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.

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.

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

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.

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

- He has an idea.  "Hello."

"Where might you be from?"

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

"...what do you remember?"

Jensi attempts to look thoughtful.  And confused.

"Do you know your name?"

"What sort of words are names?"

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

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

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.

Fine.  What are the tests like?

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

"Not really."

"Okay. Do you remember about aliens?"

".....No."

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

"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."

"Uh-huh." The doctor glances at a varmint sitting on his desk. It bobs up and down, perhaps communicatively. "They'll send somebody. The good news is I think it's actually fine for the kids to hear that you have no memories and don't know why you have no memories, though you might not want to let on anyway since that's a good way to get deluged in curious children."

"- Oh.  Is there a way to mostly avoid interacting with children at all?"

"There's lots of them in town. It's a good place to raise kids. You don't have to have extended conversations with them but they will be around."

"Okay."

There's a knock at the door; a voice says, "It's April."

"Come in," says the doctor.

The door opens and in comes April. She is wearing what is probably a uniform; it's got an embroidered patch on it that says ENRICHMENT. "Hi. You're - our nameless amnesiac?"

Jensi is not actually familiar with the concept of uniforms.  "That's me."

"Okay. You're going to need a first name and a surname. Do you want to give me anything to go on picking something?"

Makes sense that they use the old order here.  "Could I look at a list?  Or hear some examples.  Of what words are names."

"I'm April Parson, your doctor is Terrence Huang, if you don't give me anything to go on at all I'm probably going to call you John Connor but that's because it's a fiction reference that doesn't even really suit the situation."

"Fine."

"Welcome to Hollow Grove, John. I'm going to bring you to meet Tom Slater, he'll be your host for the next while."

"Thanks."

Out of the doctor's office they go. It turns out to be up a switchback staircase from a valley town, and the view's good; lots of trees, radial layout with neighborhoods among the spokes and a town center in the center and a vast zoological park on the far edge.

Jensi has ever been outside before, and has even as a non-toddler.  And modern tents are pretty good at picturesque.

He stares anyway.  Just for a few seconds, before switching to walking.

.....And then he has to stare at the stairs before starting down them.  It can't be that hard; it's not like literally every surface he's ever walked on has been perfectly even - okay, yes, after a few steps he has a rhythm that can keep pace with April.

April slows down for him when he exhibits stair-related hesitations. It's several flights. The stairs are made of half-logs but when they end they're walking directly on short dense grass. "Tom has grown children, who don't have kids of their own yet, so there won't be any bound and determined to visit his house. He's got a dog. Plays the violin."

What's the violin.  "That's nice."

"You can move into a house of your own whenever you feel ready, but I'm expecting you to stay with him for at least a week and probably more like six months, becoming accustomed to the way things work."

He should probably establish a precedent.  "I'm used to -"  He stops in his tracks and puts on a confused face.  "I'm used to living with someone.  I think."

"Well, you can try to find someone you'd like to live with, but I didn't know enough about you to set you up with someone who'd be a good long term housemate for you."

"Of course."

"The habit in Hollow Grove is monogamy and nuclear family units sharing houses, with some exceptions for including extended family or living together as platonic friends that are culturally marked. There are many ways it's perfectly natural for humans to live together and apart but this one was common to our source population so it's what we're doing here. If the human population recovers then one day there might be affordances for multiple communities that can sustain different cultures but you probably shouldn't expect it in your lifetime."

"...What were those two words you said at the beginning?  I don't know them."

"'The' and 'habit'? - or 'monogamy' and 'nuclear'."

"Second pair."

"Monogamy is a tendency of a romantic relationship to consist of two people who do not have outside partners. Nuclear means - well, several things, but in this case it means a couple and their subadult children and only those people living together."

"So most - houses, have a couple and their children, and not anyone else, and sometimes people are allowed to do other things but not many other things?"

"You can probably do most other things you're likely to think of if you find someone to do them with, they'll just be unusual and require explanation to anyone you're introducing to your situation for the first time. Our protectors aren't inclined to strongly enforce the cultural norm."

'Protectors', sure.  He wants to ask - but if they don't have magic, will it be suspicious - but it might not hurt, for him to look like he cares a lot about hedonistic things - "Are there ways to not have kids?"

"Yes. You can go back up the stairs and get your own, but any women you encounter will have arrangements so it's not urgent even if you expect to hook up with someone within the hour."

"Oh, good."

