Raverian Jida in Hollow Grove
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Jensi owns multiple sets of clothes.  It's a lot cheaper than only owning one, and anyway he wants a better idea of exactly what he wants his outfit to do before locking anything in.  That's something his tentmate is always talking about, how everything's growing so fast that new things are more limited by ideas than by seamsters.  And that's only going to get more true as more people hit opalescent.  So Jensi owns pajamas, fabricated ones, instead of a single outfit that never gets dirty and is comfortable in any situation.

His tentmate has an idea for how to get new ideas, and, being an actual seamster, executes on it.  It's a little embroidered ball meant to temporarily enweird the effects of magic around it.  She passes it to him as she stumbles into sewfall, asking him to go try it out.  Even though he's in pajamas.

 

Well, he did skip dinner reading pocket updates from a bunch of people he respects, and there's a place he's been craving food from.  It's technically on another continent, but it's only a few minutes' walk from his tent.  And she's liable to be up before he is, wanting some manner of report.

So he slips on some shoes but doesn't bother getting more dressed than that.  He brushes an ear with the back of his fingers, a habit from before his earrings were a necessity even inside his own home.  Swipes a handful of coins from his hammock-side table.  And heads out.

 

The ball doesn't do anything immediately obvious to his earrings, which isn't very surprising since there's no one else around to talk to.  It does turn the next tent's decorations abstract, when it's close enough, and - it's clearly doing something with the portal, as he approaches it.  The color changes, and the rustling of the fabric takes on a different pitch.

....Probably, probably this will not actually take him to dumplings, but he should still dip through and then back, even if he then has to trek back home, set down the ball, and return.  (He's not just going to leave it lying next to the portal; that would be egregiously stupid.)

 

He passes a hand through, not the one holding the ball, and feels nothing unusual, and - it's probably for the best that when he tips his head in and his entire body goes slack, the ball winds up on the opposite side of the portal from the rest of him.

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He is in -

- it doesn't really matter, because he's not conscious. Skipping ahead a bit, he is in a weirdly cozy doctor's office, lounging in the buff on an exam table draped in a thick sheet sort of thing, with his possessions neatly stacked on an adjacent chair. There some kind of six legged flying squirrel looking thing perched on the back of the chair and a doctor murmuring at another such squirrel.

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Hm.  That's much worse than he thought this was going to go, although maybe it wouldn't have been if he'd thought about it while properly awake.

Heeeee.... reaches over for his earings??  Are they close enough that he can grab them without getting up.

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Yup, they're on top of the stack of his effects.

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He puts the first one in, then tries to not react to whatever he can make out of the human's muttering while he does the second.

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"- contusion of the elbow but otherwise in a state of physical health not consistent with origins in - oh, hello."

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- He has an idea.  "Hello."

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"Where might you be from?"

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"I don't... remember....."

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"...what do you remember?"

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Jensi attempts to look thoughtful.  And confused.

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"Do you know your name?"

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"What sort of words are names?"

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"...let's circle back to that later." Time for a battery of cognitive tests.

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Can he put his clothes on first?  Ideally without an audience?

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He can put his clothes on but the doctor is not leaving. Neither are the flying chipmunks. Just when you think you've counted all the flying chipmunks in the room there turns out to be another one.

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Fine.  What are the tests like?

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Repeat back this list of words. Spell this other word. Draw a square. Identify the commonality between all these nouns (they're fruits). Repeat that list of words from the first exercise again. Describe this here varmint verbally. Add six and five. Mime making breakfast. Subtract nine from seven hundred and four, and then subtract it again a few more times. Draw a tree.

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He can repeat the list, and spell, and draw a square, and identify that fruits are the thing in common even if he doesn't recognize all of them.  He intentionally whiffs an item on the list the second time.  The varmint is small and furry and has six legs and round-bead-like eyes; eleven.  ....He mimes receiving a sandwichish item from another person and eating it by hand.  695... 686..... 677... 668.  He sketches a deciduous tree, starting with a shaky, somewhat impressionistic outline of the leaves and hatching in some shading before sweeping down some lines for the trunk and branches.

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Okay, and he still doesn't remember his name or where he came from? His family? What happens if the doctor digs up an old dialect-triangulation test to find out if he calls water fountains "bubblers" and so on to get a guess at where he learned English?

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He does not.  But sure, he can take a quiz.

('The devil is beating his wife'???  Small freshwater lobsters?  The night before Halloween??)

He picks answers that contain words from the question wherever possible (a sale of unwanted items in your porch or yard: is probably a yard sale) and is vague whenever not (he uses firefly and lightning bug interchangeably; he has no word for a lot of 'this'es; he has never heard of a lot of 'such a thing's).

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Wow, that's an incredibly inconclusive dialect test, though of course it's twenty years out of date so it couldn't possibly be that good anyway.

"Do you know what you want to do next? What kind of place you would like to live?" asks the doctor eventually.

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"Not really."

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"Okay. Do you remember about aliens?"

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".....No."

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"Ah-huh. - do you have any expectations about what will be outside when you leave my office. At all."

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