He is basically suppressing all preferences about his environment until he can get somewhere with a shower. Boarding house will do. He starts looking for people who should know about electricity.

What are his criteria for that?

Remind him of his dad! ...more usefully, have the resources to do experiments and some inventions to their name already.

There are servantmakers; this type of person seems to typically go into servantmaking.

...servantmaking is yellow and the thing he is looking for green but sure, he will talk to one.

This servantmaker specializes in shine programming and has invented a method to precisely measure distances along long overland stretches to send shines unsupervised down them.

That's probably green. Aitim brings by the pocket everything.

The servantmaker is enthralled by the pocket everything!

And Aitim can explain that the society he's from created lots and lots of things like it, they're cheap, and he wants to introduce them here but needs someone who can figure out what's tractable given the current technology base and also work from vague specifications because Aitim's society has a lot of specialization and this is not his specialty.

This servantmaker doesn't know where to start on the hardware unless Aitim can tell him about more primitive versions, but the software might be adaptable into servant form?

He can tell him about more primitive versions! The most primitive thing that runs on electricity is a lightbulb; they are like so. Generators use magnets and often a watermill or coal or something to spin it but maybe you could do that part with servants.

Oh yeah, spinning things is really easy. Magnets aren't easy to find but he can try to hunt some up. Why did Aitim leave his fantastical country?

"We have no idea what happened. There was some kind of - bewildering phenomenon that looked a bit like an alien animal and a wildly swinging portal - and then here I and one other citizen of my world found ourselves. I don't think my society has the means to come and find us, though I know they'll throw everything they can at it."

"That sounds terrible." And like bullshit, but, pocket everything...

Nod. "The people in the creche where we found employment thought that this could maybe be done with shines and enough care. Is there a way to confirm it wasn't?"

"I could try to pull a shine off, but if it's an important shine then your device is broken."

"I am very, very confident that my device does not run on shines."

"I'd want witnesses just in case so you don't go around claiming I busted your thing."

"That seems like a good idea anyway; it will stop working eventually and I would like lots of people to have witnessed that it did work so they can understand why I want to replace it."

"Why will it stop?"

"It runs on a fuel I don't know how to make."

"Can you make it run on automata?"

"I don't think so. I don't know much about automata but everything in it is very tiny and complicated and there are only a few people in my world who understand all of it."

"Well, I can round up some people to watch me try to yank a shine and maybe try it themselves."

"Thanks so much. I'll look forward to it."