"If you see fruit or nuts or anything like that growing around you it's almost certainly edible. It's the principal way to get fruit. Mushrooms will reliably be nontoxic but not necessarily any good for you. Vegetables can be foraged but you should learn which ones so you don't wind up eating the leaves of a plant that's there for the stalk or something like that. Things other than fresh produce can be had at the grocery store in the town center. Everything is free. That also applies to the stores with clothes, art supplies, the library if you want to keep a book from there - you can only keep the aboveground ones in your house, the basement ones are information leak risks for the children."

As they walk there sure are varmints all over the place, gliding overhead and scurrying underfoot, though never close enough to touch.

Jensi tries to mostly ignore the varmints, which is hopefully also what 'John' would be doing.  ...Hm, he did skip dinner, and he doesn't know how long he was out - is there any of this food around?  How hungry is he, if he pays attention to it?

He's got the slightly queasy ravenousness of someone who was recently knocked unconscious for several hours and whose digestive system isn't sure what that adds up to. They are passing trees and some have apples on them.

Anything these - people, or whatever - wanted done to him they will have already done while he was out.  It doesn't do to be suspicious of the apples; he'll pick two and start at them with a speed that hopefully won't make his nausea much worse.

While his mouth is full he considers the stores thing.  And then gets distracted by the art supplies one in particular.  Probably the strategy is not to go straight into sewing.  John'll start with something Jensi likes (music, maybe, if they do that here enough to build a hobby on), and then discover that he doesn't like it quite enough to fill all his time, and take recommendations for other activities until someone suggests sewing or at least until he's tried several other things.  And he'll keep at the music, too...

The apples are really really good.

John is delighted!  John is going to be repeatedly surprised by how much he likes things here, and that starts with this apple.

(Jensi thinks it's good but is less enthused than that.  It's the best apple he's had by far but definitely not the best food, or as good as the dessert dumpling he was going to get.)

Eventually they're walking down one of the plush grass streets between neighborhoods all the way into the town center. "Tom lives in Strawpatch. Most of the neighborhoods are named for a particularly abundant fruit, Strawpatch has strawberries. It's close to the town center compared to some, though if you're not already used to walking everywhere you'll get that way."

"I don't know whether I am!  I guess I feel fine so far; is this as long as a normal walk?  Is all the fruit this good?"

"It is if you pick it fresh and don't get one that's been damaged or something, yeah, it's all good varietals. This is a pretty normal length of walk to get someplace."

John is too naive to know that identifying how much stamina you have is hard until you run out of it, and doesn't have memories to compare against for a more educated guess.  "Nice."

"We're almost there."

Tom's house is a two story ivy-covered thing with a porch swing and a big oak tree dangling strawberry-plant baskets from its branches. Tom's waiting out front in a recliner under the tree. "You must be John."

"Apparently.  Tom?  Hi."

"Yes, I'm Tom. Put sheets on the spare bed when I heard you were coming, I'll show you." He gets up and shows John inside. "Thank you, April," he adds.

"Thanks."  What is the weird stiff home like on the inside??  Also presumably it will become obvious what a bed is shortly.

The weird stiff home has mostly weird stiff furniture! There's a flap over a hole in the bottom of the door. There is a rug on the floor in the front hall and windows showing a blackberry thicket on the side of the house. The hall has a staircase straight ahead, and an eating nook between it and the blackberry window, and a closet (open, revealing various hanging outerwear and a broom and some folding chairs) to the right, and then after that a sitting room with a violin on a stand. Tom says, "Kitchen's past there," that is to say beyond the eating nook, and then he leads John up the stairs to show him the bedroom. The bed is a weird stiff freestanding hammock! The room also has a bookshelf and a desk and a mirror and an armchair and an ensuite bathroom. And its own window showing a blooming lilac tree.

John would like to run a finger along the mirror, and the window, and have it explained to him how the things in the bathroom work.  (Jensi would like to see if he can identify how the rug was made, from relatively brief glances.)

The rug looks woven. Tom can turn the sink off and on and flush the toilet and run the bath and the shower for a moment.

"...Where's the water coming from?"

"There's a reservoir up in the mountains."

"Huh!"  (If there's even one hint that sewing magic might exist here, Jensi should immediately put his plan on hold.  But the rugs are woven and they claim the water comes from somewhere...)

There continues to be no evidence of sewing magic as Tom explains the use of a toothbrush and proffers a set of loaner pajamas. A dog at one point walks into the room, a sleepy old shepherd.

"I... think... that what I'm already wearing is pajamas.  How can I get regular clothes?"  Weird dog.  "Or, where?  If everything's free?"

"Are they? I didn't recognize the style. There's a clothes store in town, you can pick a style and say what colors you want it in and they'll stitch it up for you."

"I could be wrong...  Does this include shoes?"

