"Radio check," comes the voice of Aisha through the suit's speakers.

Acknowledgements filter in from the others in their group.

"I can feel all our supplies. Nothing's missing."

"Then we're good to go. Charlie whenever you're ready."

"Transit in 3... 2... 1..." And then they're elsewhere.

Somewhere else: a grassy plain beside a river about as wide as two people lying head to toe. There's mountains in the distance behind them, the sun peaking out around them, casting the mountain forests into a dusky blue-purple and the fields into a golden green. They're on a bit of a hill where the water spills down, narrower and faster, before widening out into distant farms interspersed with orchards and livestock ranges and areas apparently left to nature. The farmhouses are almost universally colorful, visibly pink or blue or purple or lime green or yellow or cherry red, very few any sort of plain white. A wide paved road winds down from the more northern mountains, set in a good bit from the river, through the ranches and farms, with smaller tributaries branching out into small, sparse neighborhoods. A few cars and tractors, mostly colorful, putter along the road, some turning off here or there.

And, as the river continues rolling downhill and gentling - a small town, farm houses growing closer together until there's two streets worth of buildings, three or four stories high, all in rows. The main road crosses the stream here, before meandering on past the horizon, heading away from the mountains while the river turns and runs loosely parallel to the low range.

"There's people, I wonder if they're human?" Emily bounces a little.

Sapphire is grinning ear to ear, "I guess all that training will finally come in handy." She takes in the landscape for a few seconds more, "Emily how's the air?"

Emily's eyes close for a moment as she reaches out with her senses to test the air, "We have a safe oxygen nitrogen mix, low levels of industrial byproducts, everything is in the safe range. Our filters should last for at least a day without replacement or a refresh. No need for supplemental tanks."

"First off, first contact procedures. Charlie blink us back so we can send a quick report."

"One sec let me put down an anchor," says Charlie. The world shifts back to where they were long enough for them to transmit a quick report and then they're back.

"Nice, alright, it looks a little far to walk and there's people so I don't want to leave gear around so let's take the cars. Keep the drones stowed for now, no need to look more aggressive than we have to."

All seven of them get into one of the two cars they have. The cars are silvery capsule like things, with a wheel system a bit like one of the rovers humans once sent to mars. They're designed to handled a variety of terrain with ease. Each car has seats for four and a generous cargo area. Both cargo areas are pretty full at the moment.

Once the doors are all closed they get underway. "Let's try to meet someone on the road, I expect that'll make a better impression than driving up to someone's house."

Meeting someone on the road: is doable. The first car they meet is a pickup truck, bright orange, with more attention paid to aesthetics than aerodynamics. The back's full of crates. The driver slows down when the weird capsule cars approach, rolling their window down and sticking their head and arm out to lean over. They look approximately human, skin a medium-dark brown and black hair hair messily pulled up under a hat, a few braids with beads dangling here and there. They're the only human-like-being in the truck, though a lizard - about the size of a large dog - sticks its head out the other window and flicks its tongue out, making a chittering noise.

Sapphire takes off her sidearm and loads up the first contact app on her tablet before stepping out of the car. "Hello, we," she gestures to the cars behind her, "are explorers." She doesn't expect to be understood but she needs to start somewhere.

The alien says something  - "Hwej'r 'yal'z sor." ("Don't know that language."), voice a bit gruff.

Back in the car Ria looks at her tablet and then via radio, "The computer doesn't recognize that, at a minimum it's a novel dialect. Switching to new language acquisition."

To the alien Sapphire says, "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"Narrel 'yal'zne rya? Ei... La-nashet heh-geil vi-medaki?" ("Y'all don't speak Narrel? Uh... Can you all speak Medaki?") The last phrase is distinctly in another language, said more slowly. And then, almost as an afterthought, they sign something, a bit awkwardly.

Sapphire is quite glad that all this is being recorded because she doesn't understand any of it. She's careful to say words she's said before the same way. "I don't understand that either."

"Eiye. Seown 'yal'z. Skwodeh yal dwa kyei hwejarnyar nrilem junt rya..." ("Huh. Don't know anything else. Y'all are awful lost if y'all don't even got a phrasebook...") They lean out and look around, glancing mostly towards town. Low, mostly to themselves: "Heh... Elarrimint wernath nrim Hanelte - ling va tekwuzi sriye dwa zweth skwode terer vith nerth..." ("Hm... Hanelte's got a networked teleprinter - lost tourists are probably town council's job though but that's farther...") They point at the town in the distance, and, louder, clearly directed to the group, "Svath za rya?" ("Y'all heading there?")

"We can go that way if you think that's best." She tries nodding, maybe that's a shared gesture.

They frown, and attempt to pantomime 'do you want me to go with you,' which isn't very successful or clear.

She just repeats her new standby, "I don't understand."

Sigh. 

They point at the town again, at a loss for how else to communicate.

She tries nodding again. At the point her best guess is still that they want her to go to the town and that was her next idea anyway.

They hesitate a bit, then take their arm off the edge of their window, turning back to their wheel - trying to signal 'I'm going to drive off now.'

Sapphire turns and gets back in her car. "Did we get anything useful Emily?"

"I tapped into local radio transmissions and that's helping a little. I think we have the words for a greeting and the very beginnings of a corpus but we need in person context to be certain of anything and start really building a translation matrix."

"Alright, I think we need to follow that individual to the nearby town, hopefully we'll be able to find someone more helpful there."

They start driving towards the town following the local.

Town's about fifteen minutes away at the pickup truck's speed, which isn't so fast the lizard can't stick its head out the window, colorful head frills raising and flapping in the wind.

