He wakes up in a hammock, under a blanket. There's something hard wrapped around each of his legs.

There's someone in the hammock next to him, and someone else writing at the desk on the other side of the room.

He opens his eyes and leans up and pings everyone he knows and – his legs twinge, quite badly.

… He was pretty sure, rather certain, that his injuries were worse than that. Someone must have come with healing powers, got him out. It's only a matter of time until there's another attempt on his life—

But he doesn't think he recognizes where he is.

He's in a square room whose walls, ceiling, and floor are made of a pale and waxy wood. Dim purple light streams in through the large hole in the wall. A healer he may recognize is asleep and under a blanket in the hammock next to his, held up by hooks from the ceiling.

When he moves, the person at the desk looks up and says something in a language he doesn't know. She's noticeably greener than the average human.

"… Hello," he says in English, frowning. "I don't recognize that language."

He does in fact recognize the healer. That is probably why his legs are not as bad as he thought.

She points at him and the healer, then at her legs, and says something that sounds like a question.

He does not really know what she's trying to ask, so instead he – says aloud, as he transmits: "Could you repeat that?"

She looks very surprised, but tries to think loudly as she repeats "What happened to you, are your legs healing correctly?" and adds, "I don't know if they set right- I have no idea what you are. How did you do that?"

"I'm Relay, Formed," he responds. "I was in a disaster zone – I'm not sure if they're healing correctly. I think they're set right, and they should be fine when this guy wakes up." He indicates the person in green next to him, the healer.

"That's good. A disaster zone, like of a plague? What are you? How did you get there?"

"– I'm just going to send it all, might be sort of disorienting."

So he sends a visual of the scene, as it happened, and his communication with the other Turned and Formed. They all have superpowers, all the non-civilians, with the Turned outnumbering the Formed by a large factor. People who appeared, fully-grown, with powers, those are Formed; as compared to Turned, those who had normal human childhoods and then got powers within the past seven years. They're all varying levels of broken. The visual then returns to him, showing his last moments: everything blurs, his range shrinks and makes him feel claustrophobic, and after a short deal of terror, he's swiftly knocked down, crushed, and made to fall unconscious.

So they're just like that, it's not a side effect of some bizarre disease. They're probably from a different planet, with the weird grey things growing from the ground, and both gods making people shaped like humans, somehow. She tries to send confusion and the sense that he's probably on a different planet than before, sorrow for whatever bizarre pain happened to him and his friend.

People are typically not green on his planet, no: people all come in the species of human, at least the ones he's acquainted with, and human looks like this and varies approximately like this. (He sends a few example people and ranges and variants on different body parts. It includes what they look like in… relatively graphic detail, sort of superimposed so she can see the differences and variation.) His planet looks like this (but only vaguely, only approximately).

Well, if she's ever feeling particularly blasphemous and sure of her abilities, now she's got more inspiration, and what.

That is an absurd shape for a planet to be, she'd been assuming he was from an actual planet (attempt at sending what a real planet looks like, a slowly growing cylinder of soil, surrounded by a glowing bubble. This one's covered in plants, the other ones are too far away to tell for sure what's on them, but they're definitely the same general shape.)

He's… not sure why it would be absurd for a planet to be spherical, like, here it is sent again but with a better idea of how large it is, look, huge, doesn't grow. Other planets are – nowhere near nearby, you need a telescope – or maybe a pair of binoculars, he's not sure – to look at them properly, and they do not have any glowing bubbles surrounding them.

… Is there any chance she can give him an idea of the local political sphere? He's used to large countries with presidents and small districts, currently mostly set up as it was before heroes started appearing, but he's not sure what to expect here.

Well if the spheres are very big, the top should be flat enough for some people to stay on, at least. They'll run out of room pretty quickly, though. And how do they not run out of water, or have enough light for anything to grow? Maybe they just haven't noticed the bubbles, somehow?

She sends a general impression of the political system, with conventions of scribes in the capital and larger towns debating and deciding the law and sending out messengers if anything changes. There's a process for petitions, with a better chance of succeeding if there are signs that you've been useful to the people around you. She hasn't paid much attention to it, since there aren't any laws about engineering she'd like changed and would have any hope of changing, and her housemate hasn't particularly needed anything. There's another area with a different organization and set of laws, somewhere on the far side of the center, with looser regulations. They've invented and traded some things that are useful, but have a greater chance of growing out of control, or being otherwise inconvenient.

The countries, on his world, go all around the sphere. Because people live on it from all sides. Because 'down' means 'towards the nearest center of large mass', approximately, or in fact just means 'towards masses nearest you', weighted by how close you are and how heavy it is. The sphere is huge. The sphere orbits another huge sphere, one that is even bigger, and has a smaller sphere that orbits it.

… He's curious how 'useful' is defined, if it's just if people you know like you, or if this is like the concept of political influence that he's used to, where you know someone high up and can possibly trade favors with them.

That seems like a pointlessly complicated way to have a planet, and will probably eventually run out of room, but apparently it works for the people who live on it. Does life on his planet not need light and water? What are the bigger and smaller spheres for?

