He nods again. "I will do so."

The walk back up to the cabin is uneventful, aside from whatever else the visitors have to say. The birds have been quieter than Tsarer is used to, but he figured they've probably been spooked by the transposition, or possibly even flown off to explore (assuming there's any land close enough for them to reach). Maybe they've even started roosting on the ship! He chuckles at that thought.

Tateneka deftly keeps up a level of light conversation that appears to come across as polite, based on his body language.

When they reach his cabin, the archivist breaks off to carefully begin scanning each book. One of the sailors is recruited to help.

"Well," Tateneka says to him once everyone is settled. "It is very exciting for us that you are here. We didn't know that islands could visit sometimes! I have three things I want to ask you: what your home is like, things you might know about how your visiting happened, and what you want from us as our guest and for helping. Is there a one you want to start on?"

He will respond to the small talk, but not initiate much on that front. He doesn't seem especially talkative, though perhaps it's too early to tell whether that's a personal characteristic or something indicative of his cultural background.

"I'm not sure where to draw the line for 'home', whether you mean here on Zestsaksanrewp Island, or in Prazbzebsa City, or Dwerdzwajzb Province, or the Federation, or just Narmjesa as a whole? And the only thing I know about the island's transposition is that seems terribly appropriate to the myths, so I suppose I may start with the last..."

Then he gets a thoughtful face, and starts thinking...and keeps thinking, and eventually flushes a bit, smiling and stroking the back of his head in embarrassment. "I'm terribly at thinking of things I want before I want them. I'm a nature preserve warden. I'm fairly used to living out on my own, even if that's usually with the city just across the strait. Given your earlier question, I don't get the feeling that sending me back to visit my family when it's the holiday season is on the table."

He thinks a little longer. "I suppose, especially if I do stay here, some help keeping my food and drink stocked, and maybe new clothing if the island's new climate turns out to be significantly different, and maybe figuring out an alternative septic disposal solution would be good?" He scratches his beard. "I know people always complain about getting essentials as gifts...I guess some music might be nice? I don't really get tired of songs, but having some local music to commemorate being sent to another world seem appropriate."

Tateneka notes these down.

"We can do those!" she agrees. "And no, we don't know how to sending you home. We will try to learn it, because we want to visit your home too, but I don't know how hard the learning is."

She turns to one of the sailors and exchanges a few words. They hand her a medium-sized box, which she opens and presents to Tsarer.

"This is a phone," she says, pointing out one of the little hand-held devices that the sailors were using yesterday. "It was my guess for what you might want. It does several things; one of the things is play music. Also you can use it like a radio to call us if you need. The island is a little far in the sea, though, so it will only work goodly on clear days when it can talk to the sky-radio-relays."

She points at the other item in the box.

"The phone needs electricity, but I didn't know if your radio supply was the right kind, so this is a turns-sunlight-into-electricity box that can feed the phone."

He nods, and then receives the phone gingerly. If it's got those functions in such a tiny form-factor, its internal components must be wafer thin, so he'll treat it carefully. He'll treat the solar charger the same, though he imagines it's probably a bit more durable, just for being more single-purposed.

"Thank you. The cabin's power is actually generated the same way, from sunlight I mean, since it wasn't possible to connect it to the city's power grid, but I have no idea whether electrical details would match up. Also, wow, sky-radio-relays? How did that happen?" He knows that, for ocean exploratory missions, they sometimes have to bounce the radio signals off of part of the sky, thought he's iffy on the details. That doesn't entirely sound like what they're talking about, though.

"Our world is round — I think from the maps yours is round too? — but everywhere has a 'down'. So 'down' is different ways on different sides of the world," she explains. "If you make something go around the world fast enough, by the time it falls a little, its in a place where 'down' is a different way, so it starts falling a different way. With lots of very careful thinking, you can put a thing on a path where it falls around and around the world in a circle, never coming down."