There's a sign outside of town proper, with a colorful mural of a river winding down from mountains and presumably some phrase of welcome or a town name in a blocky script. More people, here, both in cars and walking about, and most of them seem to know the pickup truck driver - or at least it's generally polite here to wave at people you're yielding for at stop signs and crosswalks. People do seem to think the silver cards are weird, but not exceptionally remarkable. The buildings have a lot of colorful murals on them or chalkboards with drawings out front or colorful awnings or hanging baskets full of flowers, and there's broad roads and low hedges broken up by trees screening the sidewalks from the road - cut back around crosswalks, presumably for line of sight reasons. The street lamps appear to be electric and have stylized casings. No one seems in any particular hurry, and there's multiple small parks, often with some kind of statue or piece of playground-esque equipment.

The pickup truck driver takes them to a large building in an angular, geometric style, that seems to have been designed by someone who just heard you can make colored glass and went hog wild. They turn down a side street, parking in an open lot, and gesture to some open spaces near them. 

They pull into the indicated spaces. "Alright first contact procedures, everyone stays together. Lock the cars. Ria, keep an eye on the cars' cameras. Charlie be ready to yank us out if things go wrong and make an anchor here so we can recover equipment if we need to."

"Done," says Charlie. Unlike observatories, anchors aren't visible.

"I'm on it," agrees Ria.

"Aisha, Courtney, keep your hands off your weapons if this goes wrong it's not because of us."

"We'll only go hostile if Charlie is injured, we remember our training Sapphire."

"Sorry, I'm just nervous."

She takes a second to gather herself and gets out of the car. The others follow in short order. "Alright, let's get this show on the road." She walks over to the Alien's car with the others following.

Alien gets out of their car, too, whistling something to the lizard, which wriggles excitedly about the car and waddles around the alien's feet, flicking its tongue at the visitors again. It's about the shape of a komodo dragon, though only about two thirds as long, once unfolded from the car.

"Hello again. Should we go into the building?" She points towards the entrance of the building.

They point as well, and make a gesture that - is not recognizable as affirmative to the humans, but does seem positively linked to the pointing.

Also, the alien starts walking to the building's door, lizard waddling along beside them.

Sapphire and her team follow.

The doors open into what seems to be a lounge area, with a few soft-looking couches with colorful patterned upholstery with side tables scattered around. Not usually in conversation clusters, though - in fact, the design seems to assume everyone waiting will want to not be interacting with other people too much.

There's something that's probably a receptionist's desk with a wordy sign and someone with braided blue hair reading a book. The alien goes up, writes something down on a piece of paper, then slides it across the desk. The receptionist looks up, takes the paper, reads it, and asks something - "Zwenath skwode chitangne royen tamb medaki lo narrel lo daljir naretha srelem susha?" ("You found lost tourists, and they don't speak Medaki or Narrel or Naretha sign?"), which gets a wordless noise from the pickup truck alien. "Meta. Fenahwedath kwalenwa besadi," ("Alright. I'll try translating,") the receptionist says, looking at the exploration team, "Tamb seown nrilem ki besadi zel whing besadi chaln kwemunwa fenatyi tor besal." ("And if I don't have anything then I guess we'll contact someone using the radio.") The receptionist's dialect's notably different from the pickup truck driver's - slower, with a different word rhythm - but it's still the same language.)

The receptionist gestures them closer.

"Hello, we're explorers."

"Hwejir shi iyalez besadi." ("I don't know that language.") He hands them a stack of laminated pages, a cross between a chart and a book with phrases in different languages, all translating roughly to the same 'I speak...' in their own little color-coded rows. There's a blank white row with an empty circle in black at the top of the front page.

Sapphire carefully makes sure her cameras get a visual of all of these pages and checks to see if they're double sided. She switches to radio only, "Is there any way to associate these with what's on the radio?"

"No, but it will be useful once we have a starting point."

"Well I guess, it's my turn to play charades." She switches back to being audible. "I'm sorry I can't read any of that would it be possible to speak it?" She gives the sheets back without doing anything to them and then covers her eyes with her hands before pointing at her ears.

The receptionist pulls the sheets over to himself and points at the top box, white with the black circle, and says, in Narrel, "Laraleng royel?" ("You all cannot read?")

"Based on our corpus and the context I think that first word. Means something like 'illiterate'. I'm going to enter that in as a guess to the translation software. It also seems like the second word is a second person pronoun, but it's hard to be sure."

Those translated guesses appear underneath the IPA rendering of the words in Sapphire's HUD.

Over the radio she says, "Thanks Emily"

To the receptionist she repeats "laraleng."

The receptionist tilts his head and hums, then starts slowly reading down the list of phrases, which conveniently for him have a phonetic transcription in small text under them.

She listens attentively, as the receptionist reads she makes sure to keep the sheets somewhat in view and their corpus grows as they associate the phrases with both the phonetic symbol set and the non-phonetic symbols. It also helps them begin to build a cross comparison between the different languages.

"I think the one we'll have the most success learning is 'Narrel,' That's spoken more than anything else on the radio and I think this person is fluent in the language." She carefully enunciates the alien word. And highlights that entry in Sapphire's HUD.

"Thanks."

Sapphire slowly and meticulously pronounces the "Narrel srem besadi" (I speak Narrel). It's probably pretty clear that she doesn't actually.

The receptionist looks skeptical. "Hyir yurwene royel?" ("Where are you from?") he asks.

And she's back to not understanding. "I don't understand," She says again in English.

He rustles in his desk some and pulls out an atlas. He slides the book across the desk, and repeats, "Hyir yurwene royel?" ("Where are you from?")

