This is still unpleasant but she has some sense of scale and will not complain. She can keep this up for months if she has to, although she's liable to slow down a little and start sleeping every night.

They will not object to her sleeping on a nightly basis.

Yaaaay.

She's going to be so so so so so bored by the time she's done but not, you know, dead, so.

A billion people can sure eat a shit ton of food.

Uuuuuugh. She's going to need to come up with a better solution than this at some point. Food food food.

Eventually they move her to some orchards for tree-based food.

Great.

Well, the harvesting machines are pretty neat?

Illia will appreciate them, she's sure.

...She starts getting faster at this.

...okay. They rope in some more farms so the purples can keep up.

Her acceleration isn't constant but it is definitely a thing.

Meanwhile Illia has not been idle, either, although it's certainly a more pleasant kind of not idle. She continues learning Tapap, of course, and interfaces with various people who need to be interfaced with, and plots, and reads the internet (particularly looking for reactions to the aliens) and sometimes walks around the city, sometimes as herself and sometimes illusioned as various castes of Amentan.

Not red, surely.

Well, no, but yellow and purple and orange and grey, for sure. She avoids blue on the grounds that it would not be inconspicuous and green on the grounds that she is from a preindustrial society with completely different art and suspects she would have more trouble passing for green than the other castes.

People sometimes comment if her wardrobe is inconsistent with her presented caste.

She makes vague laundry-related excuses and updates her wardrobe in future illusions accordingly.

They have a lot of very tall buildings. Some have bridges between and balcony paths around them, almost a whole second street level twenty feet up. There are compact little parks lit with cunning mirrors so the plants don't die of shade. Most people are purple. It's busy.

She will be purple more often than not, then.

She gets better at Tapap and starts understanding the people around her better.

There are occasional vehicles humming along on streets that permit them.

Here's an idling truck splashed with red, and a girl with bubblegum hair at the wheel.

Hm.

Illia loiters near enough to hear her but far enough away to not be suspicious.

The red is fussing with her pocket everything, singing softly along with a track it's playing.

After a little while of this Illia ducks into an unobserved alcove, goes invisible, and sneaks close to the red.

"Excuse me," she says softly. "I'm an alien, we don't have a concept of pollution the way Amentans do, and it seems like things really suck for reds. We're trying to figure out how to help but without consulting any reds it seems hard to be sure of doing more good than harm."

"Um."

"I'd show you my hair but honestly invisibility seems harder to fake than buying costume hair dye."

"Are you where the food's coming from?"