He looks around.

This is definitely not his apartment.

"Hello?" he tries tentatively in Jakavi.

She stands up. Potatoes. Dog. Aunt Kairda. Some random green she's never seen, trying to speak some language she doesn't know. She was really pretty busy being pissed about the concept of spring, but hey, she's not going to let that stop her from being pissed about whatever this is. 

"What the SHIT," she says. In Voan, because she wants Kairda to be aware that this is a situation that calls for pulling out all the stops on vulgarity.

Um. 

This is... at least a different problem than the set of problems they were dealing with before.

"Hello?"

He frowns and pulls his everything out of his pocket. Machine translation of audio might not be perfect, but it's better than trying to converse with them with no shared languages.

(It does not occur to him at this point that they might speak another language; most purple people are monolingual. He would notice this assumption if he were thinking about it consciously, but he isn't.)

His everything shows no internet access. He blinks at it a few times, then tries placing a text. It doesn't go through. He looks back at the other people in the field, furrowing his brow.

She takes out her everything and pokes at it; it's not getting any reception, either. She turns it off and shoves it back in her backpack. Kairda is still looking around nervously and biting her lip, which is what she does when she's got no idea what she's supposed to be doing, so if she wants to figure out what's going on, she probably has to do it herself.

She tries Tapai, that's statistically the most likely to work. "You! Green person! You know what's going on here?" She waits a second and then repeats herself in Anitami, prepared to try muddling through in her four or five much worse languages if neither of those works. 

The younger person says something else in a language he doesn't understand, then -- Anitami. Why hadn't he tried Anitami?

"I do not have even a slight idea what is happening," he says in the careful syntax of an overly self-conscious green who hadn't started to learn the language until he was already eleven years old. "Does this area look familiar to you?"

Oh good, she's not gonna have to get to the pantomiming stage of trying to communicate. That would've been annoying. She's good at Anitami, practically a native speaker by now. She surveys the field. There are more fields beyond it, a couple houses beyond that, more fields, and something that looks like a dirt road going up a hill.

"Nah. Never been here before. Can't be that many places left in the world that have this much open space, though. Dunno how we got here, but I guess that's probably not something we're gonna figure out until we figure out where here is."

She snaps her fingers at the dog and tries to get it to sit. The dog does not know Anitami.

Well at least Zada's making friends. Probably. It's also theoretically possible that she's making mortal enemies. She sounds like she's speaking Anitami; Kairda knows enough to recognize the language but not enough to use it. She settles for waving at the other person and pointing out the houses.

"It looks like it's some sort of farming community." Not that he's ever seen a farming village closer-up than a textbook photo.

"Do you want to see if there are any other people around? They would probably be able to tell us where we are, even if they can't help explain how we came to be here."

"Assuming we speak their language," points out Zada, but she whistles to the dog and heads off towards the houses, without checking to see whether any non-dogs are following her. She's pretty sure the other people can take care of themselves.

This is a patently absurd situation. She was in her apartment making toast not three minutes ago, and now she's in a field with her niece and a stranger and a dog that already likes Zada better than her.

She feels like this would be a much easier situation to deal with if someone else were freaking out. Then she could take over the task of not freaking out. Maybe the dog will freak out at some point and spare her the trouble.

She sighs and walks toward the houses.

"Even if they don't speak our language, we'll probably be able to communicate 'where are we' nonverbally, although admittedly it might be difficult to interpret the answer."

He follows after the other two, looking around at the houses and trying to identify any clues as to his location, like a sign with writing or something. The architecture definitely isn't Jakavi or Elesean, and most likely they aren't on an island at all, but construction is not remotely his specialty.

"How do you think we ought to introduce ourselves? It's not as if the actual situation is especially plausible, and we don't have an explanation for why we don't know basic facts like our location."

"I was gonna tell them I went for a hike and got lost. If I lived here I would totally go hiking."

"That only works if we can identify the general region from its name. Unless you've memorized every province in every country on Amenta, it won't help if we're in another country, since people generally don't get lost while hiking and wind up in a different country. 

...Perhaps people who don't live on islands do, I suppose, but they'd still be able to narrow it down to two."

"If we recognize the language then we'll be able to tell country based on that. If we don't speak the same language, but they have everythings and can get the translation working, we tell them we're visiting relatives, relatives are in the city, ask for directions to the nearest city, get internet reception, and figure out the rest from there. If we don't speak the same language and they don't have machine translation, then I don't think it super matters what our fake cover story is, we're not gonna get to use it."