She flips through the atlas scanning each page and then puts down the book and taps the table beside it.

That seems confusing. "Santru dwelnane hyir shi royel yurwe?" ("Where you're from isn't on the map?") he asks.

She takes out her tablet and shows a slowly rotating image of the planet they travelled from. The shape of the continents is clearly different.

He startles, as does the pickup truck driver who'd been hanging around.

The pickup truck driver whistles. "Shinath nrine hyir rya?" ("Where'd y'all get a thing like that?") they ask, not really directed at the strangers.

Her HUD is starting to fill up with suspected word meanings:
royel: second person pronoun
besadi: first person pronoun
srem: speak
Nerral: name of the local language.

Sentences should use object verb subject ordering.

"I'm currently only sending you high-confidence guesses, if you have something specific you want to say we can try to make a guess."

"Do you have any sense of a word for no or negation?"

"Nothing stands out, they might be modifying words somehow but we don't have contrasting pairs."

She signal acknowledgement then switches back to external speakers.

"Hyir yurwene besadi" she tries pointing to the globe depicted on the screen. She intends to say I'm from here.

" - Neneyir shi dwangne?" ("Is that a question?") asks the receptionist, still a bit startled. He then recovers and pulls out a piece of paper, drawing in one corner a circle with lines coming off it, some plain circles around it, then in the other corner another set of circles, and draws a line with hooks coming off it from the second set of circles to the first. He taps the fifth farthest circle from the big circle with lines in the first drawn group, and says, "Har dwang besal." ("We are here.") Then, pointing to the second cluster of circles - "Chir yurwene royel?" ("You all are from there?") Tracing along the line with hooks from that circle cluster to the 'here' cluster - "Har tivelne royel?" ("You all come to here?")

"Emily can you reconstruct an approximate picture of their world from the atlas?"

"Sure I think I know what you're going for let me tweaks some things and I'll send it over."

A short while later the Emily's animation appears in Sapphire's HUD, there's an animation of the planet they came from, next to an animation of this planet and a line connecting them, a circle moves between the two.

"Looks good," agrees Sapphire and send it over to the tablet still on the desk.

The aliens don't seem to know what to do with that initially.

"Try, 'Har yurwe besadi.' I think that might fix the tenses from the last thing you said. Though it depends on the specific meaning of Har."

"Alright." She repeats Emily's suggestion pointing again at the image of the planet they came from.

The receptionist nods. 

From the pickup truck driver, to the receptionist - "Jisper yal zanernath dwarn yeish." ("Weren't awful prepared for aliens today.")

From the receptionist, to the driver - "Chaln kwemumwa besadi. Susha orengwane royen?" ("I'll contact someone. Will you watch them?")

"Saah," ("Yeah,") says the pickup truck driver.

The receptionist faces the aliens with a smile and gestures that he's going to step out and the aliens should stay here.

The aliens wait. A steady stream of guesses and updates march across Sapphire's HUD. The most significant breakthrough is determining that the '-ne' suffix indicates a question.

The receptionist goes through a door. There's the sound of mechanical typing for a little bit, then a ding, then the muffled sound of the receptionist talking.

The pickup truck driver goes to sit down, lizard flopping on their feet.

Are there any bookshelves in the room?

Yup. Several, in fact, mostly situated in between windows on the wall to the left of the entrance - the room's four walls are the entrance wall, which has several windows, a wall of windows and bookshelves to its left, along which the lounge area is mostly situated, three doors presumably leading further into the building across from the entrance, and the receptionist to the right, who has two doors and a bookshelf situated mostly behind the desk in a way that suggests they aren't open to random visitors.

"Do we know how to say 'can I look at that?' or something similar? I'd like to look at the books, maybe some of them have pictures."

"They look like they're open access, it might be better to ask forgiveness than permission. Especially since we don't know the words for yes or no."

"That makes sense." She walks slowly towards the book shelves. Do any of them look like children's books without taking them off the shelves?

The driver doesn't try to stop them looking at the books.

There's what looks like children's board books, in fact, as well as some early reader books, in displays sized for small children near small beanbags and seats, in the left hand corner farthest from the entrance - the right hand corner has a child-sized table with what looks like a magnetic sand insert. Books at approximately preteen height on the shelves also seem to have disproportionately bright covers.

She pulls one of the children's board books, that's the most likely to have illustrations and simple sentences which is what they need most.

The board book has illustrations on every page, but it also has a lot of text, not in a particularly large font, and it's not always clear what the association between the text and illustration is - probably this story is about some very colorful snakes, though.

Well that was a swing and a miss, she still flips to the end for archival purposes and tries for an early reader book instead.

"Ye! Kradhen dwang besadi!" is the text above an illustration of a large brown reptile, with enormous frills around its head and what seems to be a prehensile tail. The reptile's standing on some yellow ground with what might be grass-like shading. On the opposite page is a map of the world, with one continent and part of another in bright green, the rest in dark brown - "Tlung tamb nutolndur va haje myir besadi!"

The letters are large, high contrast from their background, words clearly spaced apart, and in a font that's probably very friendly towards kids with dyslexia or other trouble reading.

("Hi! I am a [reptile species]. I live in [continent] and the subcontinent of [region].")

Dwang is now suspected to mean the verb to be.
Kradhen is now suspected to mean reptile or a specific type of reptile.

She turns the page.

