She finds herself in a pristine white room. Roughly cubical, maybe three meters across.

The third most interesting thing about the room is that its walls, floor and ceiling all appear to be padded. It's hard to say at a glance, without actually drawing close and poking at one, but they certainly have the shine typical of rubbery cushioning.

The second most interesting thing about the room is that she isn't alone in it. There's another person, currently facing away from her, suspended in the middle of the room by a series of cables (one anchored into each of the room's corners).

The most immediately engaging thing about her new surroundings, however, is certainly her current state of weightlessness. She's freefloating, more than a dozen centimeters from any solid surface. And, moreover, in her weightless state she is currently drifting slowly towards the aforementioned mysterious personage in the mysterious room's epicenter.

??!?!?!??!!??!!?!?!!!!?!!?!?!!!!

She's never seen a rubbery cushion before in her life, such things not having been invented where she is from. Neither has weightlessness: that is new.

?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!?!!?!!?!?!?

The other person in the room is, upon closer examination, definitely clad in Various Other Things Not Yet Invented. No cloth would cling to a person in quite that way, the various doodads protecting the neck and other joints have a rather alarmingly foreign look to them, and the cable plunging down from the ceiling and into a gap in this person's flesh between their shoulder blades definitely does not parse as anything reasonable!

Before Aly has too much time to puzzle over all this, though, the two of them collide bodily.

The strangely dressed woman suspended in the room's center makes a quite alarmed sound!

"Ahhh I'm sorry!"

The woman sputters out some syllables that would probably a disjoined mess even if Aly did understand her language.

Their general meaning, in context, is pretty obvious though.

"I'm sorry! I don't know what happened!" She is trying, even more physically awkwardly than usual in the weightlessness, to avoid thwacking the woman with her scooter.

The woman looks her over for a couple seconds, still very baffled and a little frightened, saying more words but not making any more sense.

At length she turns around partway in her harness to point at Aly, moves that hand to grip one of the tethers supporting her in a meaningful fashion, and then gives her a somewhat impatient are you getting what I'm saying look.

Aly reaches tentatively for the nearest tether.

Suddenly, their surroundings stop being weightless.

She doesn't feel quite as heavy as she's used to, back where she came from, but it's certainly an amount of weight sufficient to throw an unready person quite forcefully into one of the walls.

The woman in the room's center, naturally, is barely jostled by this change of circumstances. In matter of fact, she seems to be sleeping through it? Her eyes are closed, her head tilted back, and her body hangs limp in its harness.

Aly is in no way ready for this. She slams into a wall.

The walls are, in fact, padded!

She is pretty sure she does not break anything.

A few seconds later, the force pressing her to the cushioning eases up... and then reverses... and there are no handholds within reach, so...

She flings the arm clutching her scooter handhold-ward and spins the scooter around - the woman's probably not paying enough attention to notice how it does this without any outward physical force - and uses it to yank herself cableward again to get a firmer grip and hang on for dear life.

The direction-of-apparent-gravity does not change again.

The room trembles for a moment, as though caught in a minor earthquake, and then goes still. The woman in its center snaps back to alertness.

She says something vaguely reassuring sounding, reaches back over her shoulders, and yanks the cable out of her back and lets it drop away.

She then presses a buckle on her harness, slips out of it, and drops gracefully to the new 'floor' of their surroundings.

Aly stands up, wobbly with stress and dizziness, leaning on her scooter for balance.

The woman gives Aly one last Am I Hallucinating look, walks over to one of the walls and turns a knob recessed away into the cushioning.

A ladder of sorts then springs forth, which allows her to climb to a trapdoor on the current 'ceiling' of the white room.

She motions for Aly to follow.

(Aly and her possession currently weigh about a tenth of what they used to, so getting herself and her scooter up the ladder won't be particularly difficult).

Aly and scooter climb carefully up.

Beyond the hatchway on the ceiling there's a narrow crawlspace and beyond that crawlspace there's a transparent cylinder forged from not-quite-glass.

And beyond that glass...

...there are stars.

They resemble the night sky she knows in all respects but three:

(1) their constellations are all wrong

(2) they don't twinkle, they just stare down icily

(3) they stretch endlessly in every direction: constrained by neither sun nor horizon

EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS SITUATION IS SO CONCERNING.

The woman from the white room does not seem concerned by the situation in the least.

She continues up another ladder, this one set into the wall of the not-quite-glass cylinder, without sparing a glance at the strange starscape around them.

Above the transparent passageway there's a Huge Thing. Not a vehicle. Not a building. More like a Metal Island floating without any apparent adjoining sea.

Lights across the [underside? surface? it's hard to know what words to use for orientation here] flick on. They're aimed not at the two women in the tube but rather at the space they just emerged from.

Which is another Huge Thing. Not as huge as the Metal Island, not nearly, but still a bigger expanse of steel plating than Aly has ever seen assembled in one place before in her life.

It looks... sort of like a suit of armor. Only thirty meters across. And they're crawling out from between said armor's shoulders. In the new light, she can see thin silver tethers anchoring the smaller Huge Thing to the larger Huge thing--and can only wonder at what those threads must be made of, to so easily bear such a terrible weight.

Some kind of huge golem? It is pointless to speculate; she does not know. She follows the native.

And then they're in a hallway.

And apart from being wrought from absurd quantities of steel, and the lanterns illuminating it having a rather strange quality to them, it looks like a Perfectly Reasonable Hallway.

Which is probably a nice change of pace.

(Granted, there are occasional windows-on-the-floor. Which does not seem reasonable. But if she doesn't look at those, or at the starscape spinning by below them, she can perhaps pretend that she's in a place that makes sense?)

Pretending the place makes sense is not her interest at the moment. She assumes it makes some kind of sense to someone. She just needs to get her bearings and learn the language and then figure out how.

The native starts speaking, at a rapid clip, in the language in question.

First she speaks into a wall. Then, when a couple other women who look generally-kin-like to her show up, she speaks to them to.

"...hiiiii," says Aly uncertainly, which they probably won't understand any more than the first one but maybe the sentiment will come across. And the fact that she doesn't speak the vernacular, if that hasn't already been covered.

She gets some nervous smiles from them, but not much in the way of conversation.

One of them does gesture her into an adjoining room though, and seems to indicate that she could sit down there if she likes?

(There are three chairs to choose from, one of them behind a desk).

She sits, not behind the desk.

More people show up. The newcomers are wearing slightly less exotic clothing: the materials are still a little off, but the garments themselves--pants, skirts, jackets, blouses, overalls, coveralls, etc.--at least fall into familiar types.

There seems to be some sort of chain-of-command here. Certain people that get deferred to by everyone else.

Moreover, the congregation seems to be steadily going up this chain of command as time goes on.

Nobody seems to know what to make of the situation.

Aly waits nervously.

Several of the higher-ranking individuals make their own attempts to speak to her, but have no more success than the first woman she met here.

