Bruce should start heading back to his house if he wants to get there before nightfall. He picks some dates from the date palm and eats them on the way back, checking at the same time whether they have pits. Tomorrow he'll come straight back here and follow the coast for a bit, see if he can get a sense of what size of landmass he's on.

The dates are as seedless as the apples.

Making his way back home is fairly uneventful; a small colourless slime follows him away from the grassland for a bit before jumping in the river and being carried back downstream, and a few sparkling ones try and fail to cross the river toward him, and some green ones wander past through the forest.

This is a beautiful place, for all its impossibility. He feels like a pioneer exploring a new continent, except this continent seems to have exactly four people and low odds of pointless wars with any of them. And quite possibly also no dysentery, if there aren't humans or anything similar here then the local pathogens probably won't know what to do with him. He's still not drinking the river water except as a last resort, but it's starting to look like he might not be about to learn whether dying here implies dying in real life.

He should be coming up on the place where he put a beam over the river soon. Maybe it's still there.

It is! There's one of the small shiny grassland slimes hopping across it as he approaches.

Awww. That's so cute he almost doesn't worry about how he might be disrupting the local ecology. Also, not much farther until the point where he needs to leave the river and head back towards his house. If it doesn't look like he'll have enough daylight to make it, he should build his second house by the river instead.

The sun is descending slowly enough that he should have plenty of time to get back to base.

Oh good. And the trail he carved in the ground should be somewhere around . . . here.

Yep, there it is! The grass has crept over it a little in a few places but it's still legible.

The grass here grows quickly! He follows his trail back to his house and heads inside. "Hello!"

The forest spirit waves. {did you have fun?}

"I did! I found a river, and an area that's colder than the area next to it which is super weird, and a beach, and fruit trees with no seeds! Do all the trees here reproduce by being cut down?"

{yes! tree gives seed when cut, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes none. all tree do. sometimes also special tree seed from night monster.}

"Is two more common than none? It would have to be, or there couldn't come to be more trees. What's up with monsters having seeds, do they cut down trees to get them, what makes them special?"

{every place have two tree, one normal, one special. in forest, oak and apple. in river, reed and willow. in snowy forest, spruce and maple. normal tree usually just have wood, special tree usually have fruit. don't know why monster have seed. monster have things usually, is how monster.}

None of this makes any evolutionary sense. He would have expected evolution to start happening anywhere there was life, but maybe the "life" here doesn't have the right sort of variation and heredity for it.

"So the fruit doesn't have anything to do with how the trees make more trees . . . Do you know how there came to be a lot of trees in the first place? Actually, can you just explain to me the history of the world as far as you know it, starting from as close to the beginning as possible?"

The forest spirit considers this question gravely.

{world is. world have place. island and ocean and sky and underground, and forest and desert and and river and lake and more other place. then world have tree, then world have animal, then world have monster, then world have spirit. then world have friend! then is now.}

"Do you know what caused each of those changes? How did you come to know what order things happened in before you existed?"

{i know things! is how spirit. don't know why world have things though. have things is how world.}

Argh, what a frustrating answer. But it isn't the spirit's fault they were born (created?) with innate knowledge and no nearby civilization.

"Would you like to learn the scientific method? It's a way of coming to know more things."

It bounces happily. {okay!}

"Cool! So, the way the scientific method works is, you start out with some ideas about how the world might work based on things you've noticed with your own senses--what you've seen and heard and smelled and so on. Then you think, if the world is this way, what would I expect to see if I tried something new? And if the world is actually a different way, what would I expect to see instead? The goal is to find something you can do that would have one result if the world is one way and a different result if it's another way. Then you do the thing, and whatever result you get affects your beliefs about how the world works."

The spirit has to sit down on the ground to grapple with the weight of this concept.

{woooow,} it says. {is complicated.}

Bruce has definitely daydreamed about someday teaching the scientific method to children, though in the daydreams it was usually his children and not adorable tiny aliens. This is all very Star Trek in an excellent way. "Yeah, it's pretty complicated. Would you like an example? I find those help."

The spirit bounces enthusiastically, like a whole-body nod.

"Okay! So when I made a torch earlier, I wanted to know what torches were like. Where I come from, torches do a thing called burning, where they take a part of the air and some sort of fuel and turn it into other stuff, most obviously heat and light. And it makes them look a lot like torches do here. So I put my hand near the torch expecting to feel heat, but I didn't. And I put a bit of grass in the torch expecting it to get used as fuel and stop existing, but it didn't. So now I know that torches here only look like they're burning, and aren't actually."