The reptile lives in the savanna! Their cousins live in the forest! Their cousin is small, and the lizard is large (there's a side by side, here). The lizard hears with their head frills! Two lizards can talk from very far apart! The lizards like to be in large groups with big lizards and small lizards of the same species. The lizard's tail is prehensile! Prehensile means you can pick stuff up with it! Your hand is prehensile! It is like a tail. The lizard does art! (This is shown as painting with the tail). There are a lot of Cool Lizard Facts in this book - lizards get cold in the snow, lizards like the sun, lizards have scales and do not sweat. The lizard used to fight the humanoids! (The humanoids are holding spears, and the lizard is reared back). Now we are friends! (Everyone seems relaxed and does not have weapons. The humanoids are smiling). We cannot understand each other when we talk! This makes us sad. Maybe you can learn how to talk to the lizards and then we can be happy! (This last is just a picture of a humanoid child and a small lizard facing each other; the humanoid child is smiling and has their mouth open.)

There's usually one picture per sentence or two.

That gets them even more words, it's also enough to have a decent guess at how the rest of the alphabet corresponds to sounds when compared with the radio corpus. Alien symbols now accompany IPA in Sapphire's HUD.

"Alright let's parallelize. Wilfred see if you can find a dictionary. Everyone else focus on these children's books for the moment. Courtney, Aisha, one of you keep an eye out."

The early reader books seem to mostly consist of Cool Facts. A lot of them are about animals. Some of them are about rocks, or volcanoes, or cosmology, or rockets, or history, or foreign cultures instead. The cosmology and rocket books are very worn down, apparently popular. There's an introductory alphabet book with simple, illustrated nouns containing different letters, which should help confirm their guesses.

A dictionary exists on one of the upper shelves. It's notably the thickest book there.

The thickest book is indeed where Wilfred starts. She starts carefully scanning each page. Steadily more words enter their corpus. At this point their main issue is probably grammar. Sapphire switches to block books in the hopes of improving their understanding of grammar. When the receptionist comes back they're likely to be quite surprised by the change.

The receptionist comes back shortly. "Town rep decided to escalate this to the regional council," he says, mostly to the driver. "It's all above their ability to investigate."

"Not surprised," says the driver. "They've just been looking at books while you were gone."

"Hello. We worked to understand Narrel. I think we understand now." She's speaking slowly and with an accent but she's understandable. The other members of her team are continuing to look through the books, slowly moving to harder texts.

"Oh - that's fast, but I guess if you've got some fancy Universal Translator type deal... It'll help, though."

"Yes. Our technology helps. Is there anything you would like to ask us before the council representative arrives? Or anything you think we should know?" They might notice that whenever she talks her mouth moves without sound for a little while before she speaks in Nerral.

They're familiar with recordings; aliens maybe having something recording them then playing the sound seems either in line with a Universal Translator or just an alien weirdness.

"Not sure how much context you already have," the receptionist says.

"We have very little context so far. We've been focusing on picking up the language and there's only the seven of us here so we haven't been able to do in depth cultural analysis."

"How did you all get here?"

"We teleported. We have magic that lets us do that."

" - Magic? Do you mean technology?"

"We call it magic because only one person knows how it works and all attempts at reverse engineering have failed."

"I guess that's not a bad translation..."

"Yes. Most of our capabilities come from technology but there are a couple of types of magic which allow us to do things no known technology can do."

"So you're just exploring at random?"

"Mostly, we're also trying to scout for all the worlds near our own to be aware of any potential dangers. You're the first alien civilization we've found."

"Neat. We're really excited about aliens - just started seriously trying our own space program."

"That's pretty cool. We've been doing a lot of work in space development recently because we figured out how to use teleportation magic to get around some of the difficulties with space launch."

"It unusually hard on your planet? Or are rockets harder than we're guessing - "

"Launching rockets typically requires a lot of infrastructure and we want communications and mapping satellites above every planet we've explored."

"Ah, yeah, I can see that kind of demand outstripping production pretty fast."

"Yeah, we're working on scaling up but there's still a lot of work to do."

"Sounds it. We're still on this one planet, and people're figuring it'll take years of working together to get to the big milestones."

"What do you see as the big milestones?"

"Getting a satellite into space and then getting it back down, getting something simple living into space and getting it back down - probably there's some more scientific step stones there but the big early one's gonna be sending a person into space and having them get back, and sending people to one of the moons that people think will be best for staging for farther trips, and getting an orbiting research station."

"Those are all good goals. We might be able to offer your some advice or knowledge. I have some authority to negotiate but any agreements I make need to be approved by our government if they involve any sort of long-term commitment."

"Yeah, and people'll probably want something international for any agreements with y'all, and that might take a while."

"Agreements involving a lot of people always do. Are there any formalities we should observe when meeting your government representative?"

"Councils don't tend to stand on formality too much. Uh - most people don't like other people getting within arm's reach of them unnecessarily? Or, like, sudden loud noises."

"That's good to know. I don't think we would have made sudden loud noises regardless but some greeting rituals in our society involve physical contact. I'm glad I know not to offer any such gesture."

"Yeah. Most people who need bigger bubbles also have a service snake, so you can kinda tell - snake's usually trained to hiss if someone gets too close."

"Interesting, that's another bit of useful knowledge. We also sometimes use service animals, mostly other mammals."

"There are service mammals! We've had reptiles in general domesticated longer though, I think."

"I think we also have some domesticated reptiles but we don't tend to train them to the extent that we do mammals."

"It's kind of weird if you have any similar animals at all."

"It's not really weirder than the two of us looking so similar. I'm sure our scientists will be fascinated to look into how deep the similarities go."

"Yeah. Sounds like the type of things that'd have biologists in a tizzy - we'd also wanna be sure we can't share any diseases or parasites, I bet."

