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Minaiyu becomes Aware of Pandemic Awareness Day
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On his way back from a training shift at Lilyfield Hospital, Minaiyu decides to take a scenic route through a park. It's nice to linger sometimes and...well, maybe not smell the flowers--he hasn't actually bothered to take off his hospital-grade respirator--but enjoy the sights and sounds.

 

He's never been this way before, but if he leaves the park heading this direction and then takes a right, it should still get him to the train station. The park maintainers turn out to have decorated this exit with a rounded archway, a wooden lattice covered in ivy vines and small glowing lights. It's a nice touch.

 

He steps through--

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...and arrives standing on a field separating several fairly dispersed 3-story buildings, hemmed in by a forest opposite the square and austere buildings. There are huge windows, but they're far away enough that Minaiyu can only barely make out that there are people behind them.

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...he seems to have gotten lost.

 

He turns around to go back the way he came--

 

--no, that's more field. What the fuck?

 

 

 

He will...start by getting close enough to the nearest building that he can hopefully ping a fixed-location mesh node inside and request its coordinates? If he can pinpoint himself on his map, he can navigate home or at least start making a plan for how to get there.

 

(He's not getting a signal in the middle of the field, but perhaps they didn't bother getting powerful enough transmitters to reach him here.)

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Minaiyu gets zero coordinates from any kind of node, nor any form of signal anywhere he's going!

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Hmm. Maybe they're too isolated to have much contact with the broader Mesh, and they don't bother leaving transmitters running.

 

it wasn't that many steps ago he was in Lilyfield, there were relays in the park they shouldn't have too much trouble hitting but there is, somehow, no park to be found, so

 

...was-- was the archway some kind of fairy ring? He didn't think humans could get through those, and he didn't think the fae would just leave one in the middle of a human town. "He's in the fae realm" seems as plausible as anything, though.

 

He will knock on the door of the people who may or may not be fae. Maybe they can help. It doesn't seem like he's going to get much of anywhere on his own, in any case.

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After a bit of a walk, Minaiyu can see that there are a few children and adults who turn to look at him. They walk off to change into simple face masks, before one of the adults opens a door leading into the house and looks to Minaiyu. "Hello? Can you tell me who you are?"

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...that's not Tashayan.

 

But it makes perfect sense.

 

...fae are secretive people, but he feels like he would have heard if they had translation magic??

 

And-- it's not that he's in someone else's brain and piggybacking on their language centres (even if that would also explain why he was suddenly in the middle of a field): his body is the same, he still has his bag, his joey computer is still in its pouch and its interface is still in Tashayan...

 

He will...feel around in the...sourceless semantic bleedover???...and say through his speaking diaphragm:

 

"My name's Minaiyu yet Talia. Did-- did you give me this language?"

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The woman who opened the door shakes her head. "No, this is just the Singleton Literate Language, you know how you learned to speak it! Nobody can "give" people languages like they're cakes or CPR."

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"...I mean, I didn't think anyone could give people languages either, but I did not speak this language ten minutes ago and now I do."

 

"I still have my native Tashayan also," he adds in Tashayan, and then repeats it in the...Singleton Literate Language. (Is it the trade language of some island confederation he's never heard of? Did the fae recently invent translation magic and decide to portal-kidnap a human to test it on?)

 

"Um, hang on..."

 

He pulls out his joey, still open to the map software. "I was here--" he points to the map of Lilyfield, labelled in Tashayan letters "--and then I walked through...probably some kind of portal, in hindsight, it looked like a normal archway...and then I was over there," he points in the direction of the part of the field he arrived in.

 

He zooms the map out until it shows the whole world, a supercontinent with scattered islands. "Where am I now?"

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"Well... now you're in Piaget, a parent city on the northern hemisphere of thomassia. I don't know what or where you're showing me on that computer, it's certainly not this planet!"

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Not this planet.

 

 

 

Well. He...wasn't expecting to be stranded on another planet today, but he was expecting it eventually. In some sense, it's no different than if he'd experienced a sudden heart or brain failure.

 

Except--

 

--except he's not in a local body, he's brought his own body with him, to this alien world and its alien biosphere--

 

 

 

"...and you're...biological lifeforms? Not spirits that happen to be taking this shape?"

 

He's asking just in case, but he's pretty sure he knows what the answer is going to be.

 

He's holding very still, tracing back through his memories since arrival and mentally cataloguing everything he's touched, suddenly incredibly grateful that he didn't take his respirator off after work.

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"Spirits aren't real, of course we're biological lifeforms! Why are you acting this bizarrely?"

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"It-- you'd act bizarrely too, if you were abruptly, physically dumped onto another planet--"

 

He pauses. Takes a deep breath. (Listens to it hiss softly through the filters. Desperately hopes that's enough.)

 

(He takes a step back, winces as his boot touches the ground, freezes indecisively.)

 

"...I think I have been physically brought here from an alien world," he says, in the tone of someone trying very hard to keep themself together. "Our microbiomes might be mutually pathogenic to each other. Our self-limiting pathogens might be mutually deadly to each other. Do you-- do you know where I can get a quarantine facility, are you able to contact local emergency services--

 

--and-- and if you think I'm just delirious, well, uh, most things that would do that would also need quarantining, so."

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"Well, uhh... we have some very well-equipped biosafety labs, if that's what proves to be needed, but they are far away and we are not remotely equipped to take you to them! There are a few remote huts that we can drive you to and have you quarantine there, they're designed to have positive pressure and keep any illnesses out. You know, for the babies and moms. I'll see if there's one free in walking distance, so we don't have to risk or deal with a vehicle and a driver... unless you know a way to do this that makes sense, I have no actual pandemic-handling training outside of the Pandemic Awareness Week PSAs."

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