Then they go out and deliver a report (to the wall, same place on it as everyone else has been talking to).

And then they wait nervously as well.

Aly spins one wheel of her scooter, held off the ground, in a nervous fidget.

Finally, an order comes down from somebody with the necessary authority to address the unprecedented situation.

A woman in white--a doctor?--arrives with a metal cylinder clutched in one hand and an apologetic expression.

(The three soldiery-types who first encountered Aly enter the room as well, presumably as backup, but keep a polite distance).

The doctory-type says a few calming words in the language-that-Aly-can't-understand, and then attempts to to press the metal cylinder to her shoulder?

Aly falls out of her chair flinching in startlement!

It's certainly a startling sensation!

A sting, and then a slight burning in the flesh where the needle entered it.

It doesn't hurt too much, though.

And then, as time goes by, everything starts hurting less.

The soldiery-types retrieve her gently from where she's fallen and, within a few minutes, she's unconscious.

This would be alarming if she were awake.

She also feels heavy. The right amount of heavy, now, unlike conditions when this [dream? nightmare? journey?] started. The room's dark, it has no windows and the weird lanterns on the walls glow only dimly. She appears, for the moment, to be alone in it.

WHAT THE FUCK

She does not want to contain tubes and wires but is not sure how embedded they are, they might not all be like that casually removable cable the woman was attached to. What do they lead to?

Most of the wires lead to the weird blinking boxes.

Most of the tubes lead to transparent bags hanging from hooks.

There's a sliver of light at the bottom of the far wall: the crack below a door. The space beyond must be either outdoors or at least substantially better illuminated than her present confines.

She probes cautiously at wires and tubes to see how in they are and how out they could be without damaging her.

With the wires its hard to say. The tubes, though, she can feel the outline of pretty well and she'd guess from their depth that they'd be Painful But Not Life-Threatening to remove.

While she's probing at the these invasive elements, the handle on the door turns and it starts to creak open.

aaaaaaaaah

The door opens. A hand touches a panel by the wall, and the weird torches glow brighter: lighting up the whole room in an instant.

"Hello?" The woman who just entered says. "Please, nod your head if you can understand me."

And it's really weird. Because this woman's clearly speaking a foreign language. And yet somehow Alymbel just knows on a gut level what the words mean?

...Aly nods.

"Good. I'm going to turn on the optical interface. Let me know--by nodding or shaking your head--if it's okay or if you need me to turn it back off."

Aly's newfound linguistic intuition does not explain what an 'optical interface' is, but everything else about that last sentence more or less made sense.

The woman moves up one of the weird panes of glass off to the side of the bed and touches it.

Words suddenly appear, floating in mid air. No, wait. Not floating in the air. They move along with her whenever she moves her head, it's more like they're floating in her eyes.

When she looks at the boxes with the blinking lights, she gets alien words like machine and computer and biomonitor. When she looks at the portal leading out the the room she gets door and when she looks at the weird torches she gets light and electric lamp.

Though the letters are in a language she doesn't recognize, she somehow knows what sound each of them makes. She could probably say them aloud if she tried to.

Yes, but can she say "what the hell did you do to me"?

She can't!

Well, she can try to, but it'll come out in one of the languages she was fluent in back home and whatever translation solution her hosts have hammered out does not appear to work both ways.

The woman notices Aly's state of alarm, though: "You're safe here. I promise. This is the best hospital on one of the best fortified inner colony habitats. Do you need me to turn off the optical interface? It'll help you in the long run to have it active, but we can take things slowly if you're scared."

Aly's problem with this situation cannot be addressed by turning off the optical interface.

She looks at the tubes and wires to see what they are called and says those words in an aggrieved tone.

"Oh. I can take some of those out. Not all of them, yet, but some. Would that help?"

The woman approaches her bedside and begins closely examining the sites where the tubes/wires enter Aly's body.

Aly nods.

Some tubes and wires get removed!

When the woman sees that Aly's still uncomfortable, she looks the remaining ones over more closely and removes a few more.

"You can leave the room, now, if you keep these with you." The woman takes hold of the metal pole with the hooks that the bags-of-whatever hang from. She moves it back and forth, demonstrating that the pole can roll along the floor to keep the ends of the tubes within reach of her if she gets out of bed. "I'll need to show you where the toilet is, now that we've removed the hookup for that."

Pause.

"Do you know how toilets work?"

Nod. She looks at the bags-of-whatever and names them in hopes of an explanation.

"We had to make some... changes to your body, to make it easier for you to live here? And those changes need to heal, and [gibberish names of stuff] will make them heal better."

She offers Aly a hand.

"Be careful standing up. The inertial forces on this habitat are very strong, you could hurt yourself if you fall."

Well that's concerning. She accepts the hand and steps very carefully.

She's led to the door, and then out into the hall. The woman shows her to a room that she claims contains a toilet, although the thing inside only resembles what Aly's used to in the vaguest possible sense.

"There are some important people who'll want to talk to you now that you can talk. Do you think you need to rest longer before that?"

Headshake. She names the toilet with a questioning inflection.

The woman explains.

Toilets here are, evidently, extraordinarily complicated for some reason.

"Will you need help, do you think? If not, I can go ahead and get a room ready for you and the Scions."

With the explanation she imagines she can manage. She waves her away.

She manages!

When she emerges into the hallway again, the woman from earlier is standing a couple doors down and sort of smiling-nervously in her general direction.

She beckons Aly foward and inclines her head towards the door she's holding open.

"They're ready to see you, now."

So Aly follows her, pulling her pole of fluids.

There's a round table in this next room, with comfy-if-unsually-shaped chairs set out around it.
There are two people already seated at the table. Both are elderly but fit, calm but alert, and dressed in a fashion that she'd wager passed for fancy around here (it'd certainly be fancy back home).
If she's ever encountered royalty before? This pair of women probably remind her of that.
"Please, sit down," the nearer of the two says.

Down she sits, conscious of the weird outfit they've put her in but assuming it's either appropriate or understood to be necessary for some reason.

Her state of near-undress is not missed by her hosts. One of them gives the doctor-woman a questioning glance.

The doctor says: “You asked to see her as soon as possible?”

The glancing one says to the doctor: “That’s Fair.”

She then turns to Aly.

“My name is Edith Trunhardt. What’s yours?”

"Alymbel Mahri."

Edith’s counterpart speaks up.

“The pilot claimed you simply appeared in her SLAYER’s cockpit. Is that correct?”

That word, SLAYER... she can feel the Capital Letters behind the enunciation of it. Without those capital letters the word would just mean ‘killer’ but with them it evokes something bigger. It brings to mind that huge armored thing she saw drifting in the dark back when she was climbing that Ladder Of Stars.

Edith side eyes her companion.

”Sanjana. No cause to be so blunt with our guest.”

Aly nods.

Sanjana seems to entirely ignore Edith's call not to be blunt.

She asks another pointed question:

"Are you from Earth?"

Headshake.