Pause. 

"You're from an island?"

He nods. "I'm from the Island of Jakav, which is an island near the Republic of Jakav. Well, the country is officially referred to as the Islands of Jakav and Eleseo, but my island of origin and residency is the Island of Jakav."

"I know where the Island of Jakav is," she says, trying not to sound insulted. It is the sort of place a person could conceivably not know about. "We were in the middle of Voa, though. Doesn't make any sense for you to end up in the same place somehow. Though maybe I should have lower standards for what sorts of things make sense, given the rest of the situation."

"Were the two of you together? Were you with the dog? What were you doing when you found yourself here? What did you notice about your transportation here?"

"Yeah, we were in the same apartment. Not the dog, I dunno what's up with the dog." She points at Kairda. "That's Kairda. Uh, what were you doing before the thing - ?"

     "...Making toast?"

"She was making toast. She's boring like that. I was bemoaning the fundamental injustice of spring. And then I, like, fell? And we were in the field? - Did you notice anything about how you got here?"

     "I don't think so? I wasn't doing anything, really, I was in the kitchen and then there was some kind of - the ground wasn't stable and I fell. Into a field. Somehow."

"She says the ground shook or something. I dunno."

"I had gone to get myself a snack, so there's a trend there, but with so few data points it's difficult to tell and you don't fit the pattern."

He pauses. Introductions: something that, in light of the circumstances, he had completely forgotten about.

"My name is Simurika, incidentally."

"Cool. Zada. And I'm pretty sure that snacks don't teleport people."

The farm houses have wooden walls and wooden roofs. There's no evidence of a lock on the door of the closest one. There isn't even a handle, just a circular cutout where one might expect a handle to be. There's a wooden cart parked out front, and there are other structures close by - a barn, a stable, something that might be a chicken coop.

The dog walks up to the door and barks.

He's pretty sure that doors generally have handles even in rural communities, and nearly positive that wooden carts are not in common use anywhere. This is very strange. Perhaps someone on the farm does carpentry as a hobby, and the residents don't want to risk losing their everythings in the field and decided instead not to have electronic locks? But that's not an especially plausible explanation, not that there are any plausible explanations for why he and these strangers from another country have been teleported into a potato field.

He walks up behind the dog, glances at Zada and Kairda, and knocks on the door.

The door swings inward a bit, and a purple who appears to be about thirty opens it the rest of the way a moment later. She's wearing what appears to be a hand-spun dress, and seems to be very puzzled by his appearance. A one-year-old toddles up behind her, wearing similar clothes.

She asks a question in a language he doesn't speak.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand that," he tries in Anitami -- he is definitely not on either of the Islands of Jakav and Eleseo, and he hasn't eliminated Anitam as a possibility.

She frowns at him and shakes her head. She asks a different question, still in the same language, apparently aiming it at Zada and Kairda.

She isn't positive she knows what's being said - the pronunciation is different from modern Voan in ways she thinks she recognizes, but she's missing every third word entirely. Still, it's enough to prompt her to timidly respond.

"We're, uh, from the city? We were trying to visit someone, and we got lost. Could you tell us where we are?"

It's not clear that the woman understands all of what she's saying, either, but her face brightens and she waves them inside, saying something about cities and visiting and some kind of food that Kairda's never heard of. Probably food, anyway. She thinks she knows what verb it's being matched with.

He follows them inside, pulls out his everything, and glances at it -- now that they're in the house, there should definitely be internet, although he may need to go through a relay to get the password, and then he'll be able to at least roughly understand what everyone is saying.

There is not internet.

He looks at Zada, pausing for a moment to deliberate between asking for a translation and bringing up the unnerving lack of an internet connection. Maybe his Purple Culture class had simply neglected to mention internet access issues in rural communities? He wouldn't have expected the professor to know, and the purple assistant had, as far as he can remember, been from a city.

"Can you understand what she is saying?" he settles on, adding, a moment later, "My everything isn't detecting a connection. Do you know of any purple families that don't have internet access?"

"Everyone has internet access. Fucking reds have internet access. Unless they're like - I dunno, some kind of weird hardcore historical reenacting community?" 

It seems like this could be true - the house has a fireplace instead of a modern heating system, and the floor appears to be well-packed dirt. No television, no computers. No couch, just a set of wooden chairs. The window on the far side of the room has shutters, but no glass. There's a spindle in the corner.

