The places closest to the market are all out of her price range but she can find a place at the edge of town where the rooms make the place she saw before look positively spacious and are not really marketed toward people as big as orfs but which she and the baby could just fit inside without anyone being crushed. Someone looking at such a room thinks about the fact that the alternative is sleeping in the park in the open where anyone can see you, which they find obviously horrifying.

It transpires that no one selling food in this town was expecting anyone to want crickets. There could conceivably be worms in some of the discounted fruits which are the cheapest foods for sale. If she's after protein specifically the meat is pricey but there are also nuts.

She will get some nuts and some of whatever's cheap that her baby can clutch in her little hands, and call it good. The baby gnaws with her little teeth. Is sleeping in the park horrifying because people will be mad or because it just is disagreeable to this individual specifically?

It is widely considered horrifying to have to sleep where people can see you, but it is not widely considered horrifying to see someone else sleeping. It's vulnerable. People here dislike the idea of being vulnerable, maybe for reasons not totally unrelated to how lots of their neighbors think doing things that make other people angry is a good strategy.

Hmm. She doesn't really have to sleep right now. Maybe once it's dark she will see if she can find the edge of the city and locate a less obtrusive place to sleep.

Several minutes' walk from the market on one side of the city are orchards, open meadows, and animals being raised for their meat; on the opposite side there's some scrubby woodland, and then farther away there are mountains.

The scrubby woodland is the nicest darn place she has ever been! She lies down in the scrubby woodland and looks at the stars, baby asleep on top of her.

There sure are stars, different from Arda's stars, and a tiny sliver of moon.

After not too long, someone comes by and watches her, wondering if where she's from it's more polite to interrupt someone sleeping in the open to offer them shelter or if it's more polite to leave people who are resting alone. He's aware that she's probably an alien and would really like to avoid antagonizing her and ideally they'd have caught up to her earlier.

She will continue to pretend she's sleeping and listen to him thinking for a bit longer before deciding what to do about that!

He's pretty nervous about this. Nearly all of the scenarios he's worrying about are tame compared to what she's used to, and the worst he thinks could possibly happen to him is probably nothing that hasn't happened to her a time or several, but even so he's afraid of what happens if this goes badly. The people he works for back in the capital want him to talk to her and be reassuring and unthreatening and convince her to go talk to them. What if he mangles it badly enough to get fired? What if she's hostile and attacks him? He has backup in case of this eventuality but what if somehow they fail to subdue her if necessary? What if they're about to get lots of immigrants who are mostly hostile? Okay, he's going to go ahead and count to twelve and then try to get her attention.

She turns her head when he gets to eleven.

Of course she does. Terrifying mind-reading alien. This is why he doesn't know anything he doesn't need to about this mission, which is not comforting.

He's one of the small furry ones, same species as the one who wanted help with furniture. "Hello. I'm with the imperial government. Welcome to Har."

Thank you.

Maybe this is going well? But it could still go badly.

"We thought we might offer you somewhere private and safe to sleep tonight. And after that your presence in the capital to answer some questions would be appreciated. You would of course be compensated for your time."

This is something the imperial government has done before and he doesn't have any reason to think it's a trap but if it were he definitely wouldn't know.

And then what?

"You'd be flown back here at no cost to you if you wanted, or you could stay in Mar Geru. It's not impossible that they'd have a job offer for you, I guess."

And they're not gonna try to steal my baby or anything?

He's vaguely baffled that this is a salient possibility when obviously they wouldn't have the first idea what to do with a baby of this species. Maybe there's a reason they should, and he hasn't thought of it? Maybe there's a reason and it's terrible and he should be more worried.

"I don't think so. They will probably want to ask you questions about her."

I don't think you have a reason to steal her but I left where I was from 'cause they did there.

"In the Hari Empire, we respect people's rights to their own property. Theft is illegal here. The full set of laws is available for free at any government office."

I can't read Hari.

"You can have them read to you." They'll probably make him do it, since she's already had a chance to learn all his secrets. "There's also an illusion show for learning Hari that you can have a free copy of." And it's kind of terrible and not how he learned but it's free. Is it bad if he thinks things like that? Is he going to turn her against the empire? This is so stressful.

She sits up and puts the baby back in her shirt. Are a lotta people against the empire?

Gah! He's making things worse!

"No, the empire is a very good place to live." It's not his job to have all the statistics about mortality and so on memorized, he's not who they'd have picked for this job if not knowing anything useful weren't a constraint. So he's short on evidence for this. "It's nicer than everywhere that came before it. But even if someone did try to fight, it wouldn't matter, because the empire is the most powerful polity ever to exist in this world." ...But if other people from her world are going to start showing up they could be more powerful and that might be very bad.

Where do you want me to go?

"Tonight we can pay for any room available in the city you were in earlier." Unless she likes sleeping in public? Is that a thing in other worlds? "Tomorrow morning we'd like you to visit the capitol building in Mar Geru, which is north of here. We can fly you there. Would that work for you?"