"That's why we're in airtight suits. We also sterilized all our equipment before coming to your world."

"Thanks. First contact diseases can get pretty bad, even when you're the same species..."

"We had some pretty horrible times in our own history that demonstrated that."

"Minimizing disease and managing outbreaks is one of the big things governments are important for."

"We're in agreement on that. The Network guarantees healthcare for everyone in our territory."

"Nice. Most major nations have managed at least weak guarantees by now, but getting it truly universal is apparently kinda hard..."

"I wonder what the sticking points are. I know it wasn't easy for us to get universal healthcare either and it's one of the hardest things to scale because it can't be automated as easily."

"Yeah. Not sure what our sticking points are - not really something I've read about much at all."

"I'll have to ask the people I meet with then. Aside from improving healthcare and exploring space are there any major goals your people are working towards at the moment?"

"Politics is a lot of it - we don't have a world government or anything, but a lot of people think we should. Just don't agree on what kind of government or how to go about it. We're also trying to get automation good enough most people can stop working. We've gotten work hours each week to about a fourth what they used to be, though, even if we haven't gotten them to zero."

"I think that's a cultural difference to some degree, we do have shorter working hours than we once did but mostly we've transitioned to doing different things as a result of automation as opposed to less."

"Huh! Having people only work when they want to is a pretty big goal for a lot of people. No one toils in paradise and all that."

"There's been some movement in that direction, but well, we're in a period of rapid restructuring and expansion so most people are pretty invested in what they're doing. There's also a lot of cultural baggage from our previous economic systems that generally stigmatized idleness."

"We generally don't like being idle, either, but most of the things people want to do - like, art - is very culturally valuable but hard to run an economy off of, you know?"

"That makes sense, we're still adjusting as we move closer and closer to being a post-scarcity society. By the time we're done I expect we'll have pretty short workdays as well, though I expect a lot of people will still refer to their personal projects as work for cultural reasons."

"Yeah. And there's lots of stuff you probably just can't automate that still needs doing."

"Definitely, there will always be work to do in government, and medicine is pretty hard to automate in general. Also magic can only be done by people, not machines."

"And someone's gotta design the new machines, even if we get machines fixing each other."

"That too."

He nods, then - "Representative should be here soon. I don't know that I have much more to talk about..."

"Thanks, out of curiosity what is this building for?"

"Community center. Town and regional council meets here, but they're not in session right now and decided to just go ahead and escalate to the next highest council when I contacted them. There's also some clubs that use the meeting spaces - fiber circle, the smaller unions without their own building, some of the bigger homeschooling groups, the debate clubs for the general education kids and the kids getting their academics... Also popular to have neighborhood meetings here, since it's a neutral place more than someone's house is. Some of the medium-sized religious groups also use the council hall for their meetings, if you've got too many folks for someone's house or a library room but not enough for your own place. My main job's making sure people find what room they're looking for, contacting council members if they need contacting, and helping people work out schedules and all. I also keep an eye on the lost and found and make sure the entry area stays tidy and all."

"That's nice, we tend to build places like this too."

"Neat. I guess most social species probably would end up with a similar concept?"

"That seems possible, as I said you're the first other species we've encountered."

"Yeah. We've got possible other sapients on our planet, though we're only really strongly communicating with one, and they don't have a lot of building traditions of their own or anything yet - though they do have communal areas they return to I think? And they'll use buildings we make for them."

"Interesting, we haven't really investigated too closely into the sapience of the species we've encountered in our travels. Though we are trying to be careful about the impact our construction projects have on the local environment. Magic makes that a lot easier."

"It's probably easier to tell if you live on the same planet long term, too..."

"It probably is, we suspect that several species on the world we evolved on might be intelligent. The government I work for doesn't govern any part of that world though."

He nods. "Yeah, trying to communicate's mostly left to locals and curious scientists."

"That makes sense. Does this area specialize at all? Some areas in our culture are famous for their cultivation of a particular crop or for having a particular industry."

He shrugs. "There's some famous hiking spots in the mountains, and the main tourists we get are people stopping on their way into the mountains. We've got some historical sites and all of our own, and this area produces a lot of some types of fruit."

The driver says: "And we're the birthplace of a folk singer who made it a bit big. Got a lot of nice songs about our valleys."

The man laughs. "I don't listen to the music channels too much, so I guess that would've escaped me."

"What sorts of things do people tend to do for work? You mentioned that people are eagerly awaiting more automation does that mean a lot of people work in manufacturing?"

"Yeah. I think manufacturing's one of the biggest industries overall - around here's there's more farmers, but we've got a factory downriver of us."

"How do things get distributed? In the Network everyone gets their basic needs taken care of and them some extra for group or personal projects and amenities. Do you do something like that?"

He shrugs. "We don't have anything like that set up yet, though a lot of people think some variant's a good idea to work towards. Not sure about all the nitty-gritty details of transport - we have a currency system, backed by the government, I earn money and use that money to buy goods other people've made, which goes to them so they can buy raw materials and food and stuff."

He pauses, glancing out the windows. "Looks like the council rep's pulling up."

"Thanks for answering so many of my questions."

He smiles. "It's no problem."

Sapphire turns towards the entrance and waits for the representative.

Who arrives shortly. She seems a bit flustered, her black hair pulled into a loose ponytail, her outfit light and flowing. She smiles when she enters the building, her aide right behind her.

"Are these the ones you typed me about?" she asks the receptionist.

He nods. "Yes ma'am. They've learned a lot of our language, too."

She smiles, thinly. "Very good." To the aliens: "May I have your names? I'm Representative Tyuln."

