...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.

She answers incredibly quickly, and Minaiyu can see that there's an unanswered call from the woman's number. "Yes, hello, Iris here, what could I do for you? I did intend to call you when you arrived at the hut, but I, ahh, was unsure as to when would be appropriate to make my call and I was worried about breaking your concentration if you were doing something important. Are you perhaps hungry, or do you have questions about how things work?"

...oops. He winces when he figures out there was a previous call. (Probably it was before he got here, but still, he should have called sooner.)

"I have enough of my own food to last the rest of the day, but pretty soon we're going to have to figure out what--if anything--I can eat here. We should go ahead and get the food ready for that: I guess the thing to do here is to start with simple things, no complicated mixes of ingredients that would make it hard to figure out what I'm reacting to if I react to one of them, definitely no flavouring agents that plants originally developed to act as deterrents."

"And yeah, that is the trouble with synchronous calls, the timing can get awkward," he adds. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting: I was writing a guide to my language, trying to capture enough of the basics that your people could decode the books on my computer if something happens to me. I don't want you to lose the chance to study a new world...

...actually, is it a new world for you? Is there some catalogue or something we could check, to see if you've had any-- oh. You don't have a word for the thing where the spirits of dead people from other worlds possess the living. I guess you're not going to have any prior testimonies from Rekkans who got here that way, then."

"It's going to be sad that you can't have some properly rich and flavorful food to enjoy, but needs must! I assume that flour, rice, and beans are familiar enough as simple ingredients to test for any sensitivities, and I'll try to get some help to get a longer list to go through. Does that sound like what you'd need?"

"Also, what in the world is with your bizarre questions about spirits from other worlds, it sounds like utter madness to me. There are no Rekkans that got here by possession, that's not a thing that happens here at all!"

"Yes, that sounds good for the food. Maybe at some point I'll be able to work my way up to trying local delicacies."

Ah, she has mentally incremented her "evidence that this guy is delirious" counter. That's...uncomfortable, but there's only so long she can keep thinking that before the amount of evidence for the truth surmounts it.

(Is he delirious? He's not sure how that would work: both of these worlds seem too rich in detail to be hallucinations.

He guesses it is possible he's still on Rekka (or the fae realm) and she's lying to him about it for some reason? But even in that case, he probably doesn't have any better options but to play along.)

"I suppose it would sound that way, if it happens rarely enough here that you don't have words for it. It varies a lot between worlds how often people land there; we don't know why. There are about twenty thousand walk-ins living on Rekka at any given time, and a new one lands somewhere on the planet probably more days than not.

And...as for whether I'm really from another world, well, there's a lot of books on my computer. Given the run of an alien library, I'm sure your people can figure out some way of proving to their satisfaction that it's genuinely alien. Testable claims in the encyclopedia that they didn't already know about, that sort of thing."

"I'll try to get a quarantine-safe food delivery to you, with various kinds of non-animal ingredients, to double-check that you don't have any sensitivities. And... well, I know you're not from this planet; I just cannot find any way for spirits to make sense knowing everything I know about physics and reality, that's what I haven't seen just happen in front of me."

Okay! Progress!

"We don't really understand how it works either. And I can see how...if there aren't any spirits here that are capable of taking physical form without being housed in a biological vessel, and if there aren't any walk-ins, I can see how the remaining signs of spirits existing could just seem like curiosities? Like, drugs that seemed okay in lab mice but turned out to put monkeys into comas...or a dog acting strangely after being dropped on its head, you might end up thinking it was just in chronic pain now or having sensory problems and that was all that was making it act like that."

is this the part where it turns out that actually the local mice and/or dogs have souls

"I mean, yes, you're talking about things that don't sound like they'd be particularly spirit-related at all. I have no idea about why you'd consider those examples of signs of spirits existing, rather than the world just being complicated and unpredictable."

"There's a pattern there, in which species react to damage one way and which species another, in which minds are either stable or dead in situations where other minds are distorted..."

(--oh no, do these people think that they just cease when they die, like a soulless animal would? That's horrible! This situation is stressful enough as it is, and if she's under the impression that her very existence is at stake...

...but he doesn't think he'll be able to persuade her of the existence of immortal souls in an off-the-cuff phone call. It will have to wait. And if he is...no longer available to be interviewed...after that wait, they will just have to read the encyclopedia article on souls and test its claims for themselves.

He makes a mental note to translate the soul article if he gets the chance, give them a head start on deciphering it.)

"...but we can go over that later, I think: this doesn't seem like a great time or communication method for hashing that out.

Hmm, what else is more urgent...how does the laundry work? I didn't see any laundry supplies: is there some heavy-duty washing machine done off-site? I don't have any spare clothes with me."

"Yes, laundry is generally handled off-site, certainly for huts like yours. I'll get the Novel Illness experts who... know what to do, and they can handle cleaning up potential ultra-infectious laundry. I know they know far more than me, and little more!"

"Excellent.

I'm sorry I had to dump all this on you just because you happened to be closest. I'm glad you'll be able to get help."

"The food should get there... rapidly." It takes around 30 minutes after the end of the conversation for a metal robot to arrive outside of the hut, wrapped in a layer of plastic and bringing with it a food container kept in its own plastic bag. There are instructions on the plastic cover, reading: "remove plastic cover as you receive the food. do not dispose of plastic materials as waste, wait for a Novel Illness Team to arrive and remove all materials featuring this symbol:", with an illustration of the thomassian hazmat symbol, a neon red illustration of viruses and bacteria within a circle surrounded by arrows pointing in. The plastic container has quite generous portions of various kinds of rice, beans and pancakes. It's bland, but filling.

He spends the wait working on a translation of the encyclopedia article on souls. He'll do the article on walk-ins next.

He puts his respirator back on before going out to fetch the food delivery, in case the local pollen is a problem. Some people wear respirators like this specifically for pollen, if they're sensitive enough that an everyday mask isn't quite sufficient.

He steels himself to try the alien food.

It...seems fine? The rice-looking thing even tastes like rice. The pancakes taste odd, but-- oh, they're made with wheat flour, not amaranth. This must just be one of those places where wheat is the unmarked form of flour, that's all. He doesn't have celiac or anything, so that part isn't a concern.

(His nose starts to itch partway through the meal. He doesn't scratch it.)

The two hours of brisk walking have given him enough appetite to finish the container.

He doesn't feel hungry afterward. Would you still feel hungry right after eating a meal of indigestible dextro-protein food? He's not sure.

Minaiyu is not a tanyikai, as such. He can't seal himself off in that layer of cold, mechanical calm. But he is a paramedic in training, and that means learning how to set aside one's grief for a while, until the job is done.

He's running out of tasks urgent enough to qualify as "the job". It's getting harder to set aside the grief, and the alarms blaring in his mind. He can feel everything around him, the way you can feel the difference between shoes you only wear for indoor exercises and shoes you wear outside, the way you can feel the difference between a joey that's been wiped down with sanitiser to fully bring back into the home and a joey that is simply waiting in its pouch for the next outing, the way you can feel the difference between a door handle that hasn't been used by a sick person and one that has. It's something almost like proprioception. It threatens to overwhelm him.

He gets up, washes his hands again, scratches his nose.

He heads into the bathroom and figures out how to use the shower. As he scrubs off the dirt of two planets, he sings a song written by a walk-in, about the five lives she's had thus far.

He is not alone. Some things are different, but others are the same. Countless, countless people have found themselves lost in other worlds, sometimes unexpectedly, often far too young. Countless people have had alien languages in their minds. Countless people have faced the threat of plague, and countless people have faced the possibility that the threat came from within. And, one way or another, they endured, and thrived, and lived.

He is alone in this society, composed entirely of people from this world. He is alone in his head. But he is not, truly, alone.

After showering, he robes himself in a large towel that--he tells his clean-sense firmly--is his now, and curls up on the bed that is his now, and tries to take deep breaths of the air that is his now.

Eventually the shaking fades, and he feels settled enough to go and investigate the house in more detail, particularly with regard to what it has for entertainment options. Are there books? Anything recognisable as music recordings? Puzzles? Crafts? Is the phone they gave him specialised in audio transmission, or is it a general-purpose computer; if the latter, what affordances does it have?

There is a very limited selection of books placed on a bookshelf in the main bedroom on the first floor, but not really anything else. Checking in on the phone, it's a fully featured smartphone that can do a vast range of things: fiddling around in it eventually reveals its ability to read books, watch film and listen to music, and play games; quite a few of them simulate doing some kind of craft or another, or simulate historical battles.

Presumably you're expected to bring your own entertainment to the quarantine facility. Reasonable.

He will spend the rest of the evening alternating between "exploring the alien media on the alien joey" and "reading comfortingly familiar books of his own", depending on whether his curiosity is outweighing his stress at any given time. He thinks he's missing too much cultural context to actually understand much of the fiction he tries: he's not even sure if the vast, hive-like town depicted in the movie is a science-fiction conceit or if it's real. He likes the cloth-making game.

At one point, he sets his own joey (now sanitised) to speaker mode and the new joey to audio-recording mode and listens to an album. One is none.

His sleep is somewhat fitful, and he would rather not have had the nightmare about a forest fire, but overall he manages a decent amount of rest.

(While the psychosomatic stress responses mean he's not quite as confident as he would like, his digestive system does not in fact seem to be objecting to the meal it was given.)

The portal--small mercies--turns out to have landed him in a place without much in the way of jetlag relative to eastern Tashay. He wakes early in the morning.

He has a message on his phone, this one coming from a completely new number. "We wish to hear from you how you're adapting to the situation! Are all your physical needs met, and do you additionally feel safe and cared for? We intend to send in some so-called sniffers, to see whether you carry any pathogens familiar to us, or whether they sense any novel kind of pathogen. You only need to place them within the same room as you, and we will sterilize them thoroughly. Is it acceptable to you that we send them to you?"

He texts back:

"The sniffers sound like a good measure. They can tell if my gut flora is novel or known-pathogenic to you from across the room?

I think I am probably about as safe and cared for as can reasonably be managed, under the circumstances? Thank you."

he could do with a hug he doesn't really want a hug from a stranger in a hazmat suit, and that is the only option that is even theoretically available

"Though I should double-check with you: what form and level of monitoring does this facility have, security cameras and periodic check-ins and the like? If I were to become incapacitated and unable to call for help, how long would it take someone to notice? I am not sure of your cultural customs regarding privacy, but I think the situation calls for substantially more monitoring than I would have in my everyday life.

I seem to be adapting well to the local food and water so far, though it's too soon to be sure. (Would it help to take a sample of one of my Rekkan ration bars for analysis?) I haven't yet attempted to breathe unfiltered outdoor air, but the indoor air, at least, seems to be well suited to my biology.

I would like some clean clothes, if that's practical. I know how to take basic rectangles of cloth and wrap them into robes, but I do prefer trousers. I'm not sure how to take the necessary measurements to get clothes of the right size.

I would also like to upload copies of the contents of my Rekkan computer, for safekeeping and for your anthropological study. I expect we should use measures that are as non-invasive as possible, at least until we've gotten the information to safety: it seems extremely risky to tinker with an irreplaceable alien artifact.

Possibly if we start by uploading pictures of encyclopedia articles regarding computers and network protocols, you might be able to build something compatible on your end without needing to tinker with the alien computer directly? Uploading the entire library via taking pictures would take a dangerously long time. I'll help as much as I can with translation, of course."

He pauses for a moment, thinking over whether the message is ready to send, then adds:

"A keyboard that isn't constrained by the need to fit in a handheld form factor would help with writing translations, and probably also with writing these messages. Though I'm sure a lot of my slowness is simply from lack of skill with Singleton Literate Language keyboards."

"The sniffers work better in more cramped rooms; they're not necessarily sensitive enough to detect anything across a particularly large room. And I'm glad to hear that you're pleased with what we're doing for you. The facility has monitoring in the form of emergency buttons in the main room, and maybe the nursery as well? We don't do anything proactively unless it's a special request from a resident, but we can install a camera monitoring system and do checkups if that's what you want to have happen? You can also use the phone you're sending messages from as a camera, if you find some way of propping it up. If you became incapacitated... it'd probably take at least 4 or 5 days before we would feel the need to investigate; this isn't driven by privacy, we merely dislike receiving or giving help that's unnecessary, and we're happy to increase the level of monitoring if that's to your taste."

