Then she will read until the sun has set, and she notices the change in the light. At which point she figures she should probably go to bed, so she makes her way back up to her apartment.

She peels out of her clothes, leaves them on the floor, gets into bed, and is immediately bothered because the sheets are wrong.

She tosses and turns for a while, before getting up and taking a shower. When the feel of the water has replaced the feel of the sheets, she tries again.

Whether it's because they are no longer so unfamiliar, or because she is simply tired after an unexpected day, she manages to fall asleep on the second try.

The next morning, she figures out how to take notes on her phone, and prepares a list:

Clothing

Toothbrushes

Statistics

Exams

Dishes

Investigate the park

Backpack

Breakfast

She thinks for a moment, but can't come up with anything else to add to it. She mentally sorts it by urgency, and starts trying to figure out where she should go shopping.

Remembering the food and the library, she tries her phone first this time. Can she order a backpack, toothbrush, and maybe clothes via the phone? Or does she need to travel somewhere?

A backpack, toothbrush and clothes are all available through the phone, shipped via cargo robot. However, Emily gets quite the impression that having clothes ordered and sent to you is considered quite unusual, as opposed to trying clothes in person to ensure they fit better.

She has never been particularly bothered about clothes, so she starts to just order some, before remembering that some of the clothing she's seen is pretty strange. People seem to wear tight shirts, which probably doesn't fit with her habitual choice of loose-fitting t-shirts. Also, she's seen relatively few pants, considering.

She drums her fingers on her book, before deciding that the proper order of operations is probably ordering a backpack, so that she has something to carry purchases in, and then going out to a clothes store.

She finds a forest green backpack of a reasonable size and price, sends off her order, and settles in to read more of the mystery book until it arrives.

It takes about 2 hours before the backpack arrives, somewhat clumsily carried on top of a similar robot to the one that brought her the food. It's uncannily light, and comes with some kind of plate that looks like it's made of carbon-fiber that fits on the inside of the backpack. The backpacks were basically all sold in standardized rectangular sizes, designed to fit into luggage bins; the most reasonable size is a tiny bit too large for Emily.

She startles when the robot arrives, but pulls the backpack in after a moment. She puts her books, phone, and key into different pockets, and then sets out.

She stops in the library to pick out an introductory statistics textbook, and ends up leaving with two more books that looked interesting, even though there will be no time to read them on the train at all because it's too fast.

And she follows her phone's directions to a nearby clothing store.

The phone suggest a clothing store just 2 stops away, marketing itself to parents and children and proudly advertising the many schools that they've sold uniforms to. The store sells all kinds of everyday clothes in a wide range of pretty colors: skirts, pants, shirts, jackets and dresses, never really anything out of the ordinary.

She examines the items carefully, running the cloth between her fingers to test how it feels. The first few things she tries are not acceptable, so she keeps going until she finds some that feel alright.

She ends up getting a small selection of shirts, pants, underwear, and socks, split between blue, green, and white. She looks around for a teller or other checkout option — is this place more like the phone store, or like the library?

There's a friendly woman standing around ready to answer any of Emily's questions, waiting behind a counter as she realized that her customer probably won't ask her for anything and ready to accept Emily's payment.

... she's not sure what it says about this place's priorities, that they have people to help in shops, but not in libraries. Who does the restocking, anyway? Robots?

She's struck by the urge to capture a library robot and keep it like a pet that could organize her books, but she smothers the impulse and pays for her clothes instead.

It does make her realize that she might need more than just statistics classes, just so that she has some idea of how things work around here, though.

The clothes are very, very cheap, so that's reassuring. And they're made of a fabric that feels incredibly nice against Emily's skin while keeping her cool, as well.

She makes her purchases, and bundles them back into her backpack. She steps out on the street, and consults her list. She's handled a lot of what she planned on, and honestly the thing she probably should do next is work out when she needs to take her exams and what's included on them, but she's loose in a strange city, and she feels like having an adventure.

She consults her phone — she thinks it's not too far to her original arrival point. Can she walk to the park from here?

It'd be a bit of a walk, yes, but she can absolutely get to the park she arrived in from where she is now.

Excellent!

She sets off in the right direction. And, since she is now Investigating, she takes the time to look for clues. Except she's not sure what she should be looking for exactly, so she ends up just watching the people as she walks. What kinds of people are between her and the park?

