Xander is touching up her outfit - he has shoe ideas, something he saw on In Skirts he wants to riff on - when the snake appears.
He sees it first because she can't see anything around her while in starscape. He pushes her out of the way - she doesn't realize what's going on in time to abort the reflex action of stopping herself on the way down - can't switch targets fast enough to stop the snake, when she notices it, to stop it from going on to eat her after it's already gotten him.
Then -
Isabella doesn't recognize the alphabets. She blanks the American flag, replaces it with writing: We only know English.
The tablet seems to spend a while processing that. The person running the homeless shelter shoos two people out and checks three in and shoots them occasional glares.
Then the tablet changes modes. It shows pictures. "We only know English???" blinks above the pictures.
...
The pictures are of a shoe, a table, a building, and a tree. She... touches the shoe and says, "Shoe."
The tablet plays happy music about this. It tries a person, a child, a planet, a wheel, a rock.
When they've been there for a while they are offered dinner. The shelter apparently serves flatbread with interesting toppings, and vegetable soup, and tea.
Yeah, okay. They will eat shelter dinner while Isabella tries to convince the tablet that English is a real language dammit.
When it has nouns it moves on to asking her to describe short video sequences in which people run, or drink, or eat, or talk.
"The person is running. The person drinks tea. The people are talking to each other..."
And eventually to describing scenes itself and awaiting her correction. "The people leave off the planet and the people go to the station?"
"We aren't in India, Xander. We're not on Earth. There are humans so I guess it might be time travel, I don't know."
"We aren't in India, Xander," pipes up her tablet, showing two people running away from a building labelled India. They run onto a pile of dirt. "We're not on earth," says the tablet, and they run off that too. "There are humans, so I guess it might be time travel" - suitcases appear in their hands and they approach an airport. "I don't know?"
"I was talking to you," says the tablet serenely.
"The wing person and the person come to the planet, no money, no luggage, no language."
"The wing person and the person not answer questions of a computer for permission to come to the planet."
"No. We didn't come here intentionally. - We have names. I'm Isabella and my brother's Xander."
"Brother is a word for person of same house?"
"You are an altered person, some say not a person, Xander is a human person."
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