"We want to get that ration bar you mentioned for science purposes! And there's not much advantage to you breathing outdoor air, it'd be unnecessary risk on both our ends. Please stay inside for as long as is tolerable; we'd probably send in a volunteer before we'd want you to risk being exposed to the outside."

"We'll give you a measuring tape so you can get your measurements, and we're happy to get you some basic clothes once we know what to send."

"If your patience lets you, we think that uploading pictures of articles from your encyclopedia would be incredibly valuable; translation is similarly valuable and strongly appreciated."

"Finally, we're happy to send you a keyboard! You might be faster and more comfortable using voice dictation, however."

Four or five days??

He is so glad he thought to check what the aliens' default assumptions were!! Even after being largely baffled by their media, he still needs to make fewer assumptions about what the aliens are thinking. He'd figured it would take at most one day for them to get worried if he dropped abruptly out of contact, even if the quarantine facility was taking no special measures to that effect: after all, there's no food stored in this building, except the ration bars they didn't know he had until just now.

(...how sure is he that the local human-analogues eat every day? They're warm-blooded, so-- are they warm-blooded? He hasn't seen any heat lamps or anything in here, probably they're warm-blooded, and he thinks it's generically true that warm-blooded creatures need to eat fairly often...

It's also possible that-- no, the days on this planet can't be that short, he would have noticed by now.)

...right, okay, the bed is sized for multiple people and there are three bedrooms in total, that suggests this facility is normally for quarantining most or all of a household together, and it's unlikely that the entire group will be incapacitated at the same time so whoever's still conscious/lucid/etc can call for help for the rest...

That might still be making too many assumptions. And they don't even have walk-ins, let alone aliens who weren't filtered for brain-compatibility, they won't have pre-established systems for helping otherworlders integrate into a new civilisation...

"I think the cultural gap here is even larger than I expected. We will need to be very careful about defaults, subtext, etc."

(Now that he's been prompted to look for it, he's found the voice-dictation mode and is trying it out. It's remarkably good at what it does--much better than Rekkan dictation software--but still kind of annoying to use, in the way voice activation always is. Maybe Thomassians don't find voice activation inherently annoying: maybe that's led to a virtuous cycle where dictation software is more widely used, which means more effort gets put into improving it, which makes it even more widely used.)

"If the plan is for me to stay in this particular building for the medium term, and not as a stopgap measure while you arrange for a facility that is already designed around lone individuals (with no housemates around to keep an eye on whether they've become comatose or delirious), then yes, I would like cameras. I'm not asking to be moved to another facility, to be clear, I know moving carries a lot of risk in itself, but I'm not sure what your plans are for me going forward.

I think that on balance there probably shouldn't be cameras in the bathroom, but definitely in the living room. I will try to check in with you or someone you designate...maybe three times a day? I still need to get the hang of local timekeeping.

How can I contact relevant emergency responders in as few seconds and movements as possible, in case--for example--I've picked up a novel-relative-to-me pathogen despite our efforts and wake up in the middle of the night struggling to breathe?

As for other retrofits, I think exercise equipment would help with staying inside? At home, I" have "had a stationary tricycle, some dumbbells, and a pull-up bar, but I'm not sure what would be most practical here.

I think dictating my translations will be easier on day one, but that a keyboard will surpass it once I gain more skill. I'd like to get the keyboard so I can start practising with it.

Should I still be contacting Iris regarding food deliveries, or is that role being handed off to someone else now that she's had a chance to call in specialists to handle my case?"

Hmm, what else...

"Also, do you have any recommendations for nonfiction aimed at children or other people not expected to have much background context, something that will let me start getting a better grasp on your world and your culture? (...I guess I don't actually know for sure that your children aren't expected to have much background context: I can't yet rule out that they inherit memories from their ancestors or something. We look like the same species, but that doesn't necessarily mean we work the same.)"

(And if there were species that inherited memories from their ancestors, their brains presumably wouldn't be compatible, and he wouldn't have heard about them. For all he knows, that's why this world doesn't have walk-ins.)

After sending the text (but before receiving a response), he realises one of the nebulous bits of confusion that was bothering him, and some of the weirdnesses snap into place.

It's a positive pressure room. This particular facility is designed to keep germs out, not in. Which is why it's not set up under the assumption that you're especially likely to wake up mid-suffocation in the middle of the night, why they assume you're capable of handling yourself for days on end and it's not a sign that you're departed or dying--

--we, the contact person on the other end of the link said, we don't do anything proactively unless it's a special request from a resident--

"...sorry, I think I may have noticed another subtextual gap," he texts. "I was assuming that you were from the Novel Illness team Iris mentioned, but some of the things you've said suggest that you're from whoever normally runs the positive-pressure facilities? Could you please clarify who you are and who I will be working with?"

"Well, I'm Circe, and yes, I am from the Novel Illness team. You'll be working with me and some other people also from that team; eventually, you'd almost certainly need to get access to money and a way to spend it. And regarding your other concerns: we're planning on sending you a camera that works for the living room; it feels like a bit of an odd request, but if it puts you at ease we're happy to do it. It's now our turn to handle food deliveries until you feel like you can do that yourself; then, we'll get you a spending account so you can buy food and other supplies yourself.

You can turn your phone into a tool that asks for emergency help from our end at just the push of a button, but we can get an emergency help pager for you that you can wear in bed instead? There are several different form factors; I'm not sure which one makes the most sense. That's sort of the case with the exercise equipment, too; getting the bike and the strength training equipment sounds good to me, but I'm not very familiar with your preferences. I'll send in a kind of keyboard I like, and find you some non-fiction that helps children understand what quarantine's like? Those are the things that I could help you with right now, I think."

Okay, he's back to being confused about why the Novel Illness team would be happy to leave the guy who may or may not have some kind of horrible alien disease alone for five days.

...hmm, to be fair, he was wearing a respirator and he has barely touched anything other than the contents of the house, he probably doesn't have some kind of horrible alien-relative-to-him disease right now he hopes; and if his gut flora or something turns out to be pathogenic to locals, that's not a sign that he is particularly at risk of suffocating in the middle of the night or losing himself in feverish delirium. Maybe they think the risk-reward checks out? And it sounds like they're accustomed to most people they work with being able to source their food deliveries themselves (and, for that matter, it's possible that most people they work with are in facilities with stocked pantries), which would mean they're not accustomed to thinking of it as a warning sign if he'd stopped asking for food...

He still kind of feels like he's missing something (or maybe several somethings) and going around in circles without it. He hopes he figures out what it is before it goes to pleurisy blows up in his face.

"Maybe a bracelet for the pager?

That sounds like a good start, thank you. I think the exercise equipment can wait a bit until I'm more familiar with how to research available options over your Internet, if that helps.

I know this isn't really your purview, sorry, but if you know of a basic guide to Internet usage I could read, I would greatly appreciate that. I've been able to figure out the basics of operating this phone's local functions, but I know that there's more that can go wrong when you're trying to navigate a vast network, and I'm not sure how much of my knowledge of how to use my world's internet carries over."

(It sounds like Thomassians do not inherit memories from their ancestors.)

"Yes, let's get going; here's a few links to some nonfiction articles for kids about what to do when quarantined, and I'll start sending over a bracelet that you can use for calling for emergency assistance (they'll be informed about you being strictly quarantined, don't worry about that). And another link about how to better use the Internet. Do you also want to agree to getting a schedule for your check-ins before we sign off?"

It occurs to him that there was an alarm clock in the "phone's" list of software. He experiments with the alarm-setting interface a bit until he has a decent sense of how this society measures the course of a day.

Equipped with that information, they can figure out a reasonable schedule, running from late morning (late enough that an ordinary amount of oversleeping won't trigger alarms) to late evening.

He will also ask for instructions on how and where to upload the encyclopedia pictures and translations.

He reads the articles and checks if there are any surprises.

A day is divided into 36 parts 3 times over; 36 "turns" forming 36 "loops" forming 36 "circuits", with each day starting 18 circuits to the turn after the previous noon. Everyday time is designed to be built around local noon in one of the very many finely divided time zones. This can result in clocks being set forwards or backwards, as there aren't precisely 36 turns, loops and circuits in every day, so an additional turn must be removed in order to follow the movements of the sun. This means that for important appointments like exams or elections, things are scheduled according to atomic clocks that run fully independently of the sun, if only behind the scenes.

The Novel Illness people guide Minaiyu towards the RRF Limited Written Sources, an organization dedicated to preserving and understanding the written history of peoples with limited, poorly understood or poorly preserved textual sources when he asks about who to send encyclopedia images and translations. They're hoping that Minaiyu would help them out on learning as much as they can about his culture.

The articles explain some of the very basics of being quarantined: washing your hands frequently and thoroughly, minimizing contact with others, and testing yourself regularly to be on top of any potential illnesses. Sniffers use specially trained insects that use olfactory receptors to detet the unique smells of people with different illnesses; this lets them know which of many diseases people have. There are several kinds of sniffer batteries, that use complicated combinations of insects trained on multiple different overlapping groups, meaning they need less than one insect for each illness. There are a bunch of mnemonics for washing your hands properly, and disinfecting anything you come in contact with, but it's not particularly interesting.

After that, there's a more in-depth explanation of various kinds of respirators and protective equipment for various illnesses. As the very simplest measure, there's a simple "don't spit on people when you talk" mask, available in transparent fabric that keeps your face visible if the bug is something really mild and non-infectious, as well as more effective disposable mask designs that protect better. Beyond that, there are respirators, with various kinds of more or less breathable exhalation valves, and respirators without exhalation valves being the most effective and protective unpowered protective equipment; and finally, there are the positive-pressure systems used in healthcare settings or the most severe illnesses or roleplay. They're all custom-fit, are available with rechargable or primary batteries, regularly have microphone and speaker systems to get the best possible voice quality, and some designs are meant to let everyone get a good look at your face; the article shows an image of a famous musician wearing a very elaborate kind of positive-pressure respirator that shows off her face while being light and breathable enough to let her dance energetically.

There's also a huge crowd of concertgoers, dressed in the face-revealing low-end type of mask. But they're just doing a Pandemic Awareness Day, so there are no endemic infectious diseases at the time and they have absolutely nothing to worry about! Finally, the article shows some of the musicians on stage dressed in "formalwear masks": they are cartoon heads of anthropomorphic animals, often worn on top of suits of foxes, wolves or other kinds of furry animals. Formalwear masks are big enough to hide tons of fans and filters to keep the performers cool, and they often help enormously with keeping them cool as they exert themselves playing music even in the heat of the summer. Maybe you'd want a cool, high-tech formalwear mask, or even a full outfit, of your own one day?, the article suggests.

The time system will take some getting used to, but he thinks he can manage. It's odd to think of the new day as beginning at midnight rather than dawn.

Huh. He's...kind of unnerved by the sniffers being biological, that seems hard to disinfect, but maybe they're bred in cleanrooms like those strains of microbiome-less lab mice.

They manufacture transparent fallback masks? He's not quite sure under what circumstances you would want this over an ordinary N99--if you're alone and are only looking to keep out dust, why would transparency be useful? "letting breath-bondmates read your lips when you have a dust mask on" seems like a small niche--but it's interesting that they can.

...he stops and stares for a while at the picture of the concertgoers and its caption. A huge, dense crowd...that is wearing merely low-end masks...and they're only even bothering with that much because they're doing a pandemic drill?

'There are no endemic infectious diseases at the time', it says. Just...just how good is this society's medical tech, to have gotten that much of an upper hand in the arms race against its parasites?

He's read the statistics. In the average year, about 10% of Tashayans contract a cold. They've made great strides since the bad old days, but children struggle to understand the importance of keeping their masks on and their dirty fingers away from their eyes--he certainly did, he had a cold when he was three (so he's been told: he doesn't remember it) and another when he was nine (the first five-day of it was the worst five-day of his life, and after that he truly understood what the adults were worried about)--and most people don't find getting one booster or another every three five-days to be worth it to maintain vaccination against all 160 of the currently-vaccinatable rhinovirus strains, given each person's individual life circumstances and individual level of proneness to side effects. (He does. It's encouraged in healthcare workers (though not mandatory for most roles), he doesn't have a needle phobia, and his side effects are very mild.) And then there's the constant struggle against evolution, the selection pressure towards vaccine-evading strains and strains with longer pre-symptomatic infectious periods...

