After a while she sighs, and goes to drink some more soup.

If she wants to go home, she'll have to figure out the means herself. And the first step must be getting over her illness. She doesn't know what the next step is, but she'll figure it out from there. Maybe it's a Narnia sort of situation, and she has to become Queen.

She dozes. Time slips away like it does when one is sick, and soon enough it is nighttime. She takes another dose of antipyretic before bed, and sleeps.

When she wakes, she doesn't feel much better. In fact, she wakes with a particularly phlegmatic and unpleasant cough.

She doesn't want to get up, so she doesn't. But after a while she feels so grungy, sleeping in uncleaned sheets, that she drags herself to the shower. After her shower, she hangs off the bed upsidedown and beats her chest, like her parent taught her, to try and get the stuff out of her lungs. She coughs it up into the bathroom sink.

Afterwards, she's feeling much more comfortable. She orders more soup, because she sees no particular reason to eat anything else. She likes soup, and it's important to have fluids when you're sick. She also, belatedly, remembers that she needs to cancel her tests, and tries to figure out how to do so. They must let you reschedule tests if you're sick, right?

That's entirely correct; rescheduling is essentially as simple as ordering an exam, and you only pay a fee for canceling if you ended up taking an exam slot which someone else might have taken, which Emily thankfully didn't. Also, while she was asleep, someone had her spit sample tested. She got a phone from the lab that did the testing. "We have confirmed that you have been infected with a NOVEL pathogen. Be careful and proactive in terms of treatment, and reduce the strain on your body to its absolute minimum. We're here to support and care for you; please accept this payment as a reward for informing us about the novel pathogen." Checking, a respectable amount of money has been added to Emily's account.

... being paid to be sick is honestly so weird. But it does mean that she doesn't worry too much about lounging around the house, ordering in large quantities of soup and library books. It would be enjoyable, if she weren't still too cold and too hot at turns, and coughing up unmentionable substances with some regularity.

She spends a lot of time napping. She's never really liked napping during the day — it's hard to rest when it's bright out — but being sick greatly increases her tolerance.

In between the napping, she orders more books, and frets about whether anyone else would have caught what she is pretty sure is the flu from her.

She looks it up ­— what do the people here do when they detect a novel pathogen? Because surely they must do something about it, to make reporting one worth a payment.

Novel pathogens lead to starting races to create tests, and ideally sniffers, for detecting it, followed by highly-publicized races to invent theoretically-useful treatments for it. It's treated as almost a sporting event, where everyone is excited to see what kinds of treatments and tests that all the scientists manage to come up with.

... huh.

She's not a doctor, but she's pretty sure this is the flu? It seems like flu, anyway. But she doesn't know how to treat the flu, exactly, other than bed rest and fluids, which was already their default advice, so she probably can't contribute much to the races.

Actually, does anyone want to see pictures of her phlegm?

Reading up on what little has been done in the "race" so far, it seems like there are people interested in trying to talk to whoever got the Novel Illness to try learning as much as possible through getting more info about what symptoms you get from it. So they'd probably also want to get a look at Emily's phlegm, if she felt like talking to the people working on tests and treatments for it? They're offering rewards for whoever sent in the sample to talk about their illness on a video call.

Um.

She's not very sure about a video call — she is currently a mess. Because she has a fever.

Instead she writes up a detailed textual description of how she feels, what her temperature was at various points, and some vaguely remembered facts about Flu from her world: more common in the winter, often not serious, unless someone's lungs fill up or they're already not healthy.

She sends it off to the researchers, and indicates that she can answer questions, she just doesn't want to video call.

And then she hides her phone under her pillow because she doesn't want to look in case responding like that was rude, and tries to read a book instead, for about 30 seconds, before checking her messages. There are no new messages. Because it has been 30 seconds.

She puts her phone down again, focuses on her book, and drinks more of her soup.

The researchers are happy to ask questions about Emily's Novel Illness via text. They ask about what the symptoms are like, what kinds of treatments she's tried, her theories about how the treatment is going to progress, and what might be some possible ways of improving her quality of life.

Right.

Well, she hasn't had anything other than soup and antipyretics. And she doesn't feel great, but that seems basically fine? It's what she would expect the treatment for something like this to be, unless she got worse, and then there are antibiotics and stuff?

She's not sure if the Flu is bacterial or viral, though. She's not entirely clear on whether you can even tell that without a microscope. Anyway, generalized antibiotics or antivirals are a thing if someone actually gets very sick, she thinks.