"I'm Envoy Sapphire. These are Charlie, Emily, Ria, Aisha, Courtney and Wilfred." She points to each of the members of her team in turn. They nod politely.

She nods. "It is my pleasure to meet you. What brings you to our town?"

"We're explorers, this town happened to be the one nearest to where we arrived on your world."

"How did you arrive here?"

"We teleported from one of our exploration hubs."

"Was your teleportation targeted at all?"

"Not exactly, the system that we use selects similar atmospheric and gravitational conditions but otherwise doesn't have much ability to target when traveling to new locations."

She pauses for a bit, then: "Have you taken precautions around spreading microorganisms?"

"We sterilized the exterior of our suits and all our gear and there are air filters that prevent microorganisms from passing either in or out of our suits."

"Good. What are your goals for this contact?"

"We hope to establish peaceful relations going forwards. Eventually an artistic or scientific exchange would also be of interest."

She nods. "Did you bring proof of your claims to be visitors from another world with you?"

"We have technology which seems not to have been invented on your world if that's acceptable proof. I also expect that there are biological differences between our peoples but it would be hard to demonstrate that without risking pathogen transmission."

"Advanced technology would suffice for me."

Sapphire gets her tablet back out and sets it to show the representative a video of one of the Network's planets from space.

"Impressive. That's - very far from anything we could manage right now, or in the near enough future it'd be reasonable for someone to have hidden while developing, I do believe."

"That was the impression I got from the others I spoke with."

"Yes. Anyone has guessed we might ever build things like that - but we don't know how soon it would be."

"I don't personally understand all of how it works, it requires very precise manufacturing capabilities though."

"It's the same basic principle as the electric lights you already use just with a lot more precision and different materials. An electric current is sent through a material that converts some of the electric energy into light of a particular wavelength."

"Surely there must have been advances in data storage, too - but I digress."

"I was just referring to the screen. Data storage and processing are both based on the same basic manufacturing methodology though."

"This is a bit off topic."

She smiles. "Unfortunately so. Perhaps they'll let me be in the room during the scientific conferences, though."

"Perhaps, ideally they'll be broadcast and recorded so that everyone can see them."

"We should be able to set that up even on our end, yes, though the technology isn't quite as good as we'd like - still, for this, I suspect they'll be releasing transcripts of the important parts onto the teletype networks."

"In the short term, do you have a sense of how we should proceed? Depending on how long negotiations are going to take we'll either need to coordinate teleporting to and from one of our worlds or setting up our tents."

"I expect this will be momentous enough the national government will want to start from an international standpoint - we're at peace, right now, and we'd like to avoid appearing to compete with each other too much. Calling such an international meeting would take time - even just picking a venue might take an entire day - and the various nations would want their own verification of what you say."

"Of course, these things are practically guaranteed to take time. If transportation is an issue we can bring in aircraft."

"Oh, we have aircraft, and communications that're fast enough for our tastes. The main delay would be just the compromise parts, I think, unless they decide on day one to co-opt one of the existing international committees."

"That makes sense. Is there anything else you need from my team before you talk to others in your government?"

She pauses to consider this. "I don't think so, not at the moment."

"Alright, we'll wait while you do that. Do you need to consult with them about whether we should setup camp or commute?"

"If camping's more convenient for you, I can find a place for you to stay on city land while everything else is resolved."

"That would be appreciated."

She nods. "I should have that arranged within the hour."

"Thank you."

"You're quite welcome."

Sapphire turns her attention back to her team. "How are we doing on digitization?"

"I think we have the important books from what's available here. Our translation matrix is reasonably complete and we're working on reviewing for cultural context. They seems a lot less inclined towards violence and war than humans. Either that or their history is heavily sanitized in the books we were able to read."

"There's some weak evidence for the former, none of the people we've spoken to move like they have combat training and the representative came without guards."

"She did mention wars as a possibility though. What sort of wars were written about in the books?"

"Back in their past there were wars over resources and occasionally insults or matters of honor. More recently there's been a number of wars to end slavery. It's hard to tell but it sounds like they're setting up real governments instead of puppet states. It's also a lot more common for wars to end in rapid surrender by one side or the other even going so far as complete conquest sometimes, I can't see most human civilizations accepting that."

"We certainly didn't, though the secession wasn't much of a war by human standards."

"I hope you're right Emily. It would be nice to have allies, though unless something bizarre happens there isn't going to be a war here. The worst the Network would do outside of extreme circumstances is blacklist this world and never come back. Like that plague world."

The team continues chatting about their research until the representative finishes whatever they need to do.

She lets them know fairly soon that there's a field just outside of town they can set up their tents in, though they might want to wait for something nearer a city.

"Is there likely to be a new place we ought to move to today? If it won't be until tomorrow we can just setup a smaller camp before we settle on our final location."

"It won't be until tomorrow at the earliest, I'd expect."

"We'll just setup a small camp then. It doesn't take long and it gives us the ability to take off our helmets so we can eat solid food."

"I can imagine that'd be desirable, yes," she says with a small smile.

"Do you have a map or someone who can show us where we should setup?"

"My assistant Starmir will lead you there, yes," she says, gesturing to a blond man, wearing a purple knee-length dress, who grins and waves, balancing his papers, before stepping forward.

"Hello!" he says.

"Hi there."

"If you'll come right this way, I can show you to the field - it's a small drive."

Sapphire nods to her team and those of them who had been sitting stand up. "Lead the way."