(He wonders if his decision to onboard onto the rhinovirus vaccination cycle has saved the world: if not (necessarily) from death, then from tremendous suffering. He'll probably never know for sure, if that was the critical piece that prevented him from carrying one into this staggeringly clean society. assuming he didn't carry one in, his oldest boosters are almost two-thirds of a year old and wearing off, and then there's the fomites)

He does feel somewhat better about touching things that came with the house, after that.

He wonders if the formalwear descends from rituals aimed at communing with nature.

He would love to contribute to the Limited Written Sources archive.

Pictures! Of! An alien encyclopedia!!

The people from the Limited Written Sources association are utterly ecstatic about everything that Minaiyu sends them, as they excitedly work to help translate and understand everything written in Minaiyu's language. As this is happening, someone from the Novel Illness people asks Minaiyu how check-ins should be scheduled, and whether he'd feel safer if he could have some medical equipment kept on standby at the hut where he's quarantining.

He asks the Limited Written Sources contact if he should also send them copies of music recordings, or if there is some other archive that would be more suitable for those.

"I'll text you at these three times (I've set phone alarms for them), or within" ten loops is too short, he might be showering. twenty? no, eighteen is a rounder number in this system, let's go with that "18 loops thereafter. If I don't text you within that window, call me. If I don't answer, check if you can see me on the camera, and investigate if you can't figure out what's become of me or if you can see something's gone wrong.

I will let you know if a different schedule turns out to work better for me as I settle in here, and I will also let you know if I'm planning to do something that will leave me uninterruptible during a check-in window.

As for medical equipment, hmm...a pulse oximeter? I'll let you know if I think of something else."

He pauses for a moment.

"Oh, actually, we should put one of the analgesics from my bag on the list of alien substances to analyse. I feel like you have a word for 'paracetamol', but I'm not sure I trust the mysterious language implant to be giving me a direct translation for that and not a localisation. I'm not in any particular pain right now, and I have several of my own paracetamol(?) pills with me, but it seems good to check in advance."

The Limited Written Sources people want audio recordings sent to someone else, although they're not quite sure who. They don't have any recordings and want to leave working with them to the experts in that area.

"We're glad that we're able to reassure you by checking on you once in a while. And we're happy to send you a pulse oximeter together with the emergency summoning bracelet, and a camera that lets us observe you in the living room, as well as another just for good measure. Although we're quite sure that paracetamol refers to what we'd expect it to, we'd also wish to analyse it to guarantee that it does... although we're not quite sure about how to do that while you're still quarantined and we're worried about spreading illnesses both ways."

He'll still make copies of the music (including some recordings of himself singing folk songs and other such things he doesn't have professional recordings of), but he'll leave them on the phone for now. Once he gets a spending account, he can look into personal remote-backup services.

"I can include a paracetamol alongside the ration bar whenever we're ready to do that, however long that takes."

"That'd be an excellent time to do the analysis, yes. I can't think of anything else we need to hear from you? Are you happy to be by yourself while we stand by for the first checkin for today?"

"Yes, I think that's everything for now, thank you."

He's not quite hungry yet. He thinks he'll probably ask for breakfast during the late-morning check-in.

In the meantime, he'll work on archiving. He experiments with a few different setups, testing whether it's practical to run audio copying in the background while he takes pictures of text, propping the computers (carefully) up against different objects to find the most stable and convenient configuration. He sets up by a window so he can charge the joey off his solar panel.

Copying audio as he takes pictures of text works perfectly fine. There are a few books and a bedside table, and a few books do a fine job propping up both of the handheld computers.

He's more concerned about taxing himself by trying to keep up with both tasks than about whether the phone is capable of running both programs at once, as well as concerned about introducing background noise to the recordings by moving around, but those issues seem pretty workable also.

Late in the morning, the phone alarm beeps.

"Hello!" he texts. "Everything is coming along well so far."

"I'd like to get something to eat, please. Probably we should stick with the rice, beans, and wheat pancakes for another day or two before we start introducing more items?

My main meal is mid-evening, so I won't be able to eat as large a portion as last night right now, but it's probably more convenient for everyone to send larger amounts less frequently than to send small packages six times a day. I can keep the leftovers in the fridge."

He sends a picture of the empty food container, since the size information on that might have been lost in the handover.

"I think another package the same size would last me a few hours? I don't have my heart set on this exact size, though."

(He almost didn't bother to mention what general scale he was thinking of, but he is trying to make fewer assumptions with the aliens.)

"Well, we're used to eating twice a day, and that inevitably means fairly large portions. We're happy to get you rice, beans and pancakes, and we're hoping they'll still taste fine if you let them sit in the fridge if you don't think you'll want to eat everything at once. You don't need to send us the picture; food is made to fit within that size food container by default, so you'd have to ask us for a different-size portion. We can start sending over the food now; we hope you find it fresh and flavorful."

As this conversation is happening, Minaiyu hears a chime. Looking out, he can see a robot covered in plastic carrying a plastic bag with the things that he asked for: two cameras, a dark gray pulse oximeter with a bright, high-contrast LED screen, and an ultra-soft silicone wristband with a recessed button that'd work to summon emergency medical services to his location if he should ever have the need for them.

Twice a day? He...might be able to get used to that? Maybe he will ask to keep some non-perishable snacks around once he has sorted out which ones are safe to eat, so he can eat on a more normal schedule without having to bother them with weird portion sizes / frequent deliveries or eat leftover rice. It is kind of itching at him to be in a dwelling with no food stocks.

Ah, lovely. He gears up, fetches the delivery, and re-does the home-entering purification. (Another reason not to want to order food on six separate occasions.)

He puts on the wristband (what a nice design), sets up the cameras, and tries on the pulse oximeter. 99%.

It's mostly uneventful for another 2 circuits, until another robot, carrying a total of 5 different kinds of sniffers, arrives. They're small black boxes, come in another sealed plastic bag on a plastic-wrapped robot, and have strips of indicator lights on them. After leaving them somewhere in the room and waiting a bit, only one of the lights turns on, glowing red; it claims that Minaiyu is shedding some kind of Novel microorganism, and also reassures him that the hut is free from basically every plausible illness know to thomassia.

("Hi, bugs," he says to the sniffers in Singleton Literate Language, as he sets them up.

It feels objectively silly to take care to address the bugs in SLL, it's not like they'll understand him any better that way than they would in Tashayan, but he can't quite shake the feeling that it's more polite.)

Welp.

It's...not necessarily pathogenic to Thomassians.

or to any forest creatures that stepped on his footprints in the field he landed in

He texts the Novel Illness team.

"The 'novel microorganism detected' indicator lit up," he says. "What are the next steps?"

"Well, the last time this happened, the person in question rested at home until the virus or bacteria that caused the illness were beaten off and the illness faded! We think that this won't happen this time. Our thought is to see if an animal of some kind, perhaps a bird in a lab, catches something of you? But... I think that this is a situation that calls for us sending in someone to take a sample. And to try and find out what this very novel illness might be. We're taking this as seriously as is possible for us. Again, we see if whatever is triggering the sniffer goes away by itself, and in case it doesn't... we'll send in someone. To take a sample and find out what can be learned, and hopefully move on from there. I'll need to get the preparations going; I'll let you know as far as I can in advance, when we're thinking of sending someone in."

He winces at calling the microbe an "illness" when they don't yet know that for sure, but he certainly doesn't like the odds that it's not true.

"Alright.

What will the sample-taking process involve? It's not that I expect to balk at it or anything," honestly, if they decided it was too dangerous to leave him alive he doesn't think he would fight back, given the stakes (and the fact that he knows his existence isn't at risk, even if they likely don't), "but it would be good to know what to expect."

"Well, we're going to land one of our helicopters in that clearing of yours, and have someone walk out in a pressurized suit, with an extremely well-reinforced airtight steel box kept inside a heat-sealed plastic bag inside a plastic bag to hold the sample, and then we're going to track its location until it reaches our maximally remote biosafety lab."

That is good to know, but he was primarily asking about what he will need to do. Maybe someday he will get the hang of talking to the aliens.

(At least he doesn't need to learn Singleton Literate Language from scratch: that would have been so much worse.)

"What actions will I need to take during the sampling process? Will you need a blood draw, or a spit vial, or for me to blow into something, or is it passive like the sniffers, etc?"

"Oh, we only need a spit vial and to take some samples from the air... most likely; I was going to give you the instructions once everything was done and finalized, but I'm quite sure they're going to just do those 2 things."

"Ah, I see."

He will...pace for a while, and manage one leftover pancake, before he goes back to archiving.

what if he never gets to hug anyone again, what if he's stuck in quarantine for the rest of his life then he will contribute to his host society remotely, and when the time comes for him to shed this tainted body they can study it in a heavily warded biohazard lab until they have learned all they can, and then they can cremate it, and one day he will land elsewhere having brought nothing physical with him at all and can he hopes make new friends there that he can safely touch

Into the phone's audio recorder, he sings a song about how to develop antibiotics.

The next few days aren't quite enough to form a routine, but things at least begin to settle into patterns.

Minaiyu records articles and songs and some translations and a few books. He pokes cautiously at the Internet, trying to stick to the shallows until he has a better sense of the appropriate security practices. (He finds and plays a game designed to help people practise their typing skills.) He paces and does push-ups and jumping jacks, for the time being. He gradually adds more variety to his food orders, and none of it seems to harm him. (He avoids asking for the thing the sourceless-semantic-bleedover is telling him is "strawberries", since Rekkan strawberries give him a rash. He is curious if Thomassian strawberries would too, but now really doesn't seem like the time to test it.)

He isn't sure which of his dreams are worse: the ones full of fire and destruction, or the ones where he is happy and safe.

He sleeps hugging a pillow.

He doesn't, subjectively, come down with any symptoms.

Ultimately, the sniffer still gives the scary positive result as it always had; Minaiyu gets told a few circuits in advance that a helicopter is going to land, with someone walking out to take spit samples and the ambient air. And, as scheduled with immaculate punctuality, a very loud wooshing noise can be heard as a helicopter makes its approach to the clearing. Someone wearing a very large and bulky positive pressure suit starts taking a few surprisingly nimble steps towards Minaiyu, holding an incredibly durable-looking metal box on top of 2 plastic bags, and a tiny vial perfect for taking a spit sample. The man waves at Minaiyu, his voice coming through crystal clear, only slightly muffled by the wall separating him from Minaiyu.

"If you wish, you can walk to the floor above or hide in the bathroom while I take some samples and leave the vial for you to use, and then I'll return to take it back to get it sampled and tested? You seem to be quite careful concerning biosafety, and I thought that would possibly put you at more ease than me walking into your personal space."

Minaiyu puts his respirator on: it sounds like leftover breath will be sufficient at this point and there is no need for him to be actively putting more unfiltered breaths into this airspace right now, and it's good to gear up before opening an external door (he still hasn't dared test the pollen, after all).

"I think probably a good balance would be me taking the vial from you and then hiding upstairs to do the spit sample while you sample the air?"

"Yes, that'd also mean me spending the absolute minimum of time here in addition to everything else... I also feel like it's more appropriate that you open the door. So, shall we?" He takes a few steps closer and gets ready to hand over the vial.

He nods, and opens the door to another person for the first time.

He carefully plucks the vial from the man's grasp (still not touching anyone, even through the hazmat suit) and goes upstairs to lift his respirator and take the sample.

Meanwhile, the man quickly turns on his sampling machine, clicking the Petri dish into one of the compartments of the thick steel box, waiting for Minaiyu's return with the vial containing the spit sample.

Minaiyu sets his respirator back into place and ventures downstairs to drop off the vial. Everything seems to have gone smoothly with the spit sampling, he didn't get any spit on the outside of the vial or anything like that, though of course he did touch the vial with his bare hand so it's not like it's clean.

"...thank you for everything," he says. "I hope we can make this...situation...okay."