"We wanted our radios to work from everywhere on the world, but doing that takes a lot of relays, lots of cables, lots of people working with radios. Once we learned that we could put things up around the world in falling-circles, we realized we could put relays up there, and they would work better because there is nothing between the radios on the ground and them. We still don't have enough to cover the whole world, and they aren't powerful enough to go through thick clouds and some kinds of weather goodly, but they make it easier to radio far-away people."

Tsarer remembers that constant perpendicular acceleration results in circular motion, and that acceleration due to gravity is approximately constant, so that checks out on the face of it, but if he considers the distance scale on this world's maps from yesterday, the speed they must be going at...

He gets out some loose paper and a pencil and starts working out an estimate of how fast the sky-radio-relays must be going. Then he does it two more times slightly different ways to make sure he's not making some arithmetic error.

"These things are going over twenty thousand kilometers per hour? How did you get them going that fast in the first place?"

Tateneka flips through her language notes.

"If you said about your units, it isn't in my notes. But yes, sky-radio-relays have to go very fast. Putting them up there is expensive, but then they can go on their own for a long time, so it is worth it. We use ... I don't have the words for this either. Do you have things that you light them on fire, and the fire pushes them up into the sky? We use big ones of those with hot-burning fuel."

"Oh, yes." Then he'll go look for his roll of measuring tape and give an example of a meter* before continuing, "A kilometer is 1296 times this length."

"Hot-air balloons? I don't think you're referring to hot-air balloons, they don't go anywhere near this fast, but I'm not sure what else you'd be referring to."

(The provided length is more like two and a half feet, and specifically is derived from a pre-standardization measure of five shaftments, rather than an SI meter. The resulting kilometer is almost the same length as the conventional kilometer, however.)

She does some calculations of her own.

"Yes, I think twenty thousand kilometers per hour is about right," she agrees. "And no, not hot air balloons; those can't go very fast at all."

She looks up a clip of a rocket launch on her own phone and shows it to him. Video would ordinarily take forever to download on a satellite link, but the Emergency Services ship that brought her out here has some data storage populated with things someone thought might be useful, and it's still close enough for her phone to connect.

"The fuel for this fire starts off very cold, and then it burns hot. The getting hot makes it also get big, so it pushes against itself, and throws hot gas out one end of the rocket, which pushes the rest of the rocket the other way. At first, the rocket is fairly slow, because the fuel has to lift a lot of fuel. But when a fuel tank is empty, it can throw itself away and the rest of the rocket is lighter."

She shows a video of stage separation.

"So, with a big enough rocket, you can get the last part of the rocket going fast enough to fall in circles. Getting enough metal and fuel to make the rocket is why putting things up there is expensive. But after being up there, the relays can last for many years."

He grimaces just a bit, at seeing what appears to be basically a massive, directed fuel-air explosion to fling a giant metal canister into the sky. It's fascinating, but some part of it also feels kind of sacrilegious. "That does look like quite a lot of fuel being burned. Err. Mm. Well, if you've all found it worthwhile I suppose I can be thankful it's there to use."

He is probably going to avoid using the phone too much, though, knowing that it's relying on stuff that's all but literally built on towers of smoke rising to the heavens. It almost feels like a scene in some kind of morality play.

He wonders whether the Coalition are working on something like this back home. He knows they're supposedly burning tons and tons of fuel to generate their electricity, so maybe the difference one of these 'rockets' wouldn't be so enormous in their minds. He shivers at the thought.

To get his mind off this topic, he'll set the phone down on his desk and start fiddling with his big radio terminal, which it turns out he's also recorded some previous radio broadcasts onto. Before he actually turns the music on, however, he thinks to ask, "Would you all mind if I turned on some music?"

She notices his discomfort, but he seems like he's trying to change the topic, so she lets it be.

"Not at all; I would like to hear some music from your world."

The sailors and the archivist agree.

"Would you mind if I had my phone listen to it, so I can share it with others?"

He gestures with a hand-flap as he replies, "Feel free, I'm just playing records I made of the public music broadcasts, no secrets or the like."

