The sea is always a bit harsh, this time of year, for all that they should be entering the channel and therefore sheltered from the worst of the storms off the cold sea. They're a bit off the usual course, having diverted for a thunderstorm some hours ago. Lharever (the skipper, not the Lharever who works in the mess) peers at the bank of fog with the dubious pessimism of someone who has had too many near misses in fog.

"Local traffic, this is the Cold Sea Logistics Support Ship Contemporary Accounts on a course 0.013 clockwise of South, currently at —"

They glance at the navigation system.

"Distance 450 units from the island without trees navigation beacon on bearing 0.214 widdershins of North. We're entering an unexpected fog bank, with limited visibility. If you can hear this, please respond with your own coordinates so we can avoid an accident."

And then, because þereminians believe in having backups, they hit the button for the horn, which plays a series of long, low tones that echo through the fog. Layered on top are theoretically machine-readable high-frequency harmonics with their location data — but Lharever has always been skeptical that they work properly.

Tsarer had just sat down with the book he selected for today's distraction from the horror of his situation when he heard his radio crackle with a signal it wasn't quite tuned to. Naturally he stood up, dropped the book, and rushed over to try and tune it, and had just managed to tune into the tail end of the transmission when the blare of the horn comes out of the fog.

After fiddling with the radio and reminding himself how to transmit rather than receive, he broadcasts, "Dzwej Rermjetsest satra Zestsaksanrewp Tsamjesa Memkswankansa. Prejk tse kra njeppa? Narmjesa njepsa?"

He couldn't recognize what was said in the earlier transmission, or even recognize what dialect they were speaking, so he can only hope that they have someone there who understands federal scholastic.

It'd be just his luck for him to have somehow gotten the whole island teleported to the east coast or something.

... that's not any language they recognize. Which isn't saying much — not only are there plenty of historical regional languages still in use, but it could always just be one of those unified global language advocates who can never agree on which language ought to be spoken globally.

"Unknown transmitter, I didn't recognize that language. Can you please repeat in LCTL? Can you please repeat in SCOL? Can you please repeat in Cold Sea Merchant's Cant? Can you please repeat in Þrevlish?"

Lharever fiddles with the radio array to see if they can get a bearing when the unknown party transmits.

That didn't sound like any dialect that Tsarer's ever heard of. Are people out there sailing whatever size of ship has a horn like that and only speaking in a conlang?

No. If this is happening then clearly the island's ended up...somewhere else. Maybe there are humans on the other side of the stormwall, or maybe this is some other world entirely, but he's far enough afield that they're speaking real, other languages. People who the Kings never reached, for one reason or another. At least, not the Kings who ruled the mainland.

He broadcasts, "Bzer psjejppsaz bjest kra bzwast psezbzez bjesttar kra naj dzwej. Mresp dzazzaspen neprezb traksa tsarkpsjejppen bjasktsakkwasp kra bjest memneprezb nre," pauses for a minute, then repeats the last sentence periodically every minute or so. Hopefully that'll give them a good enough chance of finding him.

... ooooookay. Is the tone of the transmission panicked? Smug? Happy? Confused?

Their Network uplink is offline right now, but the local Network is working just fine. He pings everyone awake on the ship with a notification asking if any of them recognize the language.

While waiting to hear for an answer, he at least gets a good fix on the direction of the transmission. Without some idea of the transmitter's strength, it's hard to be sure how far away it is — but he can steer them well around it, just in case. There's no reason to hit anyone in the fog.

"Look, mate — it's a navigation hazard to be out on the ocean without speaking a language in common use. I think we've steered clear of you and will pass you by to our starboard, but still."

The voice coming through is initially worried, though not quite panicked, and certainly also confused, but is growing calmer over time. Maybe even a bit hopeful. There's a pause in the repeated message when Lharever speaks, and the voice's tone wavers a bit, but doesn't seem to say anything different.

It may be concerning to them when, as they make their closest approach, that it becomes clear through the fog that they are not passing a ship. They are passing an island.

Lharever throws the engines into reverse.

"Full stop!" they announce over the intercom. "Land where it shouldn't be! Memskol, report to the bridge to help me try and reestablish our position."

They stand up and search around in the equipment locker before coming up with a spyglass. What does the island look like?

It's vaguely conical, thickly wooded with oddly smooth and bulbous trees, fresh with spring green and draped in vines. The ground is rocky where it's visible through the foliage, and there's a small patch of sandy beach. There's a small dock on the beach, more fit for a ferry than a ship, with a boardwalk that leads up from the beach and to a wooden shack at the edge of the forest. A thread of smoke, just barely visible against the background of the fog, rises up from somewhere obscured by the trees.

Well, none of that looks like any island that should be along their route. They back off to a (hopefully) safe distance from the island, and post a watch to see if they drift toward any shallows.

The crew spends a while trying to figure out how they could have gone off course without much luck.

"Memskol, you try to raise Island Without Trees Emergency Services on the long-frequency radio. Vernish, take the—"

    "Sir — there's someone there with a radio, could we just row over and ask where we are?"

"Vernish. If you'd let me finish my sentence, you would find we are in agreement. Ask for volunteers to go with you, ideally good with languages."

Vernish ducks his head and heads out of the bridge.

About 30 minutes after first sighting the island, a small electric boat lowers from the side of the ship and heads toward the island's dock.

He's not sure whether he stopped hearing the subtle sound of a large ship moving past or if it's just faded into the background, and if he's actually heard it he's not sure whether that means they've stopped or whether they've disappeared, like the mainland evidently did.

Then he hears something shriller, smaller, but maybe getting closer. Maybe a boat approaching the dock?

He quickly grabs the radio's portable handset and runs faster than he has in a good few years out of the cabin, along the dirt paths to the boardwalk, and clacking over the boards and down the stairs to the dock.

A small electric boat is carefully navigating its way toward the dock, one of the three figures in it peering into the water in case of unknown rocks or shallows.

One of the other figures spots him running and waves.

That's people! A bit of the tension tied up in his chest slackens, knowing that. Now he just needs to hope they're friendly.

He waves, big and wide with his whole arm, as he heads down to the dock's jetty to wait and help them tie off.

They tie off with practiced ease and hop out. Their boat is a small metal affair, clearly intended primarily to go back and forth between the shore and the larger ship.

They already tried plenty of spoken languages, but you can't do sign over radio without a video link, so it's worth a shot.

Hi! Do you speak LCTL? Or SCOL? Vernish signs.

What a remarkable little vehicle. Tsarer isn't sure he's seen anything quite like it. It's a bit like if someone decided to build a motor into a dinghy made of metal, though maybe a bit larger than that as well. He hasn't ever seen the island just up an move either, though, so why not?

His reaction to the attempted sign is not even confusion so much as overlooking. It takes him nearly a second to realize they're attempting to convey anything, and once he does he can only shake his head. "Bzer psjejpkswan bjest kra naj dzjaw." It's something of an embarrassment of his, honestly.

"Mas dzaskwawn tar tsjew bjest katnjart?" he asks, gesturing back up the boardwalk. Hopefully with access to his books they can figure out a better way for him to communicate with them.

... sure, why not.

Vernish says something to one of the others, who radios back to the ship. The three of them all look agreeable, and follow along wherever it is that mysterious island person would like them to go.

Then he'll go ahead and lead them up and around and through, back to his cabin!

It's a relatively basic affair, at least as far Tsarer thinks of it. It's two floors, with four rooms plus the garage. On the first floor there's the main room, where he cooks, eats, and entertains his friends and family when they come by for holidays and the like, and his office for reading and working, and a door to the garage. Upstairs, there's the bedroom and the bathroom.

He'll take the current guests right to his office, showing them his radio (it's a big, blocky, desk-sized thing, which he replaces the handset back into), his drafting desk, and his bookshelves, which he begins to search for things dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other illustrated reference books he happens to have, briefly turning around and opening one to show its contents (full of unfamiliar script, but with an overall structure that might be recognizable as lexicographical in nature) to the guests, hoping to communicate what he's bringing them out for.