"Why would you even ask her that? How would that make any sense?"

"She has human DNA. Unaltered human DNA. Her genome resembles my parents' more closely than mine does."

Aly has surprisingly little idea what any of this means considering the implanted language.

"Never mind any of that, Miss Mahri. The bottom line is that we don't know how you got here, we don't know where you're from, but we'd very much like to help you any way we can."

Aly raises an eyebrow.

"Yes. There's some concern you might be an enemy spy but, frankly, if our enemy has developed the capacity to drop agents out of thin air and directly onto our pilots then presumably the war's lost already."

Edith seems to be observing Aly quite closely. What she sees is anyone's guess.

"Indeed, you've had the bad luck to be dropped into an active war zone. In more peaceful times there'd be more good faith to go around, more options to pursue and more time to pursue them in."

Well that's concerning but it has lots of company.

"With assistance from the neural interface, though, you should be able to get your bearings here in a reasonable time-frame."

"Yes. Well before the enemy is at our gates."

Uh-huh.

"The doctor tells me that it will be difficult for you to speak at first. If you have any questions for me, and think you can communicate them with what you have access to right now, please do so." She gives Aly an encouraging look. "If not, you can reach me later, or consult any of the staff here at the hospital. I've instructed everyone here to be completely transparent with you."

Can she say "how" or "when" or anything like that?

If she was paying attention at the right point earlier, then she has 'how' but she does not have 'when'?

Nope, if the implant can't do it on her own she has not been sparing quite enough attention to vocabulary.

She mimes writing.

“Get this young woman something to write on,” Edith says to the doctor. “Actually, get her three things, in case the first two don’t work.”

The doctor leaves the room.

She returns with paper and pencil, plus a weird glowing pane of glass, plus a box full of multi-colored block letters.

This last item draws a raised eyebrow or two, but when the doctor says "From the Children's Wing" everybody nods like that explains everything.

All of these writing options get set out on the table in front of Aly.

Aly takes the paper and pencil and starts sketching out her vocabulary, trying to extract a complete alphabet.

This works pretty well. If she works from memory alone, she can get nearly two dozen letters.

If she uses the children's toy the doctor brought out as reference, she can get the full alphabet.

She knows intuitively what sounds all these letters make.

Okay, then she can get to work on actually memorizing that and all the words she has. She runs out of things to write down and looks hopefully at the assembled parties, who hopefully know how this thing works.

The doctor has never spoken any language but her own. The other two have not spoken any foreign language in a Large Number Of Millennia. Nobody present has much of a knack for linguistics/translation.

"Your interface is currently running on its least intrusive active setting." The doctor can comment on the technological options available, at least. "We were planning to wait a couple of days before activating the advanced interface elements, but we could try them on now if you asked--they can always be turned off again if you're overwhelmed."

Nod. "I - I -" She doesn't have verbs or anything anyone hasn't happened to say in any grammatical form other than nouns. Whatever they did to her she might as well get use out of it.

A pane of glowing glass gets touched.

"How are things now?"

More letters appear on the inside of her eyeballs. Not just definitions of things she's looking directly at, full-text real-time translation of anything said in earshot.

...Nod.

"Another advanced function: if you look at a word that doesn't make sense to you, and blink once with both eyes, it'll pull a definition of that word. Blink twice quickly to dismiss all definition screens."

(It might not be immediately obvious what the woman means by 'screens' but, hey, the word is right there in Aly's field of view and she could blink at it if she wanted to?)

What a good idea. Blink.

Screen (noun): an area on an electronic device--such as a communications interface, computer, or optical cybernetics--upon which images and data are displayed

Huh. Well. A lot of those words don't make sense either.

But, uh, said words are currently being displayed on a glowing rectangle that hovers near the word she just blinked on. So, uh, probably the rectangle containing the word-definition is the 'definition screen'?

She'll go a few definitions deep, having no more efficient way to learn things right now.

Electronic (adjective describing a device): having or operating with components such as microchips and transistors that control and direct electric currents.

Computer (noun): an electronic device which is capable of receiving information (data) in a particular form and of performing a sequence of operations in accordance with a predetermined but variable set of procedural instructions (program) to produce a result in the form of information or signals.

She encounters a bunch of words!

She could probably do this all day if she wanted to, and keep hitting new words!

Sanjana sits there quietly, making no move interrupt Aly's exploration.

She does pull out a glowing pane of glass (a screen?) and start tapping away at it, though.

(Edith gives her counterpart a look, but doesn't comment on Sanjana's actions)

Aly does not comment. She's still a little low on verbs and question words but maybe she can find them if she tries.

"Perhaps we should have a conversation, for our new friend's sake?"

Aly makes a frustrated noise, not having been provided with such a convenience.

"That'll take hours. And she seemed to have something she wanted to say right now?"

"You can't rush these things."

Tap. Tap. Tap.

"Well, not any more than we already have, at least."

Tappety-tap.

"We've confirmed what we needed to in the initial interview. Let's adjourn for now, let the doctors do their jobs."

The doctor, still standing by the door, beams.

Aly looks doctorward.

"We've already got a room made up for you. And food--you'll have to let us know if anything isn't to your taste, we just took best guess at nutritional balance based on your physiology--and numerous ways to familiarize yourself with new words. Dictionaries very much included."

As she speaks, Edith and Sanjana pass behind her and exit to the hallway.

Aly gets up to follow the doctor.

They have, indeed, provided her with a room!

It has a bed, a desk, a computer, books, some colorful things that are probably toys of some sort?

What are the colorful things named, she can say their names while sounding puzzled.

In lieu of a verbal answer, the doctor will duck down and demonstrate the use of the colorful things.

They light up and make sounds when they get slotted into each other. There's some sort of pattern to this, but the specific correspondence between block-combination and output isn't obvious.

An accompanying 'screen' offers some clues, perhaps? Text scrolls out across it as the blocks shift.

"It's hard to explain," she says. And then she says an inexplicable thing ('coding logic tutorial'). "If you're ever restless but don't feel like leaving your room, though, this is something you could do with your hands?"

Nod. "Dictionary?" She was careful to memorize that one as it went by.

Dictionary!

The doctor points one out and cracks it open.

The big book contains densely packed words organized based on definitions of Large Bold Words (and those words seem to be ordered by first-letter)?

"There's a dictionary on the computer, too, but you'll probably find the book easier at first."

Nod nod.

She starts paging through the dictionary; she doesn't stop to read every word, she doesn't need all the details on what an aardvark is, she just goes through it and pauses to note locations of important words.

The doctor leaves her to her work.

Comes back a minute later with refills for the hangy drippy things ('IV lines?') running into Aly.

"You can use this here to call for me or one of my coworkers." She points to a button on the wall. "If you need help with something, or just want to talk. We don't have any other patients in this wing right now, so someone should be available at any point in the degree."

('Degree' feels intuitively similar to, but not quite the same as, the word for 'day' in her own language)

"Clothes," says Aly, having found the word.

