He lets the dog out - she'll run off, but she won't go out of sight of the house without good reason and she'll come back at nightfall if not sooner, it should be fine - and cannibalizes another section of railing to make a temporary enclosure for the chicken and moves her to it to let her get used to him while he works. (He was hoping for an established flock, but he can handle introducing chickens to each other, it's fine.) He turns one of the boxes of junk into crafting material, takes a break to have a look at the seeds and grow a couple he's curious about in pots at the base of his house, converts another box of junk, and finally feels settled enough to head to bed, bringing the chicken up onto the deck/roof of the ship/house while he retires inside.

He doesn't have a way to let the locals know he's up, a few hours later when he wakes, and they might not want to come back out this close to sundown anyway. He gets back to work on converting his house into a walking vehicle, and if they haven't shown back up in the fifteen minutes that takes he'll start building a second walker out of the new material to hold his new garden.

It is, on the one hand, probably rude to watch the alien with binoculars. On the other hand, he can vanish inside his house any time he wants to, and also he has unknown capabilities and is set up near the third-largest airport on the continent, which they can't afford to shut down. And also he probably can't figure out the phone from first principles and message them.

(The fact that Largest City does not have the largest airport is one of those little ironies of logistics that people make five minute audio essays about; to cruelly summarize, the trains are good enough and Inheritor of the Old City is more centrally located for connecting flights.)

So when he comes back out of his house, the guard who has been assigned to watch him with binoculars takes note, and a few minutes later the diplomatic team is assembled and ready to go talk to him again. 

Diplomat Tatenika is currently in Edge of the Forest City in southern Smaller Continent — but she's not the only professional diplomat available. Vesherti is, in many ways, her Larger Continent counterpart. And, luckily, he was overseeing trade talks in Largest City, and so was immediately available.

When it pulls up, he hops out of the truck and waves to Traveler, before setting up another portable screen to write with.

"Hello! Were (the things we gave you) the right things?"

They were! He's going to need more chickens and he's not familiar with all of the food plants but they've got the right idea. Also he'd like to take five minutes to finish getting his house in walking shape, and they should be aware that his dog is out and will probably come back soon to see what they're about - she's friendly to strangers, there's no danger, he just doesn't want them startled.

Vesherti has never met a dog, but he's vaguely aware that they're still used for animal herding in some areas. Presumably it's easier to handle living with an animal when you're telepathic.

"We won't be startled," he promises. The screen is linked to his tablet, so it's easy to scribble down almost as quickly as speaking. The þereminians wait patiently as he finishes up, although Vesherti does go through talking points in his head.

He gets back to work on the house, finishing up the connections that let its long spidery legs move, then backs it off a few paces and switches to the new smaller walking vehicle on the roof to come down and talk. He's added a blue band around the top of the base of this one, bordered in gold, to indicate that it's okay to talk to him, and the whole sitting area is enclosed in a bubble just large enough for him to stand in if he chooses to, with the transparent front half shading into opaque sparkly indigo at the back and the five communication dots replicated at the bottom of the transparent area.

"You communicated you would ask people about (you got here) — we are very interested in going there and here. Are there things that you think would help with (know how to go)?" he asks once it looks like Traveler has gotten settled. "There are other things to talk about, but sometimes it is helpful (when working to learn) to observe things quickly."

He has no idea what the phenomenon might be that brought him here; his best guess on how to proceed at this point is to ask one of his traveler friends to go to the area he disappeared from and look for records of crafting experiments that might be related or talk to the elders and record-keepers in the area to see if they know of anyone doing that sort of experimentation in the past, and if that doesn't work they'll have to ask around to see if they can find anyone else doing anything that might be similar. He doesn't know of anything that can be done from this side, unless they have some idea of how something on this side might have been the cause.

He shakes his head.

"No, we don't know of such a thing. But it's good to check, in case. We have sent (mechanical birds) through the sky where (you were), and they did not find a way to go," he explains. The programmers haven't gotten Crafter glyphs hooked up to the text-processing standard yet, so he has to draw glyphs by hand, but his handwriting isn't too bad.

"What do you (plan or want) to do next? We want to figure out (how to trade with Crafters)."

Next, he's not sure; the main constraint he sees on his plans in the next month or so is that he's presumably going to be integrating chickens into a new flock and that can fail if he's moving them around too much at the same time. In the longer run he's going to want to travel, he doesn't do well if he tries to stay in one place for too long. He doesn't think he'd do well in their cities at all but if they'd like him to move closer to one to be easier to trade with that shouldn't be a problem, at least if they can hold off on the rest of the chickens until he gets there and keep him supplied with eggs or meat directly in the meantime.

Vesherti thinks about how to explain the existence of a global transportation network, or at the very least of helicopters.

"We have many people who (they like to travel)," he settles on. "So we have many good machines for traveling fast. It is mostly easy to trade with you wherever you go. If you want to live in a boat in the ocean, it would be harder."

"We can supply eggs and meat until (you find a spot to settle the chickens), though. If (you don't want to see the cities), what do you want to see? Or do you want the movement of traveling, not the seeing of traveling?"

He does want to see the cities, just, like, as a day trip, not to try to live there. He likes seeing new things - or seeing things again to see how they've changed - but the part where he's always going to new places is the important part, he's very nomadic by nature. A few months hanging around outside a city and visiting it every few days should be perfectly comfortable, though.

Oh! Alright, that makes sense.

"Lots of people will be excited to (you see our interesting projects)," Vesherti agrees. "The closest city is 'Largest City'."