One of the sailors reaches for the book with an inquisitive look, while another watches and the third steps to the shelf and starts scanning titles.

Tsarer hands it over happily, then considers things for a moment, before grabbing a pencil and some paper, tearing off a strip, and writing something on it. It looks something like this. He points out each symbol and enunciates the associated phoneme, then tucks the slip into the collar of his shirt. Then he writes out what seems to be his language's entire alphabet, which is surprisingly small and seems to imply an equally sparse phoneme inventory.

Okay! Either this person is being an obsessive stickler about their conlang, the ship went way off course, or something weird is happening. It doesn't really matter which, because either way the þereminians are prepared for this.

The sailor with the book starts sounding out words under his breath to get a feel for the language's phonology and morphology. Vernish holds a hand to his chest and says "Vernish", and then points at the island person and looks inquisitive.

Morphologically, the language is quite dense with consonant clusters, as many six in a row when analyzing across syllables. The placement of sounds seems exceedingly regular, though. Syllable nuclei are exclusively vowels, and in the onset of a syllable, any plosive or nasal present will be first, followed by any present sibilant or rhotic, followed by any present approximant, followed by the nucleus. The coda in turn follows the reverse order, approximants followed by rhotics or sibilants followed by plosives or nasals, and additionally there seems to be some restriction on what sounds can appear in the coda and in what quantity, such that a syllable whose onset contains no plosive or nasal may not have one in its coda, a syllable whose onset lacks any plosive, nasal, rhotic, or sibilant may not have any in its coda, and a syllable without an onset may not have a coda either. It's an odd bit of symmetry, and doesn't help dispel the notion that this language might be constructed, or at least have been subject to some kind of unnatural regularization at some point. Interestingly, in the writing, characters representing the elements of a word's coda appear to be written backwards.

Tsarer is pretty sure that's the stranger trying to identify themself...probably. Hopefully. He'll go ahead and mimic the gesture, before retrieving the same slip as before and state, "Rermjetsest."

LCTL has much smaller consonant clusters, because some people have trouble with them. But the consonant clusters aren't that difficult, all things considering. One of the sailors is holding their phone above the book as they flip through it, presumably recording the text for analysis. The other two solicit additional vocabulary by pointing at things and looking inquisitive, since that seems to have worked well so far.

What a fascinating and fantastical little device! They're using it like some kind of camera, but a tiny fraction of the size of the smallest one that Tsarer's ever seen. Combined with the curious state of their boat, he can only assume that's these people's technology must be awfully advanced.

He'll do his best to not get distracted by that when attempting to provide vocabulary. Aside from just doing his best to name whatever particular object (or creature, if they're pointing out the office window) they're indicating, especially if the most obvious choice is something they've already gestured to before, he'll beg back the illustrated encyclopedia that's being captured on not-technically-any-film-that-he-can-see and flip through for images of what else they might be aiming for and reading them out.

That's tremendously helpful! Vernish smiles and clicks appreciatively in recognition of his efforts.

After a few minutes, they have enough noun-related vocabulary to try soliciting some location-related vocabulary by putting things on top of each other, or to the side, and so on. That and any maps in the encyclopedia might be enough to ask where they are.

The language evidently has a pretty limited set of basic prepositions (and indeed seems to be prepositional, rather than inflecting for a variety of locative cases or some other system), and when prompted for me specificity the islander man simply prefixes other words onto the preposition.

There is indeed a map of the island, labeled Zestsaksanrewp Tsamjesa, roughly meaning 'No-Bridge Island,' and which would seem to indicate that there's supposed to be a bustling port city just a couple miles north of the island, and indeed, ostensibly an entire moderately sized continent which matches approximately nothing in any atlas that the sailors have seen. Notably, all of the world maps' southern borders are labeled with zero degrees latitude, rather than ninety degrees south, and the southern border of the maps are consistently drawn in grey and labeled Zeddebbebdek, roughly 'Stormwall,' which if asked about, Tsarer will get a thoughtful look for a moment as he revises his expectations regarding where he's ended up, before explaining that it's is the permanent storm that surrounds the equator, where monsoons come from, and which no one has every managed to survive crossing, at least to his knowledge. Certainly no one's ever come back from the other side.

They caught at least half of that!

But yeah. If it weren't for this damn fog screwing with the ship's communications link, they'd be a lot more certain about what had happened here.

Vernish pulls up a map on his phone, and points out the Cold Sea region — to the north and west of the largest continent. Then he zooms in on the channel between an archipelago on the mainland, and taps the spot that the ship is supposed to be in.

Gosh, these little gadgets are just amazing. He hopes he can get his hands on one. If he ever gets back, he bets he could make a fortune from selling just one to the right company, or maybe even to the government.

Whether he is ever going home, now that he's quite certain he's on another world entirely, is a different question. At least he parted on good terms with everyone at the last holiday, and with the entire island gone, no one will have to wonder whether he just ran off.

Also, goodness. If that's where the island is now, he's quite a bit further from shore than before. At least it looks like he's a good bit further from the equator than before as well, and there's no Stormwall to worry about, so hopefully the island won't just get washed away by a hurricane.

Given the opportunity, he'll gesture at their map and ask, using as simple a vocabulary he can for now, "Kepsa njepsa psenseskjewm? Tsjew njepsa psenseskjewm?"

"Psenseskjewm kepsa —" he points to a spot on the northern coast of the bit of sea that extends east into the interior of the continent. "Psenseskjewm tsjew —" he points to a spot on the southern coast of the largest island of the archipelago.

He nods along. So, if the way they set up their cities is anything like back home, they're probably headed for a smaller one, from a larger. Maybe bringing out equipment and other finished goods out to a city based on resource extraction? Or possibly just based on servicing ships. Their technology looks advanced but he doesn't have any idea how much maintenance it needs, or how they're storing or generating their power.

He shakes his head, and refocuses on how this impacts his situation. The island's more isolated than before, further from the land, and it looks like further north than before. Plus, who knows whether this new world's air is exactly the same, or what sort of differences the sea creature might have. It's a precarious spot, and he has a hard time imagining the island won't be going through ecological changes as a consequence. Even if he's not in a place to get paid to do it, he is still the warden of this place, and pretty knowledgeable about its wildlife and geology. He thinks he should stay, to keep watch and try and manage whatever consequences the island's about to suffer.

After a long quiet pause as he thought all of that, he speaks again. "Psjejpkswan bjest kra bzwast kwarp bjest kra mrejn bra tsamjesa kepsa brabzeb. Psjejpkswan bjest kra bzwast prejk pswarp kepsa bjest sjejpa tsjew tar sjejpa, psja tswajn sjertse. Bzer psjejpkswan bjest kra bzwast tswajn kswazmmwern bjest ksewtnrazbkswaspsjaj kra nantaksa zjejzkwaspsjaj, pswa mresp tsajpnjajktse bjest."

Then he remembers that might be a bit much to hear all at once, and so he'll take the piece of paper he tore a bit off from and write it down, and help them translate.

That takes a bit of puzzling, but it's not too bad since they can just reference the dictionary.

"Psjejpkswan bjest kra bzwast tswajn kswazmmwern psjet kra nantaksa zjejzkwaspsjaj bzebza sjasteter set. Tswajn mrejnpsaz bjest kra pektse ksewtnrazbkswaspsjaj bra tar tsja bzer tse tar psjet," he reassures him.

Tsarer relaxes, fractionally. He still needed to process being cut off from everyone he'd ever known and being thrust into some kind of other world, like the morning fog was the mists of time itself, but at least he wasn't going to need to worry about finding food after his stores ran out, or rebuilding civilization from scratch.

"Bzajtzaj. Mradwezzaz kra bjest bra prakpa psjejpkswan," he says, standing in his office for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, before coming to some kind of realization. "Mas tswajn bzewz bjest kra najpsjaj traksa tar? Kswan kra pwaj membaz psja memsjez."

