"Uhhhhhh....."  The walls here are weirdly solid; everything here is weirdly solid; barely anything's fabric.  The other human's clothes are weird.  They let him have his earrings, but they gave him a language test... so it's probably not that they know what the earrings do and that they're harmless.  (Unless they're toying with him; he shouldn't forget that they might be toying with him.)

Either way, Jensi thinks he's probably very, very far away from the city.  Shame it's not his tentmate who's here; she'd be ecstatic.

The question is what they're using instead.  Everything about the clean lines and lighting and general level of comfort suggests that there's more going on than a lack of seamsters.  Maybe the magic here cares about flat surfaces.  Or little critters.  Or... he's not really sure what else.  It wouldn't be that suspicious to make up a wildly wrong guess, but he doesn't actually have any.

"Still no."

"Okay. So there are - two places humans live nowadays. I guess three, including wherever you came from, but I don't have a clue where that is so I can't get you sent there. There used to be a lot of places but aliens wrecked most all of them. So now there's Tintown, a community of independent survivors pulling together what they can out of the ruins, and then there's Hollow Grove. We're a zoo, for some other, nonmurdery aliens. Do you know what a zoo is?"

"No."

"Well.

"A zoo is a preserve for a species that would otherwise be hard to get a good look at up close, which protects and supports members of that species with that goal in mind. There's a zoo with animals in it, inside Hollow Grove, but Hollow Grove is itself a zoo of humans. For these guys." He pokes the nearest varmint. Its fur isn't very deep pile but it squishes when poked; it must be very soft.

"I can send you to Tintown. There's a bus. If 'Hollow Grove is a zoo' is all you need to know, then you should go to Tintown and see what they can do for you there; they're decent folks to the extent they can be. But if it's not a dealbreaker then Hollow Grove is a much higher standard of living in almost every other respect."

"This is - a lot to take in."

"I can imagine. You can have a few hours, maybe even a few days, to think about it here, but - those are the only places so until you know which one you want you can't really leave."

Hm.  "What does it mean for a place to be a zoo of humans?  In a practical sense, day-to-day."

"There's varmints all over the place. They don't allow anything they think isn't healthy for humans, so that's no sugar, sharply limited electronics, no motorized transportation - though they're not positive about everything and you stand some chance of convincing them about edge cases. Through the human Enrichment Committee since varmints don't talk, exactly. You're not allowed to let on to the children that they're growing up in a remotely unusual way. There's plenty of food - you don't look underfed yourself, but I know you're not from Hollow Grove and I have no idea what hidey-hole you managed to appear out of that has consistent food and isn't a zoo, Tintown has supply issues. A lot of people don't have full time jobs but those who want them go into medicine or manage the zoo - the animal zoo - or teach or do crafts."

Okay, these people definitely don't have sewing magic.  ...Does Jensi?  His earrings still work but that doesn't necessarily mean that he can still make new artefacts.

"And whatever I decide, I can't change it later?"

"You can, but, like, once. You can't pop in and out whenever you please, they want a reasonably stable human population in Hollow Grove and they'll stop letting you in if it looks like you're treating it more like a vacation spot."

If only one of these places has abundant fabric he knows where he needs to start.  "I can... try... here."

"Okay. The kids rule is pretty serious. The kids think this is a normal way for everything to work, okay? The varmints think it's healthy to grow up thinking whatever's going on is normal. They figure out there's some big secret, eventually, but you talk around it like the secret is Santa Claus, that's the convention. - do you know what Santa Claus is."

"No."

"...okay. I don't have time to get into all that with you, you can ask anybody over the age of eighteen about it and just not talk to kids too much before then, say you're shy or something, the important thing is that they think the varmints are dumb animals and that all the things around them are either natural or put there by humans and that they don't know what they're missing as regards sugar and the internet and so on. They reckon Tintown's probably a lot like Hollow Grove, none of them have ever seen it. We're not allowed to have organized religious practice, the varmints won't stop you praying when there's no other humans around but they don't like it if it gets more involved than that. No dangerous chemistry or engineering or whatever experiments - you don't have to figure out where the line is yourself necessarily, just know there is one and if the varmints start disappearing your ingredients that's why. If the Enrichment Committee shows up and says something, they most likely got it from hours of trying to talk to the varmints, so their word is law, but you pretend your heart out that they're just your friendly consensus-appointed respected community leaders because the varmints think pretending makes it so for many human social constructs and if you're disrupting the Hollow Grove social construct you're out. All that sound livable?"

"What happens if someone does something they don't like, that isn't worth kicking them out over yet but that doesn't have ingredients they can disappear?  As in - what happens if someone tries to pray around other people, or is bad about pretending the thing you said about the Enrichment Committee, or - something like that."

"They will kick you out if you do that. They might not kick me out if I did that, because I already have, you know, social relationships with the existing Hollow Grove population, so they'd be ripping up some things they care about if they booted me, and also they can communicate with me about where the line is and know I'm generally on board with the plan. If you look like you're going to be trouble, or look like you're not trying that hard not to be trouble, they will kick you out. They're bad at - talking to humans on a human level, understanding humans on a human level - but that doesn't mean you can get schemes past them, it just means they're going to interpret the schemes as regrettable animalistic stress and maladjustment and have no respect for what you were actually going for at all when they send you off to Tintown. They're always watching. They can interpret human expressions, just not the way humans do."

"I.... I think I can live with that."  By which he means he thinks if he's maximally cautious about making artefacts that are magic but don't in practice do anything, he can level up enough to make fabricators.  And then move to Tintown and more freely level up enough to get home. 

"Any more questions?"

"Not questions per se."

"...okay. You can have a while to think about it. You're medically cleared to move in to Hollow Grove if that's what you want to do."

"If someone else can teach me how to, how to live here, then I'm not attached to sticking around.  But I don't know if there's anything important I don't know, that only you can tell me."

"Anybody can teach you how to live there, though it'll maybe take the Enrichment Team a bit to pick somebody for you - do you have any preferences about what kind of person besides that you're not going to get anyone with kids in their house?"

"Not that I know well enough to say."