"Oh. Sorry." She opens a closet recessed into the back wall of the chamber. "Here."

There are several sets of clothing. All weirdly-textured, but all in her size.

She thinks she might remember a possessive pronoun. "My clothes?"

The doctor shakes her head.

"The clothes you arrived in were processed while you slept. You might be able to recover some of them at some point, but I'd have to contact the lab at Outpost 5..."

"Processed?"

"We didn't know what you were." The doctor considers using more tact, but tact doesn't work well on people who barely know your language. "Or how you got here. And you didn't have any way to tell us. So we studied everything about you that we could, as thoroughly as we could manage to without hurting you."

"Processed??"

"The specifics would be... difficult to explain, with your current vocabulary?" The doctor looks sort of apologetic and sort of lost and slowly backpedals out of the room. "Maybe another degree, after you've learned some more words?"

Rrrrrgh she could understand if she explained it, she can look up as many words as she has to, insisting on waiting until her expressive vocabulary and her retained vocabulary that she knows even when she isn't looking at it is stupid - but Aly can't say that. She makes a frustrated noise.

And then the doctor is gone.

When the time comes to deliver a tray of food to Aly's room, they send another hospital worker to do the delivering.

Aly has by then skimmed most of the dictionary and extracted the most important words for her little handwritten phrasebook. "Thank you."

The orderly smiles. Says: "You're welcome."

She sets down the tray on the desk. There's a bowl of soup, a drink, some crackers, and... a napkin with something written on its corner in very small letters?

Hmmmm?

The letters read: can you keep a secret?

By the time she's parsed them, the orderly who delivered the tray is gone.

She writes yes in equally small letters. She eats.

The food's bland, probably not spiced with anything more interesting than large quantities of salt.

The tray gets retrieved about half an hour later, and then after that she has a lot of time to herself.

There's no obvious way to tell what's supposed to be day or night around here. Come to think of it, the dictionary didn't even seem to have words for day or night.

She totally has a bed, and the doctor did mention it being important for her to rest, but nobody's forcing her to do that.

Absent a schedule of any kind, she studies, finds a word for "scooter" and writes that down with some peripheral words in case their scooters don't look like hers, and goes to sleep when she's tired.

They wait to send more food in until she's up and about again.

It's the first doctor again, this time.

"Hello. Where is my scooter? Can you explain 'processed'?"

She beams when Aly gets the language right.

As for the question: "Your scooter was taken apart at another facility. It could be put back together and shipped here, maybe, but it'd take some time. Outpost 5 is a couple orbital degrees away."

(Apparently, 'degree' can be used as a measure of distance or time? How confusing)

She has a script for this! "I want it or something like it."

The doctor nearly claps her hands. She is very impressed!

”I’ll ask to have such a device fabricated for you as soon as there’s a macro-fab to spare.”

(‘fabricate’ means to have a machine build something, a ‘macro-fab’ is a machine that builds other machines)

"Thank you."

"Of course. We'll do anything within our means to accommodate you."

She fusses over the tubes again, and then consults a handheld screen.

"You've taken very well to the implants. We can finally take these hookups out safely."

She does so. There's a little bit of blood, but the doctor has colorful little sticky bandages ('band-aids'?) to cover the broken skin with.

"I know they must have been uncomfortable. You did such a good job of not tugging at them, you should heal up just fine."

"What were they for? Please explain. I understand even though I am not good at talk yet."

"We implanted... medical technology... into your body." She speaks slowly, enunciates clearly, and otherwise makes following her words as easy as possible given present circumstances. "This medical technology was designed to help people either born with disabilities or recovering from traumatic abuse at our enemy's hand. Sanjana Kaur, one of the two greatest biological scientists of our civilization, personally adjusted the technology for your situation and your... well, your differences from us."

She is not going to try to explain genetics right now.

"The hookups were necessary to ensure the implants remained healthy after you regained consciousness. According to all the tests I've run on you, the integration was a complete success and you should be set for life."

"Do they do anything besides what I see?"

"The implants will do a lot of minor things to make living here easier for you. I don't know the full range of enhancements offhand, but I could try to track down some documentation for you if you like?"

"...Yes," she says. Yes she wants to know what the things implanted in her while she was asleep are dOING???!

The documentation in question is not forthcoming throughout the next couple of meals.

Eventually, though, a knock comes at her door along with what sounds vaguely like a promise of aid.

"Miss Mahri, I'd heard you requested a couple of things that the hospital couldn't expediently provide. I've made some alternative arrangements, though. Are you feeling up to a walk?"

She's been studying very, very hard. "Aly," she says. "Mahri is not a - Miss name. I can walk but is there a scooter? I am not good at walk."

"Oh, I see."

She leans against the door frame.

"I thought you might like to pick your new 'scooter' up from the macro-fab yourself, but I can have it sent down here if you aren't up to making the trip yet."

"She's only had a couple degrees since waking up from a major surgery, and I suspect she had mobility impairments even before that. She isn't up to making the trip."

Sanjana is out in the hall, not visible currently but audibly tapping away at one of her screens.

"I am not good at walk, but I can walk."

"Doctor, get this young woman some crutches!"

Crutches are provided.

"Now, let's see if we can't show you something a little more interesting than a hospital room."

"...No," she says of the crutches. "I am not good at walk, walk -" She flips through her glossary. "- with more things not good."

The crutch provided looks nonplussed.

"Okay, sure." Edith steps back into the hall and starts down it at a measured pace. "This way. You won't have to be on your feet for long."

Aly walks with a hand on the wall.

They go through a door at the end of the hall. Then down another nearly-identical hall at a perpendicular angle. Then up to a set of heavy metal doors that Aly implants identify as an 'elevator'?

"I was told you wanted to know more about the procedure you underwent after your arrival here." Sanjana speaks up, seemingly reluctantly, while Edith presses a button beside the elevator doors. "As the one who re-calibrated the implants to accommodate your atypical physiology, I might be the only one qualified to answer your questions on the subject."

She sighs.

"So. Ask away."

Aly has her prewritten questions handy. "What do they do? How do they do it? Why do you not try to ask first?"

"Their primary function is to allow you to rapidly acclimate to our language and our environmental circumstances."

The door to the elevators open. Sanjana steps inside.

"They do that by providing you with direct access to new neurological material. The new neurological material was imprinted beforehand with relevant skillsets. Your brain will gradually integrate these skillsets into its own neurons, such that with enough practice you'll be able to navigate the colonies as though you were born into them."

She holds a button on the inside of the elevator. The doors remain open.

"It's typical to establish patient consent before performing a cybernetic procedure as extensive as the one I'm describing, but given the circumstances following standard policy apparently wasn't viable."

"Why didn't you try?" asks Aly, diving into the definition of 'neurological material'.