Vernish references the encyclopedia, and eventually puts together a statement explaining that they're slightly worried the food might be poisonous to them, even if it's not to him, and since they have plenty of food on their ship they're not interested in risking it for politeness's sake.

It takes him a minute to figure out why they'd be worried about that sort of thing off the bat, but he does figure out that, given they've had a whole other world to live in, there's some worry that they've got some kind of allergy or other sensitivity that the Kings removed from themselves and their subjects. Fair enough.

Still, is there anything else he can do for them? Or anything else they need to do for the moment?

The sailors take a few moments to confer.

Mostly what they want right now is notes about language, but it would also be helpful if he could make a list of emergencies or dangers he's familiar with that are common knowledge in his world, with a particular focus on things that could still effect him or could have conceivably traveled with his island. That sounds like the kind of thing that it's better to try and keep on top of even if they're most likely just the same things they're dealing with here. Are any of the flora or fauna here particularly poisonous or invasive?

Hm. Well, the island's not volcanic or anything, and it's rooted well-enough that the last landslide was nearly half a century ago, and only happened when a particularly dry year prompted the worst forest fire they have on record and was followed by an equally wet year.

The flowering vines that are common on the island are terribly hard to get rid of, though they're fortunately also not all that prone to spreading. They're actually native to the island, and pretty hard to cultivate elsewhere. They only ended up on the mainland because the local King wanted to study them for some reason or another. Really, he'd be more worried about other species invading the island than vice versa, though naturally he doesn't really know anything in particular about this new world's situation.

Otherwise, nothing particularly comes to mind. At the same time, this island used to only be a couple miles off the shore, so combined with the Royal interference its ecology was already well-communicated to the mainland, so any disasters would've happened ages and ages ago.

The sailors spend some time speculating about whether any fish are likely to have come along with the island, but Emergency Services is clearly going to have to check that anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

Vernish radios the ship with an update, and they continue pumping their new friend for vocabulary and grammar.

A little while later, the ship radios back saying that they've got a low-bandwidth channel to Island Without Trees Maritime Support Services, who want to know if their guest needs immediate evacuation or not.

"We talk to the ship, the ship talk to the land," Vernish informs Tsarer. "They want know if you want someone come get you to land immediately, or if you feel okay wait here for a while."

"I feel okay stay here," he answers (attempting to match Vernish's currently vocabulary and grammar level for understanding's sake). "I know island. I have food and drink. I have home. No immediate danger here."

Vernish nods.

The sailors do language lessons and take notes for a while longer, before eventually concluding that they should write up what they've learned so far and send it to the mainland.

"A ship comes tomorrow with more talking people on it. We greet you again tomorrow?"

Tsarer nods with a smile. "I greet you again tomorrow. I get up around dawn. I go to the dock then, or I go later if you say what time."

"Dawn is fine," he assures him.

They file out and head back down to their boat, waving as they go.

Island Without Trees Emergency Services does not think it's particularly likely that an entire island from another world has suddenly dropped into their eastern ocean. They're not sure what is happening, but weird navigation failures and elaborate pranks are just overwhelmingly more likely than that.

But you'd have to be completely joyless and far too certain of yourself not to check.

A bit after the sailors return to their ship, an Emergency Services search-and-rescue seaplane homes in on them and does a long circle around the island.

Well.

In the morning, the party that comes to greet Tsarer is somewhat different. The original sailors (who have the advantage of already having established friendly relations) are there, but so is a tall woman in a long purple dress, flown in overnight in a great hurry. Also accompanying them is an Archivist in plain green robes held closed with a pin bearing the sigil of the library. They carry a rugged, human-portable document scanner and a power brick.

Vernish waves as they guide the boat into the dock.

Just as promised, Tsarer is waving back from the dock, happy to guide the new and familiar back to his cabin. He'll greet them all as they disembark, curiosity obvious on his face as he looks over the tall woman and archivist.

"Hello, Tsarer! Is good to meet you," she replies. Her vocabulary and grammar roughly match where the sailors left off yesterday, but her accent is a bit thick. "I am Tatenika, a talking-to-people person. This is book-saver Galhasa."

Gosh, those sure are some sounds that he's not used to distinguishing linguistically! At least he can guess what the roles they're gesturing at.

"Well-met, communicator Tateneka and archivist Kaddasa! I apologize for my incorrect speaking. Dzwejwej does not have some of those sounds," he offers as he leads the way.

Names are just convenient labels for people. She mentally adjusts hers.

"Your apologizing is unneeded; everybody is troubled by new languages," she reassures him. "There are some things I want to ask you. Most important is: do you mind if the archivist copies your books? We don't know the rules for book-copying of your home, but here we all like to make sure books can't be lost."

Tsarer mentally reviews the contents of his office library, before nodding. "I don't think any of my books are secret information, so it's okay to make copies."

"If you remember after and any things are, tell the archivist," Tateneka advises him. "Our archivists have a promising not to share secrets, so that people feel okay letting them save their books."

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."

"Well, I wasn't actually thinking of deserts," Tateneka admits. "Does your world have other worlds in the sky too? We think the two nearest other worlds could be places to live, if we figure out how to change the places or ourselves. The further-out close world is like a big, cold desert. Neither of them have magical beasts."

Other worlds in the sky...

"Planets?" Another word that he's surprised he needs. "Other large, spherical bodies that are orbiting the Sun?"

And they have one that's like a big, cold desert. "Maybe? I'm not sure how sustainable it'd be, though."

"Planets!" she repeats, mentally adding it to her vocabulary. "And it would definitely be very challenging. It is a far, far future wish, not something to do right now. But many people would feel good about knowing that if something bad happened to this planet, there were people on other ones."

She shakes her head.

"Anyway, that is not really most important to talk about. That is just one reason that we would quite like magic. Can you tell me, you said the Kings were killed in a rebellion — that sounds like it would have been a lot of change. How are your governments organized now?"

Tsarer nods along to the explanation. He supposes if they can get things from their planet's surface to orbit, then going to other planets is a natural next step.

"Well, I don't know much how all the Coalition's member states organize their things. I know they all send a representative to the Coalition oversight council, but I don't really know much about the specifics of that either, really. In the Federation, we have a bunch of municipal administrations for cities and special interest regions, which are all grouped up into a handful of provinces with legislatures to draft laws, charter executive organizations, and whatnot, and then there's the federal legislature, which does the same stuff but for the whole Federation, though the main executive organization they charter is the military."

Tateneka looks puzzled.

"I'm not sure about 'military' or 'Federation' either. Sorry," she remarks. "I tried to learn as much as I could. I'm sure we'll be able to speak better after looking at your books."

"It's okay, I didn't exactly have a plan for communicating all my vocabulary to people from another world." He's pretty confident he knows people who do have plans for that kind of thing, even if only for fun, and he feels a bit guilty for not participating at least a bit himself now. "A military is an organization of people who are trained to use various weapons and to fight in various ways. Ours mostly helps enforce the laws, and makes sure that the Coalition doesn't think they could just march there's over and take everything. The Federation is the country I live in, and it was founded by the army that slew the High King at the end of the rebellion, along with the various castellans that the High King and their vassal Kings delegated the management of their human farms to and some of the freeman bands that had been struggling along in the Interior. They all got together, and after a couple years of hashing things out they wrote the Federal Treaty and then went up and down the coast and had the leaders of every community they could find agree to it, and to sign the Treaty as proof. The original copy's in a museum back in the city, and it's quite a sight with how long it is."

...

"Oh, because magic is good at manipulating the environment, so you can't just salt the fields and burn your infrastructure if they try to take them!" she concludes. "That's sad. I'm sorry you have to spend so much effort on a contingency because of something that is otherwise good."

"That treaty sounds kind of similar to how we organize things," she continues. "Our cities are all in various agreements with each other. The group I work for ..."

She trails off, seeing the look on his face.