He leads them out, points out his car, and relays verbal directions, written directions, and a map of the town in case they lose track of him - "We have so little traffic normally that shouldn't happen, and gossip about you guys hasn't had a big chance to get out, so I don't think that'll change - "

"Good to know." The team gets into their cars and follow when he starts driving.

He takes them to a field outside of town. It looks like it's used for agriculture, but whatever's usually here has been rotated out and the field's lying fallow.

"This look good to you all?"

"Definitely, this would be enough space for a full camp and we're only setting up a temporary one." She turns to her team, "Alright, let's not be too show-offish, also this is temporary so no boring."

Sapphire helps the others get out four tents and upack them. Then the team backs up.

The tents spring open with spikes driving themselves into the ground the whole process takes about half a minute, Emily can't quite hide the smile on her face. Each tent has a sizable entrance section. Three of them are smaller about large enough for two people while the fourth is larger and tall enough to stand up in.

The assistant whistles. "Neat. Looks useful, too."

"Yeah, it saves a lot of time when we don't need to setup the tents by hand."

"Probably you could have robots set them up more easily, too, right? - Though I'm not an engineer or anything, I just read the Intrepid Stars serial..."

"Our robots aren't the best at doing complex tasks requiring a lot of fine control, at least not outside of very carefully controlled conditions. They'd also take up more space than we can easily spare."

"Oh, I meant if they're self-deploying, the robot could just drop one in the right spot - I guess that'd mostly come up if you were trying to set up a base camp ahead of people, though. Fiction tends to assume sending robots into space is cheaper than anyone who needs to breathe."

"Our fiction tends not to assume that. In reality we travel using magic so we can't easily send robots ahead of people. Once we establish ourselves on a planet though we tend to use automation to map the planet and that's also largely true of exploring other bodies in the same solar system."

He nods. "Stories about traveling worlds with magic have it a bit less - organized, generally?"

"That makes sense. At least in our fiction most magic isn't bestowed by the government, and well, part of the point of a lot of stories with magic is the power fantasy."

He laughs. "I guess so."

"I think we're going to have a brief meal, will you be waiting or should we meet you back at the community center?"

"Depends on if you anticipate needing me soon."

"I don't think so, we can find our way back to the community center on our own."

"Alright! I'll head back, then, and let people know you're settled in."

"Thank you." The team makes their way into the large tent one of them carries a box from one of the cars in with them. They don't emerge before he leaves.

"He seemed nice, actually all the people we've met so far seem nice."

"It's definitely a suggestive pattern, maybe they're just a more pro-social species or culture in general."

"All the biology books I saw weren't detailed enough to really draw firm conclusions, I think maybe some muscles are attached a little differently but even that was subtle enough that I almost missed it and it might just be a misprint or something. It's really weird," says their team doctor Wilfred Hanna.

"We do get around with magic, I guess it isn't as implausible as finding such a similar species out in space. Most of the animals we've seen on this and other planets are a lot more like Earth species than scientists would have predicted."

"That's true, maybe we should do more initial forays from orbit, we know that the teleportation magic filters for places with a similar atmospheric composition."

"We don't do that because we want to find worlds similar enough to build low-impact colonies on. Our industry isn't quite ready for large-scale space colonies yet."

"Let's ease off the policy discussion, things may or may not change now that we've met the Krisans. We really do need to have some food and I don't want to delay too long before we head back."

Courtney takes that as a cue to put down the rations box they're carrying and start passing out individual rations. Eating follows.

"Ria, can you launch a drone, it would be good to place where we are relative to the atlas if we can."

"Of course." Outside the tent a relatively large drone about 60 centimeters across detaches itself from one of the cars and starts zipping upwards. It goes about three kilometers straight up before coming back down. A minute later Ria looks up from her tablet. "It doesn't look like the computers can make a match, the atlas just wasn't detailed enough. We have a decent image of the general area though.

"Oh well."

After a little while longer they exit the tent again and drive back to the community center.

The representative from earlier is still there, though some of her retinue has shifted. There's rubber-neckers watching, though most people seem to be obeying a cordon. The truck driver from earlier has left.

"It's interesting how fast word has spread, it can't have been more than a couple hours." Sapphire comments to her team as they drive up.

The team gets out of the cars and make their way back inside.

The town does have foot traffic - most of them seem to be more idly curious and with nothing better to do, since a few are wandering off when they pull up. (And promptly wander back.)

They're not disturbed heading inside. Representative Tyuln turns when they enter, smiling. "Everything to your liking?" she asks.

"Definitely, if we needed too we could probably set up their long term, though that would also involve digging a well and a thermocouple."

"We'll have a more permanent place for you soon enough. Can you hook into local plumbing systems instead of digging wells?"

"Sure, that's definitely possible, we can also use your electricity grid instead of making our own onsite but we don't have the materials to do that with us. I'm also not sure how much we'd need relative to your capacity."

"Probably a question for our engineers."

"Definitely."

Smile. "Is there anything you need before we get you talking to people with fancier titles than me?"

"I don't think so, nothing is urgent and it would be silly to make plans before we figure out what's happening."

"That does make sense."

Sapphire waits to be directed to whoever she should meet next.

Next seems to be a local representative from the medical branch of the International Science Association. He's sorry for the wait - the news is still spreading, and of course it'll take people a while to pick the best place for talks...

Anyways, he's very curious about the aliens! They look a lot like the Krissan, actually. Have they noticed a lot of similarities beyond appearance?

"Hi, I'm Wilfred I'm the team doctor. The books we've looked at didn't go into depth about anatomy but it looks like the broad strokes are the same. It's a strange coincidence."

He nods. "We know that what we'd consider sapience doesn't always require the same body plan, too, though it's possible that complex tool use to the level of magic or space travel would."