She frowns at Kairda. "How're you - ?"

"It's um. It's middle Voan. I don't know it, but I recognize the vowel rules it's following. Uh, if you've ever tried to read the original text of the Song of Darivia, it's a lot like that? I don't know half of what she's saying, and I don't know which words she knows, I'm just trying to stick to traditional Voan and leave out loanwords? Please don't ask me why she's speaking middle Voan, I have no idea why she's speaking middle Voan."

"OK. Uh. Kairda thinks she's speaking middle Voan. Doesn't know why. She says it's sort of like the Song of Darivia - dunno if they cover Voan classics on the Island of Jakav, but it's from like, two and a half centuries ago? Which lends a lot more credence to the weirdo reenactors hypothesis, but I have no idea why she isn't breaking character, and I can only understand, like, a tenth of what she's saying."

The woman pours the three of them some kind of meat stew and offers them a plate of what looks like plain rye bread. She says something that sounds apologetic. Zada really wishes she could understand it, but she can't really fault herself for learning Tapai and Anitami and not a language that literally nobody speaks.

"Who would allow this much space to a historical reenactment community, though?" he asks. "Maybe they use modern agricultural techniques to grow the crops, although the wagon would seem to contradict that hypothesis."

At least Kairda speaks Middle Voan; it could be worse. "Can you ask her to ask for an explanation? Even if they're heavily invested on remaining in-character, they should be willing at least to inform us where we are, and I suspect that most reenactors would explain their reenactment group when asked."

While he's waiting for a response, he takes a piece of the bread and nibbles on it.

"I don't speak Middle Voan," sighs Kairda, after Zada relays this, but she dutifully asks the woman where they are. That question she understands - they're west of Goamo, which Kairda gathers is the nearest city. The woman doesn't know 'state' or 'province', and 'region' returns 'Voa'. 

She asks them when they are, hoping that if she's a reenactor she'll at least be willing to explain which period, precisely, she's reenacting. After a few rephrasings, she's given the day of the month. It's a different day of the month than it's supposed to be. She thanks the woman, relays this to Zada, and dips a piece of bread in the stew before trying it. It's unsalted and unspiced. Good would be overselling it, but it's edible, and she compliments the cook anyway. 

"Is Goamo a city name you recognize?" he asks. It's not a name he recognizes, when this is relayed to him, but he wouldn't recognize anything that isn't one of the two or three biggest.

He pauses for a moment, thinking.

"I think I have an idea of what may have happened. Some time has clearly passed from when we arrived here -- actually, we should check on when the last date we remember was, given the discrepancy -- and electricity-based devices don't seem to be working properly. Perhaps there was some sort of weapon or natural disaster or something of the sort that prevents electricity from working properly." He frowns. "I think a magnetic --" he pauses, groping for the word "-- a reversal of the part of the planet that makes magnets could cause it, although I'm not certain. I can't think of any weapons that would do this, but it's not as if I worked in weapons development, and there might be secret weapons with the same effect.

That doesn't explain how we arrived here, but maybe whatever caused electricity to stop working also causes amnesia."

"That's a lot of maybes," observes Zada. "And it doesn't explain the way this place looks, unless you think Amenta's magnetic field reversed and then we just happened to run into a historical reenactment group immediately afterwards. And you wouldn't get mass amnesia just because the magnetic poles reversed. Even if you did, which you wouldn't, it'd affect everyone, including the reenactors. And even then, that's not enough to explain us being brought here - you'd have to believe that someone dumped us, and only us, in a random field somewhere, and left the reenactors untouched for some reason." Frown. "I think Goamo's in Tova Province? That's, like, four hundred miles away from Solgatan, where we were. Pretty sure it was the fourteenth."

"It was the fourteenth for me as well. Maybe, if it was a weapon of some sort, we all had previously decided, for some reason, to come here, and then the weapon struck, and that's why we don't remember how we got here. That still doesn't explain why this place looks like it does, although some forms of brain damage and amnesia can interfere with the formation of new memories, so it's also possible that there was a weapon strike on the fourteenth, we decided to come here, and then we forgot about it. At least, that's my understanding of what is possible."

He pauses.