He's a little surprised that the first thing that came to mind for her is burning everything down and salting the ashes, which probably leaves a lingering twinge of confusion and concern on his eyebrows and lips when she checks.

When he notice her looking, it occurs to him to school his expression (or at least, attempt to). "It's unfortunate, I suppose. It's hard to not see them as just part of how the world works, though."

She nods in commiseration.

"That makes sense," she agrees. "Ah. In any case, that treaty sounds similar to how we do things. There are a bunch of different treaties for different things, but your island ended up near the loose group of Larger Continent treaties. I usually work in Smaller Continent, but I was in Last Stop Before the Ocean City — not far west and south of here — for a treaty meeting."

Interesting. "What was it about? The federal legislature has a yearly meeting around mid-spring to decide on yearly budget changes and to renew charters that are about to expire, but other than that they usually only gather together in the federal building if one of the legislators is making a big proposal."

"This one was about anti-taxing parent-friendly cities. Some cities make it easier to have children in various ways, and the people born there tend to move to other cities. But government programs always have a cost, and cities do actually need people to maintain their infrastructure and so on. So it wouldn't be fair for the cities that make it harder to have children to benefit from the cities that pay to make it easier. But you also can't just tax people moving between cities because of various free-movement agreements. And collectively, we don't want a situation where every city feels the need to compete to be less child-friendly, because that will eventually drive bad outcomes," she explains.

"So right now this is handled by some general regional agreements, with the rest mediated by long-term infrastructure insurance. That insurance isn't going away, because cities need it for planning purposes, but the hope is that by coming to a global consensus on a framework for anti-taxing parent-friendly cities, less-parent-friendly cities will be able to pay money directly to more-parent-friendly cities while also bringing down their insurance premiums. That means more money being spent directly on making places that are better for people to live, and less money being spent on planning for the contingency where the birth rate starts dropping over the next few twelve-year periods."

"But with all the cities involved, everyone has opinions and caveats and things that they want to make sure are required or forbidden. And it's not as urgent a problem as something like recycling standards or judicial cooperation agreements, so the whole process has dragged out for years at this point. At this meeting I was mostly trying to resolve a bunch of concerns around ensuring that the system doesn't incentivize anti-taxing emigration either, which Backs to the Mountain City is particularly worried about."

"Wow, that seems awfully complicated. I guess that's sort of inevitable with how many people you must have with all this extra land, though."

How does the Federation handle this problem? He gets a contemplative look as he considers it. "I guess we also mostly just try and make sure that none of our cities are all that different in terms of how good they are for raising kids. That and if there's a big population shortfall probably the federal legislature would charter some kind of incentive for people to move."

"There are definitely things where we have to standardize like that. But it's generally a good thing to try and give people options about where to live, so it's worth spending time working on," she responds. "I'm not sure you can assume our worlds have the same population density, though. We have about a billion people, worldwide. How many people does your world have?"

"Huh. That's only a little over twice as much as the Federation, if I remember the fact. We have something like 544,195,584 people I think, give or take. Narmjesa as a whole might actually be pretty comparable. Why do-- well, I guess probably the fact that you didn't have any Kings is why you don't live that densely. I guess the real question is, why do you live in cities at all, if you weren't being packed into them by sheer necessity?"

"Cities are convenient! There are things that are easier when you do them in large batches, and if everyone is close together that means you can share more of those kinds of jobs. Like cooking — when you live alone in the country, you need to cook for yourself. When you live in the city, a group of 24 people can all share one big meal, which takes less effort per person to make."

"There are lots of things like that; when you have a large enough community, it sort of forms a feedback loop where the way to improve a bunch of different things is to build denser and denser. We actually have to have laws to make sure our cities don't get too dense, because if they get too dense they get less pleasant to live in. So there are laws about how narrow streets can be, and how much green space there has to be, and so on."

It's a little amusing to think that people need laws to make sure they have green space, rather than trying to make sure people aren't filling every available space with plants that are going to end up breaking through nearby walls, floors, or roofs. Tsarer nods along, but gestures in a vaguely frustrated way at the end. "That all makes sense, that's why we aren't really trying to get rid of our cities. I didn't ask the right question, I think. I want to know about your history. How did you start having cities? The feeling I've gotten from occasionally keeping up with archeology news is that the transition from pre-city nomadic bands to cities was pretty unpleasant, and distinctly prone to reversing until the Kings came around and took people's choice of lifestyle out of their hands."

"Oh! I see. We had an intermediate step between nomadic bands and modern cities," she explains. "Unfortunately, the transition from nomadic bands to the first stationary farming villages predates our written records, so we can't be sure, but we think there was a particularly bad famine that wiped out our ancestor's normal prey animals. So they started investing in stationary farms that needed tending year round in order to secure their food supply against things like that. But the villages they formed were still pretty small — usually 12-144 people — and still did plenty of ranging through the surrounding countryside to hunt and forage. So the transition would have been less of a change."

"Then, having stationary locations allowed our ancestors to invent technologies that need lots of equipment or access to local resources, which in turn gave a reason for steady trade between people living in different areas. The random geography of the land concentrated traders in some locations, and the villages where they stopped got larger in order to cope and offer supplies and services to the traders. Those were the first proto-cities. Eventually, they did become sort of disgusting and terrible, until people established forms of government that work for larger numbers of people and started cleaning them up. At that point, they noticed how the cities were actually producing things more efficiently, and not just acting as trade hubs, and we realized that cities could be more pleasant and efficient."

"But most of our population still lived rurally for a long time, because cities are not as good at producing food, since that takes a lot of space. But having people in cities allowed for the development of schools and universities, which sped up our invention of farming techniques, which made farming more efficient, which let more people move to cities, etc. It formed a cycle that drove things to the point that a single farmer can supply food for hundreds of people, and now a large chunk of our population lives in cities."

He continues to nod along, occasionally humming curiously. "I guess our ancestors turned out more sensitive to that unpleasantness? Or maybe just didn't have enough time to figure out alternative forms of government before the Kings showed up. It's interesting how we still ended up in mostly similar places either way."

That particular curiosity of his has been satisfied, and he's drawing a blank of what more to ask about, so he'll let Tateneka (or anyone else who happens to enter the conversation) take the lead.

Well, Tateneka has an agenda — namely, trying to get latent cultural information out of him, both for ethnographic purposes and to figure out whether it's going to be a problem to just leave him alone on his island if that's really what he wants.

"Could you tell me more about the Coalition and how your argument with them got started?" she requests.

Tsarer scratches his beard as he considers what he knows. "I don't know much about the details, really. I'm not sure there really is a single particular argument with the entire Coalition exactly? It's more like we have problems with a bunch of member states in the Coalition, and the Coalition isn't willing to do anything about it, and the Coalition's biggest member states don't like that the Federation isn't something they can boss around like the rest of the Coalition is." He shrugs. "It's not exactly the most unbiased perspective, though. I don't really get into the political weeds. I work in a nature preserve."

"That's fair!" she agrees with a smile. "Maybe we can talk about that, actually — I know we already checked that you didn't know of any invasive species that we'd need to be particularly aware of, but are there things that the plants here need to stay healthy? If nothing else, we can probably transport samples to a greenhouse in a climate they're more adapted to, to try and preserve any species that react badly to the winter here."

He opens his mouth to start an answer, before remembering that he has notes that he should probably reference first.

After searching around for his notebooks, and then through his notebooks for where he's been keep tracking of yearly atmospheric spirits, weather patterns, and observations of the island's wildlife. "Do you have-- no, you don't have magic. Hm..." He considers for a moment. "But you've got things in orbit. Do you have records of what the weather over this sea-region? We had some winter, but if this area gets lots of snow, or gets cold enough to have seasonal sea-ice, or doesn't ever get much warmer than it is now, those might be problematic."

"We do have records, yes."

She pulls up a graph of historical temperatures in the cold sea region.

