure the library knows you have that book so they don't get lost. You can return them right away, and if you really like a book, you can't take it, but you could buy it from a bookstore. Book stores just sell books, and they don't let you borrow them to read."

If Gask bought every book he read Valli was pretty sure he'd run out of room in the apartment. He'd need to buy a house, and then that would fill up.

"You can start anywhere. That's the nice thing - you don't need to start in a particular place, and you can just kind of... wander."

Valli had rarely had time for the library. It wasn't that he disliked it. No, he liked the books. He liked wandering the stacks and finding books based on premises and covers alone. But he rarely had time for it, and so he'd let the habit fall by the wayside. Even right then, with time to spare, he still hesitated to do it.

What if Gask needed help? What if he had questions?

Really, Valli wasn't giving him enough credit. Gask had lead a veritable army. He'd started a settlement. Even if he was unfamiliar with the modern world, he could adapt. He could figure things out. After a few minutes of nervously hovering, Valli decided to get himself a book, even if it killed him to leave Gask alone. He stayed near the front of the library, terribly easy to find, and picked out a nice novel without paying too much attention to what the actual contents were about.

They didn't really matter. The point was to have something to read.

Seeing Gask return with a dozen of the most random books Valli could imagine let him relax, and spotting Gask's face - filled with more joy than he'd probably ever felt - made things easier.

He hadn't made a mistake, Valli decided. He'd been foolish and he'd rushed into things without thinking it all out, but it hadn't been a mistake.

"I suppose it'd be stupid to ask if you found everything you wanted," Valli said with a small smile, gesturing Gask up towards the checkout counter before retrieving his school ID. Twelve was fairly reasonable, considering he was faculty, but he'd have to get Gask his own card eventually.

"There's a little cafe nearby. We can sit down and eat something, and then we can talk about where things go from here."

And get him used to something basic, like eating at a restaurant.

The cafe would be new to Gask, so Valli made sure to choose a seat where they could have some privacy, a nice booth on the side of the cafe. They could see the exit easily--something Valli wasn't sure Gask cared about, but seemed relevant--and the entire thing was quiet enough for a conversation.

"This is a cafe, a type of restaurant that normally serves lighter meals. Restaurants provide you with food in exchange for money," Valli explained, before taking a guess at what Gask would expect. "I'll be paying for things, so you don't have to worry about that for now." Better to get that out of the way, or else he'd probably end up worried he didn't know how money worked just yet.

"I wanted to ask you about school. It seems like... well, the most obvious and pressing of all the things in front of us. The school here is free, and covers all kinds of lessons. They'd help catch you up in areas you're behind, and let you take classes on things that interest you." He couldn't imagine Gask saying no. It felt like a foregone conclusion, but one he'd have to ask anyway. He couldn't just ship him off without talking to him. He was confused, and a little bit ignorant of the ways of the world, but he wasn't a child. He'd learn quickly, and asking was going to go over better in the long run.

To adequately survive. Valli was confident that he'd go beyond that. That he'd thrive in the new world he found himself in. Gask had all the tools he needed to find himself living a happy, healthy life. A normal life, miles beyond the life he'd have lived in the simulation if it had continued.

Valli wasn't quite sure what he expected, but I don't sleep, I read other languages, what am I? was not it. He'd never really talked about what Gask was, not really. He'd talked about it, hadn't he? Only the more Valli thought, the more he became convinced the answer was no.

He hadn't talked about it. He'd said he downloaded him and put him in a shell or something like that, but he'd tried not to confuse him, and so he'd gone out of the way and avoided saying you're a robot, harry like that would mean anything to Gask.

This was going to be a confusing explanation, but Valli was more direct. Gask had had time to calm down, after all.

"Your body is a robot - a type of machine. Made to look human, and made to emulate human in as many ways as possible. So you can feel, and taste, and otherwise act like a human. Only they definitely... tweaked you a bit."

Valli cringed at that.

"If I'd gotten full say in it, I'd have made you as human as it was possible to be, but that would have been extremely costly and sort of self defeating, so instead you ended up being the 'standard' model. You don't need as much sleep as a person, because your brain can recover faster in a shorter period of time. You're omnilingual, for any language on earth and many that aren't of earth at all. There's a couple other things, more minor--you'll heal faster than humans, but first aid won't help you at all. You can't get food poisoning either, or be effected by drugs. The only real disadvantage over a human body is that magnets can make you go a bit... woozy."

Woozy was not the term the salesman had used, but it was the word Valli preferred.

"Aside from those, you're effectively human."

More or less, anyway. Of course, Valli had missed a rather large one, but that was out of ignorance, rather than malice. He simply wasn't thinking long term.

Gask didn't have to actually say it. He didn't have to say the words. Whether it was real or alive, the sentiment was clear enough, and Valli grimaced slightly as he tried to come up with the right words.

"You're alive," Valli said. "As alive as someone who had to get an organ transplant, only... more complex. And you're you, the only you that exists. Part of the deal when I -"

He was terribly close to saying bought you, but he stopped himself in time. "When I made a deal with the station was that they didn't keep a copy. They wanted to, but I didn't want there to be... to be multiples. To have you running around and having a crisis because they could just make a you that was just as valid. So it's just you."

With no backups, for good or bad.

But the rest was easier to handle.

"Generally people get a job. They do that job, and they get paid money. They use that money to pay for goods or services. The island has a good system though - a small amount of what you make from your job goes to the island, and the island uses it to make sure that no one starves, or is homeless, or anything like that. And no, we don't allow killing, or taking people as slaves. Killing someone's a crime. Hurting anyone at all is a crime. And slavery... well, that's a big crime too."