The symptoms are just the normal disease stuff — generally feeling bad, coughing, sneezing, a bit of nausea, fever. Personally, she thinks the fever is the worst, because it makes her feel bad. Also she has had less energy, but that's normal for any sickness. When she's gotten sick like this in the past, things have been pretty steady, and then all of a sudden her fever breaks and she feels fine, basically. A little weaker than normal for a while, maybe?

But maybe that steadiness is just because her parent gave her medicine. Tylenol, which they don't have here, and which is normally a painkiller but she's pretty sure it's an antipyretic too, now that she knows that word.

As for her quality of life, she actually can't think of much? Being sick sucks, but she's getting spicy soup and books on demand, and not being made to take tests or go anywhere, and that is pretty much all you need when you're sick.

She isn't really thinking about whether the researchers know she's from another world. Normally, she might realize that they probably don't, but it takes enough concentration just to put her reply together that she doesn't really think of it.

...they're quite confused by the advantages of "not being made to take tests or go anywhere", which seems a bit unlikely for someone who's literate and would presumably have passed the relevant exams? They feel a bit confused by how she doesn't seem to have mentioned anything about trying to use a humidifier so she can have moist air that often feels better or try one of the inhalational medicines that usually ease the coughing and sneezing; most people feel like it makes things really just to try it, and renting the equipment for just a few days is cheap enough anyway.

Oh. She had no idea that they made humidifiers or medicine for that. She's pretty sure that they didn't have those in Vermont? Or, they had humidifiers, but people didn't use them when they were sick.

Also she's not sure whether she would really want things to be more humid. She's been inhaling the steam off the soups, and ordering spicy soups because they help clear her sinuses, and that seems fine? Her eyes do get dry and scratchy when she has a fever, so maybe a humidifier would be helpful. She'll try one and let them know.

She sends a response off to the researchers, and then looks at what it would cost to rent a humidifier.

The cost to rent a humidifier is indeed a very small number! The researchers also ask her about if she's ever properly participated in a Pandemic Awareness Week, and what kind of mask she has, if any, just in case she feels like going outside and wants to not have to worry about making anyone else sick.

She'll order in a humidifier.

It has occurred to her, by now, that the researchers definitely don't know she's from another world. Which ... she feels like she should have been more on top of that? Should she have not let that slip? On the other hand, it's not like it would be hard for a shadowy antagonist to figure things out from what she has said.

She spends a little while trying to figure out if this is the kind of story where being from another world gets her locked up in a lab, or the kind of story where the moral is about learning to trust other people. She watches clouds scuttle across the sky.

The truth is this isn't any kind of story at all.

She hugs her knees, trying to figure out how to respond. Finally, she remembers something that her older cousin Peter told her once, at a different cousin's wedding, when she found him sitting on the dock with a mug, his feet dangling in the water: "tell the cops nothing, and doctors everything".

Disease researchers are probably relevantly doctors, she decides.

No, she tells them. She's never participated in a Pandemic Awareness Week, because she's from another world. And she doesn't have a mask, because she just came here with a book and her clothes and didn't realize masks were standard.

As soon as she's sent it, she realizes that she probably sounds delusional.

She tells them that they can check, maybe, with the teacher who found her when she arrived. She has their phone number.

She looks up masks on her phone, her eyes drooping closed for long stretches. She should probably nap again, but she wants to see what the masks are like. Something about the idea of wearing one in public really appeals to her.

The researchers respond quite fast. They think Emily is weird enough that it seems quite likely that she did come from another world, as opposed to somehow hallucinating an entire life that left her with such extremely limited familiarity with thomassia. When it comes to the masks, they are commonly custom-made, just like thomassian clothing; the most common design is a form-fitting mask of transparent fabric, to be worn in ordinary situations.

To be safer, and especially if you're working long hours in hospitals, positive-pressure masks that constantly push air away to keep any viruses away from your mouth and nose are incredibly common; they're seen as more breathable and helps prevent people that are around sick people all day from getting infected, but they have batteries that need to be changed and keep track of, so they're a bit less convenient. There are also "formal" masks, which for some reason involve hiding a bunch of fans and filters inside an anthropomorphic animal head with disproportionately large eyes.

She scrolls through the formal masks with increasingly wide eyes herself.

The idea that these count as formal wear — and, therefore, are presumably okay to wear anytime she wants, even if people think she's being oddly formal — is amazing. The idea of walking down the street, knowing that nobody can see her, and she doesn't need to think about her face ...

