The Velgarth humans have warm clothing with them, but without being asked, one of the mages brings up a weather-barrier and warms the air to a more normal room temperature; they've been tested and aren't detectable to sensors, of which there don't seem to be any anyway. 

Leareth directs the Farseers left and right along the coast, and then scries a point a half-mile above his head and starts riding it inland. Moving fast; the other mages can do short-range scrying for detail, he's looking for the big picture, in particular whether he can connect it to a location on the 3D map-projection he's studied. 

They're on some islands. Mountainous, forming a long peninsula of some kind, curving inwards towards a large northern landmass. 

(One of the Farseers can see the nearest town; it has twenty two houses in some neat squares, with paved roads, a little inland on the adjacent island.)

This is passed on to Leareth and Matirin. 

Probably there are not any Yeerks in this random tiny human town, but Leareth has the Thoughtsensers check anyway if they're in range. 

Every head has exactly one inhabitant. English-speaking, apparently. They have electricity; some of them are watching TV on boxy black devices and some of them are fetching things out of the refrigerator and some of them are listening to recorded music while they're out fishing.

Donni is acting as the Mindspeaker for this; she benefit of a Companion to boost her, she has almost fifty miles, only moderate for a Herald but very long-range everywhere else, and further than anyone in their party except Leareth. She's not at all used to skimming surface thoughts, but she gives it a go to see if she can get a place-name from them. 

The town is Karluk. One of them is thinking about how they need to go to Kodiac, which is apparently a much bigger city, this weekend to pick up their sister.

Leareth doesn't recognize either name, he didn't spend that much time on cities except the really big ones, but when Donni explains this he passes it on to Matirin so they can find out if it matches anywhere on the map-projection, which he guesses can be queried that way; he also shares his scrying view of the coastline shape with some of the Andalites in case they have a better memory for it. 

They find it pretty quickly. Big northern island chain connecting to the sparsely populated northern part of the continent. The country is called the United States of America, made as promised of states, lots of them, this one called Alaska. English and Spanish are both commonly spoken. The most unremarkable ethnicity will be pale-skinned and brown-haired, though there are other ethnicities in substantial numbers as well. 

<When the shuttle comes back I think we should find the nearest place with a bank, tell their computers that we have a lot of money, take some of the money from the bank, and buy artificial skin. I think textile manufacture will have advanced substantially and our existing artificial skin will be conspicuous.>

Leareth glances at his Velgarth clothing, compares it to the people his Farseer glimpsed and shared the image of. "Yes, I think so. Also I am suddenly so curious how this world does banking such that that would work but not immediately noticed by the computers at a different bank being in disagreement. - That is not actually a high priority question." 

Cayaldwin wants to explain it anyway. <The computers talk to each other via satellites in orbit and will all query the specific computers where all of the records of who has bank accounts are. I think. It may take some time to work out their exact setup. They will have encoded it all but encoded it using some assumptions about how codes work that are not true. One of the assumptions is just that no one around has a computer that can conduct as many operations in a second as ours and the other assumption is - more complicated but with the way they are doing computing, some things are always going to be very hard, and if you do it a different way, those things will instead sometimes be easy.>

<Alaska seems like a fine place to establish an underground base. There are lots of mines. We can arrange internet access. The population is low so the collateral damage will be minimal if the Yeerks decide to try to blast it from orbit.>

Leareth is going to sit on his sudden desire to know everything about which assumptions of how codes work are false. "I agree. Can we find abandoned mine sites from our maps - or their maps? Farsight will be less than entirely helpful for finding underground structures. I can make a temporary shielded area here, and once we have a map location plus Farsight coverage, I ought to be able to do a very precisely aimed Gate, which will not be detectable from the surface if it is far enough underground." 

<Our maps do not seem to have that information but we can purchase theirs in the city, I would expect.>

Nod. "I think it makes sense to wait for the shuttle to travel there, unless you intended them to be gone a long time; I do not straightforwardly see a place to Gate in unseen." 

<They should be gone about ten more minutes, and I agree that we should wait.>

Leareth nods and takes the opportunity to sit down and rest.