"You're right, though, that this electricity-free infrastructure would have taken time to set up. It's possible that rather than being a couple of weeks, it's been a year, or perhaps multiple years. I don't actually know if the future-affecting type of amnesia can affect memories for that long, but it wouldn't shock me, and normal assumptions about -- brain biology -- wouldn't necessarily apply if this is the result of some sort of weapon."

This sounds super implausible, but given that the entire situation is super implausible, it seems like it'd be kind of mean-spirited to make fun of him for it.

"And the post-apocalyptic weapon survivors are speaking Middle Voan because....?"

"I am neither a linguist nor Voan, but if we assume for a moment that there was a weapon used, that implies that there was a war. Sometimes, after wars, secession movements will use languages to mark out a distinction from whatever country previously controlled them -- Libeki, my roommate who is studying to be a historian, says that after the Oahk Empire collapsed, there was a country that declared the local purple dialect standard because it was the least similar to Oahkar."

He pauses.

"Admittedly, Middle Voan would be a rather strange choice for that."

"Even if they had picked Middle Voan for some reason, this purple's, what, thirty? And apparently doesn't know modern Voan? I'm pretty sure we haven't been out for thirty years, that's insane."

She copies Kairda and tries the stew. She makes a face after eating it. Kairda shoots her a warning look, so she smiles at their host and puts on her best 'mm, good' face.

"Do you have any other hypotheses?"

He's hesitant to try the meat, given that it was apparently cooked over a fire, but he eats the bread and some of the broth. Eventually he caves and eats some of the meat; he doesn't want to go hungry. It's not as good as anything he or any of his roommates cook. Perhaps she lives with someone else, a spouse or a roommate or a child or something, who normally does most of the cooking. Or perhaps this is the inevitable outcome of cooking your food over a fire after whatever disaster caused this to happen.

"Money's on historical society given some excessive grant to study historical living conditions. Possibly a really wealthy reenactor group. Dunno how we got here, maybe we were abducted for some reason and given drugs that made us black out for a few days."

She can, in fact, think of a reason why someone might want to abduct her and keep her out of a city, but she feels like anyone willing to go to that kind of trouble would either be straight with her or just straight-up murder her, and she's not about to volunteer the information.

She does her best to gather more information while her niece and the stranger - she should really ask Zada for the green's name at some point - talk about whatever it is they're discussing. Finding words they both know isn't easy, but the woman doesn't seem deterred, though she notes that they must be visiting from very far away. Kairda agrees - she grew up in Dezar Arin. The woman hasn't heard of it. 

Her five children (five!) and numerous grandchildren are apparently planting grains today, and will return for the midday meal shortly. The one-year-old is her daughter's daughter's daughter's son - apparently they use the same words for family in Middle Voan.

She relays this information to Zada when she's sure of it.

"Maybe they're a group of blue reenactors." That would explain the wealth, and the lack of cooking ability.

When Zada relays him the information about the family, he furrows his brow. "Are you absolutely certain that she said that we're in Voa?" He pauses. "I suppose if they're reenactors her children could just be five other actors, although a sufficiently serious war might result in a relaxation of population controls."

"I mean, they could be lying," she points out, "but if we're going to throw out everything she's telling us, then we might as well just focus on getting to the nearest city as soon as possible."

"It seems highly unlikely that someone would lie about having five children while being Voan. I suppose she could be extremely unintelligent, but it's the sort of lie that anyone who thinks about it for a moment could catch.

Her guess --" a nod at Kairda "-- is probably far better than mine with regards to her honesty, though."

Sigh. "Kairda? Do you have, like, guesses on what's going on here? Simurika's waffling between worldwide apocalyptic EMP weapon and eccentric blue reenactor group. How fake is she?"

"Non-fake. She seems like she's genuinely puzzling through modern Voan words about the same way I'm puzzling through her language. She'd have to be both a gifted linguist and a gifted actor to pull it off. We could double-check with the child - a one-year-old wouldn't be able to act that well, and nobody'd raise a child only to speak Middle Voan. In terms of guesses, uh... if we were in a book I'd put time travel on the table?" She ducks her head when Zada frowns at her. "I'm not saying I think we've actually traveled back two and a half centuries. Just. I'm a historical science fiction author, Zada, I have to mention the possibility."

