In the aftermath, Cherry will be asked to move her experiments even further away from anyone important. The theoretical physicists will be very puzzled, and eventually someone will be awarded a Nobel Prize for determining exactly what happened.

But our story doesn't follow them, it follows the other Cherry.

A surprisingly intact pale golden orb (although there are a few chips missing) and half of a mangled corpse appear in midair, and drop to the ground with a thwack.

And then the corpse sits up, and tries to make any sense of the warnings her fixity crystal is painting across her HUD.

It is the 41st millenium, and an unremarkable provincial Hive World in the middle of nowhere was having a normally gloomy day until this very second.

Cherry pops into existence in the middle of a busy street!

Well, "street" is a relative term. It's more like a valley in between two mountainous cliffs, if the cliffs are made of concrete (monolithic plates of vast dimensions), glass (most is actually closer to a plastic and much tougher, but many replacements are crude glass), and metal (gilded steel, with most of the gilding worn out millenia ago.)

There's a cathedral in the distance, which is non-negligibly less tall than Mount Everest on old Terra. Above, there are clouds of smog, an atmosphere that doesn't pass the most stringent lead safety norms possible, a likewise ozone layer, and two Suns of different sizes.

The vehicles are very different and range from a carriage (moving briskly up the street) to something like a spaceship shuttle (parked in the distance). There are street food vendors. The EM spectrum is full of radio transmissions.

The people are people. Not perfectly healthy, nor in constant pain. Foreigners, speaking in an unknown but distantly familiar language, and, right now, backing away from a sudden corpse and then forming a small crowd around it.

Ugh. Okay — she takes things step by step.

First, she makes sure her fixity crystal is repairing itself. Next, she has it start pulling in some air — creating no more than a brisk breeze — to get some mass to repair her leg and arm with.

Then, she attends to the bizarre readouts in an attempt to figure out where she is. Wherever she is, it's definitely not anywhere in her original universe. There is something ... kind of like an extra spatial dimension, if that dimension lacked a well-defined distance metric and changed apparently at random, preventing the fixity crystal from getting any kind of lock on it.

She sets it aside for now, and has the crystal focus on grabbing those radio transmissions to see if she can work out the local language instead.

The people are at least human-shaped, though, so maybe they have some things in common. She makes sure she's clean of blood, and then smiles (without showing teeth) and waves nonthreateningly at the people.

"I'm sorry! I don't know how I got here. But I'm okay, and I come in peace," she says. She knows they won't understand, but hopefully her tone carries through.

The people are... awed, but also frightened. Some of them put their hands on their chest in a vague shape of an eagle, and quietly chant something. Some are maybe calling someone on their phones (?). They are not very reassured about anything, and are neither closing the distance nor dispersing.

The radio is very busy but some of it are unencrypted analog sound transmissions in the same language that the people around are using. It's a distant, distant, distant descendant of English and Latin.

Her translation software starts putting very-low-confidence guesses up on her HUD, once it matches up a few vocabulary words, but it's mostly nonsense.

The EM transmissions are loud enough that she can't get a good fix on the background stars — not with only a few meters of fixity field, during the daytime, with most of the sky hidden by the gigantic metal walls of whatever city she's ended up in. Weeping Cherry briefly contemplates going up to get a better read, before deciding that she should probably not risk an air-traffic problem.

She stands, gingerly putting weight on her new leg. It is technically hollow right now, air not being all that dense, but the fixity crystal lets her fake it. She smooths down her dress, causing it to reject the dust of the street in a little puff.

She slowly, with deliberately telegraphed movements so nobody is taken by surprise, steps out of the probable path of the carriage and onto the sidewalk.

Carriage isn't the only thing she's in a path of, but okay. 

The people are growing increasingly more suspicious and numerous, and arguments are breaking inside the quickly growing crowd. They are, of course, unbeknownst to Cherry, debating if the newcomer's sudden appearance and healing are manifestations of Emperor's miraculous will or indicators of a loose witch or a loose xeno; the fourth hypothesis that being "result of some haywire Mechanicus technomagery" have lost a lot of points when she failed to communicate - but is still a consideration.

They are extremely suspicious of Cherry standing up and moving around. A corpse lying flat on the floor isn't very scary, but a person going around a mere minute after being that is worrying. Some people back off and run away, and the body language goes more stressed, but the crowd is absolutely not dispersing.

They gesture her to halt.

By the way, it may now be apparent that the crowd includes people whose age or life haven't been kind on them - the one-eyed woman, a lame elder. There's a guy with a cybernetic augument. There's a noticeable skew towards the kids and teenagers, and, among the older but not the younger parts of the demographic, towards women.

There are people with knives, ready to pull them out.

(Some of the stuff translation parses as nonsense is going to still be nonsense even after being properly translated. Welcome to Imperium.) 

She can correctly interpret the gesture!

She stops, and stands with her arms at her side.

"I'm afraid I don't speak your language," she says. "But I'm working on getting a machine translation. Vereor ne linguam tuam loquar, sed translationem machinae molior."

She puzzles about what to do next. She doesn't want to frighten people, and it seems pretty likely that she'll be able to offer them healing in a few minutes when she has a better hold on the language.

She slowly settles so that she's sitting crosslegged, hands clearly visible. She gestures to herself. "I'm Weeping Cherry — Meum nomen est Pendula Rosea."

She gestures to whoever looks least afraid, with an open, empty hand. "What's your name? Quid est tibi nomen?"

Hivespeople don't speak Latin any more than they speak English. I'm actually not sure if they can even notice a difference.