"The pajamas? I can get you slippers but it's September so I didn't expect you to get cold feet."

"At the clothes store."

"Oh, yes, you can get shoes there too."

He nods, then points towards the violin.  "What's that?"

"It's a musical instrument." He goes over and picks it up and plays a little arpeggio.

Ooh.  "Oohhhh."

"Vocalists get cranky about most of the lyrics being censored but for every other kind of musician it's - well, not unmixed, but there's all the time in the world." Little lick of melody.

"Most lyrics?  ...Or can you not say.  What they were about."

"I can say them, in little snatches, what you don't want is for them to get stuck in your head so you start singing them or reciting the poems without realizing you're doing it. But there were a lot of songs about a lot of things, before. I'd hope Tintown's keeping the culture alive while we keep the species alive but I think they don't have enough slack to do it systematically."

Yet.  "Oh.  I... don't think I know any songs, or poems."

"The library basement's got some." He plays a few more notes. "Anything else you need for right now? You hungry or anything?"

"Kinda hungry, yeah.  And thirsty?"

Violin goes back on its stand and Tom shows him to the kitchen. There's a water dispenser in the fridge, he fills a glass from it and offers it up. Then he looks at the state of his leftovers. "I've got chicken, I've got potato soup. I could make you a grilled cheese sandwich, there's bread left from this morning, or a ham sandwich. Ratatouille but not really a whole meal's worth."

Gulp gulp.  "Potato soup sounds nice."

"You want it warmed up or cold?"

"How long does it take to warm it up?"

"Minute in the microwave." He puts some in a bowl and plops an upside down plate on top and sticks it into the microwave. "We had to argue with them for a while about these but we won the argument, if you want to call it that."

"Huh..."  John (and, to be honest, Jensi) stares at the spinning bowl.

And then it's out, the lid-plate goes in the dishwasher, and John is presented with the bowl and a spoon.

And warm??  "Thanks."

"No problem. Do you know how to cook?"

"I don't... think so....."

"I'm no great shakes but I can get you started at least."

"Thank you."  He wants to ask - but if it's not real that will be so suspicious - but they have a word for it - "How does the, I don't remember what you called it, work?"  He points to the microwave.  "It seems like almost magic to me."

"I don't know. I didn't know even before," Tom snorts.

So that still points to there maybe being flat-things magic that only some people know, but that existed before the aliens.  Jensi should not risk, for example, making artefacts that only react in the presence of magic he didn't create, when trying to make ones that don't do anything.

"Huh."

"There's probably something on it in the basement of the library."

"I'll probably need to do a lot of reading."  Sip sip soup soup.

The soup is pretty good.

"You don't need to, but if you want to know how stuff works then yeah."

"It's already pretty annoying not knowing how stuff works.  And I haven't even really tried to do anything yet."

"What are you thinking you'll want to try doing?"

"Well, a problem is that I don't really know what things there are...  Cooking seems good to understand, yeah, and I liked the amount of music I've heard?  The bit you played."

"Well, it's good you like music. I can practice a bit more now if you like."

"Please!"

Tom goes back to violining.

Is he any good?

To a lay listener, yes!

Nice.

The sun is going down. There are artificial lights, though. Tom goes out before the last of the light is gone and collects some strawberries for an evening snack.

Does he want help?

Sure. There's plenty of strawberries. They want the reddest ones.

John is capable of identifying (and collecting) those strawberries which are most red!

Once they have enough they can go back inside and Tom can make some whipped cream with a splish of vanilla and a little bit of honey to dip the strawberries in.

It's nice enough.  Jensi doesn't quite feel full by the end, but he can probably make it up in the morning.  It feels - right, to not be completely satisfied tonight.

The guest room is ready for him when he wants sleep.

Jensi doesn't want to sleep immediately, but he does want 'lying down in a dark room', so John wants to try pretty soon.

He really needs to figure out what sort of character John is.  It won't hold up forever to have him switching back and forth between 'excited about material comfort' and 'vaguely unhappy about aliens' on the whim of whatever's currently happening.

...If he lies down on top of this weird flat hammock that doesn't move when he does, on his side, what do the critters do?  How many of them are in the room, and where are they...

Their eyes don't glow in the dark, but there were four visible ones in various parts of the room at the time he turned the light off. They are politely not making skittering noises in the dark.

That's nice of them.  He makes sure his face is turning away from them - actually, he should probably just bury his face in the pillow for the time being.  Just in case.

