The days were spent in lessons with Efre. Etiquette became increasingly specific, shifting from broad interactions with a wide range of members of the community and the nature of names, to forms of address that were appropriate in public and in private, to how to appropriate request and respond to invitations to private interactions such as meals and sex, to how to conduct oneself in such interactions.

When the lessons got sufficiently specific, there was a lesson that was a demonstration, followed by a lesson in which Self participated, with Efre offering corrective advice. The first such lesson was walking, as apparently floating above the ground was considered intimidating.

Meals were a messy lesson. It required a level of fine motor control, Efre had explained, that would come in time. Self didn't need to eat; Efre introduced several kinds of food, and the signals - two signals Self hadn't paid attention to before - were new, but not particularly interesting, and after some conversation, Efre had said that if it wasn't of interest, it would be best to stick to water or broth, because others needed the food. After the first, meals became a weekly lesson.

Others were brought in, and Self was walked through the basics of interaction over the course of many lessons; one lesson would be introductions, which had their own etiquette, and the next would involve using that person's name - Self didn't have trouble with this part, but was having issues identifying which person it was, eventually settling on simply comparing their faces to the set of memories of faces. It was still challenging - people basically all looked the same, and the differences were minute - but Self gradually got better, and more importantly, faster. These were also weekly lessons.

Sex got four lessons; there were two body shapes with slight differences, male and female, and there were two lessons on each, again, one demonstrative, and one in which Efre walked Self through several kinds of acts with a partner. The signals involved were sometimes complicated, part of which Efre described as pleasure, indicating that the sensations were considered positive by the participants. This had apparently been what Mehr engaged in, the company of others.

There was an additional complication when one participant was male and one was female, which was the possibility of procreation with a subset of the sexual acts. Self apparently didn't have to worry about that, but the non-loopbound had etiquette surrounding that, in turn, particularly in how male and female individuals interacted if that was the intent. Male participants had etiquette which indicated willingness or desire; in turn, female individuals chose male partners based on various criteria which generally but did not always coincide with how well they fulfilled their obligations; Self did not need to know the specifics of the etiquette there, so Efre had not spent much time on it.

Clothing had its own etiquette, about what to wear when. Funerals, public gatherings, private gatherings, and the baths all had their own etiquette. The hallway to, and the baths themselves, were the first location Self saw outside the room itself, four days after the lessons began, after which it became a weekly visit on Efre's insistence; water did feel quite interesting. The next was what was called a courtyard, an area enclosed by walls but open to the sky, for the funeral, which took place once a month as necessary; those Self had killed, and several others, were burned. The sensation of heat, the curious motions of the fire and smoke, and the smell had been curious.

The bath had been the first time Self had become truly aware that shapes shrank as they grew further away; the courtyard was the first time Self became aware that it was possible to judge distance without reference to the size of the shape, because it didn't work on the sky. After the first glance upward, Self's eyes remained on the fires and smoke. It had made it difficult for a time to tell which direction was up, and sight... spun, a little bit.

Efre had stayed at Self's side through the funeral, providing quiet commentary between each brief interaction with others on changes; speech pattern, tone, where Self was looking, how Self was standing. It had been a sequence of faces that were mostly unrecognized, many with facial expressions Self recognized from lessons as sorrow.

Ethics, meanwhile, had begun tying into the previous day's lessons in obligation. These became a series of questions and answers; Efre asking, Self expected to answer. The point, as far as Self could tell, wasn't to arrive at a specific answer, but to develop a process for providing answers.

Each began with relatively simple questions Self didn't have much trouble answering; mostly, Efre described a situation in detail, often including details Self didn't think mattered, and asked which obligation, if any, entered into it for the person in question, who was only occasionally a loop-bound. Then more complicated situations, in which there were two or more obligations, asking how to best fulfill the obligations of the person involved. And finally, truly complex situations, in which multiple people had multiple obligations.

Self couldn't always find a way for every person to meet every obligation, or even not to act against at least one obligation, but Efre insisted the important thing was to think carefully about the obligations involved, not to arrive at the perfect answer. Ethics wasn't about perfectly meeting obligations, only doing your best to meet them. That the obligations had different priorities - some obligations were more important than others - usually made it easier to identify which obligation needed to be met.

There were also occasionally questions in which obligations competed with etiquette, early in the lessons, until Self had figured out that obligation always took priority over etiquette; after asking Efre about this, Self got a smile, and those questions didn't turn up anymore.

Obligation lessons got a lot more complex than Self had initially expected; the first few lessons were pretty broad, and Self thought the material was well-understood. Then they got specific. These lessons involved Self asking a lot more questions than the others.

Those who hunted had obligations to bring in food; their obligations were considerably more complex than this, however. There were obligations about what to hunt and when - for some of the larger animals, a hunter was obligated to avoid killing the females of the species, or to avoid it in certain seasons of the year. There were specific animals they were obligated to kill at all times, as they could cause harm if they were not. There were obligations about how the excess materials of harvesting were disposed of.

Some obligations required more work than one person could fulfill, a subject which also came up in etiquette, and there were many names associated with these professions. But there were also obligations involving how each individual interacted, and whose judgment was to be followed, and when that judgment should go to the group.

There were obligations about leaving things in hallways - broadly, people shouldn't - and disposing of waste products of many kinds. Obligations about how long one should be in the baths, how often the females individuals chose reproductive mates, and the use of oil for lanterns - Self hadn't realized shadows weren't a part of the shapes of people until that lesson, which had turned into an explanation of light and darkness, complete with demonstration, after which Self had begun turning off the lanterns each night.

Every lesson came with a new list of obligations, and Self began to have an idea of how the community worked. There were major obligations, and minor obligations, and individuals whose obligation it was to ensure that obligations were met, who were collectively called the obligators. Those who failed to meet major obligations were usually forced to take a new name, or exiled, except in a few cases, when they were killed.

Those who failed to meet minor obligations, it seemed, generally didn't rise to the attention of the obligators, unless pervasive; there were apparently etiquette-based punishments the community as a whole engaged in. The loop-bound were not expected to participate in the punishments, but were not required not to; Efre didn't spend a lot of time on this, either, explaining it took many years of proficiency to be able to effectively participate.

Self learned. The community had needs, and a number of people met them. There were priorities for the needs - food and clean water, shelter, and protection being the highest priorities. There was also obligations to the greater community - there were other djinn communities, one of which had a someone named Hadi, who had an obligation to the protection of the other local communities and the establishment of new communities. Further away was another named Setareh, who was responsible for the protection of all communities, and the establishment of new clusters of communities.

Days passed, turning to weeks, and Self learned, in the world of the room and the baths - Self had no desire to return to the outside, with the eye-bending sky. Days were spent under Efre's tutelage, gradually learning the ways of the djinn, and occasionally with others. Nights were spent alone, thinking through the day's lessons.

Self was becoming more, but as weeks passed, it began to feel like each day was adding a little less than the day before; in the first few weeks, learning the obligations of those who ensured clean water - digging wells, digging the channels that the wastewater flowed from, the rules for how far these had to be apart - these had added to Self's mind. The lessons lately had begun to grow less, however.

Thus, the day Efre told Self that the next day's lessons would be in learning something new came as something Self had come to know as relief.