If you're particularly good at something you're trying to change a law about, your opinion about the subject is more likely to be meaningful than the opinion of someone who's not. She thinks she'd have a reasonably good chance of succeeding if she petitioned to change a minor law or regulation about engineering, because many people buy the seeds she makes. Some people are really good at more general things (like her housemate's friend with all the bracelets who is good at logistics and convincing people of things) or do a lot of politicking, who are more likely to successfully push any kind of change. So yes, either expertise in an area, or persuading scribes with charisma and trade in order to have influence.

The larger sphere provides light, the smaller sphere is not 'for' anything except tides. Tides are where gravity from the moon (the smaller sphere) produces changes in water height around coasts daily. They do not seem to have run out of water, seeing as the oceans are huge and they also get rain and a water cycle.

Engineering with seeds…? Is this genetic engineering?

Water just sits around on top of - of course it does, why should its extremely limited surface area all be habitable, and she should probably stop criticizing his weird spherical planet and its weird transparent god.

Confusion. She changes the patterns of seeds to make the plants they grow into more useful to people?

Changes the patterns how…? He's used to DNA, looks like this if you go in with a microscope, genetic engineering is where you change this through some method (he thinks by introducing a specially-designed virus or by splitting it up with some enzyme?) and it can do things like golden rice (see, higher yield and lower disease resistance and better nutrition and he really hates starvation, this might be clear).

… The planet does in fact have limited surface area, but it's quite a large limit, and he's not sure how large her… circle on top of a cylinder is. And they do not have a transparent god unless you mean bubble-like thing surrounding the planet, in which case he thinks you might mean 'atmosphere', which is again caused by gravity, of the huge object. Protects them from harmful radiation (approximately: invisible damage) from the Sun, keeps all the air in (otherwise they suffocate), helps keep the water cycle going (the rain and the lakes and so on, has she seen this?).

You touch something and feel its patterns and if it's a seed you can change them? She sends an impression of editing something, and the symbols she would use to draw it: there are four main kinds of pieces of instruction, which connect "horizontally" in groups of three, and "vertically" in long strings, and branch with the fifth kind of piece, which splits a string into two strings. Both of the two types of outer piece can connect with up to two other outer pieces, and with one inner piece. Both of the two types of inner piece can connect with up to two outer pieces, and with up to two branching pieces. Each branching piece connects to one inner piece on the string it branches from, and two other inner pieces, on on each of the strings it branches to. You can change any outer piece to any other outer piece, and any inner piece to any other inner piece, and feel generally what change results. It's harder to do, but you can move branching pieces around. If you try harder than that, you can sometimes force an inner piece to generate an attached branching piece.

Is that how DNA works? She doesn't know what the patterns would actually look like close up. Of course they edit food plants to grow more quickly, be more nutritious or tasty, and produce more. Starvation is pretty terrible, but it doesn't usually happen unless there's a plague, or something else of about that magnitude goes incredibly wrong. Is it a common problem on his world? She can buy him seeds for things that are pretty hard to kill that grow a lot of food. Apparently people in his world can't edit patterns, so someone would need to fix the beginnings of their patterns to let them grow, although his planet is weird, and they'd want to check if anything could actually grow there. ... Does he know how to get back and forth between the planets?

Oh! Yes, the bubble-like thing surrounding the planet, which creates rain and light and new species, that's the god. She doesn't know if there's air outside of the bubbles, but if there isn't then it's very good there's something to hold it in. But his other sphere, the Sun, also makes light, but it invisibly hurts people? That seems bad, even if their god protects them from it, have they tried getting rid of the Sun?

The atmosphere doesn't make light, or at least not in quantity that it'd help you with daily functions – you get things like the aurora borealis, but he's pretty sure that's due to the Sun. They have not tried getting rid of the Sun, no, because it is the only thing that produces this necessary sunlight in their local environment.

He does not know how to get back and forth between the planets, and he has no idea how he got here, and he's suspecting it was a part of the disaster but he has not heard of 'teleportation to as-yet-unknown place with other magic' being part of a disaster before.

Genetic engineering… possibly works like that, somewhat; he's not sure, not having taken any higher-level biology classes. He does not think he can do that unless it's a special feature about this place and not his species. Would she, perhaps, like to show him a seed he can try doing it on while he tries to prod the healer awake? His legs are annoying him.

It seems like it would be vastly better for his "atmosphere" to just produce the light directly rather than having to filter external light to not hurt people more, but she doesn't know how to make that happen.

He's probably here forever, then? She sends the feeling of extending sympathy, and a sense that there are logistics that will need to be figured out at some point.

She can get him a seed, yes. The ones in her workshop are too complicated to be a good test, she'll grab him some simpler ones. If his legs are hurting him she can get something to numb them, assuming it works on his kind of person?

He unfortunately does not know if her painkillers will function on him but it's okay because the person in the green spandex-or-whatever can probably help.

(He prods them a few times. They seem to stir a little.)

Okay, she'll just grab him some simple vine seeds, then, while he waits for his acquaintance to wake up and help him.

She waves and climbs out the window.