He points over the hills to the south.

"How fast is your walking house? By our (traveling machines that go on a traveling machine path), it is an hour away, but I think your house is not as fast as a traveling machine is."

He doesn't usually go that fast, no - the limitation is more to do with how fast he feels comfortable going than the machinery, though. At any rate he could make the trip tomorrow, if he's estimating their speed right it shouldn't take him more than a day to go as far as they can go in an hour.

Vesherti nods again. That sounds about right.

"If true, we would be happy to have you visit. We will make sure to tell people in the City to (be very careful not to touch you). There is lots of unclaimed territory in the city, but it is not colored grey. We can't recolor it all in a day, and that would be a lot of work. Will you be okay if (people can point out what is unclaimed), even if it is not colored grey? Or if we tell you how to guess well?"

The easiest way for him would be if he had a guide; he might be able to infer which places are public from how people are acting in general, but it'd be effortful and there's a risk of him freezing up in the middle of everything if something goes wrong. Instructions would help with the inferential method but won't be enough on their own.

"I can be a guide," Vesherti offers. "Or we can make sure someone is available even if I am not. I am a (skilled at communicating with people) person. I do lots of (communicating with a group of people so they can live together without fighting) and (making sure groups of people understand each other), and right now our (group of groups) wants me to make sure we can live well with you, so I am happy to do things that help with that."

They weren't sure if Traveler would want to visit a city, but it was an obvious sort of thing to prepare for, so Vesherti flips through the checklist.

"When you were reading the dictionary, we didn't see any words about ... the very tiny animals that make people sick? The ones that are usually killed by heat. Do you not know of them, or are there more words we don't know yet?"

They know that heating things protects against illness but he hadn't known that it was because of tiny animals, that's neat. If they're worried about him carrying illness he doesn't think they need to worry too much, he heat-cleaned his house before he left the last settlement of Crafters he was at and it's been long enough that anything he might've picked up from them should be gone, he thinks.

"That's good! We did want to know that," Vesherti agrees. "But we also want to make sure you don't get an illness from us. People's bodies get to know the tiny animals over time, and get good at (fighting them without getting ill). So some tiny animals that will not hurt us, but maybe they will jump to you. We will keep the ill people away from you, but it's still probably a good idea to heat-clean yourself after getting back from the day-trip or before touching food."

He puts up the same picture of someone wearing all-concealing white clothing that was used to explain different clothing before.

"This is the clothing of our very tiny animal fighters. You probably won't need to talk to them, but if they ask you to not go somewhere, please don't go so that they can stop the spread of the tiny animals."

Sure, that's reasonable. Though also in general if anyone tells him not to go somewhere he's likely to have a hard time doing it - the main exception to the instinct against taking actions in other peoples' territory is that he can always leave by the most expedient route he knows about or can infer, and that could in theory lead to him being someplace they don't want him, but if that's a concern he can make sure he's prepared to fly out, that's presumably fine in all outdoor cases.

"Leaving is always okay, in public places," Vesherti reassures him. "By flying or not by flying."

He has directions, he's accepted a guide, he's going to comply with quarantine procedures, he is going to visit in a known timeframe ...

Vesherti mentally crosses off most of the list of things to clarify.

"Do you have questions (you want to ask them of us) about visiting the city? Or can I ask you about ansibles?"

He'll probably have questions about the city at some point but he hasn't thought about it much yet. What do they want to know about ansibles?

"We can do machines without Crafting, but we don't know how to do ansibles without Crafting. Our machines communicate with invisible light and inaudible sounds, not ansibles. We want some ansibles to look at and try and figure out how to ansible. Also, we want access to more Crafter books, and most of all the Crafter book ansible, but we know it is precious. What kinds of things would you want in trade for making some ansibles, for printing more books, or for giving us your book ansible to get books with?"

He only has the one library ansible and doesn't want to give it up, but he has no objection to letting them use it anytime he doesn't need it, or in theory to setting something up to get a full set of the library's books; it might be possible to rework the machinery to use local non-crafted materials to make the books, but if it's not and he has to make crafting material for the whole set that's another constraint and a pretty significant one, the library has a lot of books. Or if they have a way to copy books he can set up the material they're printing them on so it's reusable. In any case there are options there and the main thing he'd want to be compensated for is his time, not the use of the ansible and related machinery.

For ansibles, he can make them a batch of a few dozen and he'd consider that partial repayment for what they've done for him so far; if they want more than that he's less willing to do it, it gets boring after a while, but it'd still be a reasonable request if that's how they want him to discharge his debt. He'd ballpark the first, say, 24, as discharging a quarter to a third of it and an additional 36 as discharging the whole thing, including the additional requested chickens.

... huh. On the one hand, that's very convenient. On the other hand, he would become a pariah if he was not completely fair to the alien.

"We have a standardized system for tracking transferrable debts between people," he explains. "This makes it easier for lots of people to work together, instead of owing each other individually. By our measuring, you making a dozen ansibles is worth more than the things we have given you so far, because they are completely new and unique and lots of people will want one. Since you think they are worth less and we think they are worth more, would you call it fair to say that the things we have given you, and the extra chickens, is a fair trade for a dozen ansibles?"

He starts a separate thought on the other side of the screen from that one.

"If we made a pebbleclinker that (you have an ansible to it) and (we have an invisible light link to it) and (it keeps your book ansible and sends things back and forth), would that be okay? So you could print books like normal, and when you weren't printing books we could use the ansible without bothering you. We can probably make a pebbleclinker like that, but having a copy of the book printer would help to be sure."