"You have the luck to be actually on the ocean, near the north warm current. So it doesn't get as cold as it does on land," she explains. "That line there is where water freezes; the ocean won't freeze here, but when the temperature is below that you might get snow. The water in the sea-air means that snow is typical, but I don't know how much is 'lots'. The highest temperature is about a fourth of the way from water freezing to water boiling, but it stays that temperature for most of summer."

He has more info, and some sketches, for this! He flips to a different section of the notebook he's holding, and produces a few sketches of what a few of the higher up parts of the island look like after the snowfall, as well as statistics on the average depth. It doesn't seem like it consistently gets more than a couple thirty-sixths-of-a-'meter' deep in terms of actual snowfall (though around the steeper slopes the snow can pile up higher as the wind pushes it down). "The lower areas, around the docks, usually don't get much proper snow, more pellets or hail instead of flakes, and maybe about half as much than the higher areas. And, that temperature sounds pretty close to what it usually got to before."

Tateneka frowns, and pulls up some precipitation measurements.

"Having an island here might change the winds," she warns. "But I think you might see half a meter of snow. So more than usual, but not much more than it can drift to. What species do you think will have the hardest time with it, or are most urgently in need of conservation?"

Oh, that would be quite a bit. "Hm..."

After more flipping through notes, and searching for a couple other notebooks and more flipping through them, he's able to provide a list of plants, mostly smaller ground-covering plants that compete with or parasitize the flowering vines. The vines themselves already regrow from the portions of their network that cling to the trees, though.

"Honestly, it's not related to plant life, but I'm a little worried about the dock. It's pretty durable, since the currents in the Zestsaksanrewp Strait were quite violent, but much heavier yearly snowfall might start wearing it down in a way I'm not really equipped to repair."

"We can take care of the dock," Tateneka, who can make recommendations to the First Contact Bursary Board, promises. "How often do you typically need resupply?"

He considers that question pretty thoroughly as well, putting away the seasonal weather notebooks and finding his resource usage logbooks. "Back home, food delivery and waste management came by once a month, but that was also when I was just a couple miles offshore, not in the middle of the ocean. The stores I have here right now can hold out for six months before I need to start foraging. I'd have to start defecating in the woods once my septic tank starts backing up though, which I'd like to avoid. I don't know exactly how soon that'd happen, but to be safe I'd probably guess a little over two months?"

Tateneka frowns.

"We usually design septic systems with a larger capacity than that. Is there something about the layout of your site ..."

She will spend a good amount of time talking through a plan for keeping the nature reserve functional, while continuing to subtly absorb cultural context from Rermjetsest. In the background, the Archivist makes a serious dent in the library.

The scanned pages get striped across a local redundant disk array. The presence of books with new metadata triggers an automatic push notification to the Archive's geographically distributed indexing servers. The backup servers notice that there are books registered with the index system that are not stored locally, and automatically add the missing books' UUIDs to their content-request advertisements.

The networking hardware between the Archive's backup servers and the CSLSS Contemporary Account's terrestrial downlink negotiates for reserved priority capacity — the benefit of having an institution as old as the written word, and with connections to every government on the planet. The books saturate the ship's network link, radio packets flying from the Archivist's device, to the ship, to the mainland where they become laser pulses, and spread out across the entire planet. All automatic, all designed with the most robust possible protocols, on a network stack that was recently proved formally correct.

And then the Archivist radios in a check to make sure the books are making it through anyway. Because you don't get to become the oldest institution in the world by just assuming that a battle-tested, proven-correct system works without actually checking.

Most þereminians don't really think about the details of how the Network, the Archive, the various territorial agreements, the networking standards, the spectrum-allocation systems, etc. all work together to smoothly save alien books — for one thing, they're distracted by the alien books. But if you told them, they would not be particularly surprised. The þereminian Network is a machine made of rules, wires, lasers, transistors, and, at every turn, the soul-deep understanding that getting written words to eyes that want to see them, forever, is important.

Someone who would be considerably more surprised is hiding in a storage closet.

Previously:

Dzarmpsoz is not unfamiliar with stowing away on ships. As an illicit healer, and a smoke-mage unwilling to live in a pen and chew grass like cattle, she's been on the run from Federation witch-hunters for years.

She had thought Zestsaksanrewp Island would be a reasonably safe place to hide out for a while, slowly build up her reserves again with shellfish and birds, then sneak back out on the ferry with one of the tourist crowds.

She did not anticipate the mainland disappearing into the fog like in some kind of ghost story. So, naturally, when some strangers showed up, she took her shot, sneaking onto their boat (cloaked and muffled, naturally), and hitched a ride back to their bigger, fancier, kind of scary metal ship.

She didn't realize that they're all speaking some kind of gobbledygook, though, which has made trying to eavesdrop a bit harder. Thus, her now keeping to herself in a storage closet, hoping that they won't notice her dipping into their food supply, at least not until they make land and she can disappear into the night again.

The CSLSS Contemporary Accounts is a shipping vessel — that is, a ship that usually carries many more boxes than people. A ship with many places to hide, and a relatively small crew. A ship that is crewed by sailors, not spies or professional pessimists.

All of which is to say: no, they don't notice her.

Especially not when some Emergency Services people are airlifted out as part of the first wave, and then as they busy themselves relocating everything to the IWTESSS Outstretched Hand when it anchors a few hundred feet away.

If she remains in her closet, emerging ever so carefully to snag food when nobody is around to observe ...

... then she will remain undiscovered until the ship docks.

Dzarmpsoz is a naturally curious woman. Her curiosity is what lead her to experiment with her smoke even as her parents forbade it, and what lead her to explore woods around their village, which in turn lead to her finding the wood-witch's camp, and thus to her tutelage under her.

But she is also a cautious woman, not by nature but by painstaking lesson after lesson. She wants to know what's happening outside, she wants to know these people are saying, she wants to know what happened. But she wants to stay alive more, and all the years of life as a witch have taught her that means staying hidden.

It's fortunate that, wherever she's ended up, they don't seem to be expecting her.

Well, they're not expecting her, but they are at least entertaining the possibility of disease. When the ship docks, it is not in its usual berth — instead, it is at a dock near a big white tent where the crew are being given a medical checkup and then conveyed to quarantine housing, just in case.

The dock itself is at the edge of a medium-sized port — too small for container ships, but large enough to have a decent amount of shipping traffic — which sits down a rolling, grass-covered hill from a dense, vertical city.

That looks a lot like some kind of disease control protocol. The island warden never mentioned or wrote anything about a disease, though? Maybe these people already had something before they arrived?

She hasn't felt any sickness in herself, but she gives herself a quick scan anyway, and she does discover that there's a bunch of new microbes in her gut and on her skin, though nothing that's out-competing her native microbiota (unsurprising, enchanted as they are), and none acting as sufficiently virulent pathogens as to overcome her immune system. Wherever she's ended up, the microbe species here look to be completely different. She should try and get a sample from one of the locals at some point, once she's in safer conditions.

The city is beautiful, like what she's imagined the secret land's cities looked like.

And like what her teacher said the High King's palace-city looked like. Naturally, since the High King had made her home in the image of the greatest thing she could imagine.

It looks dangerous. Like it has a lot of people, and a lot of eyes.

It'll be a bit tricky to skirt around it without going into the water, but she'll live. Hopefully, anyway. Once she's past the city's edge into the wilderness, she'll get away from the water and see if she can catch something to eat.

The landscape does not particularly suit sneaking, tending to wide, grassy expanses. But she's already near the edge of the port area, and so is able to circle around and get a hill between her and the city with not too much effort.

There are a number of scattered outlying buildings, connected by paved roads, but the density gradually decreases as she works her way away from the city.

To cruelly summarize the geography of the area, it has:
- Craggy cliffs
- Beaches
- Hills
- Grass
- Free-roaming sheep
- No trees

Once she's far enough out that she's not scared of being identified as a quarantine-breaker, she'll drop her cloak and muffler constructs, lack of cover be damned. She's low on smoke, low on life, and feeling the bone-deep tiredness that comes from being so spiritually drained, and the relative lack of security measures (or at least, security measures that didn't seem utterly unprepared for her) has left her judgement leaning towards conserving her remaining spirit.