He smiles at Minaiyu before sealing the metal box within one plastic bag, sealing it again within another plastic bag before walking off to the helicopter. "I get the exceptionally strong sense that you're going to see the world, and to love a lot of what you see." Then he vanishes as the helicopter takes off, off to the faraway biosafety lab to see if there was anything from Minaiyu worth being scared about.

Well. We live in hope.

He smiles back, but the mouth area of his respirator isn't transparent. (It might be noticeable around the eyes, if the man looks closely.)

The farewell gesture Minaiyu makes, in any case, is clear.

It takes another 5 days or so before another helicopter returns to the clearing, carrying a stottering and slow, but vividly colorful bird walking around lethargically; they've seen that whatever supposed Novel Illness Minaiyu has didn't hurt the bird in the lab that they exposed to his microorganisms, and they want to see whether a bird exposed to Minaiyu more directly remains as healthy and unharmed. The bird has a clearly visible plastic tracking chip attached to one wing, and a wire fence gets built around the clearing to keep it within it. A bowl of food and a watering station is also left with it, and a robot replaces the food and water once in a while. Nothing much seems to happen to the bird randomly walking around outside Minaiyu's hut.

The first test subject was fine.

Yes, it's only been one five-day, yes it's possible that other species are more vulnerable than this one, but...

...he's been abstractly hoping things would turn out well and he would one day be able to leave quarantine, but deep down he didn't, really, believe it might happen. Now, there's just enough visceral hope to hurt.

But then, having enough hope to hurt is the first step towards getting the thing you hoped for.

Oh no, what's wrong with the-- oh, it's been sedated for transport, hasn't it. Never mind.

Aww, it's cute. If he does turn out to be dangerous to human-analogues (or they to him!), maybe it will still turn out safe for him to have a pet bird to cuddle. There's probably a robot that will clean up its poop for him and everything.

(He and the archivists finish going through and translating every computer-science encyclopedia article that looked like it might be relevant to the task of building a compatible mesh node, and they conclude that they don't have enough detailed information to pull it off. Otherworlders aren't supposed to be able to bring physical objects with them, "the possibility of needing to network a random isolated joey with alien computers" wasn't in his society's threat model, and they made no particular attempt to optimise for it.

Which means they're stuck converting all of his files through the analog layer, and that means a disturbingly high chance that the joey will break before he's done.

He experiments more with optimising his upload bandwidth. He finds, buried in the settings of his music-player software, an option to increase speed by up to 3x: he's not sure why that option is even there--maybe a nightcore fan submitted a pull request?--but it means he can get through an hour's a circuit's worth of audio in 12 loops and just slow the recording back down again afterward (he tests this, and it comes out fine). He puts his font size as small as it will go, and he tries taking videos of himself flipping through pages of an ebook so he doesn't have to stop to take photos: it takes a lot more Thomassia-compatible storage space, but that's not what's at a premium here, and if desired they can extract individual frames from the video later.

He might make it. The encyclopedia is very large in the way that encyclopedias get when they are unbound by the need to fit on a bookcase, and he has so many ebooks and a not-insubstantial amount of Mesh cache, but he might make it.

(And it's not as if it would be better if he had fewer ebooks, he points out to himself.))

...every sign is positive; the bird seems perfectly healthy, and at this point, it's probably now or never. Minaiyu gets a call. "We want to find, and send you, a human volunteer. We think it makes sense to take the plunge and see if you're as safe for people as you are for the bird. Do you feel comfortable with that? When do you think you'll be ready to have someone come over, and... see if they get sick?"

why did they make him do this by synchronous communication, "after an extremely stressful and lonely ten-day" hardly seems like the time to be making important decisions over synchronous communication

"Uh, hmm...

...yeah, if-- if someone's willing to take that risk, I'm not gonna turn them down.

Is-- is the contact going to be one-way at first, like with the bird? We still don't know much about how I react to you...I guess we should, uh, design a catch-up schedule for the vaccines you've invented, probably, if it comes down to it I can probably do a fair amount of in-person interaction with the world by wearing a respirator all the time and showering when I get home" even if that thought is kind of terrifying "but it would be good to have that layer of protection and-- and maybe be able to have housemates again someday.

...vaccines wouldn't even help with the day-to-day, would they, you don't have any endemic pathogens-relative-to-you. Sorry, I think I'm rambling a bit."

"Yes, that's correct; herd immunity, and our effective monitoring and quarantining, has meant that the vaccines we do have aren't very necessary to protect us. But we still have them, and we're happy to get them on you. We'd also be willing to equip you with something more convenient and practical than your respirator; you'd likely want to have such protective gear on hand, in any case. But... once we find a willing volunteer, we'll let you know, and let you see them. And maybe we can try one-way contact, and only then move to see if you can interact with people without a respirator."

"Yeah, getting some local protective equipment sounds like a good idea."

(He has a momentary mental image of a future him with a pet bird and a formalwear costume designed to match its plumage. Do they do birds for the nature-communing thing, or only mammals?

Anyway.)

"Okay. I'll-- see them then, then."

He can't keep the hope out of his voice, but then he wasn't really trying.

"Well, we'll send you a photo of the volunteer, once they've been chosen. And we'll send them as soon as is practical. It can't be more than 2 or 3 days; does that sound good to your ears?"

"Sure."

(He's a little surprised that they're confident they can find one quickly, but then, a planet is a big place: presumably, out of hundreds of millions of people, someone is well suited to this.)

It's early the next day that Minaiyu hears about it. "We have a volunteer! It's a middle-aged woman, we're thinking of having her wait outside for a bit to have you not be exposed. She looks like this." Minaiyu receives a picture; the woman depicted seems quite warm and friendly. "She's on her way already, and she'll get to you at any moment!" It's only a few loops later before Minaiyu can see the large blue vehicle, and a woman slowly steps out, before making her way over to the clearing with the bird in it. She waves at Minaiyu.

Oh wow, that was not much notice at all. It's a good thing he didn't happen to be in the shower.

He grins at her through the window, and waves back.

"Hello! What's your name?"

(...is that a sensitive topic? Were they deliberately avoiding giving her name in the notification that they'd found a volunteer? Well, she knows he's an alien unused to local cultural norms, and it's not like he needs her birth name specifically if she'd rather give something else.)

"I'm Iris, actually! Nice to meet you! I'm thinking of sitting outside and maybe petting the bird a bit, see if anything happens to me. Unless you'd be comfortable with me coming in now?"

Huh. She looks different enough that he can be confident she isn't the same Iris he met earlier. Maybe it's a very common name here, like Rellakri.

"It does look very pettable.

I think it's too soon for you to come in. And when" if? "we are ready to do two-way exposure, I'd rather have me go out to you.

...although doing it outside would introduce extra variables, potential allergens and all that. Maybe we can figure out an indoor meeting place that isn't, you know, where I live.

...come to think of it, maybe you don't know: maybe your culture has weaker feelings about the sanctity of the home, if you don't have endemic pathogens."

"Not that much? I don't really need to know someone too well to let them into my house, as long as they promise to be nice and non-judgemental about how I do things. But I can absolutely wait out here until you get more comfortable!" She moves to sit down on the grass, still slowly stroking the bird outside, before turning to her phone and starting to read something or other.

After a bit of contemplation:

"Maybe the next stage should be me going out there in a valved respirator, letting us interact more directly while maintaining largely one-way exposure."

And then he can pet the bird.

(...well, if he's going to try touching things, he could pet the bird in his non-valved respirator. But this isn't the time for that, since then he wouldn't be breathing on her anymore.)

"Yes you can do that; you're absolutely not getting into my personal space walking out of your house, that's for sure!" 

"...sorry, I don't think I parsed that?"

(He was worried for a moment, during the 'you're absolutely not getting into my personal space', that she was objecting to him getting too close to her, but that makes absolutely no sense in context.)

"Oh, is it that it's my yard and I don't need to ask permission to go out in it?"

(Well, sort of his yard, admittedly. He does not, per se, have a contract to that effect, and the house clearly wasn't abandoned even if it wasn't actively occupied. He supposes he is paying rent in the form of alien books. Or maybe it's more like government-funded safety-net housing.

...probably he is going to have to move out if it turns out to be safe for him to leave quarantine: even if they'd let him stay here indefinitely afterward (and he's not sure of that), it doesn't seem like a good idea for him to be a three-circuit walk from everything if he's going to non-remotely participate in society. He's more attached to this house than he would normally have expected of living in a place for one ten-day, but then, his clean-sense has now accepted the house as his and it's him and the house against the world right now.)

"Yes, that's what I meant! You'd probably want to get out here eventually, right? So why not come out and enjoy the beautiful nature with me?"

He nods. "I'll make arrangements for it, then."

He spends a bit of time researching valved respirator models, places a request for one (noting that it would be useful for one-way testing), then returns to his book-scanning.

"Would you like to hear some music from my homeworld?" he says. "I have some recordings on here."

Minaiyu would find out very quickly that it's common and expected for PPE like that to be custom-designed, with mass-produced models being the more niche option. Nonetheless, there are quite a few choices still available, with detailed sizing guides so Minaiyu can get something that he can be sure will fit.

 "Music? I'm very curious; please, play something for me."

It seems like there's a bit of a bootstrapping problem in making one's way to a PPE tailor, getting fitted, and only then having PPE with which to brave the world, but he supposes that's not actually true for natives in most cases.

In any case, he still has the tape measure from when he was getting local clothes that weren't made of towel.

He sets the joey's music player back to real-time mode and puts on an instrumental piece. It's a shimmering purple, not that he expects her to see it that way.

Iris tries to dance to the music, although she's struggling to come up with fitting dance moves.

...oh. Oh, of course.

The sight dredges up an old memory of history lessons. When he was a child, he read a book about the last great influenza pandemic. The book's cover showed a contemporary photograph of two people dancing on either side of a window, neither daring to enter the other's airspace.

There was a supplementary activity where you learned to do the dance, which had become something of a fad during the plague. Does he still remember how to do it...

...mostly, yes, and after checking a couple encyclopedia illustrations he thinks he's got it down again.

"I don't know any dances for that song," he says, once the song has finished, "but I do know a dance designed to be done in quarantine. I can show you?"

She nods. "I'm happy to see it if you want to show me!"

He sets the computers well aside--it could be catastrophic to bump into them--and he dances.

You can tell, looking at it, that there is a sort of phantom partner. You reach out to them, sometimes, brushing against the glass.

The twirls are slow, in case you are well enough to stand but sick enough to be prone to dizziness.

Once he's run through a demonstration, he says:

"Would you like to join me? You pretty much just mirror me, I think."

(It's a little disorienting, right now, to speak in the alien words of this clean world.)

"Absolutely, I'm happy to try that." She does an impressive job of replicating Minaiyu's dance moves.

Minaiyu is having complicated emotions about this.

He's...having fun, and he's relieved to be physically interacting with someone again which he has barely done in a ten-day, and he's acutely aware that she is still on the other side of the glass, and he's scared that even that is too close for her to be safe, and he's worried that if today's exposure goes badly this might be the closest he gets to another person for a long time, and he's connected to the many people who have danced like this in the past, some of whom were probably worrying about leaky windows also...

He wonders if any of the people who departed from that influenza pandemic have landed yet. Maybe, elsewhere in the multiverse, other aliens are learning to dance.

He grins at her, maybe a little shakily.

"I'm not a big dancer," he says, "but I do know another dance that I learned for my cousin's wedding. That one is, like, properly partnered. Maybe I can show you, once the new respirator arrives."

"I'm excited to see it! Hopefully it won't be too long; everything tends to be shipped lightning-quick, these days. I'm happy to wait."

It's a few circuits before the package for Minaiyu, with the closely-fitted respirator, arrives carried on a robot within 2 layers of plastic.

Partway through the wait for pakige, Minaiyu sets aside his typing practice.

It takes him a few more moments to bring himself to disturb the silence, but before long he says:

"So...what made you decide to volunteer, if I may ask?"

(He's aware that it's potentially a very awkward topic--after all, one of the likely answers is "I'm terminally ill, and I figured if I was going to die soon anyway I might as well make it useful"--but it seems like it might be important to know.)

"Well, I... I really haven't been finding much joy in life. I'm perfectly healthy and everything, but I don't very often feel that I really want a moment to last on forever, or that my life must continue? I am... comfortable with never feeling anything again, if that's the end of my life, and I've volunteered because I still want my life to do something good for people. And giving you the opportunity to see this world, and letting us meet you ourselves and learn from you, would be a wonderful thing for me to have done for people."

