There is a phone number! The engineers are trying to develop an emulator for a phone, but maybe someone can also ask about how to get a legitimate phone line set up.

Donni can go be a clueless foreigner new to town and ask people on the street if there’s a store she can visit to buy a phone line.

Buy a ...phone line? Does she mean for her house? if the house doesn't come with it she has to get it installed. 

Yes, right, she means that thing, how does she do that, is there a person to talk to? 

(Donni Mindspeaks Matirin to say that apparently they need a house for the phone to go in??)

This person walking down the street has no idea!

Ugh.

Nayoki can find a librarian to ask? Librarians know things, right? 

(It turns out the locals don’t spend a lot of time obligingly mulling on how they got phones or what their passport looks like, frustrating!)

You call the phone company and set up an appointment and they drive a truck to your house. The librarian thinks it's expensive if your house doesn't already have the wires run for it. 

Does she know their phone instructions? And, uh, how to call them if you don’t already have a phone?

Oh, that's easy, you use a pay phone in a phone booth. There's one a couple of blocks from here.

Perfect, thank you! 

...Nayoki leaves the library and navigates her way to the 'phone booth' glimpsed in the librarian's thoughts, and goes in to examine it. 

It has a removable metal shell thing and a keypad with numbers and a coin machine! It has some faded instructions in English on how to operate it. You put in coins, then pick up the phone, then dial your number.

Nayoki has coins, they give them to you when you pay with money bills and it's not an integer number of them. She tries putting one of them in. 

It clunks away into some place where it can no longer be seen.

Huh. Unfortunately mage-sight isn't much help to figure out what it's doing. She puts in another coin. Do the instructions say how many you need to put in before it works? 

The instructions say "CALL MINIMUM: $1.00"

Nayoki reads the number on another of her coins. Theres a 25 on it, so a quarter of a dollar? A different coin has 10 on it. 

She puts in two more of the 25 coins and waits to see if anything happens. 

No, but the instructions do say once you have put in the coins you are supposed to pick up the phone.

She tries doing that, peers at it, then puts it to her ear; she's seen people do it in one of the TV shows. 

"You have three minutes prepaid. To dial, press nine pound, then your number. To dial collect, press thirty one pound, then your number."

Nayoki peers at the little board of numbers. She sees nine, and she has the number from the newspaper that Matirin says is for phones written down, but 'pound' is...money in Great Britain, according to her travel guide books? And she remembers the symbol for it but it isn't on the board of numbers at all! 

There are a couple of symbols that aren't numbers. One of them is a tiny rayed point, one is like two offset plus signs and she hasn't seen it before. Is one of those also called 'pound', that's so confusing.

She tries nine and then the tiny rayed point, to see if that works. 

It makes confused bleeping sounds and then repeats the instruction.

Okay what if she tries nine and the crisscrossy addition signs one? 

"Please dial your number."

Perfect! She consults her piece of paper and dials the number and waits.