Sigh. "Kairda doesn't think she's an actor. She thinks the way she's puzzling through her language would be really hard to fake. You'd have to be a gifted linguist and a gifted actor, which is I guess possible but it seems unlikely. She's gonna check if the one-year-old speaks modern Voan, you couldn't get a one-year-old to pull off the same thing. Her guess is time travel. Not, like, her actual guess, because that's dumb and impossible, but it'd explain everything we've observed if it weren't, you know, dumb and impossible."

"That seems incredibly unlikely, but so does everything else about this place. Can you have Kairda ask her what year it is? A reenactor might just give the year they're reenacting, but if she gives us a year in the present we can at least rule out time travel as a possibility."

He rubs his forehead.

"Libeki would have a much better idea than I would. There are always going to be differences between even the most convincing reenactment and the actual past, but I couldn't pick up on them. There isn't anything obviously wrong with the house, but a good reenactor wouldn't get anything obviously wrong, and it would have to be incredibly obvious for me to pick up on it."

"Kairda's a total nerd about ancient history stuff, I'd honestly be pretty impressed if the house didn't have anything wrong with it that she could pick up on. Kairda, can you ask them what year it is - ?"

     "How're we going to explain not knowing that?"

"I don't know! Handle looking weird! Take one for the team!"

She can't work up the nerve to ask something that makes her look weirder than she already does. Let's see. Hm.

"This is a beautiful house you have here. Things aren't so spacious in the cities. How long ago was it built?"

The woman is somewhat surprised at this question, once she understands it, but she talks about how her grandson and his wife and their six children (six!) built it together so that her granddaughter and their family would have a place that was big enough for their growing family. Must have been about twelve years ago, now.

"Twelve... I'm no good at math, what year would that have been?"

3100 exactly. That's an easy one, Kairda should study her sums more, though of course the woman understands that not everyone has the opportunity to practice sums very often. Perhaps the green she's traveling with could help her with that.

Kairda laughs nervously, agrees, and relays to Zada that the year is 3112.

That is very definitely not the year it is supposed to be. 3426 minus 3112 is three hundred and fourteen is very definitely not the year it is supposed to be.

He has an idea for how to test this hypothesis; he doesn't want to make his companions uncomfortable by bringing it up, but if he has somehow been transported more than three centuries into the past that is too important not to check.

"It occurs to me that we could potentially differentiate between reenactors and time travel by asking to use their restroom. Even an extreme reenactment group would probably have proper plumbing, unless everyone in the group is hyposensitive and probably not even then."

Kairda frowns as this is relayed, but it seems like a basically sensible test.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but we've been on the road a long time, do you have a place where - I'm not sure how to say this politely in your dialect, but we haven't been able to pee for some time?"

Oh, the poor dears. It's not like it is in the cities out here. They have an outhouse at the edge of the village, to keep the waste from polluting anything else. 

Kairda relays this.

"That strongly suggests that they are not a reenactment group."

3112. 3112. That is not the year it is supposed to be.

"Do you have any ideas about what we should do, assuming we're not mistaken? Most of my skills don't exactly transfer to three centuries ago."

"Well, uh, I guess if we have been transported three centuries into the past... I should figure out how to speak Middle Voan, it can't be that hard to learn basic conversational speech if Kairda's managing. We'll need to find some way of supporting ourselves. I'm an aeronautics mechanic but I'm sure they have some kind of unskilled labor we can do, and Kairda's probably even mostly literate. Not that there are likely to be any in-caste opportunities to make money with literacy. We should get to the city and see what our options are."

She's going to need hair dye, and if they have against all logic ended up in the past somehow, there's not going to be any hair dye to be found. Fuck. Maybe people had some way of staining or bleaching it. She'll have to ask Kairda later. She can't do it in front of everyone like this, the random farmer might catch what she's saying.

"Maybe there's some sort of unskilled labor that you can do, but no one is going to hire a green person to move boxes around. Theology is great, but it's not like -- whoever was in charge of Voa in 3112 -- is going to hire a random theologian without any provable credentials to advise them, at least not without substantial work.

...But yes, getting the city sounds like a good idea, as is learning the language."

He mentally lists everything else in-caste that he could plausibly do. His other two roommates are an author and an illustrator, but he can't write stories especially well and he can't draw at all. He might be able to learn how to write stories, or plagiarize a book that he'd studied in school, but even that would only get him content, not style. The only instrument he could play competently was the theremin, and that seemed unlikely to have been invented yet; he could learn another, but buying an instrument and paying for lessons would require money.