"I was told they made several unsuccessful attempts to communicate with you before you were sedated?" Edith enters the elevator as well. "In any case, you frightened a lot of people with the way you appeared out of nowhere. A lot of people were concerned that you might be a threat, or that you might know of a threat that you couldn't communicate, and so interviewing you was made a top priority. Right after ensuring your health, of course, and the health of those you inadvertently exposed to your body's pathogens in the aftermath of you arrival."

Aly squints through more definitions. "Can I undo it if I want?" she asks.

Neurological Material (noun): organic matter relating to the anatomy and functions of nerves and the nervous system.

Pathogen (noun): a bacterium, virus, or other microorganism that can cause disease.

"I suppose it'd be possible, once you've integrated the language, to remove the implants and keep the knowledge. It'd be a pointless and risky surgery, though."

"Risky?"

Sanjana motions for Aly to enter the small room that she and Edith now stand in.

"All surgery has risks. Performing additional surgery to sites previously cut open introduces additional risk."

Aly goes into the room. "A person changed a thing about the - implants." She'd had a different placeholder word there in her script but she thinks she remembers what Sanjana called them.

Sanjana nods.

"That was me. I modified them before implantation, to better accommodate your needs."

The doors close behind Aly. The room they're in shudders slightly and... begins to rise?

"My children look like you, but their bodies are very different in several ways. Technology made for them won't work on you quite right, unless someone adjusts it first."

Aly's never been in an automaton elevator but the concept makes sense once she thinks about it. "Not before," she says.

"Oh. Are you talking about the different interface modes? Yes, the digital elements of your implants can be toggled on or off to suit your preferences."

The elevator keeps rattling. As it ascends, standing upright becomes a little easier. It might not be obvious right away, but their effective weight is decreasing with each passing second.

"Perhaps, once you've gotten more familiar with handling our technology, you might like to have control of those toggles transferred to you?"

"Yes," she says, looking for something to grab ahold of.

The elevator rumbles to a stop. Its doors open.

At this point, Aly weighs about half as much as she did back in the hospital.

The room behind is large, irregularly shaped and bustling with people.

She can see several other elevators along the far walls, and three different hallways leading off in different directions.

"Welcome to Outpost 1. There's a whole city out there." She points at the largest of the hallways. "Biggest one in the entirety of the ring. Someone can give you a closer look, later, when you're feeling up to it."

The hallway she's pointing too isn't long. As she crosses the bustling room, it might be possible for Aly to see the balcony beyond it and the cityscape extending beyond that.

That isn't where Edith's heading, though. She stops outside another elevator--one that looks quite ill used--and presses a button beside it.

"Where - go?" asks Aly with a quick look at her glossary.

"Back to where it all started."

"She means the vessel we crossed the stars in." Edith leans her back against the wall and flashes a nostalgic smile. "It has a small macro-fab facility on board that's no longer up to the task of assembling advanced devices--but I convinced the custodians to spin it up again for this job."

"Thank you."

The hub room with all the elevators and hallways continues to bustle.

Nobody present is a man, even those with short hair or who look tall or angular at first glance. In this, the hub is not different from any other place Aly has visited since being eaten by the snake.

She's starting to wonder if it's a single-sexed enclave for some reason but it doesn't seem important enough to construct a sentence in real time rather than between interactions.

The elevator arrives.

It has a somewhat rickety feel to it, but Sanjana and Edith seem confident enough in its functionality.

They both step inside.

She has numbers memorized and the elevators are labeled. "Two elevators?"

"Yes. It's a little obnoxious, isn't it? The dysofrag superstructure is too hard to feasibly tunnel through, so we have to make do with excavating hallways and elevator shafts from existing gaps in the superstructure."

She shrugs.

"This place can be a bit of a maze. You get used to it."

She looks up 'dysofrag'.

Dysofrag (noun): an irregularly-shaped solid body orbiting our system's star. Large numbers of these, ranging in size up to a couple thousand kilometers across, are found within a tight ring called the Debris Disk, though some have more eccentric orbits. Dysofrags may accumulate metallic, rocky or icy crusts but their cores consist of Advanced Carbon Structures.

Whoever wrote this dictionary was really not helpful. She looks up "debris disk" and "advanced carbon structures".

Debris Disk (noun): a ring-shaped volume encircling the MV3-581 dwarf star at a radius of approximately twenty-two million kilometers, which contains the vast majority of the system's orbital debris. The debris disk's contents total one hundred eighty-one thousand exatonnes in mass.

Advanced Carbon Structures (noun): materials created through nano-assembly of carbon molecules. The most prevalent type of ACS is the lightweight but ultrahard Dysofrag Superstructure that reinforces the internal components of most larger orbital objects in the Debris Disk, but other types exist.

(Subjective gravity continues to decrease as the elevator climbs higher)

Dwarf star? Kilometer? Nano-assembly?

Dwarf Star (noun): a star of relatively small size and low luminosity, including the majority of main sequence stars.

Kilometer (noun): a unit of length derived from the SI, equal to 1000 meters.

Nano-Assemble (verb): to mechanically restructure matter by positioning reactive molecules with mechanical precision.

(As Aly reads this third tier of definitions, the elevator screeches to a halt at the top of its shaft. Those within are now essentially weightless)

Meter? Molecule? (Floating is interesting.)

Meter (Noun): A basic unit of measurement, defined as the distance that light travels in 1/299,792,458 seconds in vacuum. The average adult woman stands a meter and a half in height. The average SLAYER stands thirty meters in height.

Molecule (Noun): The smallest particle of a molecular substance that still possesses the chemical properties of that substance. If a molecule were to be divided into even smaller particles, the chemical properties would change. A molecule is made up of atoms that are linked together in a fixed arrangement of chemical bonds. A chemical is defined by the atoms that make up the molecule and the mutual chemical compounds that exist between the atoms. The dimensions of molecules are in the order of nanometers. (1 nm = 1 × 10 ^-9 m, one millionth of a millimeter).

The elevator doors open. There's a huge cavern beyond, with rough metallic walls. Shock-absorbent scaffolding extends towards the cavern's center, though whatever it's supporting isn't visible from the elevator's interior.

SLAYER? Atoms? She's still approximately trying to follow her hosts but not well enough; she stumbles.

“Catch her!”

Stumbling in null-inertial conditions is a lot different than stumbling in an earth-like gravity well. Rather than hit the ground immediately, a person can find themselves ‘falling up’ or ‘sideways ‘ and—particularly in a space this massive—drifting for a long time before encountering a useful handhold. 

Sanjana kicks off the back of the elevator, rebounds off the floor of the cavern, and soars up at a trajectory very nearly intersecting Aly's.

"Your hand, please?" She offers Aly her arm as the two of them pass each other in midair.

Aly flings out her hand.

They clasp arms with each other. Sanjana pulls Aly close, tilts her head back and watches their heading.

Their trajectory has changed, becoming something between Aly's prior heading and Sanjana's prior heading. This places them en route for the nearest pillar of scaffolding, which Sanjana pivots around to land feet-first upon.

"Are you alright?"

