Suddenly, there is a magenta-colored shimmer in the air, somewhere in view but non-occupied, and a person appears. 

The person seems mildly surprised at this occurrence, but with a glance at their nails, which shimmer green, they quickly recover. After making several somewhat exaggerated confusion faces, they land on "mildly curious". 

They give a friendly wave to anyone nearby.

(Internally: This will be interesting. Whenever we don't get warned it's something where the experience benefits from no warning, so, interesting. Ring, can you check on your end?)

(I'm getting the all-clear here as well. The ring on the person's finger shimmers green. And, hey, geysers!)

(They fiddle with the water just slightly in the background. What else is having magic for, if not to do random pointless things sometimes. A large droplet, magically shaped, throws a faint rainbow onto their hair.)

There's a short blue skinned person wearing goggles who's mouth is wide open. It takes them a few seconds before they manage to speak and then, "Wow an actual real life alien and you just appeared like warping but it looked different it was pink."

They snort slightly and grin. "Hello," they she says. "Actual real life alien speaking. That was my teleportation magic!" 

She teleports a step left, then a step right, with the same magenta glow at both departure point and destination.

"Anyway... Is there anything - interesting - going on here, other than me?"

(She continues fiddling with the geyser slightly, those droplets go there.)

"You're the coolest thing in a long time. All the cool stuff is out in space. I guess that new Nomai statue Gabro brought back is interesting. I'd rather go to Giants Deep and see the floating island they found it on myself though."

"Why thank you, that's not a compliment I tend to receive often!"

Man, these poor dudes, if they all think there's nothing more interesting than space there's probably a terrible lack of stuff other than that and that just seems sad. Potentially to-fix. (The Ring records this.) But maybe it's just this fella. Don't overgeneralize. 

"I'll give you a ride there, if you want," she says. "When I'm up for teleporting long distances again. Would you like that?" 

(That phrasing implies it's tiring to teleport long distances - it's not, at all, but she has a feeling this person might insist on going now and she's not oriented enough yet to the situation.)

"Yes... I mean I don't have a space suit but maybe you have magic for that too. If you want to see the statue it's in the museum under the Observatory. I can take you there if you'd like. Or you could play with my model spaceship while you're waiting for your magic to recharge."

"Yeah, I'll double check the best way to do it but it shouldn't be an issue. Worst case scenario, I can just conjure what passes for a space suit here."

She They consider doing weird body stuff, discorporating or becoming a cloud of nanites or something, but probably people would be uncomfortable if they did that, so they settle for disassembling and reassembling their feet inside their shoes.

"About how far is the museum?"

"Pretty close. It's that big building with the telescope just across the crater." They point to the building about 70 meters away.

"Alright, lead the way! I'd teleport but I'm not sure I see any good landing spots from here."

They consider flight as well but quietly discard it, as it seems to not fit that well with the aesthetic of the situation.

Presuming their conversational partner leads, they follow. 

(They also turn off some magical protections that seem not that applicable at that exact moment, to make room, and turn on the illusion power to make an illusion of their body, with animation lightly supervised by the Ring, and discorporate their actual body.)

"Sure thing." They begin leading the way down a slope and into the main town area.

A taller person calls out as their guide enters the village center. "Hello Mica... Do you have an alien with you?"

"They teleported here with magic. I'm taking them to see the Museum."

"Well all right... make sure you tell Hornfels when you get there. I'm sure they'd like to meet whoever this is."

(This taller fellow didn't ask whether Ellume would like to meet whoever this "Hornfels" is! - Just kidding, that's the Narrative and they're going to do what the narrative says. To a point. Thank you, Narrative Delivery Person.)

"Thank you! I'd love to say hi to Hornfels or anyone else who wants to meet me."

(Come to think, how is translation being handled? Are these blue people speaking English, do they have translation, is there one of those occasional random translation effects that happen out of nowhere when you change universes, or is Experience Support on Ellume's end handling it? The way to test this is obviously puns. Ellume is now on the lookout for Pun Opportunities.)

"I'm sure an awful lot of people would like to meet you. Just about everyone is interested in the Outer Wilds space program and they've only found dead aliens. Hornfels is just the person most likely to be able to answer any questions you have and the person who runs the museum you're heading to."