She's sad to not have the spare mental bandwidth to appreciate the scenery more, a thin part of her brain feels like it must be beautiful, but too much of her is focused on other things right now to really experience it.

The sheep catch her interest, though. Do they seem marked, in a way where one sheep going missing will be noticed?

Yes — they have simple metal ear-tags.

Darn. It'd have been too easy otherwise, she supposes. Does she want to risk provoking a missing livestock investigation? How much spiritual energy would she be able to build back up, in how little time?

How big does this herd look to be? If she goes up to one of the sheep and gives them a sniff, how strong does its spirit smell?

The herd numbers perhaps 40 animals, although given that the sheep seem to have been given the free run of the area, it's possible that this is a smaller portion of a larger herd.

As for their spirits — they smell strong, healthy, and slightly of lanolin.

Djarz jajdwet, she's hungry. But she needs to be smart about this. What do the ear-tags look like? Do they have individual symbols on them, like the witch-runes? Strings of symbols that look like they could be names? Shorter strings with a lot of repeated symbols that might be numbers?

They have a pattern of lines of different thicknesses, with small square symbols etched below them. If she checks a sample of tags, she'll find that there are six different thicknesses of lines, thirty-six different square symbols, and exactly two lines per symbol.

Huh. That does look quite a bit numbers, even if it's not with symbols she's familiar with. If she interprets the thinnest line as a zero digit, the second thinnest as a one, and so one, and reads the lines from closest to the ear as the most significant digit and then decreasing as she goes further away, what sorts of numbers does she see?

Numbers such as 1052'4340'0241, 1050'0351'5422, 1052'4110'3520, 1054'0240'5254, and 1050'0244'4242. The writing is fairly small.

(Someone who was familiar with þereminian inventory-accounting practices would recognize these as being standard non-sequential barcodes.)

(Someone who was even more familiar with þereminian inventory-accounting practices would probably have opinions about things like hierarchical code-space delegation and woefully lacking error-checking. They would be able to tell you at great length about how the barcodes could be made more efficient and more durable by switching to a Galois error-correction scheme. And then their economist friend would interrupt them to point out that printing and scanning machinery for the current crop of barcodes has been standardized for a long time, and switching formats has a real cost, which isn't worth it in most cases. And then the discussion would devolve into an argument about the cost of tolerating legacy approaches and how much money should be set aside to manage such a transition.)

(Hypothetically.)

Well, she doesn't know much about this system, but it doesn't look they're obviously incrementing, so she can't just look for the sheep with the largest number and skim off the top. It does look like they all start with 105, though? So she'll look for one that has 1055 as the first four digits (and will settle for 1054 if she can't find any), then keep the selected sheep calm as she leans down and exhales a good puff of soporific smoke in front of its nose. Once it's fallen asleep, she'll heft it up over her shoulder and start carrying it away from herd, looking for some kind of nook or other hiding spot she could eat without scaring the herd and drawing attention.

There are several sheep that start with 1055. And the sheep are fairly used to humans, and unbothered to have one wander around in their flock. The other thing that Island Without Trees doesn't have is any large predators.

There is, across the field, a sort of shallow square pit lined with stones which seems as though it ought to do for hiding from the sheep (and anyone else looking out over the hills).

Hm. That definitely looks man-made. Before she starts, she'll lay the sheep back down for a moment and climb down into the pit to double check that there isn't anything weird inside.

That really depends on her standards of weird. The pit contains: a small plaque covered in dense writing, a circular arrangement of stones, an arch in one wall that opens onto sod, and the sort of long, tough grasses that will survive a winter buried under several feet of snow.

Everything is a little weird in a place where she can't even guess at the writing. This looks like it might be a place of ritual significance, though, which means someone could come by basically whenever. She'll climb back out, pick the sheep back up, and continue her search a good place to hide while she eats.

There is another partially fallen-apart stone structure a few hundred meters north, but if she avoids that, her next best bet is a small fjord: steep walls prevent anyone from seeing in from any direction except the open ocean, but the whole thing is accessible from the beach.

She's tempted by a more obviously abandoned-seeming structure, but ultimately she does decide to press on and eventually find the fjord.

After making the hike down, she'll double check that the sheep is unconscious, then exhale a thin ring of medical smoke, just enough to give her a sense of where she'll need to place the nerve-blocking needle. Once she's found the right stop in the neck, she'll reshape smoke, plunge it in, then get to work clearing away the wool, cutting open the skin, and eating through the still-living flesh.

Witch-butchery isn't the same as normal butchery. Flesh provides the most spiritual energy when it's still vital. Her teacher taught her the signs to look for in an animal, to find what can be taken first to preserve its life for as long as possible, as well as an efficient construct for catching the blood as it spills and funneling it into her without needing to swallow.

Still, eventually the creature's lost enough of blood that it's life will start to falter regardless. At that point, she begins to move more quickly, starting the most spiritually rich organ first: the brain. Then she'll render the rest of the edible components into a slurry and drink them as quickly as possible.

The entire process is over surprisingly quickly, maybe only as long as it takes someone to finish an ordinary meal at an unhurried pace, and in the end the only things left are scraps of loose wool, teeth, shards of bone, and the metal tag.

The swell of her meal disappears quickly as she spares a small portion of the spiritual energy she's gained to integrate the physical substance more quickly. Afterwards, she doesn't look all that different despite having absorbed several tens of kilograms of biomass. Maybe just a bit less gaunt.

If there was anyone around to see her, boy would they have questions.

But there isn't.

In the distance, a ship's horn plays an oddly choppy sound. Closer to, a bus rumbles over a hill, although not within sight from the fjord.

With her spirit grown a bit, she's a lot less worried. She's not exactly comfortable yet, but she at least has enough to get out of a couple tough spots without emptying herself completely.

How much daylight does it look like she has left? If the sun isn't too close to setting, now might be a good time to see if she can start acquiring the language, but if it's going to be dark soon then she should focus on finding (or making) shelter.

It is only a few weeks after the spring equinox, so the sun is going to set at a vaguely reasonable time. But that time is in ... probably about six hours, would be her guess.

Yeah, that seems like plenty of time.

She'll climb back up from the beach below and see if she can spot the road that bus was presumably driving down, then pick a direction and start walking, keeping watch for any signs with obvious iconography that might help get her started learning these unfamiliar letters.

The road is just over the hill — although it's easy to miss. It's clearly not a high-traffic route. There are little black and white signs with what seem to be sequential numbers every 500 meters or so.

If she keeps following the road away from the city, it will eventually lead her to a bus stop at the center of a large cluster of buildings. The buildings are painted a cheerful red and blue, and built with steeply pitched roofs. A number of people are visible inside the buildings, and a flock of children are running around in a field on the far side under the tolerant eye of an adult in a plain green robe.

A large wooden sign faces the road by the bus station, although it will be a little difficult to read if she doesn't get closer.

Seeing other people, besides that park warden, gives her pause as she considers her own appearance.

She's tall, even compared to the rest of her family, who were taller on average than the others in the village. Her hair is long and dark, and a tangled mess, though now that it's on her mind she begins to run her fingers through it to try and sort it out at least a bit.

Her clothes are durable, dull greens and browns and oranges with dappled darkness to help camouflage her through woods and underbrush. They're also all quite dirty, since she hasn't had the time or energy spare to wash them in a while. Or to wash herself, for that matter.

Overall, she supposes she must look rather ragged. She's not sure how these people will react to someone looking like her, especially someone who can't understand what they say or speak back to them. Still, she does have the resources to escape if things turn violent, so she'll take the risk and head up to the big wooden sign to try and puzzle out its iconography.