Out of habit, he makes the Tashayan gesture for "I don't have a ready response to that, please pause the conversation while I think it over". But no, she's probably not going to understand that, that one's not even mostly intercultural the way nodding your head for "yes" is...

"...huh. I, uh, I'll need to think about that, I think there's some...layers of alien implications there...

...but I think upfront I can say that...I hope things get better for you, one way or another."

(He hopes that's not...offensive, or something, to say to a melancholic (let alone an alien melancholic). He's never actually met one before: it's very rare, and almost unheard of in towns on the train grid (when it does happen, it seems to mostly be people from isolated areas).)

"This will be very new for me, so I'm spectacularly excited! Things are already getting better, truly. Maybe they'll stay better, too? If talking to a real-live alien is really what's happening to me right now!"

(So. She does indeed think that she's going to cease to exist when she dies, and she's melancholic enough to be fine with that.

It...hadn't really occurred to him that melancholy might be a reason to volunteer to risk your life, because obviously departing won't help melancholy, departing just dumps a new set of external problems on top of your internal problems, and at least with your current life you already have experience in how to cope with it...

(...is she melancholic enough to be disappointed when she departs and realises that she still exists? Even if she isn't, someone probably is. Is that more or less horrible than someone who does want to exist thinking that they're going to cease to exist? He is not sure he wants to think about it hard enough to decide.)

("Being in an external situation that's bad enough and intractable enough that you commit suicide to escape it" is a more familiar concept--Tashayan even has an idiom for it, "taking the last train out"--but...well, the way she initially described her problem sounded more fundamental, but it's possible that her situation is illegibly bad and not-very-tractable, and that's why she's trying desperate measures to improve it like going to meet an alien.)

She's called herself "happy" kind of a lot, in hindsight. For a moment there he thought perhaps she was trying to convince herself, and maybe she still is, but that second response does sound like a positive sign.

(On the other hand, Circe has said "I'm happy to do [thing]" a lot too, come to think of it. Maybe it's just a standard phrasing in Singleton Literate Language, and he shouldn't read anything into it.))

He grins at her. "It really is!"

"Maybe, in time, you can learn to speak a real alien language!" he says in Tashayan, and then translates it for her.

"It's going to be so incredible to learn an actual, real alien language! Not just one that people make up. Could you maybe teach me a sentence or two, just to get started?"

The first sentence one should learn in any language, of course, is "I don't speak [this language]."

He will also do "my name is", "where can I refill my water bottle", and--remembering a foreign amusement park he once went to--he throws in "please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times", laughing.

After the language lesson, they go back to parallel play on their respective phones for a while.

Oh, the respirator is here! He steps out in his Rekkan respirator to get it, waving at Iris.

Okay, now to switch over...

He heads out into the yard, his nervous excitement visible through the transparent faceplate.

"Here we are!

It's-- it's been a while since I've been this close to someone who wasn't wearing a hazmat suit. ...well, maybe not really that long a while, objectively, but-- it's been a lot, you know?"

"I'm not even gonna ask. So, how are you liking this place? Like the trees, and the grass?" Iris smiles to Minaiyu as he walks into the yard. "I bet you'd be a grade-A tailor for protective equipment like that, I tell you what."

He winces a little at the chastising that...was subtextual and she is an alien and she may not even have meant, but even if she didn't intend to tell him off for (at least skirting the edge of) venting at her, she would have been right to do so. She volunteered to risk exposure to his dangers physically, not mentally: she has done less than nothing to deserve it. (Especially if she's melancholic to start with.)

"It's a very cozy place!"

it would be more cozy if he were allowed to touch it

...well, at this point there's no reason not to touch the plants inside the birdcage, is there. He sits down near Iris and places a hand on the grass, smiling.

(Speaking of which, he will look around and see if the bird is available for petting. He doesn't want to interrupt it if it's taking a nap or something.)

He taps a small blue flower growing next to him. "I especially like these ones."

"Oh, quite possibly I would be! I worked at a hospital before: I definitely appreciate a good respirator, and the power of keeping people healthy."

The bird is simply walking casually around Minaiyu, not seeming to notice him much at all. Trying to pet it results in it slightly leaning in and cooing.

"You worked at a hospital, you say? I barely know anything about how health works and I've never actually done anything more than show up in a normal mask for a Pandemic Awareness Week, so I have 0 ideas about what kind of respirators there are or what would make them good. Can you teach me about it?"

Awwww, what a good birdie. A bit too big to sit in his lap, but still an excellent choice for his first alien animal to pet.

"Here, just a moment, I'll get some examples to show you."

He pops back into the house and gets his Rekkan respirator and one of the spare masks from his bag.

"So, this is a pretty ordinary day-to-day mask," he says, holding up the latter. "They're not all pastel blue like this: there's lots of colours and patterns.

It's made of melt-blown fabric rated to filter to about 99.5 parts in a hundred: that's about where the tradeoff curve falls for a basic melt-blown mask, it's not substantially harder to make a 99.5 filter than it is to make, like, 90. And here's the ring of silicone around the outer edge to help it seal to your face, and these straps go around the back of your head.

It's pretty comfy--although not quite as comfy as what I'm wearing now, admittedly--and it's relatively simple to manufacture once you have the tech level for melt-blown, plus it lets your voice through very well without having to do anything special to it. The main downsides are that it isn't very durable, and in particular it can't handle getting wet. Some people don't bother with these disposables and just get something more durable for day-to-day use, but there's something to be said for not having lost much if you damage or soil it, and for being able to give a spare mask to someone else without it being a big deal. And some people like to switch up what colours they wear for different outfits and occasions, which is easier with cheaper masks."

He holds up the respirator. "This one is part of my hospital uniform, though you'll often see similar respirators outside of hospitals too. It's got a slightly more complicated head-strap system to support the additional weight.

The filters attach to the base unit here. These filters are a bit higher-grade than the ordinary masks, missing more like three parts in ten-thousand, and these specific ones are also designed to filter out smells: there are some situations where scent can be a useful indicator, but in a lot of situations it's more of a distraction than anything else. Plus it makes it very obvious whether your respirator has sprung a leak: if you can't smell anything, you know you're good.

Inside the faceplate here, there would normally be a glasses mount--I'm a bit nearsighted--but right now I've stuck my glasses mount into the respirator I'm actually wearing instead. You can also get a custom-made faceplate with a built-in corrective lens, but it's more expensive, and you won't be able to, like, let a family member borrow your respirator if theirs has broken, and it's more of a pain to replace if your vision changes and you need a new lens...and, uh, as we're seeing here, it potentially means not having a glasses mount on hand to stick in a respirator you borrow. I'd been thinking about maybe getting a custom one anyway, but I hadn't decided yet, and it sure does seem to have worked out for the best that my respirator's corrective lenses were more portable.

Over here--" indicating a sort of cartridge on the chin "--is where it catches breath condensation: you don't want that building up in the main mouth area. There's an antimicrobial lining on the inside, to discourage anything growing in there in case you don't get a chance to clean it quickly enough.

And this--" a circle on the front of the mouth area "--is the speech diaphragm, which makes your voice less muffled. Older or low-end models don't have these, but they're standard in hospitals these days because they give you more options for communication: like, you don't want to have to sign to someone while you're doing surgery, you know? Not that I'm a surgeon, but still, sometimes you have your hands full or your back turned.

Some models have induction ports that let you stick a straw in to drink, but not this one. I normally just go outside for water breaks when I'm at the hospital."

"And as for appreciating a good respirator, like...one time, we had a patient who had come in because of a growth in his mouth, so he spent a lot of time maskless while we were investigating, and we figured out hours later that he was also coming down with influenza† of all things. Apparently he'd recently been on a trip to Mentath††, and they're struggling with animal reservoirs. Anyway, uh, that could have been a disaster, but everyone around him was wearing a respirator and nobody contracted it.

Even when stuff like that doesn't happen, it's a comfort to know that you'll be protected if it does."

---

†He thinks the SLL word he's using actually means something more like "influenza-like illness", but it'll do for the time being.

††Oh hey, the additional phonemes from the sourceless-semantic-bleedover mean he can actually pronounce this now! No need to approximate with "Mentaf"!

"Wow, hearing all that was really fun! I bet the PPE tailors are going to think you're super-cool, and there are probably tons of cool ideas from your world we haven't heard about yet." She smiles at him. "You said you were working at a hospital, right? Do you think you'd want to see inside one of ours some day?"

"Yeah, I'd love that. Well--" he laughs a little, slightly awkwardly "--not as a patient, of course, but...maybe, when things have settled down, it might still be possible for me to become a paramedic someday after all.

I wouldn't want to become a hospital apprentice again yet, even if the interplanetary disease risk were taken care of. I'd still want to focus my work efforts on archiving and translating the alien books I had with me: it's an important job, and right now I'm in a better position than anyone else in the world to do it. But we're making good progress: one day there'll be multiple copies of my books in this world, and multiple people fluent in Tashayan, and then I won't be so critical to that project anymore."

He smiles. "In the meantime, I think I'll do encyclopedia articles on protective equipment for my next batch of translations, maybe see what cool things the PPE tailors can find in them. And-- oh, I should scan in that book on the history of rubber I got a couple months ago and haven't read yet, I bet there's some stuff about protective equipment in there."

"Learning from a genuine alien civilization is going to be so fantastic!" Iris slowly strokes the bird. "That said... do you think you'd be comfortable letting me into your house later today? Of course, I'll stay in the upper floor until you feel comfortable risking getting sick by me, but it's starting to feel a bit awkward to be sitting out here on the grass."

Uh.

"Hmm..." he says, because he still can't actually communicate his meaning by making the give-me-some-time-to-think gesture. (Part of him wonders if he should teach it to her.)

"...what's the plan for, like, where you're going to sleep while you find out whether you're incubating anything dangerous?"

"...the plan was actually for me to sleep in the second story of your house after I've spent most of the day out here with you, but if that's not comfortable on your end, I can get a very nice sleeping bag and tent and sleep out here with the bird. Eventually, I'd be flown out and tested at a real quarantine facility, but then you'd never know if you would be safe around us, would you?"

Aliens.

"...I guess when they said we would do exposure from you to me later, I don't think they technically specified that it would be at least one expected-incubation-period later, even though for all practical purposes doing two exposures within one incubation period is effectively doing them at the same time.

...the important thing, for the medium term, isn't whether it's fully safe for me to be exposed to you: the important thing is whether sustainable sanitation practices are sufficient to protect me from you. If local microbiota are so dangerous that even wearing this respirator and showering when I go back inside is enough exposure to kill me, it makes sense to go ahead and find that out now before the loneliness does any more psychological damage to me." He'd never be alone again, after that. "If I can interact with the world by...the kinds of measures I'd take if I were a mildly-to-moderately immunodeficient person interacting with fellow Rekkans, if I can go out in your towns as long as I'm wearing this respirator, if I can hug people as long as I shower at the end of the day, it's not urgent to find out whether that's still overkill. It's especially not urgent enough to risk the only fluent Tashayan speaker on the planet, when we haven't had time to fully train up new translators yet."

(It's dawning on him, in horror, that thus far he's focused on preserving knowledge of Tashayan such that they can understand alien writing. Speaking should be pretty intuitive from there--the Tashayan alphabet is pretty much phonetic--but he's done essentially nothing with signing, and if he departs at this point they're going to lose an entire modality. He places "make a signing dictionary of those top five hundred words, and record demonstrations of some basic grammar" at the top of his mental to-do list, just above translating the PPE articles.)

"...are any of the other quarantine suites unoccupied? Can you live nearby for a while, and I come and spend a few circuits each day with you? Breathing on you," he gestures at the respirator valve, "and touching your things, and still having a home of my own to go back to at the end of the day?"

"They are available, yes. But walking over with what you might have is a risk I don't want to impose on others; I'm happy to be outside, here, and then fly off to be tested after some time to let anything you could have given me incubate. I think you're underestimating how nice a tent and sleeping bag could be, for me; I'm happy to be here for just the few days it'd take to see whether anything harmful happens when exposed to you."

