A man appears in the circle, midstride, head turned back to look behind him. He stops almost immediately and reorients to face the girls, frowning in confusion. Whatever he says to them is intoned like a statement, not a question, but he regards them as though expecting an answer.

The girls seem excited and uncomprehending! They chatter in gibberish to each other. One of them picks up a book and starts flipping through it.

Pity he can't translate. He glances around the room, observing the furniture and decorations and cataloguing potential entrances and exits.

"If 'it' was something intended to make us mutually intelligible, yes it did," he says. "Where am I and why?"

"You're in our dorm room, we just need you for a couple degrees to show Nemaar is all," the darker one assures him.

"Who the hell is Nemaar and why do you need to show me to him?"

"Of all the stupid—" He breaks off, shakes his head, and continues with the frustration almost completely erased from his voice. "I work as a trauma surgeon. I am a very good trauma surgeon. People depend on me being very good. Accidents that need my level of skill thankfully don't happen that often, but when they happen, I need to be reachable immediately. You can send me right back? Do it right now. Showing off to your friend is not worth putting ten seconds' delay between me and my job."

The man in the circle silently raises his eyebrows.

"What - are you saying you can't send me back at all?" he says, slightly incredulously.

"...Define 'a while', please."

He homes in on the important information here. "Safe to let me out? Of...?"

"...are you saying you can do something to hurt us through the ward?" asks Korulen slowly.

"I do not know one solitary fucking thing about your ward," he says through gritted teeth. "Please. Let. Me. Out."

"We can't we can't the ward is there for a reason we can't until Mom checks you -"

"Are you capable of having a conversation?" Keo asks levelly, shooing the girls out of the room. They scamper.

"Debatably," he says. His voice is rather hoarse, but still intelligible. "Nice trick."

"I can get fancier with the mind tricks, if you need fancier and want me to."

"How much fancier?"

"I'll be surprised if you think up something too fancy for me. I can cut out the pain for you, if you want," she adds.

"Mnh. Don't care," he says. "It's useful. Reminds me not to move." And he is indeed hardly moving. "What are the conditions that'll get me let out of here? And optionally some medical care? I can put myself back together from here without help but it'd be a brutal job and I'd rather not have to."

"I have to be convinced that you're not going to be a danger or a liability, at least not more than balances against the inconvenience of looking after while you're in there. I can find that out to my satisfaction with the fancy mind tricks if you like. If I let you out, you can see a light about your injuries; I'd have to check the exact spell the girls used to say whether one will be able to work through this kind of ward or not."

"'Light'?"

"The local state of the art for healing. Magic."

"Sounds convenient. What are your fancy mind tricks going to tell you about my danger levels?"

"I'm mostly interested in whether you go in for gratuitous lawbreaking that the school will be on the hook for and if you're liable to hurt anyone."

"Okay," says Keo, and she smudges the chalk. "I don't know how I'm going to explain you to the light, but she'll treat you anyway. If you'll touch my hand I can teleport you there."

"...I don't know how feasible that would be, but it's not impossible a volunteer could be found. What's your job exactly?"

"I fix injured people. Not as efficiently as this, but more efficiently than pretty much anyone else whose job it is to fix injured people."

"And you think your workplace would take pretty well to a light standing in for you while you're here?" asks Keo.

"They wouldn't handle it well, but they'd handle it. If I'm going to be here for months I'd rather they had an explanation and the explanation might as well come with a stand-in."

"Okay. What's the place like? The easiest way to get ahold of a light to send would be to give a student an extra credit project, but I can't send a student anywhere very dangerous."

"Not very dangerous at all."

"Miroslav Hall," he says. "Dr. Hall. Someone who can do my job this quickly would definitely have time to research whatever their heart desired on the side. And working in a hospital is plenty safe. For that matter - something one of the kids said implied lights don't work on lights? How good is whatever you've got that patches that problem? If you get me some of the equipment my stand-in won't be using, I could help with that. My specialty's injury, not illness, but I'm good at injury. Don't know how useful I'd be, but I'm offering."

"Lights don't work on themselves or each other," says Keo, "so it's possible you'd be useful at a lights' crisis center somewhere."

"Erm," says the bubblegum-pink light. "I'm starting to wonder if your - stand-in - won't need to be a trained light? Five-year-olds can heal but you have to know what you're doing to address anything complicated like objects embedded in a wound or - well, I guess if you deal with injuries and not rehabilitation it wouldn't have to be someone who knows the procedures for scars and stumps and implants and the like. But still. None of the three of us on staff know how to take anything more complicated than a splinter out of a wound."