Maybe he can be a scientist and make discoveries by virtue of having learned about them in school, but that will require remembering both major scientific discoveries well enough to reconstruct them and when they were discovered.

"You could probably be an artist or something. Kairda's, like, compulsive about writing, just poke her to write things and then publish them under your name. Or you could pretend to be a scientist from Anitam who's come to seek royal patronage for his weird ideas, I bet we could at least teach them about, like, crop rotation or something. Anyway, to start with we just need enough money to keep ourselves from starving, and then we'll figure out whatever else we're planning to do."

It would probably be a bad time to express his skepticism that Kairda's writing is actually good enough to earn them a substantial amount of money. 

"The scientist plan would work better than the art one; I'm not particularly talented in the visual arts."

He starts to pull out his everything to make a list, since he doesn't have paper with him, then hesitates. "Actually, I should probably turn this off. It might at some point be convenient to be able to demonstrate futuristic capabilities, and I don't have a way to charge it."

"Probably," says Zada, switching hers off, too. She gets a weird look from the farmer lady, but it doesn't prompt a comment; the angle's not one where she can see the screen. "Kairda, can you ask her for directions to the city? We should start addressing our lack of funds sooner, not later."

It takes Kairda a while to get the directions out of the woman; the words for east and west are recognizable, but the words for north and south are different. Neither of them has anything to write with, and Kairda's sense of direction has never been particularly good. Eventually she reports back what she thinks is a set of directions to the city, laced with several disclaimers. The purple, who informs them that her name is Tezvea, thinks that it'll be about half a day of walking for young people like them. If they start now, they might make it back before nightfall, but there's a rather good chance they won't. Given that they must have been walking almost since dawn to reach her out here, she suggests that they spend the night.

This seems reasonable to him. They haven't actually been walking since dawn, but he also doesn't live in a society where he's used to spending an entire day walking. City inns are also presumably going to want money, which will probably be harder to acquire after dark, and it's not like he can transfer them some electronic rieni from his bank account.

Admittedly, that might be an issue with Tezvea as well. "Is she going to want some form of payment?" he asks. If they're performing exchange for in-kind goods, it wouldn't even technically be out of caste for him to help out with the farm, though he doubts that he would be any good at it and Medieval Voa might have had different laws. He wishes he remembered his classes on the history and evolution of caste labor laws better.

There's more talking he can't understand, and then Zada makes a face. "Kairda says no, not if it's for one night. Farmer lady says she thinks her family would really enjoy hearing about our travels and what we're doing in the area. Kairda can't tell how strong of a suggestion that's supposed to be, but from her half of the conversation I'm pretty sure she's already agreed. Obviously we haven't actually done anything, but if you're cool being a foreign scientist then we can probably patch together some kind of backstory for you."

"I think I could pull that off, yes." He bites his lip. "I'm a foreign scientist, from -- Anitam might be too close -- from somewhere, and I'm working on research that is very important but difficult to convey through translation, but I'm happy to talk about other topics. I could probably talk convincingly about my country's culture, modern inventions excepted, and that will save us the risk of accidentally describing an allegedly new invention that's actually been around for fifty years. I've come to Voa to spread my research findings, which I believe will help the people here. Does that seem at least reasonably plausible?"

"Seems plausible to me. And you have two purples with you who're clearly from elsewhere in Voa and kind of sucky on the translation front because...?"

"I'm researching some sort of technology that will make it easier for you to do your jobs, which are not farming-related because they'll be more likely to see through farming-related lies, such as new types of metal to help with your --" he pauses "-- the job where you form metal into shapes. You're accompanying me because I want some purple people to help explain how my advancements would actually be beneficial, and you've previously consulted on your jobs to assist me with my research. I had a translator, but unfortunately I had to leave them behind because they were injured."

"That is so excessively dramatic," sighs Zada, before getting input from Kairda. "Kairda says she's not gonna lie about being a blacksmith because they might want her to do blacksmith things, and then the lie'll be obvious. She suggests pesticide research, she was in pest control for like a year. Also says written translation was always yellow but that it was common during some eras for spoken translation to be bundled under other kinds of hospitality service, and it'd be plausible that we were much more competent translators in a different region of the country. Lots of regional dialectical differences, I guess, which is why the farmer doesn't think it's that weird that our Voan is so completely different from hers."

