Time, the progress of befores, was divided up into units of varying lengths, some precise and unchanging, others based less on a specific unit of time so much as the experience of it. The most important unit of time was the day, a unit of time which referred to both a precise element - a progression of sixteen hours, a smaller precise element of time - but also an imprecise element, which was the portion of those sixteen hours spent productively.

The djinn needed a period of time they called sleep, when their vibrations changed, their mind shifting from awareness to a chaotic pattern of integration, a period of time called night, which lasted around six hours. Self's first day thus fell into night, and the room was empty of others.

Self tried sleep, quieting the vibrations and trying to integrate the day. This was largely a matter of slowly moving through the myriad concepts picked up throughout the day, trying to understand and integrate them into an increasing space of associated concepts, which formed an increasingly intricate web.

Much of the work was spent combining the concepts taken from the dead. It was slow; each had their own conception of everything, no matter how simple. The color red, for instance, was different for each, from how they saw it to what concepts it connected to. How each individual saw things was different, and what memories had been taken even more so; some could be taken as they were, and so Self had an image of a flower, a strange geometry of intricate symmetries and stark colors that the observer had found pleasing. Others... less so, as the other memory of a flower Self encountered was just a series of concepts, more like a story about the flower than the flower itself. There were different kinds of flowers, and Self couldn't tell if they were the same, or not, so different was how they saw it, or at least remembered seeing it.

Each individual remembered things differently, conceptualized things differently, thought differently. The concept of a concept wasn't even universal; the individual who had the memory of a flower-story did that for everything, everything Self had taken was a kind of story, including concepts themselves. Each concept was a word, each word was a story, in most cases a story about how the word and its meaning had been learned. As far as Self could determine, the individual only ever thought in speech, which seemed limiting; Self tried it, and quickly discovered that there Self simply lacked words for most concepts, made the worse by that words rarely meant a single thing.

Such a way of thinking did make it easier for the individual to hold conversations; Self found it trying and slow, a process of translating thoughts into words, and Self simply lacked words for many of the concepts. It was difficult to tell how much this was a problem for others, going by the dead, because their memories were partial and fragmented; partly this was that Self had taken only a small amount from each, partly it seemed they just didn't remember everything.

A noise brought Self's attention back to sight; Efre had entered, and was closing the door. It was morning, and Self had gotten most of the way through the mass of concepts; much of the night had been spent trying to understand the conceptual space enough to get rid of concepts that were not useful. The solution had ended up being disconnecting them, shoving them off to the edge of the conceptual space, and then letting awareness deliberately exclude them, whereupon they started slowly falling apart.

"We will return to your lessons. You need to understand more, beginning with the fact that the correct term of address for Zana is Zana, not," and Efre's face changed slightly, voice shifting to a slightly higher pitch, and the words interrupted by odd exhalations of air, "'the Zana'."

"Why did ... Zana speak 'the Zana' when specifying name?" Self was trying to understand the change in Efre's speech patterns, and the attention brought notice to something else; Efre was wearing different clothes. The sandals were the same, but instead of the shirt and skirt of yesterday, today Efre wore something which Self lacked the name for. The fabric, a panel front and back, started red, a horizontal curve resting on Efre's shoulders, falling down over the curve of chest, cinched at the waist by a blue band, and falling further to the shins, forming a shape like two triangles meeting in the center; the bottom was a line of blue, rising into many identical triangles up into the red. There were two other panels, blue and mostly hidden behind the panels front and back, which wrapped Efre's sides.

Self's distraction by the clothing resulted in missing Efre's response, at first, and with some effort, memory provided some of it, although it took more effort than normal to understand enough to catch up.

"... complicated, and it will take some time to get you to understand. There are many rules for terms of address, and they vary from community to ... community." Efre's speech pattern was odd, at first - precise and uniform, without the usual variations and pauses, until the end, when there was a pause, and a drop in the tone of the final word. After a pause, when Efre's face changed twice more, the words resumed, quieter and with the slightly lower pitch, and without the previous precision and uniformity, "We will go over social rules today, first. Zana wishes for you to understand etiquette, ethics, and obligation."

Self didn't know what some of those words meant, and remained silent, expecting Efre to help with that understanding. When Efre continued, it was back to the precise and uniform manner of speech.

"To begin with, etiquette is a system of informal rules governing how people interact with each other. It helps each person to be able to know how another person will act in a given situation. It is informal both because each individual is different, and will act differently in a given situation, and that is important for reasons we will get to in ethics, but also because part of etiquette is that people want it to be easy to fail at.

"When somebody fails at getting etiquette right, it tells other people that they don't understand the rules. This can be, as with " Efre paused for a moment, speech becoming less rigid momentarily "you, who haven't learned etiquette yet, in which case people change their expectations of your behavior, or because they just don't care to understand the rules, in which case that also changes expectation of behavior.

"The rules themselves help prevent mental harm to people. Most people do not have much in the way of ability to either understand their own mind, nor to control it. Some behaviors can cause reactions they cannot control, and etiquette is in large part a construction to avoid this. This is an ethical concern, which we'll discuss shortly.

"Now, let's discuss forms of address, first," voice changing again, Efre's eyes and mouth changed slightly, "as Zana requested that. In our society, names, how people think of themselves, and how they expect other people to think of them, are important. Your name is a word which encapsulates how you are expected to behave, what obligations you are expected to fulfill, and how others are expected to behave towards you.

"Getting someone's name wrong means you think of them as different from their obligations and behavior, a suggestion that they fail to fulfill their obligations, or behave in a manner other than what is expected of them. It is considered an insult, which is a way of referring to somebody which is likely to create reactions they cannot control.

"Insults are themselves somewhat complex things, as the idea that somebody cannot control their reactions is itself an insult, so there are some social situations in which what would be considered an insult is not taken as an insult, but instead a statement that the person being insulted can control their reactions, which is a compliment..."

Efre continued for some time without pause except for breath, Self's attention now focused on the words, trying to understand, or trying to remember for later if a word was unknown, which was frequent.

Etiquette was complex, and Efre went deeper into concepts, and back out to other concepts, over the course of a couple of hours. Most of what Efre went into was the etiquette of interacting with other people, and the latter hour was devoted to the names, and their expectations.

Each name reflected a role in their community; Zana's primary obligation was to find a role for each individual to play, but also mediated disputes between djinn. Disputes, when two or more people had different conceptualizations about what had occurred or what should occur, had their own complicated set of rules; when the dispute was valid, when the dispute should be resolved between the disagreeing parties as opposed to being brought before Zana, how the dispute should be resolved.

Efre's obligations were to understand and instruct on matters of society, although the instruction would include matters outside that obligation until others were chosen to fulfill the roles of the dead. Ethics, for instance, was the obligation of Roshe, who was dead. Efre's speech pattern had changed when speaking of that name, among many others, not all of whom were those that Self had taken from.

At the end of the two hours, Efre paused to ask if Self had any questions. Another hour was spent as Self went through the unknown words, and Efre explained them.

Efre left through the door, telling Self to meditate on the lesson for the next hour, pausing only to explain the meaning of that word when Self asked. It was, as far as Self could ascertain, just thinking about something, which was something Self spent a lot of time doing anyways. So Self began assimilating the new concepts, pulling them from memory; it was simpler than the process that had been mostly concluded by that morning, as the concepts had been constructed by Self, and there weren't a lot of associations with missing concepts.