He unplugs one jack (which, with some cord-chasing, leads to big puffy around-the-ear headphones) and plugs in another, fiddles with some selector dials and potentiometers, then finally flipping a short lever. There's a bit of mechanical whining as internals spin up, and some crackle as the reader falls onto the tap, and then music begins to play in earnest. It's surprisingly percussive and bassy, with dark strings and a considerable ensemble of membranophones. There are lyrics, but they're much more liquid and vocalic than Tsarer's speech has been, and are completely unintelligible despite very clear enunciation, enough that it's probably a different language entirely.

It seems this song is familiar to Tsarer. He's bobbing gently to its beat, and while he's not singing along, his lips and mustache twitch just before particular lines are sung in a distinctly anticipatory way.

Very little will get the attention of a room full of linguistically-inclined þereminians than foreign-language media.

"What language is the singing?" Tateneka quietly asks him.

"It's the band's art-language, or at least the version of it they had when this performance was recorded." He gets a thoughtful look for a moment as he remembers. "I remember asking around about them when I first heard their music and I think they'd been using the name 'zajjanajja' for it."

The þereminians nod. Tsarer's world doesn't sound all that different from theirs, really.

"It's lovely," Tateneka comments.

Her read is that he's using this as a soothing bit of normality to put up with having strangers in his home, so she just sits in silence and listens to the music for a few minutes at least.

That is a decent explanation of what's going on with him, yeah.  He seems tempted to jump right into another song, but thinks better of it and instead spins the player back down.

"Is there anything you would like while you're copying books?" he asks, pretty clearly unsure of what he should be doing at the moment.

"Could you tell us a bit about you? How you grew up and started being a nature preservation warden?" the diplomat requests. "Reading your books will be good, but there are things that you can only be learning by listening to people."

Oh no, talking about himself. He smiles awkwardly and rubs his bald spot. "I'm not the greatest at talking about myself. I suppose that's part of why I ended up taking this job, even if it's not much of an explanation of how. Hm..."

He gets to thinking about how to explain his childhood, youth, and eventually arrival here on the island, and he ends up going to get a drink for himself, which he finished before he manages to think of anything. "I think of my childhood as pretty average, without anything much standing out and easy to forget, but that doesn't really mean much even to someone just from the other side of the continent, let alone from another world. It might be helpful if I knew more about what you're expecting, so I have some points of comparison?"

She nods.

"Of course. Here's how I answer that question about me: I was born in Prickly Pears City in a fairly normal family — my mother, father-1, father-2, and grandmother-by-father-2 lived in a little house above the market. When I was little, I liked to go to the market and talk to people, and I never really got tired of it, which is how my family learned I was a face-recognizer and high-talking-stamina sort of person. I made a lot of friends, and helped organize my school's imaginary-monster-hunts. Because of that, when I wanted to try acting as a teenager they thought that was a good fit and helped send me up to Ancestral Meeting Place city where I did feature in a few recorded plays."

"After some years, though, I realized that I liked arranging the recorded plays and the agreements for them more than I liked acting, so I ended up working for a getting-people-to-reach-agreements-about-money company. That's where I met my wife, and she thought I should try helping with the problems in the city's law-making-council at the time. That turned out to be really fun, and over the next more-than-twelve years I moved around a lot between different cities helping them reach good agreements. That's why I was chosen to come talk with you — I have spent lots of time talking to people from lots of different places, helping them understand them, and I like doing it."

Tsarer nods along as Tateneka gives her example. He's a little surprised that these folks live in cities but still seem to be living in their own separate houses like in a village, but he supposes without Kings making people live as densely as possible forever they're in something more of like a state of nature. The cultural restoration society would probably love to hear all about them. Also interesting to hear that being able recognize faces is exceptional here? He's not sure whether that's an exceptional level of ability to recognize faces even by his own expectations, or if it's more like how some people back home have trouble recognizing faces is the norm here. He wonders whether that'd have been something the Kings selected for.