The others humans practice English with each other. Leareth isn't very good at the local languages yet, due to having spent nearly all his recent time on magical research and logistics and preliminary planning. Nayoki is pretty fluent, though, she can cheat with Mindhealing to learn skills very fast if she's willing to put up with weird dreams, and since they're both Mindspeakers she can prompt him if he has to interact with the locals.

The shuttle comes back. Matirin wants it to take him and Cayaldwin and Leareth and Nayoki if they want to come; Cayaldwin will do the thing with the computers and Matirin is best at acting human and speaking English, and it'd be good to have some mages along to notice what if anything seems off about them.

Leareth will come with Nayoki. They're also both mindreaders which will help catch various threats, here. Honestly Leareth expects Matirin to pass better as a local than he does, despite being an alien. 

They change and clothe themselves in the shuttle. It lands just outside the city, imperceptible to the human eye, and Cayaldwin pulls up some incomprehensible fields of text on the screens and taps away for a while and then asks Matirin how much a house costs -

"- approximately sixty thousand U.S. dollars, as of twenty years ago."

       "Mmmhmmm. A day's wage -"

"In this country twenty-five dollars. Same caveat."

       "Mmmm. I'm going to give us six thousand dollars, two hundred. We can do it again later for more."

"Sure."

        "Your name is John Smith."

"All right."

         "You need an identity document. There are low-resolution scans of them in their system but I don't know that it'll be very good until we've seen what the document actually looks like." He prints one out anyway. 

Matirin takes his identity document, which has a picture of this face on it, and studies it thoughtfully. "Everyone ready?"

Leareth glances at Nayoki. "Ready." And he opens his Thoughtsensing wide. Mage-sight, too, just to see which if any of the local technology shows up to it. 

They step out of the shuttle.

The streetlights show up to mage-sight, as do various things inside the metal carriages driving down the streets.

Matirin walks up to the bank.

The bank teller is reading a romance novel behind her till. She looks up when he comes in, and thinks instantly that they're not from around here, because she knows everyone from around here. 

"Hey. I need to make a withdrawal."

          "You can use the ATM for that," she says.

"Oh. Can you show me how?"

          "You put your card in and then read the instructions on the screen."

"My...ID card?"

           "...no, your debit card."

"I don't have that on me right now, I'm sorry."

          Sigh. She is thinking that she wants to get back to her romance novel. "All right. Name?"

"John Smith."

          What kind of terrible parent with the last name Smith names their kid John. "Account number?"

"120447."

          "Security code?"

"54W23Q1886WZA4."

          Okay what the fuck is that some kind of prank. "....most people have, like, their pet's name, or their mother's maiden name."

"...sorry," Matirin says. "Uh, mine is that, though."

          "Well you're gonna have to say it again, waaaaay slower."

"5....4....W...2...3...Q...1...8...8...6...W...Z...A...4."

          How the fuck does he have that memorized. "And how much do you want to withdraw."

"Two thousand dollars."

          "I have to get a manager for more than a thousand."

"I'm sorry for the inconvenience."

         "He's not even here, he's out fishing."

"...can you just do a thousand, then."

         "Yeah, sure." She marks this in her accounts and counts out the bills for him. She's wondering where he got those clothes, and why he is flanked by three creepy friends who haven't talked at all one of whom is, like, super black, like Africa black not South Carolina black, she's pretty sure that's not racist. 

(Honestly Nayoki is very used to this, no one looks like her in the northern inland either.) She has no idea what she's doing that's 'creepy' but tells Leareth in Mindspeech that he should fidget more and try to look really bored. Normal humans don't just stand perfectly still. 

If this were Leareth's mission alone he would be much more willing to use a bit of mind-control, but it doesn't seem that risky, so far, and he's getting a lot from the bank staffperson's thoughts on what they're doing that seems weird. They should definitely get different clothes. 

He keeps Matirin updated with Mindspeech that the teller doesn't seem suspicious, so far, just weirded out which he thinks is fine, they won't need to come back here a lot or anything.