(Ellume spreads out their body-particles into a medium-sized cloud in midair, above their, Mica's, and the tall person's heads. Then they pull their body into normal human shape and take off the illusion for now.)

"Aah, I see. I remember a time when my home civilisation didn't have contact with any others, and there weren't even dead ones around, just - emptiness. It makes sense that that's what the buzz is about."

(Their inner soundtrack goes "~dooooo weeeee dooooo~".)

(The Ring sends an impression of an amused eyeroll and feeds the Doctor Who opening theme into their ears, quietly, and adjusts their thinking speed settings to make sure this doesn't cause distraction.)

"Anyway, will we go meet Hornfels?"

"Sure." Mica leads the way over two small bridges.

There are two small people sitting on a porch. The one on the left with the hat calls out. "Hi Mica. Gosh are you an alien?"

"Hi Tephra. Hi Galena. This is... you know I haven't asked your name."

"Ellume the alien, at your service. Nice to meet you guys!" They incline their head.

"Way cool. How did you get here?"

"Magic! ...As in like, seriously, I have magical abilities that include teleportation, among other things. Do you guys have places you'd really like to visit?"

(Ellume is tempted to reveal conjuration and offer conjured gifts, but holds off for the second at least.)

"Brittle Hollow sounds super cool. It has a black hole in the center," says Tephra.

"I'd like to visit Attlerock. It's where everything got started," says Galena.

"I want to go everywhere but especially Giant's Deep. There's hurricanes that fling entire islands into space."

"Sounds neat! I think I'd have to work out a solution for black holes, I don't have one right now that would work for you guys unless you want to watch from far enough nothing much black-hole-related would happen normally. Hurricanes, a lot easier. In what sense did everything get started on Attlerock?"

"The black hole is safe to look at you just don't want to jump inside."

"It's the first place we visited when we started exploring space."

I notice that I am confused. Is that how black holes work? I feel like that is not how they work. Something something gravity? More information required. Maybe they just mean watching from beyond the gravity well? Argh.

"Makes sense! Is Attlerock dangerous in any way?"

(They prod the Ring for comfort.)

(The Ring sends wordless reassurance and gently warms some of the air nearest Ellume's skin. If you need a pause...)

('M fine now. <3)

"No more than anywhere in space is... you just need to be big enough to carry the heavy oxygen tanks and finish all the training before they let you go. You also have to wait for a spaceship to be ready. Syl's is basically finished now so they'll be leaving soon."

Ellume is tempted to show, or maybe show off, their rebellion against the aesthetics of ordinary non-magical space travel, but that would - disturb something, they feel, without proper leadup, so they tamp down on that impulse, instead aiming for offering magical assistance within the existing assumptions.

"I think I can help you guys out with this in general. There's a few simple ways to reduce the weight of something with basic magic, and even if I don't have one already, with some prodding I can probably get you a glyph that anyone can draw that will apply an appropriate upward force to an object to make it lighter. That doesn't solve the problem of mass, but it probably makes carrying things a lot easier."

They totally already have a glyph for that but it's true that they'd wanna tweak it.

"Maybe I can even look stuff up and compare materials science, but honestly on average you're shorter than us, so there might not be anything suitable. Maybe reduce costs or risks on spaceships, depending. We'll have to look into that too."

(They ask Ring to start planning out the avenues here.)

"But even forgetting that," - I am a Kalunu and this amount of rebellion seems like it would bring more fun than dissonance, so - "I can totally give brief, safe joyrides. If someone wants to explore someplace longer than, like, 15-30 minutes" - this is translated by conveying the felt sense of roughly how long that takes, rather than unit conversions - "at a time, I'll probably be up for doing that once in a while, but for longer stays you might want to have a backup plan that works to be safe and get home without me." 

They grin, "Sometimes when I'm in space for too long, I get bored. You could say I... space out?" 

"That was weird... you said [personal pronoun] [region beyond the atmosphere] [region outside the current boundary] but somehow I know you meant you get distracted. Also it doesn't sound very safe to go places with you if you might get distracted and just leave us there."

"That was just the set up for a pun, it's kind of like a word joke. It works by having two words or phrases that mean different things but sound the same, or similar, in a language, so that when you say one it reminds you of the meaning of the other. - Anyway."