He feels like he's floundering a bit.

"...yeah, that's true, it makes sense to keep things inside the birdcage right now," he says. "I can spend a while each day hanging out in your tent, then, practising a level of exposure-from-my-perspective that I could later sustain while..." he looks distant, remembering the person who came to collect the sample "...seeing the world, if exposure-from-your-perspective does turn out not to be an issue."

"...maybe we should take some time off from each other, then? I have a phone, and I'm in the mood for some reading on it by myself now." She starts sitting on the ground, tapping on her phone. "And you can keep transmitting your culture into ours."

That feels like something that might have alien subtext (offended that he doesn't want her in his house?), but given the more overt text it doesn't seem like a good idea to ask right now.

"Okay."

He gives the bird one more pat, then heads back inside, doffs his gear, showers, and settles in to make a basic signing dictionary.

Eventually, a slow flying drone comes by, releasing a package about half as big as the woman in a glider that slowly descends in a small circle. It has a very large and thick sleeping bag inside of it, together with a tent big enough to stand in and big enough to probably fit 8 or so people in it if they were cramped together. The woman assembles the tent and lays out the sleeping bag, before waving at Minaiyu and retiring to it for the rest of the day.

He waves back.

hopefully he hasn't offended her too badly

He's more accustomed to tents and sleeping bags that are optimising for being lightweight, the better for carrying in a backpack. He wonders how much cozier you can make a sleeping bag if you aren't particularly trying to keep the weight down.

With his evening meal, he tries a vegetable on which the sourceless-semantic-bleedover translation is intriguingly fuzzy. The term...feels like it's some sort of brassica? It doesn't seem to be connecting to any more specific concept in his mind.

It turns out to be sort of like tiny, bite-sized cabbages. It's pretty good!

(Are all cabbages tiny here? No, "cabbage" seems to have a separate word.)

He dreams that night of riding a larger version of the bird through the forest. It never becomes plot-relevant what level of protective equipment he's wearing.

The day after, Minaiyu can see the woman watching something on her phone right outside the tent and waving at him after he wakes up. "Are you thinking you'll mostly be doing translation stuff today, or will you be doing some different stuff as well?"

"I was thinking of spending some time doing crafts with some of the plants in the clearing? Nothing serious: just playing around with some knotwork and weaving and so forth. I think that would be fun." And a good way to start adjusting to the idea of handling alien objects out in the world.

"Well, I know nothing about crafts, so... can I see you pick up some plants, and see you working with them? We really don't do crafts for fun much, so it'd be really new for me to see what it's like."

He grins. "Absolutely! I'll be out soon."

He goes and does his morning grooming (in hindsight, he probably should have gone ahead and gotten that facial-hair electrolysis he's been considering; oh well, at least he has an emergency thattha in his bag if it ever comes down to it, and the Thomassians have very nice razors), then heads out into the yard.

Hmm, what to try first...

...oh, there's a twig with a Y shape! Maybe he can use that as a tiny loom...

He picks out a particularly long blade of grass and starts making a warp out of it.

He almost takes another blade of grass for the weft, but...hmm...

Maybe he can use some flower stalks instead. And instead of trying to find something long enough to go back and forth across multiple rows (while still having enough flexibility), he'll try using a separate flower stalk each time, a flower on every row...

--he's broken the warp. Well, that's alright, there's more grass available...

He's more careful on the second attempt, and successfully weaves a little scrap of flower-cloth.

He beams at Iris.

She's more confused than anything else. "It seems like it'd take a vast amount of time to get anything made? But the strange things you're doing make me curious to see the final outcome!"

"Oh, I'm not optimising for speed here, I'm just enjoying the process.

I think this one's done, actually." He pokes the base of the Y into the ground, so that the loom sticks up.

He looks at it contemplatively. "Although I might wrap something around the base, decorate it a little more."

Iris keeps her eye attentively on what Minaiyu is doing.

He'll uproot the twig for the time being, to make it easier to work with.

He takes a couple more blades of grass and a dandelion-like flower. He nestles the flower into the space where the Y just starts to branch, before the flower-cloth begins. The stem of the flower hangs down against the base of the twig.

He wraps each grass blade (one layer at a time) around the twig and flower stem, binding the flower into place. He tucks in the ends, to help the grass stay on.

Then, he replants the twig.

"...do you know how clothes like the ones you wore on your home planet are made normally? Here, we have pretty magical robots that do the sewing together, and all the fabric gets made on ludicrously huge machines. I've seen the first thing first-hand, but only the second one in pictures."

"Oh, we have machines for that too, have for...probably a little over two hundred years, I think? I'm pretty sure it was one of the earlier things Amethyst Brightpath and her crew figured out how to replicate from her homeworld: it would have been a high priority, since cloth-making is so important and so time-consuming by hand.

I happen to enjoy making clothing by hand, personally, but you don't really need to gain much experience with weaving if you don't want to: I think pretty much every kid will try it out at some point to see if they like it, but most don't stick with it.

Spinning is more important because, like...places where hand looms would be useful generally already have them: if hand-weaving would be a useful skill for you where you end up, your host probably already knows how and can teach you then, and they'll know more about the intricacies of how to get the most out of the exact kind of loom that's common where they live. But lots of places get stuck in the local-optimum of using drop spindles and would find spinning wheels very useful if only they knew about them.

Even then, though, you don't have to do spinning much on Rekka these days, just enough that you're able to if you need to.

...sorry, a lot of what I just said doesn't make sense to someone who doesn't know how afterlives work, does it."

"And for someone who really only knows the basics of textiles, too! But I think anything gets interesting if it's explained by someone who really cares."

He's a little surprised, now that he's thinking about it, that she's not more weirded out by the metaphysical implications of what he said.

...on the other hand, she's talking to an otherworlder right now, so maybe she's just figuring that Rekka has had alien portals of its own.

Hmm. She's clearly not distressed about thinking her existence is time-limited, and they were already in the middle of something, so he supposes he will add it to the queue for when they're done with the current conversation.

He can infodump about historical clothing for quite a while, if she's interested.

At one point, he mentions that with some materials and hand tools he could show her how to build a spinning wheel. This is only partly because it's really cool, and partly because the poor woman must be in desperate need of some technological-bootstrapping training, if she's spent this whole time thinking that this is her only life.

...how many people have departed this world since he arrived, and how many of them knew they were dying, such that they could have at least crammed the basics

...yeah, he really does need to look into actively getting the word out on this, huh. He's not quite sure where to start. Maybe he'll start by asking his contact at the Limited Written Sources archive, who has probably read Minaiyu's translation of the encyclopedia article on walk-ins.

(He sure does keep noticing tasks that are more urgent than providing the Thomassians with information about Rekkan PPE, for comparison with their own tech. He hopes things settle down enough soon that he can get around to uploading that history-of-rubber book.)

"I wasn't aware that it could be done with such simple tools, that's genuinely amazing! I'm excited to see what the end results look like, it's probably going to be charmingly crude. We'd need to get the tools needed sent down to us, right? I was going to order a bit more stuff, so it'd fit perfectly into the order I was going to make anyway."

"The kinds of spinning wheel I could build by myself are a lot slower than full mechanisation, and that's especially true for the simplest, quickest-to-make ones, but it's still handy if your alternatives are drop spindles or handhelds. I do know things about how to build mechanised spinners, but it's not a one-person project."

He mentally plays out the building process and lists off supplies: work gloves, wood of roughly these shapes and sizes and ideally of these hardness levels, a saw, nails, a wood file or some sandpaper, some cord, fibres to test the spinning wheel with...

"...hmm, although if we're just doing a relatively quick and basic demonstration, we might want to repurpose a pre-made wheel? Last year my friend made one out of a tricycle wheel: that was pretty neat.

If we do that, we can remove...let's see...these bits of wood; we'll still need the others."

"Well, that... I'm excited to try that. I'll order it with my next shipment, although I'm not sure they're fast enough to find a wheel; the next shipment is supposed to come in, like, 3 circuits. It'd need to be sent in tomorrow, I'm thinking."

"That works!"

His stomach growls.

"I think it's time I head in for a while, get some food and all that?"

"What did you like to eat in your old world? Are you curious about trying something similar from here, maybe?"

"I liked...oatmeal with cardamom, and wraps with chicken and roasted peppers, and mashed potatoes mixed with cheese and stuffed back into the potato skins and baked, and smoked salmon, and dried apple chips, and sweetened yogurt with blueberries and pop-amaranth in it, and pistachios coated in carob..."

He stretches, trying to shake off a little of the false-tiredness.

"I, uhh. Am extremely unfamiliar with almost all of those foods! My plan is to just get a pizza, really. I guess we could sort-of eat together, separated by the glass? If that'd make you less lonely."

He smiles. "I'd like that.

A pizza is a...cheesy flatbread? That sounds promising."

"As for Tashayan cuisine...well, I'm not much into cooking, myself-- that job was mostly done by my...professional parent? I don't think that word is quite right...'adoptive uncle', maybe...anyway, most of those things are simple enough that I wouldn't have trouble making them if I had ingredients and a kitchen. Oatmeal I could probably even do in the microwave.

I bought pre-smoked salmon and pre-carob-covered pistachios from the grocery store, though.

I've definitely noticed that local restaurants use wheat in a lot of the places where we would use amaranth. Is popped wheat a thing?"

"That sounds impossible to me! You can do it with corn, and... it's very good at taking on the flavors of other stuff. I wasn't aware that amaranth could take the place of wheat; they really seem like such radically different ingredients, to me."

"Hmm, I wonder if popped corn would work well with yogurt and berries. Might need to chop it up or something, since corn kernels are so much bigger...

You might be thinking of amaranth leaves? You can also grind up the seeds and make flour out of them.

I ate a lot of pancakes my first few days here, when I was more nervous about whether our digestive systems were compatible; they didn't say what kind of flour the pancakes were made out of, and it turned out to be wheat, while back home if you don't specify what kind of flour you used for something it's generally amaranth."

"Can you make puffy, rising dough with it? I feel like making flour from seeds would be so complicated and slow and expensive... I'm probably going to learn about all these new kinds of food. I'm looking forward to it, huh."

"It's not really puffy the way that wheat bread is, no.

I wouldn't expect mass-producing wheat flour to be much easier than mass-producing amaranth flour? I guess that, all else equal, it would probably be easier to sift bits of sand out of a batch of grain if the grains are larger, but I think it's mostly a matter of what you've designed your equipment around.

Come to think of it, I do have a spare copy of my family's recipe collection on my, uh, phone, so that should be a good start for making alien food." He grins.

Eventually, the food arrives for both of them, carried by a robot under a layer of plastic foil, together with some additional supplies for Iris. She sets up a folding chair and awkwardly eats some of her pizza, looking at Minaiyu through the large window as she eats.

"It's a *bit* oilier than I'd like, but not bad, and I think it's got a lot of promise: there are probably other pizzas out there that I'll love," he signs.

...not that he actually needs to sign, come to think of it: sound carries pretty well through this wall. But he's accustomed to signing through transparent separators when eating alongside people he isn't breath-bonded to, and it seems that habit has kicked in.

Well, there's no reason not to sign, he supposes. (Except maybe that it requires putting the pizza down, but speech would require not talking while his mouth is full, so it's kind of a wash.)

She signs back. I'm glad you like it! Are you thinking you'll be staying inside all day transcribing stuff, or are you thinking of getting outside to get some sun and relax with the bird?

"I'm not planning to stay inside the *whole* day, but I'm also not planning to come back outside right away: I'll do some indoor work next, and go out in the afternoon.

...I think the next thing I should do is figure out how to get the news out about where people's minds go when they die. I haven't been focusing on that, I figured researchers would find out when they studied my books and word would spread from there once they'd done the tests to show it was true--or, well, the tests that *can* be done from here, without any dead people's spirits around--but...people are dying, right now, at any given time, and they'd be making different decisions around how to spend their final circuits on this world if they knew what would happen next."

Tests? Like what? Did people from your world find out by people dying and managing to be reborn back in your world after dying again? I can be very sure that we'd know if that had ever happened here.

Wait, did he tell her already-- right, he mentioned Amethyst's "homeworld" and then indicated that this had something to do with afterlives, that's enough for her to get as far as "people end up in other worlds when they die".