John should really share as many traits with Jensi as possible.  Jensi doesn't know how long it would take him to level up normally, but it's going to go slower than that, because he has to go slower than that.  So this probably has to hold together for several years.  (Unless his tentmate comes and rescues him.  He should be prepared for that but absolutely not count on it.)  And he probably has a bit of leeway about keeping consistent with traits he's displayed today, for medical reasons.  And just being in a place that's so new.

So.....

John should take an instant liking to music.  He'll like singing but might want to pick up an instrument, based on Tom's advice.  He'll keep at it even as he cycles through other hobbies.  He should be wary of children, at first, but eventually figure out a strategy for interacting with them.  Maybe he should have some sort of gimmick that he can use to avoid actual conversation.

Until Jensi thinks of a proper one he can just turn any questions back on them, maybe?  Or just physically run away.  Probably he should not just physically run away the moment a child asks something he doesn't want to answer.

If John has to exist for multiple years, he should be a bit smarter than he did today.  It would be so, so suspicious for him to look like he's pretending to be dumb.  No, he just wasn't feeling well after his mysterious not-a-head-injury, and then got better.  He'll eat up the library, starting with the part the kids are allowed at since there's presumably enough there to keep him busy for a while.  And he'll be a sharp learner at cooking and at least some other crafts.

(Or, as sharp as Jensi is, at least.)

He should have an actual coherent mindset involving being conflicted about the aliens.

Jensi doesn't think his initial plan of acting airheaded enough to conclude that he simply doesn't mind that much will work out in the long term.  He's not going to be able to never pull a face at something, he doesn't think.  But it's probably smart to wait on more details before coming up with a specific philosophy.

He.... hm.

Jensi's not sure how much he should try and mess with the impression of what it's like where he's from.  On the right side, he needs the little fuzzy guys not to learn about sewing magic.  For several years.  But on the wrong side, there's only so many details he can remember.  And it's not as if he knows enough about this place to have a great idea about what is and isn't a tell...

Probably he should stay mostly honest, and even more vague.  And mentally drill the things he commits to.

(John remembers living with someone, maybe.  He usually received food from someone instead of cooking for himself.  He uses firefly and lightning bug interchangeably.  He thinks fruit tastes really good.  He doesn't know where house-water comes from.  He doesn't know any songs.  He's annoyed by not knowing how stuff works...)

The bed is far too flat and too still for him to be really comfortable, but his unconsciousness was not actually very restful.  He manages to sleep an hour or so after he takes his face out of the pillow.

Hollow Grove is in a very deep mountain valley, which slightly delays dawn, but it arrives when it arrives.

He sleeps through it.  The lack of motion is less disconcerting when he himself is not doing much moving around.

Tom doesn't wake him up. He does bake a loaf of bread first thing in the morning though.

John sits around in his room for a while, but eventually emerges.  Once he's sure he's heard human activity.

Bread: baked. Bacon: frying. Kitchen garden: raided for lettuce and tomato.

Yum?

If you like a BLT, then yes, absolutely.

He likes it fine, yeah.

"So I should probably get some other clothes today?"

"Sure. You want company or can you find the place yourself?"

Navigating a single size-of-space with no portals is going to be either trivially easy or weirdly hard.  "...Is it easy to find?"

"Yeah. There aren't that many things in the town center and it's got a big window you can see clothes through. I don't mind coming with you, though."

"I - think I'd appreciate it, then."

Then they can walk into town together. Varmints abound, but there's also songbirds and butterflies and bees and one small lizard, if he keeps his eyes peeled.

In the clothing store they have sample designs, sample fabrics, and color swatches, so people can mix-and-match to order.

John likes.... this style, and this one, and fabric that's this kind of soft but not this kind.  And neutralish colors - black gray tan, some white - and purples.  These shades specifically.

What outfit does he want first?

Hmm.  The black top with the long sleeves and the knee-length indigo skirt.  (Also:  who wants to know?  How is he making the selection.)

There's a guy there who works on clothes. Tom makes a little tiny bit of a face about the skirt but doesn't say anything.

Oh no.  What does that mean.  ... Is it that it's purple??  Why would the swatch be here with everything else if purple was special or rare or something.

"Or maybe in gray, do you think?"

Tom shrugs uncomfortably.

What about the guy who works on clothes.  Is he making any faces??

Nope, he's measuring John's wrists.

Okay.

John is vaguely but not particularly interested in this process, and in the guy whose job is sewing more generally.  And even more generally in the job of sewing.  A normal amount of interested.

"Do you want to see the machines? They're in the back."

(The what.)  "Uhh, sure?"