"We don't think that's the case there doesn't seem to be something special about bipedal locomotion for instance but it's hard to know without actually meeting people."

"That would've been our guess, too."

"We're not planning to stop exploring, maybe we'll discover proof out there some day."

"That'd be absolutely delightful."

"Oh definitely. Even without verifiably comparable species, our biologists and really anyone in a bioscience field have been getting a lot of interesting data bout how life can develop such that the world it's on at present has an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere. So far the basics of organic chemistry turn out pretty similar but there's some interesting variations in the details."

"We can get you all the data we have, though I suspect you all are quite far ahead of us in investigative abilities."

"Probably, a lot depends on high-speed computers for processing. As a start it would be good to have a proper anatomy textbook. I'd also be happy to answer any questions you have."

"We can get you anatomy and biology textbooks fairly easily, yes - I might need to think on my own questions for a bit. It's hard to know where to start."

"Of course. This is uncharted territory for all of us. We've done our best to plan for meeting others like ourselves but we had no way of knowing how it would actually be."

"And we've only just started dreaming about it."

"I'm sure we'll figure it out together."

Smile. "We'd love that."

Wilfred waits a few moments to see if the representative will follow up.

There are a few questions about differences in organic chemistry.

Wilfred answers them promptly. There are a few differences in which amino acids are common.

Fascinating! The representative seems more in his depth, talking about biological and medical questions, though he has to admit to a few gaps in his world's knowledge of their own biology.

And, soon enough, a selection of medical textbooks starts arriving - currently just the ones that're more local, but they're all fairly good textbooks. Still, the local library doesn't keep medical journals or anything.

The basics are what's most important, Wilfred keeps talking while other members of the team do the digitization work. Once the digitization is complete Wilfred gets out a tablet and starts doing searches through the text, pulling out answers to questions and honing in on particular differences. There are shockingly few.

Which does imply there's a greater chance of cross-world pathogens being able to exist.

It does, Wilfred is fairly concerned about this possibility. She starts digging into their literature on the Krissan immune system and tries to speculate about whether Human vaccines will be effective.

Vaccines work as described for them, at least, so their immune systems seem similar enough in the broad function, if not the details.

Wilfred makes a note to have certain vaccines brought in. "Do you have an infrastructure for running clinical trials like this? We can do initial testing exclusively with dead vaccines and blood tests but eventually we probably need to test effectiveness, assuming we want to be able to do without these suits."

"We do - not every nation has that kind of infrastructure yet, unfortunately, but ours does, and the International Science Association will be able to bring far more resources to bear once they're up to speed."

"I've made a note to have certain vaccines brought in once we have teams going back and forth regularly. It'll have to wait until then. It's good you have infrastructure this would be a lot harder if we had to build from scratch. Do you have vaccines for most common ailments?"

"Yes! There's a few viral diseases we're struggling with - we don't have all of the vaccine development tools we'd like to have, so we might need to borrow some technology to incorporate into our systems for developing future vaccines."

"I think I can say with confidence that we'd be willing to share that technology. Or at least most of it, some of it's pretty dangerous because it can be used to create novel viruses."

"Understandable; hopefully by the time we incorporate the rest, we'll have had chances to prove our trustworthiness there."

"Agreed, I think part of it is just ensuring you have the infrastructure and plans to be mostly ok if the technology falls into the wrong hands."

"Yes, definitely - we'll want better and faster vaccination development before we risk engineered pathogens, for one."

"I think the other possibly important thing to cover for coexistence purposes is if we can share food but that's pretty difficult to figure out. Enzyme mixtures are complicated."

"And even if we technically could share food, our immune systems might react poorly to new proteins."

"Indeed, it will have to be approached very carefully."

He chuckles. "I know it's a potentially serious problem, but - I can't help but be excited for this new horizon we're opening. New problems mean new opportunities."

"They do, that's why we explore."

He nods, and starts poking at areas where the Krissan's knowledge might not be complete, but local conditions might conflict with what the humans are used to.

She answers to the best of her ability.

He starts making lists of things they'll have to investigate.

Lists are important for big projects like this.

Definitely. He doesn't know how some people get by without them.

On the point where the explorers first arrived a second group appears. This group has four vehicles and more people. They start off by sending a data burst. "Explorer teams 12 and 13 requesting status from team 3."

Sapphire notices the text message and takes a moment to compose a response. "Explorer team 3 lead here, status is good. We've opened diplomatic relations. No red flags."

"Acknowledged, if you think the locals will be receptive we should rendezvous. Also, please open datalinks for file transfer."

"I'll ask but I expect they will be." She sends a quick message asking Ria to setup the datalinks.

She goes looking for the representative again.

Findable!

"Hello, our followup teams arrived to check on us, is it alright if I direct them to our campsite?"

"That's fine by me."

"Alright, thank you. Do you know if there's anyone else I or others on my team should be talking with?" She sends a quick text to the other team lead to wait at the camp site.

"We're still getting people selected to talk to you, and getting people moved around - unfortunately, we do still have to cross physical distances to get places! So there's not much available right now."

"That makes sense. I'm in no particular rush."

"Yes. We are rather sorry about the delay, of course."

"That you're responding even this well to a completely unexpected occurrence speaks well of your society."

The representative smiles. "Thank you. We try rather hard to improve our society whenever we see how, and it is nice to hear at least some of that has paid off."

Sapphire smiles. She continues to make conversation for a time but eventually heads back to the campsite for food, rest and to meet with the follow-up teams. They shuffle things so that at least one person is always at the community center as a communications relay.