"It's not unheard of for people to be reborn back on Rekka† after dying again, though it's very rare in humans: that mostly happens with fae††. And it usually takes millennia for people to turn up again when it does happen; though there's one known case of someone landing back on Rekka without any other lives in-between, and that one had 'only' been...about three hundred years, I think it was.

I think the *main* reason we know is that..."

...she's probably thinking of walk-ins as...being like him, that's her example of how people arrive from other worlds, and she has no information to say otherwise...

"...so, uh, I should clarify: when people die, they wake up in...well, *almost* always a different world...*inside the body* of a local. The local person is still there: they share the body.

So sometimes people get possessed, and the possessing spirits can tell you all about their previous lives, can speak alien languages as complex as your own, and sometimes they know things that their host couldn't possibly have known, even if the host were creative enough to make a whole language from scratch. Sometimes they know that you can kill waterborne plagues by boiling the water before you drink it. Sometimes--rarely, but sometimes, and it happened to us about 210 years ago--they know how to build functional steam engines.

We learned a lot from her, about automated looms and railroads and tricycles and a bunch of other things. And we realised: any of our children might grow up to be like her someday. You won't *always* be in a position to do what she did: you might end up in a hunter-gatherer band with a technology gap too large to cross in one lifetime, you--" he laughs, and gestures around him "--might potentially end up somewhere that already knows, but every person who could have learned how to build a steam engine and didn't is a tragedy on a potentially global scale. If not in their second life, then perhaps their third, or their fourth.

And, uh, the tests that you could do *here*...you couldn't prove what *happens* to dead spirits, not without examples, but you could prove spirits *exist*, and that makes it easier to believe that the *rest* of my information about spirits is true, if that part was.

Species above a certain threshold of...intelligence, mental complexity, develop spirits. I'm not sure if the species here are *precisely* the same in the ways that matter for this, but back home...dogs don't have spirits but we suspect that's not by a large margin, ravens do have spirits, elephants, apes, parrots, dolphins...

Animals without spirits react differently to brain damage than people and smarter animals do. There's this...gradient of cognitive impairment, instead of the binary 'you're fine or you're comatose' that people have, because they don't have spirits that can compensate for small amounts of damage but can't stay in a brain that's damaged more heavily. It's more than just 'their audio processors were damaged and they can't hear you very well anymore and that's why they don't come when they're called', more than just 'they're in chronic pain now and that's why they're acting strangely': their *minds themselves* are damaged. And the same with less permanent disruptions to brain function: you can keep a mouse...at least a Rekkan mouse, for all I know your mice are different...on deliriants for *weeks* and it will often bounce back afterwards, you don't have that three-to-five-day window to get them off the drugs before the strain snaps their brain-spirit connection."

---

†he uses the Tashayan sign for the planet: the local sign of course doesn't have a word, and its meaning should be obvious from context

††also a Tashayan loanword

Well, I know a bit about brains and brain damage, just from casual reading. I'm quite convinced that people would find out and tell me if souls mean some animals get hit by brain damage differently! But it's abundantly clear that brains and minds are made of nothing but what we can see; it just doesn't happen that people magically switch from unharmed to comatose, the damage from the hits they take slowly builds up just like it does in every other animal.

"...they don't? It does?

Uh, I mean-- you're saying that brain-damaged" people? "humans can become...say..." what are some things that happened in the lesser-animal brain studies "...forgetful, or aggressive, or indecisive, even when they're not in pain and just being distracted by that, or maybe in ways stronger than what distraction-by-pain could cause? There are changes to their *minds*, and not just their senses or their motor abilities? You can feed humans deliriants for ten days and they wake up okay afterwards?"

Yes, that's exactly true. Minds get hurt just according to how brains get hurt, and people recover perfectly from extreme doses of deliriants, at least the kinds we're comfortable using on them today.

"I...

...it's not that I expect you to lie to me, and it seems like a weird thing to be wrong about, and I'm sorry, but for something this important I think I need to go read some other sources on this. *Before* trying to get the word out, on something that...might not...be true of people here."

(...he's not sure if he'd rather they be people or not. Being surrounded by non-conscious automatons for the rest of his life sounds pretty bad, but if there's a world full of sapient beings who (presumably?) cease to exist when they die--)

(--and if they don't have souls, they can't generate walk-ins, probably can't host them either, and that's why this world was cut off from the rest of the multiverse before he got here. There...oh fuck, there's no telling how many worlds like this one are out there, uncontacted, how many soulless people are living and dying and ceasing to be, and this world managed to industrialise unaided but it must be harder on your own and somewhere out there is a society of soulless people having a cholera epidemic and losing their very existences over something that would have been so easy to prevent if they'd known how--)

--okay, no, he should not follow this train of thought too far yet, he does not have a good enough grasp on the situation to know how horrifying it is, he is going to go do Internet research on neurology and also life-extension tech.

Researching neurology confirms Iris' claims; there's an intimate relationship between the mind and the brain, among all animals, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent. Looking up life-extension tech reveals a few different kinds of anti-aging medicines with relatively gentle effects; it's still enough that they're widely available, given out by life-longevity insurance companies. Cryonics, invented half a century ago, seems to be considered much more of a life-extension technology.

Huh.

They can preserve dead brains, with enough fidelity that they think they'll be able to read off the brainprint once that part of the tech catches up, and because their brainprints are them...

...there's still hope for them.

or, well, the ones who died on this particular planet within the past half-century that is maybe too big to even properly form emotions about, and anyway it's probably for the best if he doesn't have emotions about it

(He's not sure how he would tell whether they're people or not, but treating them like they're people when they're not fails a lot safer than treating them like they're not people when they are. And they sure do act like people: alien people, yes, but people.)

It doesn't seem like it will help anything to encourage them to train in technological bootstrapping, after all. He'll still show her how to build a spinning wheel, though. It's still really cool.

He uploads the book on the history of rubber, works on translating the encyclopedia article on respirators for a while, eats another slice of pizza (he finds that he actually likes the texture of the cheese more after it's been cooled and then microwaved), then suits up again and goes out into the yard.

"Hi!

I'm, uh, feeling significantly less existential horror about you not having souls after finding out about cryonics? Not, like, no existential horror, but-- I'm very glad to hear that you're in the process of building your own afterlife, given that you apparently didn't come with one natively. And it's fascinating how your afterlife-building method relies on soullessness to work, the way you've taken your vulnerability and twisted it around--

--I wonder if there are medical treatments that we can't use back home because they're too toxic to souls. If there were, like, a drug that vastly reduced arterial plaque buildup but also crossed the blood-brain barrier and made you delirious for the first two weeks until your brain adjusted to it, I guess we wouldn't know."

"Yes, that's true. But I think there's something that feels really right about souls not being a totally separate thing, right? Because then you can learn everything there is to know about brains only studying brains of animals, and you don't have souls that are a totally different thing that you also have to think about."

"...I would say 'but how do you become self-aware', but actually there are other species with souls and none of them become self-aware, so I suppose it's baffling either way."

He looks thoughtful, then concerned, then thoughtful again.

"...I'll have to study up on Thomassian medicine whether I end up going back into the medical field or not, in order to know which treatments to avoid if they become relevant to me."

The bird--which is not ensouled and, unrelatedly, not self-aware--settles down onto the ground near him. He runs his hand gently along its back.

(Maybe he should give it a name, since he is increasingly getting the sense that it's going to end up as his pet.

It occurs to him that if he named it Rellakri, everyone would find the name unusual and exotic. He smiles at the thought, amused.)

"Which treatments to avoid? I'm not sure how it'd be possible for you to tell. If we've never tried anything on someone with a soul, how could anyone have any idea if the soul interferes somehow? What did you learn about which treatments to avoid in your world?"

"It's possible there'll be completely unexpected interactions, but, like, with that toy example of a medication that treats heart disease in the long term but makes you delirious at first, the danger there is very clear. There might be real examples sort of like that, things where the side effects are obviously not something I could survive or at least obviously very questionable as to whether I could survive it.

...off the top of my head, general anesthesia might be an area where you'd have a broader variety of drugs than we do, and more willingness to resort to using them? You're not always guaranteed to have a three-day window to get someone off a disruptor before it kills them: sometimes it kills you quickly, and different drugs vary on how high that chance is, so we try to find ones that keep the chance as low as feasible. We think it's that disruption causes longer-term brain damage sometimes; maybe it's a form of brain damage you're willing to tolerate, like something that slowly heals up over months or only makes you forget the previous week or something."

"We have an incredible variety of general anesthesia drugs, actually! We've come up with lots of them that are incredibly safe and predictable for people to use, and that they wake up from as quickly as they can. We take pain incredibly seriously, so we've gotten incredibly good at doing things as pain-free as possible. We don't think they cause much brain damage at all, at this point. But that's only on people without souls, again..."

"Well, it seems like a good sign that you've been able to optimise for wearing off quickly and not having aftereffects, at least.

I guess there's nothing for it but to read up on Thomassian anesthetics, maybe compare them to Rekkan medications, and do my best to figure things out. And ideally avoid needing surgery in the first place.

And, like...I'd like to stick around for a long time. I like what I've seen of this world so far," other than the existential horror, "and it would suck to have to leave before I've had a chance to teach you what I can about Rekka, and I like my original body" other than the novel microbes it's carrying "and it's nice not to have to negotiate with anyone on when and how to use it. But I could, uh--" he laughs a little "--live with dying, if I had to.

...I wonder, do soulless human minds ever share bodies? Even if you don't count walk-ins--uh, that's the word for dead people who are possessing living people--Rekkans are born that way sometimes: twin-souled bodies are about as common as separate-bodied twins."

"How would that ever be possible without a soul? The brain is the only reason people feel like they are anything at all; every thought and feeling and sense of self come from and are people's brains! At least you're happy about what life is like here, even though you haven't seen much more than the house you're in right now. Seeing everything else we have to see must be something you're full of excitement for!"

It feels too soon for excitement, when he doesn't even know if he'll ever see it in-person or just through pictures.

(The bird leans its head against him, cooing happily. He doesn't think it was intentionally trying to convey "even if you end up having to stay in quarantine, at least you have me", but nevertheless it has a point. He smiles at it.)

"What would you recommend I see first?"

"I think one of the big cities, or their huge transport systems, or some of our massive dams getting people power and water. And while you're still just here, in this suburb, you can get a chance to see all the things we do to take good care of moms and dads."

"I saw a big city in a Thomassian movie, my first night here. It looked so strange, like some kind of alien hive-- well, I suppose it was alien. It'll be interesting to see up close how much of it was real."

(...the future tense kind of slipped out there. Well, if it comes down to it he supposes he could probably remote-control a camera drone or something.)

Can he see from here whether there are any solar panels on his roof? There don't seem to be any ground-mounted ones in the clearing.

There are no solar panels to be seen anywhere, as a matter of fact, and he can't recall seeing them on anything else, either.

If only he had books about modern electrical gridcraft. It's probably going to turn out that the encyclopedia doesn't have enough information to reconstruct it, like with mesh nodes. He'll just have to tell them the starting points from the bootstrapping training and let them figure it out from there.

"...massive dams getting people power? Is that still the norm here?

--sorry, that maybe came out sounding more insulting than I meant, and hydroelectricity has its uses even now, but, uh, it's really bad to rely on long-distance transmission lines for, like...anything vital or uninterruptible, anything where your life would grind to a halt if you didn't have it."

He rubs the wristband on his emergency distress signal, wondering what would happen if the power went out on his phone charger and backup camera.

he doesn't even have a pantry

"There's quite an extreme level of redundancy, and we have near-perfect uptime? There hasn't been a situation where grid issues made life grind to a halt for very many decades, at this point. Hospitals have their own on-site generators, still; but close to everyone else can handle the infinitesimal chances of significant outages on our grid."

'Many decades' is not a long enough track record. His grid's track record of not getting destroyed by solar flares is 72 years long. But it isn't 73.

"...how hardened is your grid against electromagnetic pulses? What's the strongest solar flare it's withstood--uh, the language implant doesn't stretch far enough to let me understand classification-system jargon on that, I guess the most intuitive way to measure would be how close to the equator the auroras got--and do they have solid reasons to think it can withstand worse?