The least afraid guy understands nothing but waves. It gets him Looks. Nothing happens just yet, the uneasy standoff continues.

In about 10 minutes, the Adeptus Arbites (that is, Imperium's law enforcement) are going to arrive. Is the machine translation going to work before that; alternatively will Cherry do anything other than standing and talking before that?

Ten minutes is a ridiculously short amount of time to apprehend the full complexity and nuance of a language, based only on two long-dead ancestor languages and a bunch of out-of-context audio samples. Luckily, Weeping Cherry has enough computing power with her to just throw brute force at the problem. Also, she doesn't need the full complexity and nuance of the language — she just needs some very basic vocabulary.

She sits, smiles, and waves to anyone who waves at her. If anyone addresses her, she makes a "wait" gesture and tries the software's current best guess at "Wait, I am learning your language" — which isn't terribly good.

After about eight minutes of waiting, her leg is fully flesh and blood. She's really not happy with the amount of lead and other pollutants in the atmosphere, though, and considers starting to use her fixity field to scrub some of the smog. But not spooking people is more important — she won't be able to put a dent in the planetary atmosphere until she has a larger field anyway.

Her translation software throws up some slightly higher-confidence guesses, so she is just starting to try again when the Adeptus Arbitres arrive.

"Hello," she says, addressing her audience again. "Name mine, it is Weeping Cherry. Name yours?"

Seven of the less intelligent people in the crowd simultaneously say their names. Nobody is impressed with them, and the silence restores.

A couple seconds after, one of the people in the crowd asks: "By the Emperor*, how did you heal?"

*If her translation made a guess about this word - and it's one of the more commonly used nouns - it have probably translated that as "God".

She brings her fixity crystal around in front of her and pats it.

"My machine —" she says, not having worked out the word for crystal. "My leg, it put back."

"Before I working," she continues, miming pouring something, because it's hard to mime standing around waiting for equipment readouts. "Then explosion, after here I am at."

Okay, so that's some score for "Mechanicus bullshit" theory. Although witches and xenos are of course known to be deceitful. And this begs the question:

"Then why can't you speak Low Gothic?"

"I speak English and Latin," she replies, leaving out the other languages her translator can handle for now. "Language, it changes in years and in places. Low Gothic, it is like English and it is like Latin, but many years after. My machine, it listens of the city, tells me how different. I learning Low Gothic."

She tries to formulate an explanation about how long it will take, but she lacks the vocabulary. Instead, she decides to try and take the initiative of the conversation.

"The city — where I am at?" she asks.

So, there was a definite wrong answer to the previous question, that being "I am an alien from a different polity in a different world."

That's not that. 

But it's not as reassuring as "the technological malfunction must have damaged my brain" either.

It's just confusing.

Now, Imperium's ideology preaches that what is confusing you is probably there to entrap you; things out of ordinary are more prudent and proper to destroy than to investigate. But there's no spark to incite the action. Knives and guns stay sheathed, for now, even as the hands itch more with every thing Cherry says or does.

Imperial ideology aside, you don't kill a Mechanicus functionary because you didn't understand their arcane machinery if you want to keep being a human and not a servitor drone.

"Loriactum Overstreet, 92715. Subsection 3, section 15, continent Nova Africum...

Hive World Impera Dix."

She nods, even though that answer does not really give her any more of an idea. It at least implies that this is a multi-planetary civilization, which is good to know. Once she has a good enough grasp of the language to talk to air traffic control, she might be able to get a better idea of what that really means, in terms of what she is near and where she should go to talk to the local government.

"Well, wait I must, for learning Low Gothic finishing," she remarks. "While waiting, anyone wants of my machine heals them?" she offers.

She gestures to the lady who is missing an eye. "It put back your eye, like it put back my leg, if you want it," she explains.

It would be a heartwarming display of open-mindedness and trust, to accept an offering of miraculous healing from someone who isn't familiar or authoritative at all and can't even speak Low Gothic.

An open mind is like a fortress with gates unbarred and unguarded. 

- Imperial Thought of the Day

Even more so in the middle of a tense crowd and within a minute of Arbites arriving.

Nobody takes the offer up.

... okay, she supposes that's probably a reasonable level of caution, when someone shows up with unknown abilities. And she doesn't want to get pushy.

She shrugs, and decides to try a different tack.

"After learning Low Gothic, where I go, talk to government?" she asks instead.

That's an another highly confusing question.

Why would someone who isn't in the government ever want to interact with the government? Especially if they are from somewhere far enough/in the ???past??? enough not to know the language?

Maybe to try and seduce them? Good thing the Administratum can't be talked at by random xenos (???).

There's a short pause, then someone says:

"Well, you are going to meet the government soon enough."

Weeping Cherry nods again. It makes sense that the local government would have dispatched someone to come meet her; people popping out of thin air probably doesn't happen very often.

"Good, good. While waiting, you have questions for me?" she asks, to keep the conversation (such as it is) going. Her translation software can make much better guesses when it actually has the context of a conversation. Right now it looks like it's chewing on the grammar.

A questioning mind betrays a treacherous soul.

- Imperial Thought of the Day.

They do, of course have questions. They're as curious as they have ever been in their lives. But also, now that someone reminded the crowd of the imminent arrival of the Arbites, it's not really their job to ask the questions, now is it?

Question not, lest thee be questioned.

They keep it to themselves.

She stares silently at them for a moment, a bit nonplussed at the lack of curiosity.

But if they don't want to talk, then they don't want to talk.

She turns her attention to trawling through the (probable) transcripts of the local radio chatter. Maybe she can get more of an idea what is going on with this planet by the time the authorities arrive.