...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.

...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.)

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

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.

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?"

...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?"

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."

"...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?"

"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!"

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.

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

"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."

"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."

"Okay, um, hmm...

...I think positive pressure is looking at things the wrong way around? It's more important that I not infect you than it is that you not infect me: you have a whole world at stake, and I'm effectively already dead--

--I didn't even mean that in a 'if it turns out that a common soil bacterium will kill me, it's probably futile to try to keep me alive' way, I meant it in a 'I'm already cut off from my homeworld, if I have to roll the dice a second time before I've had a chance to get emotionally attached to this world that's not so bad' way, but I guess also that. ...I guess most worlds I could land in probably have lower standards of living than yours, you have terms for 'computer' and 'positive-pressure room', that's a good sign..."

He shakes his head. "Anyway...how remote are we talking? 'The remoteness is to protect you and the positive pressure is to protect me' might work, if that's what we have to work with. Are you able to keep animals away from the quarantine facility? I don't want to create any reservoirs."

"Yes, we can do that! Remote means that it'd likely be a 2 hour or so walk, assuming you take relatively quick steps. Handling and having a driver and vehicle to take you there would be... complicated. There are other huts further still, some twice as far away, but I'm not sure if it'd be better to keep you within a smaller area. We're also keeping animals away, and we can create an animal-free zone if that's what's required; after all, we don't want any bears walking in where the babies are!" The woman doesn't acknowledge anything about Minaiyu's words about rolling the dice or getting emotionally attached.

(Minaiyu is still thinking in Tashayan, and has failed to notice that this language has no word for "walk-in".)

He nods.

"Okay.

Do you have any shoe covers? Or something that could be used as shoe covers, like disposable bags or something."

(He's still frozen mid-stride.)

"We don't, not this time; it's not generally part of Pandemic Awareness Weeks, and we don't really have any need to have extra disposable bags around, so I'm afraid we can't help you there."

He was hoping to use local supplies in case there are alien fomites on his own, but...

"This will have to do, then," he says, reaching into his (non-disposable) bag.

He takes out a pair of disposable bags, rubs the outsides down with hand sanitiser, and ties them around his boots. It's probably still cleaner than his boots themselves are, and on his end maybe it will keep the soil bacteria at bay a little longer.

(This does require stepping forward again, for balance. He tries to step onto the same place he was on before.)

"So, well... you'll want a way to communicate with us that isn't utterly filthy. Do you know what a phone is and how they work?" She reaches for a phone and shows it to Minaiyu. "I think I should have someone in real hazmat gear leave a phone for you at the hut, and then I'll call you... and you answer, and I help you from there, do you think that's fine?"

--right, of course, alien computers with alien mesh protocols, the fact that he's not getting a signal here means nothing about whether she can get one.

"I am...familiar with the general concept of wirelessly transmitting live audio? I haven't used this exact interface before.

That sounds good, as long as I know the basics of which buttons to press. A text-based option would also be valuable, if that's feasible."

He peers at the phone. How obvious is it which buttons to press, from the perspective of someone who has used otherworlder-human computers and magically speaks Singleton Literate Language?

It's quite unambiguous; phones have a feature where you can go to a calling menu, with numbers and extra letters, just by flicking your wrist. Then the woman shows how you can type in a number, and push a very visible green button to start a call. She also finds her own number in the contacts to show Minaiyu. "Does this make enough sense for you?"

"Yes."

Probably they will arrange for the phone they give him to have a suitable contact list, but he writes the number in his notebook just in case.

Off to the quarantine facility, then?

It's a fair bit of a walk to get there, but Minaiyu finally gets to a 2-story house within a forest clearing. The house has large windows, and a porch leading out to the clearing. If Minaiyu tries one of the doors, it simply opens, with a cylindrical key standing ready on a small table inside the house. The first floor has a fairly large living room, with a bed fit for 2 people, as well as a well-appointed bathroom; there's a square tub in the corner, and several showerheads letting the whole room be used as a shower. The toilet is hidden behind a sliding door that blends in well with the wall. The smaller second floor has a smaller bedroom and what's clearly meant to be a nursery, with a soft, well-padded floor as well as a crib and a chest revealed to be filled with toys.

He tries very hard to touch as few things as possible on the walk.

(He is somewhat concerned about being out of contact for two hours, but...probably nothing will kill or cripple him in that time? And they know enough to go looking for him if he doesn't show up at the quarantine facility.)

He enters the building, closes the door behind him, carefully takes off his boots with the covers still on, and looks around.

...yeah, he does not like his odds of getting a standard of living this high if he departs

(When he looks at the nursery, it occurs to him to wonder whether he's capable of interbreeding with the local human-analogues. He's really not sure how he feels about that prospect. He hadn't actively been planning on having children, but he hadn't ruled it out, and now he's the only test subject for studying differences between Rekkan and local genetics, but also "creating a person just to see if you can" seems very ethically dubious...)

So. When should he take his respirator off?

He's going to have to do it eventually. This design isn't meant to be lived in: it doesn't even have an emergency induction port for water.

He thinks it over for a bit.

He takes his notebook and pencil and writes a set of basic instructions on how to operate his joey (focusing on the e-reader software) and his portable solar charger. He writes the instructions out three times: once in Singleton Literate Language, once in Tashayan, and once in Tashayan transliterated into the SLL writing system.

Then he checks his encyclopedia to see if he can find an article with a list of the most common words in the Tashayan language: yes, there it is, the top five hundred. He writes down the list, again three times.

Then he takes off the respirator. If he departs, they can still learn about his world by reading his library.

They haven't called him yet by the time he's done writing. He thinks she said they would be the ones to initiate contact? Maybe he didn't catch that right. He hopes they're monitoring this facility well enough to see that he arrived safely, both so that they don't get worried that something happened to him on the way and so that someone will notice if he collapses or something while he's in here.

Probably he should call, let them know he's settling in and ask if they have further instructions for him--

His stomach reminds him that it is, on his original circadian rhythm, dinnertime. Come to think of it, he didn't see any food in this facility: he guesses that makes sense given that it wasn't in active use, you don't want the food to spoil if the building goes a while without occupants, but that's definitely something to call and ask about.

...oh shit, what if they use dextro proteins? Almost no worlds know enough biology for their walk-ins to be able to answer the question of whether or not their original biologies ran on levo proteins like him: he has no idea to what extent dextro-protein biology is actually a thing outside of science fiction. If their biologies are that fundamentally incompatible, that might be in some ways a good thing in that it implies his germs can't get a foothold in them, but also he's only carrying about half a day's worth of ration bars and after that he's going to starve if he can't digest local food. And then there's stuff like, birds can tolerate much higher doses of capsaicin than mammals, that sort of thing...

He calls the number she gave him.