...I guess you might not know the answers to those, if you don't have the legacy of the Blackout impressing its importance onto everyone. That might be specialist knowledge, here."

"I absolutely have no idea about that first question of yours! Certainly, I don't know of any pulse causing significant damage for the many decades we've had our modern grid; there were some spots where issues happened 130 years ago, which I was told was the last time we've had any problem because of solar flares."

He nods. "I'll have to look into it, see what we can learn from each other on that.

Uh, I should explain: 72 years ago--I guess I'm not sure if our years are quite the same length, but anyway--there was a massive solar flare that pretty much destroyed our whole grid. We...we were lucky, really, to be at pretty much the ideal tech level at the time to learn the lessons that the Sylian Flare had to teach: we used electricity enough for it to drive home how important a problem this is, but not enough for the loss to be crippling. We had no idea this was a risk before it happened, and we were very aware, in the aftermath, that if we'd had a couple more decades of electrification first we would have been extremely screwed.

It's the large-scale equipment that blows, long-distance transmission lines and high-power transformers and not, like, your phone, so...while we've done some work on making the large-scale equipment more robust, and maybe we would be able to rely solely on that and it would be fine, most of the work we've done on it was about how to need large-scale equipment as little as possible. My house back home has a backup grid connection, but most days we get all our power from our own solar panels, feeding into our own batteries. If we lived in an area with colder winters, we would have a geothermal heating system, and most of the backup grid plants that supply power when you need an extra boost are geothermal. There are some dams, I think mostly feeding their power into factories and stuff built nearby."

"It's impressive that you managed to get solar panels to work. Ours are quite terrible, and there are sadly just too few places with good geothermal potential for us to exploit. We used to have dams just feeding nearby demands, but of course, with time there were more and more demands so the dams sent their energy ever further. We do have nuclear energy, if there isn't a dam available, but there aren't many places tempting enough to make us build where there isn't a dam available."

"It wasn't feasible for me to learn all the complexities of a solar-based system as a non-specialist, but I did get some basics: we knew I might end up living in a world that needed them, someday. I'll write them down and upload them after I go back inside.

As for geothermal potential, I think part of it is that you don't need the geothermal sites to be super high-quality, necessarily: you can do geothermal all sorts of places, it's just that some will give less power than others. Maybe you need certain designs in order to expand the range of places that will suffice, I'm not sure.

'Nuclear' energy?"

"Yes, energy coming from nuclear reactions and mass-energy conservation, rather than chemical reactions! It's stupendously, mind-bendingly powerful, as both an explosive and an energy source; unfortunately, you can only practically make relatively big power plants, so it can't be put into cars or anything like that, it would have to be in a gigantic cruise or cargo ship. But it doesn't release air pollution and enough nuclear fuel to fit into a pot can fuel gigantic cargo ships for entire decades!"

He furrows his brow, peering at the semantic bleedover.

"Like the way that stars burn?"

"You must have realized that stars don't burn like coal does, and they use a form of nuclear energy, yes, but that's a different kind from the nuclear energy we use today. You would absolutely know what a nuclear bomb was if you had invented them, so clearly you never figured out how to use nuclear energy like how we use it."

"Yeah, I've heard of stellar fusion, and I was getting a sense that that was sort of the thing but not quite right.

I can't say I have a very good grasp of what kinds of explosives we have: it's not really my area. It doesn't sound familiar, though."

"The largest explosion we've ever made was as big as it'd be if we used tens of millions of tons of traditional explosives, and it was done using a bomb somewhat taller than me while being around 4 times my length. It was done for learning rather than any practical purpose, but we have made many, many reservoirs and changed the course of rivers using similar kinds of explosions, so nuclear technology has really been the backbone of how we get our energy."

"Huh."

He's not sure what to make of that. It's hard to wrap his head around.

He spends a while longer petting the bird and doing a bit more playing around with grass-weaving and the like, then heads inside to type up what he knows about how to build decentralised-solar power systems. He sets aside the respirator translation-work for a bit, in favour of doing the article on the Blackout.

He doesn't shower after going inside, just washes his hands and changes his clothes and washes his hands again. He saves the shower for late in the evening, after going outside again and lying on his back in the clearing to observe the alien stars.

The shower gives him the sense of having a bathhouse to himself: as he walks around, showerheads in the ceiling spray him with an even, powerful rush of water, with the water temperature changing on a dime if he turns the dial built into the wall. Steam fills the space, and the edge of the tub works as a place for Minaiyu to sit. The sink and a changing table, currently folded away, are both beneath the shower area that takes up the entire bathroom outside the small toilet tucked behind a sliding door.

He still takes a moment, whenever he comes in here, to be grateful that he landed somewhere with good plumbing.

(It is a little weird having the shower area be so big, but he supposes that's what you get from a quarantine facility's shower. He's getting used to it.)

It occurs to him to wonder, now, how far away they're piping the water from.

Minaiyu gets the supplies needed to put together his spinning wheel the day after. He'll also notice that Iris has started setting up more tents in the backyard of his house.

He steps outside, heading over towards the spinning-wheel supplies.

"Hello, Iris! Hello, birdie!"

"I'm thinking of naming you Rellakri," he says to the bird. "What do you think?"

The bird does not particularly react to this prospect.

"Yeah, I didn't think you would mind."

Iris looks over at Minaiyu.
"I'll want to set things up for staying out here for the long run, I think, until you become more comfortable with me. Now, I'm going to have fun seeing you put together and set up the spinning wheel!"

He goes through the supplies, making sure everything is in place.

"What do you have in mind for, like, which tents are for which things?

Oh, uh, do you want any help with tent setup before I move on to doing this?"

(...he hopes the extra tents weren't too expensive. Maybe the Novel Illness Team is comping her for them.)

"Well, right now I'm turning the first tent into a dedicated bedroom tent, and setting up a separate bath and bathroom tent, and a living room tent. I don't think I'd need any more than that, and there isn't even more tent for you to help me set up at this point."

Oh, oops, she's done already.

He nods, trying not to feel too awkward.

It's faster with a pre-made trike wheel. He's done before sunset.

It looks sort of like this:

He tries drafting some test fibres--

--hmm, needs some more lubricant, and a slight adjustment here...

...and it works!

Iris looks at Minaiyu spinning with intense curiosity. "About how good is the fiber, and how fast do you make it? Would you say?"

"Honestly, it's hard to give a good answer to that. It varies so much by skill level, plus I would need time to get used to the quirks of this wheel and the quirks of these fibres.

I've done some weaving with yarn from Teludi--that's my friend who made the tricycle spinning wheel--and hers is fantastic quality. I'm definitely not at her level, though I do enough spinning to be moderately competent at it."

"I feel like spinning by hand would get boring quick? So I doubt I'd do it enough to get very good. Seeing the wheel set up makes me so incredibly grateful for how much fabric industrial technology lets me, and everyone else, have."

"It can be soothing in the right frame of mind, for some people more than others.

But yeah, you really don't want to have to rely on this sort of thing for all of your fabric. We learn this as a stepping stone, and a sort of...proof of concept? If you demonstrably know things about improved cloth-making techniques, people are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt when you ask for help building a cloth factory. And if you're in a situation where you're struggling to get help building a cloth factory, well, at least you have a spinning wheel now and that's better than nothing."

"Right, that makes total sense... I manage to always forget the reincarnation in new worlds thing. Are there any clothes you're wanting to get? Or are you happy with everything and just spin because it's soothing?"

"I could start over on the robe I was working on back home, but...it was going to be a gift, and I can't give it to them now."

his friends and family will never know what happened to him, and that's so much worse than knowing for certain that he's gone to another world and they'll never see him again

"I think it will take some time for me to settle on what major craft project to do next. Maybe I'll do some small bits of yarnwork just for fun: I've been starting to miss that."

He looks contemplative for a bit, then smiles.

"I could make a little hat for Rellakri. Probably it wouldn't keep the hat on very long. It would be cute, though."

"Oh my god, a cute hat for the bird, that's so fantastic! Having one of those coming from your own hands would be so impossibly cute!"

He grins.

"It's a plan, then."

He settles in to do some more spinning.

Nothing interrupts him; he's free to spin, pet the bird, transcribe and read about thomassia all he likes. Iris eventually lets him know that she's to be tested and observed, and if no ill effect comes to her, he'll be considered to have finished his quarantine. And the phone call comes: Iris was completely fine, so everyone else would probably also be completely fine around Minaiyu, and he is officially no longer quarantined and free to go anywhere he wants.

It's going to be okay.

It...doesn't quite feel real.

But that feeling will come with time, he thinks.

He paces around his living room for a bit, then realises that there's nothing stopping him from going on a walk in the forest trails. The phone has a satellite-based geolocation system, so he doesn't need to worry about getting lost.

After that, he settles in to figure out what things will look like in the medium term.

He's welcome to continue living in the quarantine facility as long as he likes, and to keep the bird. He will have to pay rent (and pet food), but he's providing a very valuable service to Thomassian society by obtaining and translating alien books, and the pay will easily cover it.

(He does suspect he'll end up moving sometime in the next few years, but he'll need to experience more areas of Thomassia before he decides which one to live in.)

A couple of days later, he gets ready to travel.

He hesitates, then decides to leave his Rekkan joey at home. He's not prone to losing or breaking things, but the small chance is still too high. It feels weird not to have his library with him, but there is a large chunk of it on his phone now (and the remote-backup service he recently signed up for), and if he wants to do some work while he's out, he can record folk songs or mnemonics or language samples of signed Tashayan.

He does bring his customary alien bag with its customary collection of alien artifacts, minus the samples of ration bar and medications he's giving to science. (Upon reflection, he also removes the money from his wallet and replaces it with his new Thomassian debit card: it's silly to spend weight on carrying Tashayan coins around in a place that doesn't take them as currency.)

He wears his Thomassian respirator, too. He...at this point, he would be more surprised if the Thomassians made him sick than if they didn't, and he suspects that even if he did get sick some medical care and time would handle it okay, but he's not super sure; and anyway, he expects it will be emotionally easier to handle being in a hive-city if he's not actually sharing breath with a million people.

On his way out, he takes a picture of Rellakri wearing the little hat, the first entry in his travel photo album. "The robot petsitters will take good care of you," he tells the bird, giving it one last pat.

And then he sets off, to explore the nearest city.

It's a bit of a car ride, and at this point, masks like his are very rare to see. The city goes from towers reaching into the sky to green space, with little in between; the streets are fairly narrow, with few cars to be seen. People use subways more, with the trains coming incredibly frequently and sometimes coming with special "family cars" with more room for baby strollers and pregnant women. Just about any form of food that Minaiyu can think of can be bought somewhere in the city; there are also a fair few tailors, including ones specializing in things like underwear, PPE, outdoor clothes and large, fluffy, impossibly colorful animal costumes. Minaiyu would absolutely have seen a group of children playing in a park supervised by a few adults, dressed in bright blue skirts, playing around, climbing and having fun.

Wow.

It's a lot to keep up with. It...it kind of reminds him of working at the hospital, actually, juggling everything going on around you all at once.

He's fortunate, here, to be someone suited to hospital work. He wonders if Thomassians have naturally higher overload thresholds than Rekkans, or if it's from many years of practice.

He goes into a subway station and spends a few minutes watching the trains go in and out and observing the process of using them, but doesn't board one yet, not when the area of the city one block away is just as interesting as the area a few stops down the track.

Aww, he's glad the kids are having a good time.

(Maybe he should look into local climbing gyms that are sized for adults. That might be fun.)

He window-shops for a little while, then buys a fruit smoothie (strawberry-free) and sits on a park bench for a snack break, occasionally lifting his respirator to stick the straw in.

(There are no suspicious archways in the park. He checked.)

He's pretty spoiled for choice on what to do next. It's hard to make up his mind.

Hmm...

...ooh, he should find a building that lets random strangers into the upper floors and check out the view!

He'll start by doing a search-engine query for observation decks in this city, to see if there are any buildings specifically designed for this that he should aim for. (It might even make for a good excuse to ride the cool underground train.)

There isn't a proper observation deck in the city, rather there's a place offering blimp tours letting people take a leisurely look at the city from the sky. It's a fair distance away by intercity train, but Minaiyu can get a tour with time to spare if he starts heading there now.