The sign has a three-word phrase in a wide, looping sort of script. Below it is a six-word phrase with much shorter words, written in a more angular and blocky script. If the two phrases are the same language, it's one with a lot of stylization — they don't really look related. A stylized picture of a limbless lizard with blue neck frills curls protectively around the writing.

Below that is a hexagon filled with lots of small black and white triangles in some complex pattern.

And then, at the very bottom of the sign, someone has stapled two laminated papers full of dense presumably-writing that appears to use several different alphabets, iconographies, hieroglyphs, and what is plausibly a series of projected nets of four-dimensional solids.

Interesting. This whole place must be part of a pretty big trading network if this many different writing systems are involved.

Sadly, none of them are in the languages she reads, and the weird frilled snake-lizard looks more like a fanciful border for the text than something being described.

She'll make a little show of her modest dejection, then continue walking into town as she considers how to communicate that she needs help and doesn't speak the language. Honestly, just asking for help in a language these people presumably don't know is probably her best bet.

Most people are inside one of the buildings, because even a few weeks past the equinox it's a bit brisk. But there is a very obvious flagstone path from the bus stop to a central building with a partially enclosed porch and a large set of double-doors.

Or she could go through the buildings and bother the field full of running, whistling children.

These people seem less suspicious than the Federation's folks, but she'd be surprised if starting with their children as the first point of contact is the right move. She'll head up the flagstones to the central building. It looks like it might house some kind of administrative service, which seems like a better place begin with.

It may or may not house an administrative service, but it definitely does house an old woman with fierce eyebrows and an in-progress knitted sweater nearly larger than herself.

"Ala urrinn ďoṁ do čudačaď?" she says, when Dzarmpsoz opens the door.

Well, here goes nothing. "Bwezbdwa bjest. Zes dzwejkswan bjest kra tar dzwej.  Swejn bwes tar kra zust psjejppsaz bjest kra psjet?"

She turns to yell deeper into the building.

"Torḃas, 'se tìr-mòr a ṫ' ann!" she calls, and then turns back to her knitting.

"Senna, čan eil aul dun ag a ḃel LCTL na ṫìr-mòr," a young man in a sky-blue knee-length skirt and an apron replies, drying his hands on a towel as he walks.

"Đoz duzi ha-bo?" he adds, looking questioning.

She shakes her head with a little frown. "Zes psjejpzjejz bjest."

... huh. He doesn't recognize that one.

He fishes a phone out from a pocket of the apron and pokes at it for a moment and then does his best to repeat Dzarmpsoz's utterance to it.

When that fails to turn up anything, he puts the phone away and holds a hand to his chest.

"Torvesh"

Huh. That was an odd little gizmo. She saw on the ship that these people have tech she doesn't recognize, though that might just be because she's lived most of her life out in the backwoods. She wonders what it does?

She nods, then puts a hand on her chest in mimicry. "Dzarmpsoz," she replies, hoping that he also introduced himself.

He nods, and then points to the old woman and says "Bròs".

Then he points at her, motions eating, and looks inquisitive. "Zaveh Dzarmpsoz xaŋ siðozit?"

Well, if he's offering. She nods and replies, "Swejn baz bjest."

And she'll follow if he leads her somewhere (though, naturally, she'll keep her eyes open for exit routes), and if she's offered something to eat she'll partake.

If she gets the chance, she'll also give this Torwesj fellow a sniff. Does he smell healthy, or unwell? Does he smell compassionate, or self-interested?

He leads her into a large kitchen — easily enough to make meals for fifty people — and seats her on a stool by the counter. Torvesh smells of a life spent doing hard work in the sea air while getting plenty of nutritious food. He smells of love, but also more than a bit of self-interest, with a whiff of dreams.

A minute rustling in cupboards produces a small loaf of dark brown bread which he places on a plate and hands to her. He follows that up a moment later with a tall ceramic mug into which he pours near-boiling water and a scoop of white crystalline powder from a glass jar, stirring it with a metal rod that he leaves in the mug. The drink smells lemony.

Not a bad combination of smells. She'll need to keep in mind that she's probably not going to be getting indefinite charity case treatment here, though. No easy opportunity to trade hostel for healing, though maybe that older woman could use it instead.

She's a little sad, not surprised, that there's no meat on offer. She's initially confused by him offering what she thought might be sugar water, but after smelling it she realizes that the powder must've been citric acid instead, or a mixture of things that includes it. Regardless, she'll eat the bread and the drink the enhanced water, resisting the urge to down both as quickly possible.

The bread actually turns out to be a thin shell of dough over a mixture of cured meat, cabbage, cheese, and olives! It may not be as much meat as she would like, but it's strongly flavored and definitely filling.

The powder is, by taste, probably a mixture of citric acid, sugar, and powdered tea — good for not developing scurvy, and for making fussy children drink water.

Torvesh leaves her to eat for a minute, but when she seems like she might be close to done, he'll join her at the counter with a paper map of the world and a questioning expression.

Huh. That is a very pleasant surprise. The meat is completely lacking spiritual energy, less than even the vegetables, but it tastes good, which is its own reward. It does make it a bit harder to not scarf down the meal as quickly as she can, but she'll manage.

She'll look at the map, but it only takes her a moment to recognize that it's completely unfamiliar. "Zes psjejpkswan bjest kra njepsa zust pswert dzjez bjest sata tsamjesa sata prakpa mjesabejbar. Tsja pjejt tar kra njepsa zust brabzeb dzjez bjetar kje swejn dzawkpsaz bjest kra bjest brapswarp tat?" she says with a shrug, gesturing vaguely over the map in turn.

Ugh. Torvesh is not great with languages — although he's still doing better than his grandmother — and that is more or less completely indecipherable.

He thinks for a minute, tapping his chin, and then pulls out his phone again and pokes at it for a moment. He sets it on the counter between them and a voice issues forth. He has a brief discussion with the voice, and then a different voice speaks.

He gestures at her and tries his best to repeat some fragments of what she said.

Uh..."Zes pekpswo psjejpkswan bjest kra zust tswesk tar kra njeppa. Swejn dzazbbzaz bjest krapjest? Zes psjejpkswan bjest kra njepsa zust pswert dzjez bjest sata tsamjesa sata prakpa mjesabejbar. Tsja pjejt tar kra njepsa zust brabzeb dzjez bjetar kje swejn dzawkpsaz bjest kra bjest brapswarp tat."

She looks clearly uncertain as to whether repeating herself was what she was actually requested to do.

The voice says something in a mildly concerned tone of voice. Then there's a sequence of beeps, followed by another voice.

"H-alo?" the voice says hesitantly. "You are speak Dzwejwej?"

Her surprise is visible. "Yes, I'm speaking Dzwejwej."

Are there people in this new place that speak it too? Did they learn it from the warden? "How do you know the language?"

"A stranger is show up on an island. He is speak it and share his books. Sorry — I am learn it still," the voice replies. "I am a help-coordinate-emergencies person. I am worry that if two Dzwejwej people show up there are maybe more and they are maybe lost or not able to get help. Can you say how you are get here, please?"

So, they are getting it from warden. That's faster than she would have thought.

Should she say that she was on the island? How would she explain how she ended up here then?

Well, an island appearing out of nowhere is hopefully as strange for these people as it is for her, and that will let her get by with a slight alteration of her story. "I woke up on a beach a few hours ago, not anywhere I recognize. Some kind strangers have let me come in and given me some food and drink, but you're the first person who speaks my language, and I'm terribly lost and confused. What happened? Where am I?"

She tries to drum up some genuine distress for the last part, which isn't that hard since she is, in fact, pretty distressed and has mostly just been dissociating from it with an emergency survival mindset, which is now starting to fade.

"We are not know," the Emergency Linguist tells her, because Emergency Services personnel don't lie. They do, on the other hand, have a triage checklist which the LCTL-speaking dispatcher sitting beside the linguist is pointing at.

"Let us be at the beginning: are you hurt right now?"

She shakes her head, before considering that she's talking to a person who isn't physically present and actually answering verbally, "No."