"Not quite as nice a trick as it looks, huh? Yeah. That could be a problem. Somebody who can do what you did for me would still be better than nothing, but to really replace me, whoever went would have to know how to deal with complications."

"Well, there's not necessarily a reason it has to be exactly one person. A student will be much faster to get and much less expensive than a trained-light, even one who only has a class about wound evacuation under their belt and nothing else. We could find one of those who'll go for a couple of days within the angle, probably, if you can tell me a bit more about what they'll find there if they show up with themselves and a letter you write."

"Confused and mildly alarmed administrators," he says dryly. "What do you want to know? If anyone's going to attack them? No. If anyone's going to feed them? Yes. House them? They can stay in my apartment, it's not like I'll be using it."

"The language thing can be handled. There's such a thing as a universal translator in my world; I don't personally have one, but the hospital can probably scare one up, especially if I'm going to be gone for a while and especially if they get excited about lights. Sunlight, though... what kind of sunlight?"

"The sun here isn't the same as the sun at home. If what you need from the sun here isn't something the sun at home has, that could be a problem."

"So that's solved. Handy. What's a dragonsong?"

"If someone sings a dragon's name to a certain tune, the dragon knows about it. Doesn't know anything else, so it's best if it's an agreed-upon signal, but it does work transworld initiated out of Elcenia."

"This place is damn strange," says Dr. Hall.

"I have," reports Keo, "one student who is also a light and takes anthropology classes and would love to write a report on your world for course credit for a few shifts of healing. Shall we go talk to him?"

"Sure."

Keo waves to the light, leads him into the hall, and then into the lift, which she directs to a residence hall. The lift moves.

"Is it? Your language has a word for this," says Keo. "It's a lift."

"Different functionality at home, different aesthetic," he says. "Different mechanism, too, I bet."

"Well, yes, this one's magic. I'm getting the sense you don't have magic at all where you're from."

"Correct."

The lift comes to a stop and opens up. Keo leads him into the hall and knocks on a door, and a kid who looks like a humanoid lion opens it. "Hi, Keo. Hi, offworld person."

"Hi," says the offworld person. "I'm Dr. Hall."

"It's safe. And there's plenty to learn."

"Okay. Keo said you'd write me a letter?" The lion-kid produces a piece of paper and a stick of graphite.

Dr. Hall listens with interest to the dragonsong.

"Do you want to watch my husband send him?" Keo asks Dr. Hall.

"Might as well. Where are you gonna put him, exactly?"

"I was thinking where you were when you were summoned. Will that not work?"

"It'd work fine. Just outside Lily's office would work a little better if your targeting will do that."

"If you'll come along and provide focus for the spell we can do that, yes. Since my husband and I don't know anything about Lily we can't aim at her office like that."

"Makes sense. Sure."

"It varies," says Dr. Hall, making this amendment to the letter. "Some days I don't get anything serious at all; some days there's an industrial accident and I spend all day reattaching limbs. Averages maybe one bad case every day or two, small stuff the rest of the time."

He puts his hand there; he focuses.

Keo's husband makes a gesture and speaks a word, and the leonine kid disappears.

"Now what?"

"The school's responsible for you; we can get you an empty dorm room and cafeteria access," Keo says. "When we get in touch with institutions that have trained-lights who might take over for Kensath I can mention your skills to them if you want something to do."

"Sounds good," he says with a slight shrug.

Keo opens the lift door again and directs it to another residence hall, where she shows Dr. Hall an empty room. "I can have Korulen take you shopping for the immediate essentials at her and Saasnil's expense whenever would be convenient for you."

"Hm," he says, looking over the room. "Yeah. Whenever she's free; it's not like I have much else on my schedule."

"The pair of them have severely inconvenienced you; she will arrange to have time. She should be here in a couple of degrees," says Keo. "If you need anything else from me, just think 'Keo' really hard, I'll get it."

"Handy, in a disquieting kind of way," he says. "I'll remember."

"Hi."

"Hi, um, I'm supposed to take you shopping for - sheets and shampoo and things. I can summon your stuff from home too if you need it, I'd find a - different spell. That didn't need so much CC."

"Sheets and shampoo. Yeah. Can't think of anything from home I want that badly, but I'll keep it in mind."

"Okay, um, you probably can't fly?"

"Not unaided, no."

"Huh," he says, upon observing the city.

"What?" asks Korulen.

"Cities where I'm from have... different design philosophies. It's interesting."

Korulen peers at the city. "...different how?"

"It varies. The dropoff between city and no city tends to be more gradual, that's the main trend I'm thinking of."