"Yes. Thank you."

Atom (noun): the smallest constituent unit of ordinary matter that has the properties of a chemical element. Every solid, liquid, gas and plasma is composed of neutral or ionized atoms. Atoms are extremely small; typical sizes are around 100 picometers (a ten-billionth of a meter, in the short scale).

SLAYER (noun): the primary biomechanical space-superiority weapons platform fielded by the United Colonies. A pilot can plug directly into the nervous system of a SLAYER, which otherwise lacks a brain, and direct it as though it were an extension of their own body. SLAYERs are grown in the colony's biofabricators, just like most citizens.

The scaffolding they stand upon braces one rounded face of a massive metal cylinder. Said cylinder is braced by a dozen other scaffolds, and illuminated by powerful electric lanterns affixed to them.

Its surface is worn, pitted, even cracked in a few places. Human-sized recesses upon its face might be doors or windows? And written upon its side are huge block letters: C-I-R-D-A-N

Aly follows Sanjana with more care and doesn't follow up on additional definitions right at this moment.

Edith catches up with them a few seconds later, having taken a low-velocity approach to the same vantage point.

She then leads the way along the pillar (handholds are plentiful and weight is negligible) and up to the Big Thing overhead.

"I get a little sentimental, every time I visit this place. We've come so far. Dozens of settlements, hundred of thousands of humans? But it all started out with just the eight of us and this one little ship."

"Just seven by the time we reached this star system. Five by the end of the first year."

...Aly starts looking through her glossary to find more words, then decides it's not urgent enough to divert her attention from maneuvering.

They reach the 'ship' in the cavern's center. There's a ladder bolted to the side of it, leading up to one of its doors.

Edith goes first. Sanjana will bring up the rear. The door, conveniently enough, is currently wide open and the passage beyond it is reasonably easy to navigate under weightless conditions.

Aly follows along.

The vehicles' interior is strange looking compared even to the other bizarre architecture and technology of this world.

Its hallways are narrow, barely wide enough across for a single person to shimmy through in places, due in large part to the numerous odd ends crammed floor to ceiling throughout.

Beneath the clutter, extravagant baroque flourishes poke out: it seems almost as though this vessel were once beautiful and spacious, but had more and more new things bolted into it until it became an untidy mess.

"Home sweet home."

They are here for her "scooter", right?

They reach a somewhat less cramped space dominated by two large blocks of machinery (Aly’s implants label the two as ‘macrofabricator’ and ‘biofabricator’).

The macrofabricator hums. Sanjana approaches a screen beside it and starts tapping in commands.

Aly peers over her shoulder.

"Look here." Edith points at a transparent pane on the back of the macrofabricator. "You can see the assembly chamber at work."

The interior of the machine is brightly lit. The chamber's once pristine walls are encrusted with old rust and stranger things, but the mechanical arms within still glide smoothly.

Over the next couple of minutes, these arms retrieve pieces of metal from a reservoir higher up in the macrofabricator's volume and then fit those pieces together into something very much resembling Aly's old scooter.

"Thank you."

"Of course! You arrived here under such rough circumstances, I'd like to do as much as I can to make up for that."

"Thank you," Aly repeats. And since they are stationary at the moment waiting for the scooter to be done, she looks through her glossary. "How did more people be here?"

"We started with this machine here." Sanjana raps a few knuckles against the room's other large block of densely packed technology, the one labeled 'biofabricator' via holographic optical interface. "After we'd established a better foothold, and had the resources to feed more than just a couple hundred mouths, we fabbed up larger machines to handle the reproductive needs of a growing population."

"Huh." So they just make babies like they make scooters in the machine next door. Weird.

And speaking of scooters...

Ding!

The scooter-making-machine has finished its work. A fully functional scooter floats within its assembly chamber.

Aly isn't sure if it's safe to reach in there. She looks to the others.

"Careful. Some of the pieces might be hot to the touch, at first."

Okay. She waits.

Sanjana powers down the machine, opens the assembly chamber, and then carefully feels down the newly-minted scooter's exterior with the back of her knuckles.

She hums a note to herself, steps back and says: "It's safe to handle."

Aly collects it. She can't really ride it in the floaty areas, but she can fold it, if it's like her own.

She does this by taking hold of the handle and closing the hinge without applying any pressure to the other side.

It folds just fine!

It's a near-perfect mechanical replica to the scooter she had before, though the coloration and texture suggest a slightly different material constitution.

Edith carefully studies the scooter's movement. The way it closes as though guided by an unseen hand.

(They'd had footage of her doing this once before, spinning the wheel without touching it back at Outpost 5, but most had assumed that was just a camera glitch or an unusual property of the specific 'scooter' the stranger had brought with her. Few had believed the girl could truly apply motive force at a distance, but here it is before Edith's own eyes. Just as she'd hoped it'd be)

Nonchalantly, she asks: "Could you explain how you just did that?"

"Um. I can in my language. I need time to think of a sentence for this language. - you can't do that?"

Edith shakes her head.

"We'll have a lot to talk about on that subject, when you're ready to. These things you can do, that we can't... they might be the key to protecting my people from our enemy, and they might be the key to getting you home."

"I don't think I can get me home."

"Sanjana, didn't you say that with that relic--?"

"It's still a long shot, but it hardly seems as though her help could make our odds any worse. I'll need to have a close look at the relic, and have a better understanding of our guest's capabilities, before I could deign to speculate on our exact chances."

"Relic?"

"The dysofrag fields are full of old things. Older even than Sanjana and I--things left over from long before humans reached this place. We've excavated many artifacts over the years with uncanny properties. And the latest relic we've received word of... Sanjana, can you explain?"

Sanjana gives Edith an are you sure we should explain this to some extradimensional visitor we barely know look, but complies with the older woman's request.

"Reports say that it can transport objects between dimensions." She returns her attention to Aly. "If I were to speculate on how you got here, I might surmise that such a device was involved. Likewise, I would very tentatively hypothesize that activating this relic could be the first step towards accessing whatever world you came from."

...nod. "Okay. I want to go home." She didn't find "husband" in the dictionary so she can't mention him.

"We'll try our best. Sanjana's right, that there are no guarantees, but we've surmounted so many challenges before. I have faith in my people's ingenuity."

"Thank you."

"We should wrap things up here." Sanjana gives a screen a few taps, and everything in the room except the emergency lighting goes dark. "I've got work to get back to, and we've already had a little more zero-G excitement than is probably ideal for our respective constitutions?"

"Yes."

The trio return to the elevators, and ride them back down to the medical wing without further incident.

Once they have gravity again Aly's scooter unfolds and she steps onto it.

Sanjana eyes the Uncanny Scooter Unfolding Phenomenon with interest, but does not comment.

"Will you be alright on your own from here?" Edith asks Aly.

Aly's quarters are a couple of halls away.

Behind them, Sanjana hangs back by the elevator door tapping down notes on her hand-screen.