After a split second to remember, she adds, "At least, I don't think I am."

"Okay. The radio-device is say that you are at Sea-Dragon Group Living Location. I am not know them myself, but have no reason to be think the people there are bad. Let me be ask the person there of if you can stay."

The voice exchanges some much less hesitant words with Torvesh.

"Okay. This man is say he is Torvesh. And that you are welcome. He is say you can stay at SDGLL—"

He pronounces the acronym by taking the first syllable of each word and smashing them together.

"— and have food and water and shelter for at least six days. You do not have to. You can leave and come find another place to be if this one is seem unsafe. But if this one is seem safe, you are welcome to be there. Torvesh is say you don't look injured to him either, so probably we aren't should send a flying machine to get you. You are understand? Or you are ask me questions now, please?"

She's honestly having a little bit of a hard time following along, when the speaker sprinkles in unfamiliar syllables. After untangling everything for a moment she's able to reply, "I think I'll stay here for now. Sending medical rescue doesn't seem necessary."

At least, hopefully a week is enough time for her to start picking up the local language, gather whatever papers she's going to need to pass herself off as an ordinary traveler, and start figuring out the signs and symbols of the local underground.

"Good. Are there other things I can be help you? Maybe teach LCTL? Being in another world sounds like stress," the voice says.

Again without really thinking about it, she nods vigorously as she replies, "Yes, it really has been stressful, and learning the local language sounds like it'd help a lot. Thank you."

"I am happy to help!"

And the linguist will walk her through basic vocabulary and simple grammar at whatever speed and for however long she wants to talk. Their Dzwejwej noticeably improves over the course of the conversation from listening to her speak.

Larger Continent Trade Language is, on the one hand, full of unfamiliar grammatical categories and concepts. For example, there are several dozen cases. On the other hand, it's also militantly regular: there are no irregular verbs or nouns, almost no conjugation, only one class of verbs, etc. The few more complex rules are mostly short-hands that let you leave out case markings, nouns, or relationships between subordinate clauses when they can be inferred from context.

These case markers are pretty similar to how prespositions work in her own language, which is fortunate.

She'll focus on just memorizing a bunch of basic vocabulary and the basics of word order and hope that, for now, her interlocutors can puzzle out the rest of what she means. It's far from enough to have any sort of in-depth conversation, but it's hopefully enough to express her basic needs and, maybe with a bit more learning, enough to communicate what she can offer people. It's also easy for her to just memorize new words rather than worrying about anything more complicated, and getting her language functional quickly is the priority.

She also finds herself a little jealous of the person they're learning from's own real-time improvement in Dzwejwej. She knows that the Kings ostensibly smoothed Dzwejwej down into something easy to learn, and that the Federation Scholastic dialect it seems like the island's warden is teaching them pretty closely matches the Royal dialect, but there's still an irrational element of feeling at a disadvantage. She does her best to let that be crushed under the weight of her very real appreciation for the help she's receiving.

And, as she's absorbing this vocab, it become progressively more clear that...these people don't seem like they have magic at all. Which lands a bit like a punch to the gut initially, and she's got too much else on her mind to process it fully right now, but does present her with the tantalizing possibility of not having to live like a fugitive for the rest of her life. Something to ponder.

If she expressed her feelings, the emergency linguist would tell her not to worry about it; paying attention to details of languages is literally their job. But since she doesn't say anything, they don't pick up on it.

When they eventually reach a stopping point, the linguist addresses Torvesh for a moment, and this time she can catch some of what is said:

"Torvesh, thanks for caring [...] our guest [...] remember from the government [...] and call again if any of you need help."

"Call, [...]. Wellbeing."

"Dzarmpsoz, you learned a lot; it was pleasant to teach you. If you need to radio me for more translation or teaching, that is fine. If you're willing, someone else from Emergency Services will come out tomorrow for you to show them the beach where you arrived, so we can try to figure out what happened."

"Yes," she replies in LCTL for the sake of practice, not really thinking beyond the fact that she suspects it'd be weird if she didn't agree. "I show Emergency Services person the beach at tomorrow, and radio you."

Having said that, she comes to immediately regret it a bit, but it's too late to think twice now. She'll need to figure out where she's going to show them...probably the fjord she found since it was what she initially had in mind as she spun her story, and will map to the direction anyone in town would have seen her come from along the road.

The phone makes a little goodbye ding, and Torvesh puts it back in his apron. While language lessons have been occurring, he's been puttering around the kitchen putting together two large trays of food that are now in the oven.

"It's almost dinner time," he mentions. "Do you want to eat in the dining room and meet more people, or be alone?"

She kind of wants to just go to sleep, honestly, but she figures that being a bit more public about her existence, now that there's a chance of her existence not being illegal, will be something her future self thanks her for. "Yes, eat in the dining room and met more people," she answers.

Torvesh nods.

"Okay. When the food is done, help me carry it out. I'll introduce you to everyone."

"Everyone" is a crowd of about 40 people, who all eat dinner in a large communal dining room at the rear of the central building. The old woman who greeted Dzarmpsoz takes on something of a herding role, and gets the flock of excited children settled down as they come streaming in from the field.

Lots of people look curiously at Dzarmpsoz, but they don't rush to crowd her. Torvesh quietly indicates that she can sit wherever she would like, but that if she wants to sit with him she would be welcome. Conversation seems about evenly split between LCTL and the language that the old woman spoke.

Dinner tonight is a casserole, one large pan made with chicken and one without. Also available is crusty bread, more of that hot citrus drink that she was served, tea, and thin, spicy cookies for desert.

She remembers eating meals like this, in a big group, from before she left her village behind, and she knows intellectually that most people prefer it this way. She's never been normal on that front either, and having spent so many years needing to feed in secret hasn't helped.

She'll put on a strong face to try and not bother people, and will try and at least occasionally talk to people, mostly if she's asked a question, to continue practicing her LCTL, but it'll be pretty clear that she's quite shy, socially.

She is not shy about the food, though, and will gladly partake of as much of everything on offer as it seems would be socially acceptable.

The Central Limit Theorem means that the amount of food the members of the Sea Dragon Farm need to make for each meal tends to be pretty predictable. But, when there are ordinarily 40 mouths to feed, feeding an extra person — even a very hungry person — is not a particular strain. She's welcome to have thirds or fourths of everything; some of the more energetic children are as well. If the food looks to be getting too low, Torvesh will pop back to the kitchen and return a few minutes later with a big serving bowl of toast cubes and nuts, spiced with salt and garlic.

For the conversation, on the other hand ...

Well, þereminia is full of shy people. But. It's full of shy people who learn, growing up, how to explicitly opt into and out of social interactions. So when she schools her expression and keeps talking to people, people keep talking to her. Everyone is curious about where she came from, and how she came to the farm, and whether she would like to stay, and what her favorite hobbies are, and how her language works, and many other things. On the other hand, if she volleys a question back (especially to the children), that tends to side-track the whole discussion and give her a few minutes reprieve. Once she sees how hungry Dzarmpsoz is, the old woman also starts keeping people off of her so she has a chance to eat.

She'll resist the urge to load up on calories and marginal food-spirit when the food starts looking visibly low, and continues to resist even after Torvesh brings out additional snacks. At least, not unless someone notices her looking at the food and dragging her eyes back off it and reassures her it's alright to have more, which it seems like the older woman might.

She does her best to answer the questions she's asked, to the limit of the story she's put together in her head. She's from a village in central Federation territory (true, though she struggles with translating 'Federation'), she came here by following the road that she found after climbing up from the beach (true, ignoring how she got to the beach), she doesn't really have any hobbies but she spent most of her time helping gather and prepare medicine in the village (true, up until she met her teacher), she's not really a linguist but she can at least go over the basics (plainly true), so on and so forth. She will certainly ask questions, mostly just trying to get a sense of what society is like here, the history of this place, why it's named after 'Sea-Dragons' and what those even are, whether they'd have any use for an herbalist such as herself, that sort of thing.