They put a hand on their forehead. "As I said, it was a joke. What would actually happen is that I will stay with you for a time, then very clearly announce that we're going back, and if you have no equipment I would take you back even if you wanted to stay. The part about having backup safety and backup going home plans is only if you want me to leave you there after I want to go. Even if I plan on checking back in and fetching you home after a day or something, I would feel very anxious if you had no backups available. I wouldn't actually forget, though it would be valid of you to not entirely take my word on that. I would just rather not need to panic if, hypothetically, I did, or something else came up. I like doing nice things for people, I don't like feeling obliged to do additional nice things after having done one nice thing with the risk of someone dying or suffering if I don't." 

"Oh, okay. Do you still want to go to the museum? I bet Slate would know how best to use a magic symbol like you talked about. They build all our spaceships. They're probably up on the launch tower tweaking Syl's new ship."

"Yeah, up for going places and meeting people, whoever's closest first, unless Syl's leaving very soon, in which case them first."

"There's a loop that goes from the launch tower to the museum and back but it only works in reverse if you have a jetpack so let's keep going. Tephra, Galena do you want to come to the museum with us?"

"Will you come find us before going to space? We already saw Gabbro's Statue and none of the other exhibits were new."

Ellume might notice that it's already twilight. It seemed to be noon when they arrived.

They she could make a jetpack but she won't. Low power aesthetic. Good. She imagines patting her brain.

"I will totally come find you guys." Ring, please note this down. She has perfect recall but this doesn't mean she wants to remember all possible relevant things in a single moment and handle them in working memory, in order to plan next steps, she wants to be able to ask Ring to give her a ready-made plan when it is needed. What else is having a magical assistant who is a ring for? "See you later!"

She waves.

"Wait, is it getting dark already? What the heck?" Is it a time effect or is it... day length... Probably the latter, given the aesthetics, but she wants to see how the local responds.

"Does the planet you're from have longer days?"

"Probably? My planet's day length is 24 hours," which is sort of hard to parse the time-feel of because it's a rather long while, so she continues, "so, somewhere between half the time and double the time from when I arrived up to now, multiply that by six and multiply it again by twenty-four and that's at least the right order of magnitude for our days."

"Wow... it must stay dark for so long." Mica continues leading the way to the museum.

She follows.

"Yeah, it does," and nostalgia flashbacks to staying up all night, back when that was still a very relevant concept that applied to her. "How often and how long do you guys sleep? Do you sleep?"

"Most people sleep for thirty minutes out of one hundred twenty usually all at once." They walk behind a waterfall and then start up a long wooden ramp built into the side of the crater wall.

"Neat! Humans, that's my species, sleep for 7-9 hours on average, although there's some people who need less and some who need more." 

She's going to get into the Woz and polyphasic sleep topic, isn't she. "There's this one guy who writes about sleep and memory and learning on his personal wiki and he says having a shorter sleep around 6-8 hours from waking up helps him shorten his night sleep, but he thinks some other people's ideas about just doing 30 minute naps at precisely timed intervals around the clock doesn't really work, so it's interesting that it works for you guys. It's probably a biological difference though. But it would be interesting to study random stuff like that. The differences between two sapient species."

(She metaphorically pats herself on the head for saying stuff that probably gels with the aesthetic.)

"Wow... that sounds like sooo long to be asleep. Wait you always sleep during the night? That must be weird never seeing the stars at midnight when you can see them easiest." They've reached the top of the ramp. There's a fenced off area directly in front of them with some strange crystals and Mica leads the way left past a sign that points to the entrance of the "Zero-G cave" which looks a bit like an old-timey mine entrance.

"Most people tend to sleep roughly at night time, yes. I'm "supposed to" always sleep during the night, technically, but in actual fact I like reading or chatting or doing loads of different things at night, even way, way past midnight, occasionally all the way to dawn. And then I'd sleep during the day. This is something people get sort of judged for, not as much as other things but definitely some, but I'm magic, so I don't have to care anymore."

Ellume looks around curiously, particularly at the plot-relevant crystals and cave thing but also just in general.

"That's weird... why would people care about when you sleep?" And after crossing a bridge a bit in front of a small waterfall they've reached the observatory.