"Oh, that. Paraasilan's due to have its municipal wards recast over a larger area soon but until that happens people aren't building outside of it unless they can afford the individual castings."

"Municipal wards?"

"Oh, uh, this country doesn't have a military, at all, so if we're threatened in some way Parliament can raise the wards over all the cities at once, and city governments can do their own too, and individual buildings have to have wards even if they're not inside city limits. They're not like the one you were in," she adds hastily, "they keep stuff out, not in."

"Interesting way to run a country. Does it work?"

"Yeah, really well."

"Huh."

"And the demilitarization saved a lot of public funds too."

"I'll bet."

Korulen falls silent until they get close to the city, then says, "So I know where to get you sheets - and I know a place with men's clothes - and I know a witch shop that'll have shampoo and stuff - what else do you want?"

"If I thought you had a communications network that compared to what I'm used to at home, I might want the equivalent of a PADD, but I'm guessing you don't."

"...yeah, I'm not sure what that means."

"I could try to explain, but I don't know how much background knowledge you're missing."

"I don't know either. What would you say if you assumed I knew nothing?"

"All right... start from paper, I've seen that here. From paper you get to books, right? Okay, now say there's an artifact that's like a library in book form - it contains the information of hundreds or thousands or millions of books, and you can cue it to show you the ones you want, one page's worth of display at a time. And you can write on it, record new books into the library. And any two of these things can talk to each other, swap books back and forth. And there's a semi-centralized network so you don't have to physically find the exact one that has the information you want, you can just go on the network and find it from wherever you are. There's a lot more to it, but that's the basics."

"Sounds like... a cross between a library and link paper," says Korulen.

"Link paper?"

"Yeah, you buy pads of it in pairs, and you keep one and give one to another person, and when either of you writes on it what you're writing appears on the corresponding spot on the other."

"Link paper. Sure. A cross between a library and link paper."

"That sounds amazing."

"It's better than it sounds."

"How? Oh - clothes, in here," she says, showing him into a shop.

"The ways it's better are harder to explain. But one example is it doesn't just do visuals, it does audio. Whatever music or sound you want that somebody's put on the network, you can get."

"Linked-up music crystals, wow."

"Yep."

Korulen conducts him around the store, makes general remarks about what sorts of things people wear with what sorts of other things, and otherwise hangs back and lets him make selections.

He goes for things that are simple, minimally flashy, and afford reasonable freedom of movement.

Korulen has no complaints about his fashion sense. She pays for a few outfits in electrum coins and they move on. "The witch is this way."

"What's a witch besides someone who sells shampoo?"

"Witches do potions in general. Cosmetics and medicines and so on."

"Interesting. Do they tend to specialize in one or the other or whatever comes under 'and so on', or not?"

"Some of them specialize but witchcraft is all one skill as far as I know, so that's just a matter of using different recipes, I think. The one I'm thinking of has everything - well, everything you get for consumer use, anyway."

"For consumer use as opposed to...?"

"Industry or whatever. Concentrated plant food and desalination potions and really heavily controlled painkillers."

"Heh. Yeah, we've got heavily controlled painkillers too, just not usually made by the same people who make hair dye."

"Why not?"

"Very different skill set. No magic involved, I think that's what makes the difference."

"Huh. Wouldn't it still be a matter of mixing things up even if you didn't do witchcraft to it?" she asks.

"Yeah, but mixing up different things, using different procedures, with different safety standards and a different knowledge base required to figure out what things you should be mixing and how to mix them right."

There is shampoo. Dr. Hall acquires some shampoo. He doesn't have exacting standards, so he goes for whatever seems cheap and like it'll last him a while.

There are also various other toiletries. There are baskets to put them in. If Dr. Hall touches a basket it will start floating in the air and following him around.

Korulen buys her thing and pockets it, and buys his things and gets a bag for them from the kid behind the counter, and off they go to a place that has sheets and things.

He gets sheets and a pillow. His sole qualifier for either seems to be how they feel when he touches them.

"No, I'm fine with what I've got."

"Okay." She leads the way out to the city limits.

"The flying baskets were cute," he says.

"Well, if you had to carry them it would be hard to buy as much, so places tend to have them if they sell anything heavy."

"Clever."

"Yeah. Um, do you need me to walk you back to the school?"

He shakes his head.

"Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and fly back, then. Just tell the lift the name of the hall your room is on to go back there." And with that she turns into a smallish jade-green dragon the exact same color as her mother's hair and flies into the air.

His room is just as he left it.

He puts the sheets and pillow on the bed, the clothes and toiletries away, and then for lack of anything better to do decides to go find the cafeteria.