She needs a mask. But if they're custom fit, she can't just order them — it's a chicken and egg problem, at least until she's not sick.

She contents herself with scrolling through designs. She doesn't know if she needs a mask that has too much assisted breathing hardware — what if it breaks while she's wearing it? — and it's probably best to get one that is as light as possible, so that it's comfortable to wear for a long time.

She likes the ones with feathers.

She saves a few images of pretty blue formal masks to her phone, and slips into sleep dreaming about anthropomorphic animals.

When she wakes, she feels ... not much better and not much worse. Which isn't great — she thinks that's a long time to be sick? But there's not much she can do about it.

The humidifier maybe makes her eyes feel a little better, but she isn't really sure.

She checks where nearby she can get a mask made, and spoons disconsolately at her breakfast soup. ... maybe she should try some of their other foods, actually. She likes the soup, but she might have had enough for now. She finishes it anyway, but resolves to order something else for dinner.

About half-way through the afternoon, she suddenly starts feeling hot and breaks out in a sweat. She throws off her blankets and fans herself to cool down. Checking with the thermometer a few minutes later, she sees that she no longer counts as having a fever.

She alerts the researchers, so they have an idea of how long it was, lowers the temperature on the apartment, and takes a long shower. Then she fumbles all of the sheets off of the bed, and new ones on, and crawls in to sleep again.

Her sleep is much better, now that she is not bouncing between being over- and under- heated. She sleeps for longer than is entirely reasonable, but still wakes with the sun, feeling better than she has in days.

And maybe the sensible thing to do is rest. But she has been resting for days, and she feels better, even if she doesn't know whether she can get anyone sick still. She wants to go out and commission a mask.

She asks the researchers whether they think she can still get people sick, and if she should stay in for a while. And then she realizes that they probably don't need to fit all the masks, and maybe she could order a temporary one.

A standard-size transparent everyday mask can easily be bought; it's not the default option, but ready-to-wear clothes like that still have tons of options.

Okay, cool. She will order in a temporary mask, pick out a shirt, realize she really should shower, shower, get distracted in the shower wondering about whether the choice of animal means anything, get dressed, and head out.

Even the transparent temporary mask is kind of nice, although it feels a little awkward on her face.

She makes her way to the mask place, and then stands in front of it for a moment, admiring the displays.

There are a bunch of photos of fursuits, as well. And photos of their complicated internal wiring and cool electronics. But the big highlight is the display of "formal masks", in all kinds of colors and designs. Entering, there's a button that you press to let the mask maker know that there's a customer waiting; the button starts glowing, and after a few minutes, a woman walks out wearing what looks like a gym outfit, with a few pieces of fluff stuck to her clothes. "Hello! What can I do for you?"

"Hello!" Emily responds. "I was hoping to commission a formal mask. Only — I'm from another world, and so I'm not very familiar with what the different, like, kinds of mask mean. And I might have some unusual requirements."

She taps her fingers together, and then puts her hands in her pockets.

"So I was hoping that you could make me a custom one," she explains.

"Custom how? Do you have ideas for features in it, or are you thinking about how it looks?"

"Well, sort of ideas for features to take out? But also looks," she replies. "I don't really see why they need to have fans in them, or anything. It seems like it would make them more prone to breaking down, and then you would need to take them off to breathe anyway. But I would like it if the air could still be filtered, for when I get sick."

"As for looks — I really liked some of the fancier ones. And I like blue: the sort of deep, vibrant blue that you get on peacocks. But that seems like a ... more normal sort of thing to ask for. And I want it to fit my face, of course."

She glances down at her feet for a moment.

"I ... want to wear it a lot. Like all day whenever I need to be outside. So it has to be comfy."

"Hmm... I worry about getting you all 3? So, the thing that makes most sense is to have a system that's unfiltered and unpowered, and a system that's both. The first ones get used on most days, with the other one reserved for when you're sick, which shouldn't be all that often, should it? So... I think the best place to start is with the powered and filtered system, it's the bulkiest, and then the all-day, no battery system. And before that, you'll need to get a face scan! I currently have a job putting together a mask for someone else, but I can afford a break right now, just to get you scanned and to try out support skeletons at the very start. Sound good?" She gets ready to walk off and find her face scanner.

That sort of assumes some amount of background knowledge, but it's an expert in a hurry saying it and it sounds reasonable.

"Sure, sounds good!"