Back room! It's got a ton of swag in it. "The longarm quilting machine is new, and I can't have it computerized, but it works a treat as long as I stand there manually piloting the needle - I guess that's irrelevant to clothes, I just like it - that's the knitting machine there, I'm going to have it knit the black for your shirt right now -" He swaps out spools and turns dials and it gets underway on that. "And then when I have the yardage I cut it over there on that table and sew it here." Pat pat sewing machine.

"Pretty neat."

"Yeah, do you want to watch or just come pick the things up later?"

"Uh, how long does it take, I guess."

"Probably less than an hour, you picked a pretty simple skirt pattern and I already have the fabric for that."

"I guess that's not really enough time to go to the library."  Is there a spot that looks sittable and not in the way.

Yeah, there are some chairs; he can sit in front of the serger which isn't being used right now. The tailor cuts skirt pieces and then lines them up and clips them together and zips them through the sewing machine, brrrrrrr.

Wow.

Huh, kinda neat.

Behold, skirt!

Nice!  He'll wait to put it on until he has both.  It doesn't really go with his pajama shirt.

The knitting machine spits out three yards of knitting and the tailor gets to work on turning it into a shirt. Brrrrrr.

John idly inspects the seams on his skirt.

Perfectly even stitches. The sides have French seams.

And they're such a weird stitch, too...

He spends a while figuring it out.  Hopefully this is not terribly suspicious somehow.

The tailor doesn't really notice and Tom's waiting for him outside the shop entirely, catching up with a friend.

It's not really a human-centric worry.

There are varmints but they do not comment.

He did not expect them to.  How's the shirt going?  Can he work out how in this world the sewing machine works by watching it.

The needle goes too fast to really see, but it's just going up and down and up and down. Pulls thread from the spool over there.

That - doesn't track with the stitch he saw, he doesn't think.  ....Unless there's a second thread somewhere?  Maybe there's a second thread somewhere.

There do appear to be two threads of tail coming off the ends of the seams before the tailor ties them together and snips the ends off.

Aha.

And now he has his complete outfit. Changing room over there, and let him know if any last minute alterations are required.

Changing!  No, these seem fine.  "When should I come back for the rest?"

"If you want them all at once, end of the week, but I should have a piece or three ready every day till I'm done."

"Thanks!"  And he walks out to find Tom.

Tom is there. "All set?"

"Yep!  How many days are in a week, and which one are we on?"

"Seven, and it's Tuesday, to be followed by Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday."

"Which one is the end?"

"Uh, Sunday, I guess."

Almost the whole thing, then.  Well, he can come back sooner than that if he wants.  "Thanks."

"No problem. Where to?"

"The library?"

To the library.

It's got dozens of stacks in it on the ground floor, and stairs up for more.

Wow.  There's more stuff in pockets than this, but it's different to see it all in one place.  He'll spend a while wandering through, looking at signs and titles without picking anything up.

There are sewing patterns and books of recipes. Books about animals and plants, physics and chemistry. Fairy tales and fantasy and poems and a lot of kids' books.

Can he find any slice-of-life about what it's like to live in Hollow Grove?  It's fine if it's a kids' book.

There's a Local section with people's memoirs and slightly polished diaries and stuff.

...He thinks he'd prefer fiction, if there's any.

There are a couple recently written fiction items that seem like somebody's attempt at distilling their parental advice to their children into book format which are about a child growing up in Hollow Grove and learning to get along with others and tolerate doctor's appointments, and going to school and going mushrooming and conquering his fear of bees, and stuff.

What is taught here about how to get along with others?  And also like, what are some objects that exist in the background and that he might or might not be familiar with.

This book emphasizes that you must be Considerate and think about how you might be affecting people - being noisy at night is not considerate! Getting them a present you didn't put any thought into isn't considerate! Etcetera - and there are smokers to make bees chill out, and various kitchen gadgets, and musical instruments, and paintbrushes, and dogcarts, and cats, and potter's wheels, and doctor tools of assorted kinds.

They don't have good soundproofing; that's good to know.  And obviously everyone is much more on the same sleep schedule...

Pottery wheels!  Bee objects!  Interesting.

...What sort of doctor tools are there.  In particular what ones might have been used on him.

This book mentions tricorders, injectors, bandages, pills, and flashlights for looking into one's ears and mouth.

Do the bandages seem to be just plain strips of cloth??  Or is there anything about them to make people heal faster.

They're sticky strips of substances that are not wholly cloth. They keep irritants out of a healing wound, and keep topical medications in place.

That's strange, but most importantly not an obvious indication of magic.  ...Are there any mentions of restaurants, in this book?  Do they seem to exist?

There are restaurants! There's a sandwich place mentioned in specific.