"Yes, thank you." And she turns the wheels and scoots back to her room to work on the language some more.

Her books are right where she left them.

There's also a tray of food on her desk. Looks to be delivered recently. Still warm.

She takes a bite, and checks the napkin for secret messages.

Oh look! A secret message!

Message reads: Put This In Your Ear

There is a weird gadget tucked away under the napkin that looks vaguely inner-ear shaped.

She does not like that secret message.

She writes Why?? What does it do? on the napkin and tucks the object in her scooter cargo compartment instead. She eats her lunch.

Her lunch gets eaten.

About half an hour later, somebody comes by to retrieve the tray.

Which she returns without incident. "Thank you!"

After that, she has plenty of uninterrupted time to study or rest or otherwise occupy herself.

She goes out and scoots around, exploring, when she needs a break.

The door to the room that Aly initially woke up in hangs ajar.

The lights are on, and there's a woman resting on the bed inside.

Anyone awake around?

She doesn't see anyone else nearby.

As she's looking, though, glowing lines flash across her field of view: they resemble the hovering letters but they definitely aren't letters in any alphabet she's been learning.

Despite not being letters and not forming words, though, they somehow manage to rapidly convey meaning.

The particular set of scribbles that just like up her field of view mean, approximately: Excitement due to [unexpected proximity of] another [person resembling me]!

Dismay due to unexpected appearance of yet another variety of hallucinatory information!

Hallucinatory scribbles continue:

Are you the [person from far away] that [proper noun designating my sister] told me about?

"Yes?"

Concern that [person I am currently speaking to] sounds distressed.

The hallucinatory scribbles convey whole ideas where regular letters would just convey disjointed sounds--getting across the equivalent of multiple 'sentences' in as many eyeblinks.

Did [person I am currently speaking to] even know that she had [manner in which I am currently speaking to you] enabled? Pause. Did [proper noun designating my sister] even realize that [manner in which I am currently speaking to you] is enabled by default?

"I don't know," says Aly. "What's a - who are you talking about?"

Realization that [person I am currently speaking to] would not have a dictionary installed for [manner in which I am currently speaking to you].

There's a slightly longer pause after that last scribble. Then, one by one, letters in the traditional native alphabet start appearing where the scribbles had been.

The words read: "Hello. My name is Veda Kaur. My twin sister is Uma Kaur. She is a doctor here."

Well, now she can look up "sister".

Sister (noun): a human born to the united colonies (as said by another such human). Usually describes a human born of the same biofabricator and at a similar time to the speaker, especially if she and the speaker were born to the same coven.

And "born"?

Born (adjective): existing as a result of birth. Typically used in the context of describing where a person's birth occurred, for instance "Draco born" would indicate a person born in the Draco Territories.

(the implanted linguistic protocol provides a very strong negative gut reaction to the phrase 'Draco Territories'--grasping intuitively that the region in question is Where The Enemy Dwells)

Birth (noun): the emergence of a baby or other living thing from a biofabrication facility (this is typical in the United Colonies) or from a womb (this is typical elsewhere). Birth, in short, is the start of life as a physically separate being.

Further letters at the bottom of Aly's fiend of view nudge the definition screens out of the way: "That's me in the bed, by the way. I'm awake."

The woman in the bed raises a shaky forearm and waves in the general direction of the doorway.

"Hello," says Aly, a little distracted by the implications of these definitions.

Veda begins the laborious process of rising to a sitting position despite her body weighing nearly an order of magnitude more than it usually does.

"I'm sorry, I'm not very good at the language yet."

Veda switches back to the high speed Meaning Scribbles.

Mirth because your [ability to speak in ways that are not the way I am speaking to you right now] is already much better than my [ability to speak in ways that are not the way I am speaking to you right now].

"I can't - dictionary - this," Aly points out.

Scribbles: Annoyance that you are [asking me to speak in the standard local language] even though [virtually one-hundred percent of] all other [personnel in stationed in this facility] can do that easily and I can only easily speak in [the way that I am speaking to you right now].

Resignation that [proper noun designating my sister] would probably want me to [communicate with you in a way that facilitates your linguistic development].

"I -" She looks through her glossary. "I don't need you to change, but if I am confused I like to look things up."

The woman gropes around on a tray beside the bed, eventually laying fingers on a set of polarized glasses.

Scribbles: Appreciation that [you aren't expecting me to do something onerous and mostly pointless]. Curious if you will ask [proper noun designating my sister] to teach you [how to communicate in the way that I am currently communicating with you]. Pride in [being able to communicate more efficiently than supposedly 'undamaged' people].

"I don't know what this is," she says.

Veda looks right at Aly, her eyes open and her irises glinting.

She has too many irises.

Scribbles: [The thing you are currently looking at] is how I speak.

The three pairs of irises move independently of each other. And as they move back and forth, scribbles appear. Whenever they stop moving relative to each other, the scribbles pause.

Wow!!!!

Scribbles: We can understand [this type of communication] because of [the implant that both of us received].

She brings the glasses up to her face and carefully fits them into place.

Scribbles: You'll probably never be as good at [this type of communication] as I am, because your brain already [knows how to speak in normal languages too well] and that gets in the way. But you have all the necessary [noun describing the results of the procedure that Aly underwent while unconscious].

...is Aly's scooter shiny enough to see her reflection in?

Yup!

Aly still appears to only have one iris per eyeball.

Oh thank goodness.

And now Veda is wearing glasses that conceal her own eyes from view.

A few quick scribbles from her convey amusement.

"Sorry."

Reassurance that [I am not troubled]. Most people have [varied but colorful reactions] when they see [that thing with the eyes]. Your [varied but colorful reaction] was [in the top percentile] for most entertaining.

"...thank you. I think."

Willingness to [answer any questions you want to ask] and that [you have the necessary words for]. 

Veda smiles and shrugs.

Disinterest in [asking you any further questions] until you either get better at [conveying ​information with words] or [learn to do the meaning scribbles].

"I can say yes or no," Aly points out.

Mirthful acknowledgement of [the thing you just said].

[Joking query] of [the type that you specified]: "Do you think that SLAYERs are the coolest thing ever?"

"No."

Most [people in your age range] do, but I suppose you are a [person from far away] so it's not surprising you [have other interests].

I used to be a SLAYER pilot, you know.

"What's that like?"

It feels like you’re [approximately thirty two meters] tall and like your skin’s made from steel. You move fast and [without fear of human frailties]. And the best part? It’s quiet. SLAYERs don’t have ears, because there’s nothing to hear out there in the black. No annoying civilians conversing. No screeching gears. No wailing babies. Just you, your cockpit, and beautiful silence for [an astronomical distance in every direction].

"...If that's what you like."

Reluctant [possession of a duty to explain something], because you are [a person from far away].

You should probably know that I am [not considered typical among people here]. I am [a damaged specimen] both in terms of my [diminished traditional linguistic ability] and my [susceptibility to sensory overload].