He nods. "I can pretend to research and know information about pesticides. It would probably be good for me to pretend to focus on the type of insects that don't eat crops, since I don't actually research pesticides and they might want to know how to stop their crops from being eaten. I don't actually have any samples of pesticides with me, but I suppose I could say that I fell in a river and they all washed away, leaving me with the memory of how to make them, and nothing else."

"Or you, like, sold them," suggests Zada, biting back a second comment about excessive drama. "We don't actually know if there are any rivers around here."

"It seems implausible that I would sell off my only samples of the technology I want to teach people about, and I do not, in fact, have any money, though admittedly I could have spent it." He sighs. "It's probably not going to come up anyways."

"Fair," she says, and then relays the highlights of this exchange to Kairda.

Tezvea seems happy to have the chance to entertain visitors, and cheerfully discusses her family with Kairda as she finishes cooking the meal. It isn't much longer before several people wander in looking for lunch. There are twelve people in the group, all purple and all apparently back from work in the fields, but only three of them appear to be adults. The others are children between the ages of two and four. The children immediately have lots of questions, mostly regarding Simurika; random purple visitors are apparently much less exciting. For a while there's really too much talking to pick out what any one person is saying.

He says things in Jakavi that he doesn't expect them to understand. He lets a three-year-old attempt to braid his hair. He waits for things to settle down so Zada can relay messages to him.

The children have lots of questions, which Zada is able to relay with some difficulty. They're bad at taking turns. They want to know where he's from and what he's doing here, how he ended up so far away from the city, how many languages he speaks, how many countries he's been to, what those countries were like, whether he's ever been to Voa before, what he thinks of Voa, how long he's planning to stay in Voa for, and whether the dog outside is his. 

He relays answers through Zada.

He is from a faraway country. He is a scientist, come to share his scientific advancements with the rest of the world. He wasn't trying to end up so far away from the city, but when he left the previous city they were in they must have taken a wrong turn, and now they're lost. He speaks three languages but two of them are very very similar. (He privately thinks that calling Jakavi and Elesean separate languages is ridiculous, but there isn't much he can do about that classification.) He's been to five countries (the Islands of Jakav and Eleseo, the Republic of Jakav, Olyan, Orvara, and Voa), not counting countries that he passed through while on the train to Orvara; not knowing how many of them even exist yet, he relays this simply as "five countries." All of the countries that he's been to are very nice. The one he's from has the best food. This is the first time he's been to Voa. Everyone in Voa is very nice. He is going to stay in Voa at least until he's taught other people in Voa the scientific information he wants to convey. (He does not add that if he finds a portal back to his century he is going to take it.) The dog outside is not his, but it belongs to the people he's travelling with.

The children discuss these answers among themselves; Kairda can't follow what they're all saying. Eventually Tezvea reminds them that they still have a lot of work to get done, and the children tromp out of the house a few at a time.

They must be tired after doing so much traveling recently. Tezvea shows her guests a bedroom (not a spare one, judging from the way the bed is rumpled) and tells them to be sure to ask if they need anything. It'll be another five hours or so before dinner.

He looks around the room for anything of interest.

The room is fairly bare. There's a mattress that seems to be filled with straw, a few additional bedrolls that have been rolled up and tucked out of the way, a wooden chest without a lock, a wooden chair with an unlit candle on it, and a bucket of water on the floor beside it. A window looks out on a vegetable garden behind the house. There's no glass, but there are curtains and shutters if it needs to be closed. 

"OK," says Kairda. "You know what, OK, we can work with this. They're being super welcoming, and I think we're totally gonna be fine here until we can get to the city tomorrow. But we should - we should talk about things."

Zada flops down on the mattress. "We should talk about how insane this is," she mumbles, before switching back to Anitami. "I call the mattress."

He is not particularly inclined to start a fight with his travelling companions, especially given that he doesn't speak the local language. He spreads out a bedroll on a patch of floor, attempting to position it such that Zada is unlikely to step on him if she gets up in the night.

"We have like a week on the hair thing, right?" she asks Kairda.

She deliberately stops herself from looking at Simurika to see if he reacted to that. He's probably not pretending not to understand Voan, that would be a weird thing to pretend. "About that. Maybe two. I don't think they have hair dye in this era, but there's probably some kind of bleaching agent available in the city. I, uh, don't know how to apply it safely, but - we'll figure something out."

"Yeah." She's quiet for about half a minute. "Well, this is lame and I'm not tired, I'm gonna go find the outhouse. Back in a bit."

