None of the species here are familiar. With the plants, they still mostly look like plants, even if the grass ends in strange broad-tipped bifurcations and the trees are all shaped wrong. As soon as he sees an animal it's clearly much farther wrong: there's an arboreal six-legged reptile, here's something like a wooly caterpillar the size of his thigh, there's a bird with four toeless legs and two rows of teeth, there's a - snake. The snake is actually basically like a snake if you don't look too close.

It's convenient that all of this observation can be done as part of his devotions, even if it doesn't leave him much room to figure out what any of it means.

He tries teleporting back to where he was, when his magic comes in for the day. It doesn't work.

He casts something for speed, then - just a little boost, but one that will last nearly all day - and takes out some trail mix to munch on by way of breakfast; he might opt to fly or something to cover more ground later, but for now he's still curious about where he is. Noplace he's heard of, probably.

The wildlife continues to be bizarre, but not especially hostile.

Over there, there's a door in the ground. It looks like it folds to open, and can be opened partway, enough to admit a large dog, or all the way, enough to admit a rhinoceros.

It doesn't seem to be meant for humanoids, which is only a little surprising, really. He backs off a bit, looking for somewhere that'll let him watch the door or at least the area in front of it without being too obvious to whoever might live there. And - does he have a translation necklace on him - he does, good. He puts that on, too.

A few minutes later the door opens partway. A large-dog-sized being with six legs and thick, green, nobbly skin emerges, folds the door carefully closed after his tail is all the way through, and stops short on spotting Raafi. It's hard to read him, but he's clearly formulating some sort of opinion about the visit, tail swishing on the ground and interlocking sharp teeth making queer noises against each other as his jaw works.

He's going to have an atrocious accent even with the translation spell, isn't he. "Hello?"

"- aaah!" says the being, shuffling a few steps back toward the door and making an attempt to open it with a hind foot even though it's clearly intended to be operated with the dextrous forelimbs.

He spreads his hands in what's hopefully a universal enough indication of being unarmed. "Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you. I'm lost, can you help me?"

"What are you?"

"We're called humans, in my language."

"Hummuns. I have never heard of a hummuns."

"And I've never seen animals like the ones you have here; I think I must be very far from home. Do you have - cities, here, I guess you must since you have the word - how would I get to one? Or somewhere I could learn more about the place?"

"I don't know that they will let a hummuns on the train. Where are you from?"

"A different world, I think. I should have been able to get home if this was someplace in mine... that's odd, you don't have a word for my type of magic-user."

"...magic-user." He succeeds in getting the door partially unfolded again with his back foot. "Soramu!" he calls. "You better come see this!"

A rhino-sized, plumper and solider version of the same creature thumps up to the door and unfolds it. "- what in the world," she says.

"It's a hummuns."

"What is a hummuns."

"Human, when there's just one of us. I'm a human, it's one of the types of people in my world - I'm stuck here, I think, I have magic but not enough to get me home."

"How do you mean, magic," says Soramu.

"It does know how to speak our language," the first being points out. "And if somebody else had taught it you'd think that'd be in the news."

"Mmhmm. I can share that one, if one of you would like to see how it works - I'll have to touch you to give you the spell, though. I can also do healing, and a few kinds of transportation or movement spells, and protective spells, and a few other things."

"Why don't you transportation-spell yourself to the city if you want to go?" wonders the first being.

"I need to have been there first, or I'd want directions if I was going to fly. I would have tried it anyway if I'd gone all day without meeting anyone."

"It's east of here... but probably not due east, I'm not sure," says Soramu. "We just take the train if we go into town."

"I was about to go," says the other, "one of the boys was staying with a relative for a few days and wants to be picked up."

"Would you mind me tagging along, at least as far as the train? Or I can teleport you and your son back here, if I make it that far."

"I'm really not sure they'll let you on the train! I suppose if they don't that won't prevent me from getting on, as long as I don't say you're my exotic pet."