Most humans here, including most other pilots, are more [competent in social contexts] than me.

"Oh. Okay."

Concern that I may be [monopolizing your attention] for longer than you'd like.

Admission that I am bad at judging [that sort of thing].

Admission that I am [eager to the point of neglectfulness] to converse with people that also have the [meaning scribble implants] installed because we are [very few in number].

"Why do I have them?"

The [meaning scribble functionality] comes standard with the [most advanced variety] of [linguistic assistance implants].

[Proper noun designating my sister] is an expert on [linguistic assistance implants] due in no small part to my own [diminished traditional linguistic ability].

She probably forgot to [turn off the functionality in question] when installing your [linguistic assistance implant].

"Uh-huh."

Concern because I'm [not particularly good at parsing] sarcasm and [what you just said] sounded [sort of how I would expect] sarcasm to sound.

Aly needs to spend a minute with her glossary but finally says, "It's bad to forget things when you change someone's head."

Reassurance that [proper noun designating my sister] is [generally competent at her job].

Reassurance that [meaning scribble functionality] is [not dangerous in any way] and that you can [with only trivial effort] disable it yourself.

Curiosity regarding [how much experience you possess with regards to] navigating the [interface that puts the letters into your eyes]?

"Three days."

So nobody has gotten around to [teaching you how to use the thing] yet, huh?

I could [demonstrate the use of the thing] in [a way that you could see easily] if me [accessing more directly] your interface wouldn't [make you excessively uncomfortable]?

"Uh. What would you do?"

I would demonstrate [the things you are capable of doing] with your interface by attaining [temporary full access] to your interface and then doing [the things you are capable of doing] in a manner that is [slow and well-explained enough for you to follow].

You could just wait for [proper noun designating my sister] or one of the other doctors to get around to it, [if you prefer].

I'm just a pilot with a neurological disorder after all. I definitely don't have a medical degree.

"Can people do that if I don't let them?"

[Brief negative response].

"Good."

"Can you tell me about the things you would show me?"

Veda lowers herself back onto the bed.

You would see a [moving image] in your field of view that designates [where my eyes are looking] and that flashes when I blink. I would move my eyes and blink in order to do [the things you are capable of doing].

Alternately, I could go back to sleep. I don't [possess a strong preference].

"I mean can you tell me what things I could do by blinking."

A list of [the things you are capable of doing] includes [toggling functions on/off], [sending messages] to [other persons], or even [adding new functions] by copying them from [somewhere else].

"...huh. Thank you." She doesn't think this person is good enough at explaining to want to give her scary accesses so as to allow more explanation, but there's no harm in thanking her.

[Expression of happiness-to-lend-small-aid].

[Generic statement of polite well-wishing].

"...Bye," says Aly, and she lets herself out and resumes exploring.

She can access a couple dozen rooms via three interconnected hallways before running into impassible bulkheads in either direction.

Most of these rooms look to be like the three she's already visited: either quarters or operating rooms or meeting rooms. There's also a few bathrooms, a closet full of cleaning supplies, and a small eatery.

Can she eat at the eatery?

She can!

The food is packaged in some pretty weird ways, admittedly, but it's all hypothetically accessible?

She will pick at the packaging till she figures it out.

And her reward for this effort is food!

It comes in a lot of forms, most of them gooey or hard but none of them wet or flaky.

A passing orderly pauses in the doorway of the eatery as Aly plunders its contents, seems to consider saying something but at length just shakes her head and keeps walking.

Hopefully she isn't violating some kind of norm. She finishes her food and discards the packaging wherever that seems to belong and goes back to her room to work on language study some more.

There is a tray of food waiting for her.

She only snacked in the eatery, she will have this too. Napkin messages?

Yup!

"It will allow us to speak privately."

(There's a second line to the message that seems to have been meant to say "without having to write everything out on napkins" but the line gets cut off by the edge of the napkin and the letters get smooshed smaller rapidly so as to become nearly illegible.)

I don't know who you are Aly writes.

The napkin does not respond.

Yeah, she'll have to wait. She sets the tray aside. She studies. The implants are very helpful but it is still really hard to learn a language in two days.

Nobody bothers her for the next several hours apart from further delivery of meals.

Her next meal does not have a note on the napkin.

The one after that does, though.

It reads: "If I told you who I was, your implants would make you distrust me."

How? Why?

The napkin does not respond.

What a surprise. She studies on, sometimes speaking aloud to practice constructing sentences.

The doctor comes by a few hours later and knocks on the door to Aly's quarters.

"How are you doing?"

"I'm all right. I still don't know very much about what is going on or where I am because people seem bad at explaining things for my context but when I have learned to ask better questions I think that will help." After the first three words that's all read off a page, not composed in her head in real time, but still.

"We'll get you started on history books in just a little bit, which should help a lot with Knowing What's Going On."

The doctor lets herself in.

"That was a very impressive sentence just now, by the way. Could you set your things down for a minute? Need to check up again on how your body's holding up post-surgery."

Aly sets her things down accordingly.

A checkup commences.

"Everything's going well. You won't need to stay in this facility much longer."

"Where will I go?"

"Well, you could stay here if that's what makes you most comfortable. Otherwise, hmmm... we don't have any existing proceedures for Visitors From Other Worlds, but we do have resettlement programs for people rescued from the draco territories and I imagine we could nudge things so you qualify for that."

"What are the programs?"

"Oh. They're designed to help people starting over again from nothing. You'd get a place to stay, food vouchers, some vocational training for a job there's current demand for..."

She trails off, and then laughs a little.

"Of course, I heard that you'd offered to help the scions out with some sort of important scientific undertaking related to your homeland? If so, you're probably already set as far as vocation goes. Don't imagine the scions will allow you to want for anything, if you're making that sort of contribution to the Colonies."

"Scions?"

"I guess you're on a first-name basis with them, huh? Edith and Sanjana. They were two of the founders of these colonies. The things they and the other scions did--crossing the span between stars, carving a foothold out of this hellish place, biofabricating the first successor humans--it's the stuff of myth."

"People are bad at explaining stuff for my context," Aly says.

"The scions are Very Important People that have been here for a Very Long Time."

"That isn't explaining, that is - simple-ing -" She has to construct the last word out of guesses.

"It's hard to put things in your context without knowing what your context is. With how well you're doing with your words, though, I bet we'll be able to bridge that gap before too long?"

"I hope so."

"And in the mean time?"

The doctor goes over to the desk in the corner of Aly's room and starts messing around with the 'computer' located there.

"A history book will probably help you out a lot more than I could."

The computer lights up. A dizzying array of boxes and letters flick across its screen, and then it's displaying what looks like a book page.

"You can use these arrow keys, here, to move forward or backward in the text. You actually weren't scheduled to have one of these until after your introductory computer use course but I don't suppose there's much harm in doing things a little out of order."

"Thank you."

"Let us know if you need anything else."

She departs.

"How?" she calls after, annoyed.