She paces for a few more hours. This changes things, and things desperately need changing. She can't help but feel that in hindsight she'll feel like an idiot, though, even if she can't guess what her mistake will have been.

Carmen wakes up a little bit before sunrise and goes looking for Gimlith.

And finds her asleep on the couch, curled up and frowning in her sleep.

Is it rude to wake up sleeping people? Too bad the only person I can ask about this is sleeping.

She is staring at Gimlith during this deliberation, as one does. Everyone stares intently at pretty people, right? This is not even slightly weird.

She wakes of her own accord before Carmen resolves this dilemma. "Hey! Libraries today, right?"

"Right! Libraries! Oh, wait, I still need to learn Sindarin. Shoot. Will there be anyone at the library who'd be willing to Sindarin at me until I've picked up some of it? Well, depending on how far away it is, you could start teaching me on the way."

She sighs. "It's not too far, and no, people will expect you to already speak it. We could go to a coffee shop and listen to the nobles and I could translate for you until you get the hang of it?"

"OK, sure. I'll just need enough that I can figure out the rest of what's in the books from context."

"Let's do it, then. You needn't drink the coffee."

"Great. Thanks." She shuddered at the memory of this 'coffee'.

"It's tasty! Can you lot not do drugs?"

"As in chemicals meant to affect the brain? Yes, we can snort them, inject them, smoke them, or dissolve them in the blood we drink. Why? Do you have drugs you want to share? Because, even besides my usual reluctance to interfere with my head, I don't know how our metabolisms and neurology differ."

"Not particularly, I was just curious whether that was a thing among people who don't eat or drink things that aren't blood. We consume most of our drugs by eating or drinking them."

"Most of our drugs are ingested by dissolving them in blood, but nasal entry deserves an honourable mention. Is coffee among your edible drugs?" She uses 'edible' in the loosest possible terms to refer to coffee.

"It is! Makes you more awake."

"Huh. Cool. I guess that means people will mostly be in coffee shops in the morning and the evening?"

"It's a popular place to work any time of the day. In the morning people are likelier to be in a hurry, I suppose."

"Ah, OK. Well, as good a place as any to learn a language. Might as well go, then." She says, heading over to the door.

"It's a very good place to learn a language," she says, "you can't really go about town inconspicuously listening to people talk without alarming them."

"Are there any languages spoken around here besides Adûnaic and Sindarin? I don't want to accidentally mix a bunch of languages together while listening in the coffee shop."

"Those are the only major ones. I can tell you if you're hearing anything else."

"OK, thank you." She continues looking around at the unusual buildings.

"You did really well; you have nothing to be nervous about."

"I'm not nervous. These buildings just look... Different to what I'm accustomed to. 'To talk about the architecture' is an expression meaning to discuss uninteresting trivialities in my culture, but I am actually unironically intrigued by these buildings."

"Huh, really? We care a lot about architecture. It affects life a lot; why would it be considered uninteresting?"