"I'm... not sure where to start, just yet. But thank you, I'll keep that in mind."

Nod. Callida's run out of things to say. She's not exactly trained as a diplomat. More of an archaeologist, or librarian. ... With murder. She's a Sith, after all.

Despite this, she's perfectly polite and complimentary during the tour of the house, and not at all murdery. The rest of the visit passes without incident; Callida is terribly curious about the library, but reading it will have to wait until later, when she actually speaks the language. According to her this won't be her second language, though she wouldn't say she has fluency in others. She understands a type of droid language, apparently can translate certain ancient languages, and, quote, 'not be entirely lost most of the time if someone speaks to her in one of the more common non-basic languages,' but she insists that understanding when other people speak a language is really not speaking it. There are a lot of languages in her galaxy - you can get by if you only know Basic, but it's not recommended.

And then the visit ends and Callida goes back to her manor. There's more things to do, of course, but the major thing she's waiting on is if kolto can be grown in a vat or not.

Cordelia gets a comm to Callida's ship, and through that a communication method to speak to Envee.

Cordelia is very happy to speak to Envee! She opens the conversation by sending along a few of her favourite books, with translations into Russian, French, and Greek.

Envee is thrilled! She immediately starts asking questions about language roots and alphabets and consonants and number of vowels and if anything's pronounced differently and how the language has evolved and -

Yeah, she likes her job.

Cordelia knows a few of these answers herself, and knows where to find books that answer the rest. (Also, she thinks Envee's enthusiasm is immensely endearing.)

Excellent! Books! Envee loves books, almost as much as she loves just directly downloading transcripts of books. But they can't do that, yet, because their technology still can't talk, so she can't just download their entire library. Yet.

Envee was already fluent in English (and as such most of her correspondence with Cordelia was in English), but had not been exposed enough to the Barrayaran dialects of Russian, Greek, or French to attain fluency. Once she has, she's fluent in each in about three hours. Then she starts tracing her way back from the Barrayaran dialects to attain fluency in the original Earth dialect. And then from there, attempts to trace her way to other Nexus dialects that evolved over the centuries, to get a feel for why they evolved the way they did, where the subtle differences are.

Then, when she's done with that, she asks for any books they might have on the original languages these ones evolved from. Because she wants to learn those, too.

The books exist, and she can have them, but there are enough of them that it's starting to get really impractical to send them page by page as holos, even though Cordelia managed to automate the process. They really need a sane way to handle the data format conversions, especially if Envee wants to learn every language in the Nexus - on the Barrayaran side, they've managed to put together a way to store and display text in Basic, but that's only one language with only one alphabet, and the entire communication infrastructure between Barrayar and the Sith fleet is still frankly a bit of a kludge.

Yes. The Sith Imperials have similarly figured out how to store and display text in English, but that doesn't solve the underlying problem of two totally different systems on two totally different sets of hardware being unable to just directly beam each other information. Ugh. That's annoying. She wants books now. She'll just have to fix it all herself. As the most advanced translation droid in the fleet, backed by the authority of Lord Callida and with a direct line to Cordelia, she is the most equipped to handle this difficult task.

This takes longer than three hours.

Cordelia helpfully tracks down all the right people and all the right technical specifications to help from the Barrayaran end.

After a few hours, she has to excuse herself from the proceedings because she's just received word that her son is in the hospital.

Well, Envee wishes her and her son the best of luck. It'll be slower without Cordelia, but she'll keep at it.

And also informs Lord Callida of the situation.

Who notes that it would do a lot for everyone's opinion of kolto (and, by extension, her fleet) if she could just show up and get the former Regent's son out of the hospital in record time.

What's he in the hospital for?

Primarily the shattered arm, although there are plenty of other injuries to go around.

Sounds rather nasty. Would the Vorkosigans like Sith assistance? They have kolto, and other options that Callida would prefer to talk about in person.

Yes, Cordelia would be very grateful for her help.

So here is Callida, with her personal ship's doctor, who is probably more than brilliant enough to convince every Barrayaran doctor here that he should definitely be allowed to look at the Lord Vorkosigan. Though it might take him a while, because while they can translate English to Basic and vice versa, their translation has a bit more trouble with medical lingo.

While he's trying to explain why kolto will not interfere with the other drugs they've got him on with about half of his words not translating at all, Callida also privately takes Cordelia aside and says, "Along with the kolto, there is a less easily scaled healing solution I can personally perform."

"Is this related to your, ah, magical powers?"

"They're not precisely magic - but, well, yes. Related to those. I can put him into a healing trance, which amounts to putting him into a healing slumber until either he's fully healed or someone wakes him up."

"That sounds very useful."

Yes, Callida thought so too, which is why she went and learned it after that time she almost died dropping a building on a Sith Lord.

"It is. The way to wake him up would be through a set phrase that anyone could say. I wouldn't need to be there."

"Are there any associated risks...?"

"He would be very vulnerable in the interim. Unless someone with the phrase were to wake him up, he wouldn't stir at all during, say, a fire, or an attack on the hospital. If he's in it too long, he'll need some other vector to get him his nutrition, since he won't be eating or drinking anything while under. And if it's abnormally long, his muscles might eventually begin to atrophy. But risks for the healing trance itself, no, it works for a number of different species."

"I think that sounds acceptable. Thank you. I appreciate your help very much."

"You're welcome," she says, smiling slightly. It's nice, just being able to show up and fix things, without having to deal with other Sith wanting to break things.

Meanwhile, her doctor is excitedly talking about bizarre biochemistry with the Barrayaran doctors. Yes, of course he knows how to deal with incredibly bizarre human-based biochemistries, there are a truly impressive number of human subspecies where he comes from!

For some reason, the Barrayarans need to double check to see if he meant this. Yes? He did? They occur for a number of reasons, divergent evolution and interspecies breeding and really you can't be sure of a standard human baseline because they're just everywhere in the galaxy, getting into everything - why are they all staring at him like that. Are those expressions fascinated or horrified, he can't tell. Do they want him to explain -?

Yes. Yes they do. He is assaulted by a multitude of questions, and also now people are shouting at each other for some reason, and he is very confused, but really this is one of his favorite subjects, so he'll happily answer them all. The ones he can pick out, anyway.

Cordelia glances over at them. "I sense cultural exchange in action," she murmurs.

"Quite. Should I. Do something?" asks Callida, watching in mild fascination.