"I was born here-- not here-here, on Zestsaksanrewp Island, but in Prazbzebsa City, in the New Primary Hospital. I grew up on the first floor of the Pebzedzwan building, along with my parents, their other husbands and wives, all of their other children who hadn't grown up and moved out. I had some trouble making friends when I was younger, since I had emotional regulation issues, which also delayed my literacy a bit, but one of my alloparents who'd dealt with similar issues helped me develop some techniques for dealing with it, and offered his nook as a place to run to when I needed. After I learned to read and started to love reading, I ended up reading a lot of books about nature, about the Kings' designs, about the Interior, and about the island as something different from both. It stuck with me for a long time, and after I bounced around various training programs for things like biochemistry research or waste management, I eventually came back to it when I heard that the city was looking to hire an apprentice for the current warden at the time, who was looking to retire in the next few years. I got through the suitability exam and won the lottery for the position, I moved in with the old warden, shadowed him for a year, started taking the lead on duties he thought I was ready for the next year, then handled things while he stuck around keeping watch and sorting out his post-retirement situation. Then he left, and it was just me, and the visitors and tourists, and yearly visits back to my family for the holidays, which is how it's been for last six or so years."

She follows most of that.

"It's good that you could get a job you seem to like," she comments. "I got most of those words, but I didn't understand 'Kings'. What is a 'King'?"

Oh, right. "I apologize, the word is not usually kept in most reference material in the Federation, as a matter of superstition mostly. The Kings were a group of black mages--"

Wait, did the reference material refer to magic at all? He's pretty sure he has a history book somewhere around here...

After a minute or two of sorting through his books, he'll present a copy of 'Our Complete History' that one of his alloparents got him out of the blue a couple years ago to one of the book-copiers. It's not exactly a rigorous historical treatise, but as far as popsci goes it's on the better end, at least from what the consumer reports he's looked up have said. "This is a pretty good overview of our history, which may be useful. Anyway. I don't actually know what kind of magic you all have, if you have any. I know the legends say that people didn't have magic in the secret land, so if this place is like that maybe you don't either. Back home, though, some people could do magic. It's a lineage kind of thing, from a mother to their children. I don't remember the exact statistics, but it's not common but also not super rare? If you picked a random set of 1296 people, maybe a couple dozen would be mages. About half of them are eye-mages, people who can see spiritual energy, about a third are flow-mages who can hear and feel and move spiritual energy, and the last sixth are black mages, who can..."

How should he phrase this...

"They can taste and smell spiritual energy, and can eat it to grow stronger, and can burn their strength to make magical artifacts out of smoke. Sort of. Anyway, the Kings were a group of ancient black mages who had gotten really powerful by subjugating people and eating them to gain the spiritual energy in their bodies, and who did a lot of other terrible shit until they all got killed by the Sjesjekwapar's rebellion a little under two centuries ago. Even though the oldest and strongest King, the High King, used to live where Prazbzebsa City is now, none of them ever settled on Zestsaksanrewp Island for some reason, which is why it's such an important nature preserve. The only biomes on Narmjesa that have been less directly impacted by the Kings are the Interior's oasis-jungles, which aren't exactly in danger of being destroyed any time soon, not by human intervention anyway."

... what a fascinating response. A þereminian with less practice making their feelings legible might have failed to have facial expressions for a few moments to work through the implications, but Tateneka just looks thoughtful.

"We don't have magic," she agrees. "Or, I don't think so. If it is a lineage and you are enough like us to have children, probably the governments of the world would really like to buy your sperm. We would really like to have magic, just to learn more about how the world is, aside from being able to reshape biomes. Can a black mage make a desert fertile?"

Tsarer can't resist chuckling a bit at the idea that these people would want to stud him out. "Sadly, I'm not a mage, and no one in my mother's line is or was, as far as I know. Not that it would help if I were, since the father's status is of secondary importance compared to the mother's anyway. As for whether black mages can make a desert fertile, maybe? I know the Kings never ended up colonizing the Interior, not successfully at least, not as far as anyone knows, but I don't know if that's because it's mostly a desert or if it was the magical beasts in the oasis-jungles that made it impractical, or something else."