She leaves the room. Kairda unfolds another bedroll, rather than take her place on the mattress.

He is not, in fact, pretending not to understand Voan.

(He is slightly confused about why they keep switching into Voan to have their conversation, but he can think of lots of plausible explanations.)

There aren't any books in the room; this is entirely unsurprising, but it means he doesn't have anything to do until Zada gets back and can translate. He sits on his bedroll and contemplates the absurdity of the situation.

Kairda is also mostly busy processing. She sort of wants to point to objects and give her words for them in Voan, hoping that Simurika will respond in kind with his own language, but she's not going to be any good at it and she doesn't especially want to embarrass herself in front of a multilingual foreign green.

She takes a nap. Probably neither Tezvea nor the multilingual foreign green are secretly serial killers, at least provided they don't find out that she and Zada are tracking pollution wherever they go.

It's an hour or so before Zada comes back - she did go to the outhouse, but she also figured she'd explore the rest of the settlement. It's not large, not even really a town, just a collection of buildings that house the people who work the surrounding farmland. She doesn't learn that much, but she feels a little better now that she has a sense of her immediate surroundings.

"Hey. Back. You figure out anything you want to prioritize doing?"

It's not like we could discuss it without the translator, he doesn't say.

"There isn't much we can do until we can go to the city and earn money, so it would probably be a good idea to focus on that. I don't think there are many things here that will particularly help us."

She restrains herself from immediately responding that's quitter talk.

"OK, well, grandma outside doesn't think we can reach the city before nightfall, so I think we're stuck here for at least tonight. If you don't have any pressing concerns then I'm gonna make nice and try learning some Middle Voan via immersion."

He sighs and moves to follow her. 

....well if they're both going then she's not gonna not go.

Success!

Zada's interested in finding some little kids to talk to. This is partly because little kids won't have anything better to do, partly because it's hard to feel embarrassed about your language abilities in front of a one-year-old, and partly because it's still spring. She finds one of the kids from earlier playing in a ditch, and makes a show of introducing herself before naming and asking for the names of various objects.

He listens to the names and tries to remember them. Occasionally, when asked, he provides a Jakavi translation.

This seems like a pretty important thing to be focusing on. She doesn't want to keep managing two separate language barriers indefinitely, and she definitely doesn't want to keep going through Kairda whenever she needs to talk to someone. Getting Simurika up to speed in Middle Voan will make it harder for her and Kairda to have secret conversations in front of him, but they can have secret conversations in places that aren't in front of him, like normal people.

Kairda isn't anywhere close to fluent, but she seems to know enough to get by; after a while she leaves to find the adult farm laborers and offer to pitch in and help. Farm stuff is probably a good thing to have any experience with in this era, and currently she has pretty much none.

He continues language practice until dinnertime.

This specific kid is going to get bored of talking before then, but there are various other kids around of varying degrees of helpfulness. 

When it's time for dinner, all of the adults and children return from the fields and go back to their houses. A fairly large number go to Tezvea's house, clearly more than the number that actually live there.

He tries to take a seat near Zada and Kairda.

They're perfectly willing to allow him to sit where he pleases. For most of dinner there's too much conversation for Kairda to follow (let alone translate) any of the individual conversation threads, but after everyone has eaten they settle into asking questions (most of them, again, for Simurika). The adults want to know who exactly he intends to offer his new technology to and whether it's already in use in his native country, and otherwise stick to open-ended questions about his travels. It seems likely that they don't often get the chance to hear about faraway places from people who have firsthand experience with them.

He's planning on telling the local governments and working with them to plan a rollout; he expects that some of his inventions will help farmers. Most of the inventions are already in use in his native country. (This is not, technically speaking, true, but it ought to communicate that they work, which he's pretty sure is what they actually want to know.) He tells them a couple stories taken from historical fiction novels and hopes the novels didn't mangle the details of the past too seriously.

They seem entertained, if dubious about some of the specifics. Eventually Tezvea declares that their guests should be allowed to get some rest, they have a long walk ahead of them in the morning.

He nods politely and heads back to the room.

His companions do the same. 

In the morning - at dawn, really, Kairda is apparently pretty good at waking up at dawn - they eat a light breakfast and then make their way to the city.

The dirt road is uneven, but not hard to follow. It winds through the countryside for several miles, cutting through farmland and passing the occasional knot of houses.

He attempts conversation in broken Old Voan until they reach the city.