Lots of kids in skirts with teachers looking like they're on school trips, lots of parents pushing baby carriages with 4 or more babies, lots of people in dresses or skirts that end above the knee, a few people enjoying riding on their bikes in the sunny weather, and a few kids as well as adults running around and swordfighting with foam swords.

... huh.

When Emily was younger, she dressed up as a knight for Halloween, and her parent made her a wooden sword — painted bright pink, more to appease the other parents than because she particularly cared about the color — that she keeps tucked into the gap in the covering on the bottom of the stairs. Her parent taught her some basic blocks and strikes, although their training swords didn't have crossguards like hers. It was fun. On Halloween, though, it was hard to have sword-fights against a horde of superheroes and zombies and princesses, none of whom could really do anything about being gently tapped with a wooden sword, except try to grab it by the blade.

In any case, Emily has opinions about swords. Are they well-balanced, despite being foam? Or are they more pool-noodle-esque? Do people have scabbards and swords made for their size, or are they standardized? Are they short-swords, hand-and-a-half swords, or two-handed swords? And perhaps most importantly: are they being wielded with any skill, or being used more like thematic bludgeons?

They're quite poorly balanced, and there are only a few sword sizes. The people swinging the swords don't swing them around too precisely, due to them being so soft and floppy, but many of the people using them very clearly know swordfighting techinques and use proper guards and strikes.

Hmm.

Emily squints. That's a weird mix of characteristics. Normally people would either be totally incompetently flailing, or would have, you know, non-floppy swords.

She takes a second look at the swordfighters — do they have a common uniform, or anything like that, that explains what activity they're doing? Or is this just the sort of city where swordfights break out for no particular reason?

In which case she might have to get herself a sword.

The swordfighters are all dressed in everyday street clothes; it's clear that it's considered a bit of casual summer fun.

She adds "sword" to her list, but decides she's been sidetracked long enough. She continues heading for the park.

When she gets there, she surveys it systematically. How large is the park? What borders it on each side? Are there any areas off the beaten path enough that they could hide important secrets?

The park is rectangular, stretching out around 800 meters away from the city. The park is surrounded by tall buildings, almost forming a sort of wall around it, before it reaches the place where she arrived. There are quite a few trees that are perfect for climbing on, but none of them seem like particularly good places for hiding secrets, with the exception of the pond that she can see a few people SCUBA diving in.

Underwater villain lairs are traditional, but she'll leave that for last because she doesn't have a swimsuit and doesn't know how to SCUBA dive.

Instead, she heads down to the trees, and tries to track down the specific spot where she appeared. It's hard to pick out, since the trees look fairly similar, but eventually she thinks she has it pinned down.

She lies down in the hollow.

She sits back up again.

The city is still visible in the distance.

Maybe she needs to be reading. She tries lying down and reading her book, but she can't get comfortable. She sits up again, and it hits her that she's probably not going to be able to figure out the mystery. Not in the real world.

She inspects the area around the hollow anyway, out of a sense of dilligence, but doesn't particularly expect to find anything.

It just looks like they are normal trees in a normal hollow, although they are ever so slightly different rom the kinds of trees she's used to seeing.

She sighs.

She's no longer really in the mood for an adventure, or for a swordfight.

She starts making her way back to her apartment. But she may as well use the time somewhat productively, so she also takes out her phone and starts looking things up.

Walking while reading without bumping into anything is a well-practiced skill.

She looks up the educational requirements for children. Is what the teacher told her true? How can she schedule and take exams? When is that required by? And what kinds of things are on the tests?

What the teacher told Emily is true; it is mandatory for children to learn basic literacy, numeracy and statistics if they are able to, before they're allowed to live without a teacher or parent, although most children keep living with them well after learning the 3 mandatory skills. The law doesn't acknowledge anything to do with Emily's case.

Scheduling the mandatory exams is done through a website; there are enough children that there's actually a new exam that gets made every day. There are lots of officially approved exam centers, for all sorts of exams, and they ask questions like keeping track of the plot and characters in a fictional text, maths questions like asking how many uranium atoms you'd need to fission to take a 20-minute bath, and statistics questions like how you can know how often a test will be able to catch a disease if you know how many of the test results are false-positives and how common the disease is.