"Eh, complicated reasons, many of them unreasonable, if you really want me to rant about it for a bit I can but I won't subject you to it if you don't really want to hear it," she says. 

She waits for cues from Mica on whether to wait or knock or just kinda walk in.

(Also she really wants to subtly fiddle with something, magically, and looks around to see if there's anything in particular she could fiddle with.)

Mica walks right through the open entrance. There is a picture of a flag planted in cratered ground to the right, a picture of four people of Mica's species to the left and a large statue of some other species is straight ahead.

She is not going to start messing with the - pixels? pigments? how do they depict stuff, anyway - of the pictures. But, like, any which way, it seems Rude to mess with stuff these folks clearly value. She uses her aesthetic-aspect power to get rid of the dust on the floor and in the air, though, that seems probably fine.

Is there a New Person and/or a Person Previously Presented anywhere in here?

(She has Proper Pictorial Priorities and Propounds Pandering to Punctual Pun-dits... This is deeply easy to do with the Ring and a Practically Perfect memory so this occupies some back half of her mind while she stands and takes in what's happening.)

There isn't anyone she's met so far pictured. Mica races up to the statue and circles around it. After a short while she speaks. "Huh... I was expecting more from the statue than that... I guess it's cool to see what Nomai really looked like but it's not as cool as seeing a real living breathing alien like you."

"Yeah, it tends to be cooler to see living things than just depictions of them. I hope we can find out why they're dead." Mental check of everything they've said to her. "- Or, wait, do you know why they're dead? I was background assuming you don't."

Hopefully she can do something about that, restore these Nomai or find out they're really not dead after all, or something like that. 

"We don't know for sure, but something seems to have killed a lot of them all around the same time. Maybe there are living Nomai out there somewhere though."

"Yeah, I hope it's not all of them. But for now, I guess we can only hope." The phrase 'existential risk' floats through her their mind.

They vaguely look around for a place to sit, simultaneously 'pulling out' (actually conjuring, but it's completely unnoticeable) a small, roughly rectangular device. The glassy black side of it lights up as Ellume does some inscrutable things with it.

(Here, it's mostly a more thematically fitting Ring-interface than holograms or simply talking out loud. But it also has standard features of smartphones like random little phone games. Of course, they're all ad-free, which makes it a bit unrealistic, but you know what? Sometimes reality is stupid and needs to be improved.)

"Yeah... I hope so too. There's lots more exhibits to see if you'd like." Mica walks past the statue and continues into the main exhibits room.

Ellume follows, fiddling with the rectangle for a bit, then putting it back in the pocket it (supposedly) came from.

Mica leads them to the right and out another door.

There are three tree stumps. Above the left one there's a shard of something vaguely crystalline that is floating above it.

"This is the coolest exhibit. This rock floats and for some reason if nobody is looking at it it teleports."

"Huh! Does 'nobody is looking' include non-person objects that can record stuff, or are recordings how you know it teleports?" 

They take out their device again and point it at the floating rocks, walking around to catch them from many different angles.

(That's their way of requesting Ring to discreetly scan the rocks and stumps. Is this magic, technology, or Sufficiently Advanced Technology, Which Is Indistinguishable From Magic?)

"I don't know you could test it."

The shard is not technology, depending on how Ring classifies things it probably counts as magic.

They raise their eyebrows slightly at that scan result. "Huh."

(Is it powerful magic?)

"Okay, sure, I'll test it. Turn away?"

They turn away from the stump as well and close their eyes, but hold their device such that the "camera" has a clear line of sight back to it.

(They tell Ring to watch for a bit, then to stop watching and transform the "phone" into an actual phone that runs on pure tech with a small flash of light (visible only if one is looking at the phone), wait a while, and transform back with a flash before Mica or anyone turns back.)

The crystal seems like it is or was part of something. It's also emitting a field of something that seems to be trying to apply its magical effects to what's around it but it's too weak to be effective.

The crystal is also emitting a radio signal. It sounds almost like a choir of voices wordlessly singing.

The crystal doesn't move while Ring is running the phone as a part of themself. The crystal does move while the phone is pure technology.

Once they're done testing, Ellume watches the video. (Mica can look as well if she wants.) How exactly does the crystal move?

The moment nobody is looking at it the crystal disappears. It reappears above the center stump exactly when Ring starts watching again.