"And I can probably follow it, at least for a ways; that'll help. I don't mind if it ends up taking me a while to get there."

"Uh-huh." He and Soramu exchange a look, and she shrugs and descends back underground.

"Do you have a name or should I just call you hummun? I'm Bav," says Bav, starting off uphill.

He follows. "I'm Raafi. Or you can call me Traveler, if you'd rather, that's a title for my kind of magic-user. Not that we usually end up traveling this far."

"Did you get here by magic?"

"I'm guessing so. That kind of thing does happen from time to time in my world. Not often without someone doing it on purpose, and that doesn't seem likely, but it does sometimes happen naturally, too." Hike hike. "Tomorrow I'll try to send a message to my friends back home, maybe they can send someone to figure out what happened."

"If it happens naturally why haven't I ever heard of hummun before?" Bav says, neglecting the plural.

"This isn't one of the places that kind of magic usually sends people, is my guess. We don't have the main ones mapped, exactly, but we know enough about them that I don't think this is one - mostly they're very dangerous, so I'm not really complaining. I couldn't guess why I got sent somewhere new, though, they'll have to send a scholar to try to figure that out."

"Huh. Who are your friends? Will they be able to get you home? I don't know what we'd feed a hummun."

"There's a few people I might ask - some other magic-users the same kind as me, or I have a friend who's a prince who might be willing to hire someone to try. They'll be able to get me home if they can get here - I'd be able to get myself home if I'd been expecting to wake up in a different world - but if they can't, I might be stuck for a few years until I'm powerful enough to get back on my own. I can feed myself, though, don't worry about that."

"What, do you have magic fruitcysts that grow even if that's all you eat? I read a book like that once," said Bav. "What good would expecting it have done you?"

"There's a special tool I'd need to have to aim an interworld transportation spell; they're a little rare, but I could have gotten one. And - not quite that, humanoids don't grow fruitcysts at all, but there's a spell to make food, and another one that lets me see what's safe to eat if I want to try local things. Which I probably will eventually, magic food gets boring after a while, but I won't get sick or anything if it turns out I can't eat any of it."

"Huh. That's quite a variety of spells. I guess I don't know what I would've expected if I'd been told I was going to meet a magic alien."

"I have a pretty unusual amount of magic even for my world," he nods. "Do you have magic here at all? It kind of sounds like you don't."

"We don't! The word for it would be because of books and plays and such about imaginary things."

"Huh. Well, you'll probably be able to pick it up, once we can bring people back and forth and get you some teachers. Or my kind of magic you can pick up even without that, at home, if you have the right aptitude."

"Aptitude?"

"Mmhmm. You get my kind of magic from being very devoted to a concept, if it's the right kind of concept - travel will do it, or community, or nature, or healing, and have to be fairly perceptive on top of that, and the more perceptive you are the stronger of a spellcaster you'll be. But if you have that and know what you're doing, you can pick it up on your own - it still takes a while, but it's not complicated, I can explain it in well under an hour."

"I don't know that I'm particularly devoted to a concept. I don't know what that would even mean."

"Most people aren't, and usually it either comes naturally to you or it doesn't. I was miserable living in one place when I was a kid, I always knew I was meant to be out seeing the world. And that's unusual for a human, most of us live pretty settled lives."

"Huh. I'm pretty happy with my life. I had a malcontent phase when I was first looking to settle down but I won a literature contest, met Soramu."

"Mmhmm. Well, you get most of the benefit just from having a few spellcasters around, anyway, most of our magic solves problems you wouldn't have every day. At home, at least, I suppose I don't know enough about things here to say, yet."

"Problems like, what, not liking trains? Not having... grocery money? But presumably people'd also have to get paid to magically make the groceries."

"Not having grocery money is the kind of problem some of us solve. Not directly with magic, though - we care about things, right, for me it's travel but for some of the others it's something where they'd want to help with that - they care about making sure everyone in their community is okay, or about people getting to have things they enjoy, or about people not getting sick from malnutrition, or something. And having magic to support ourselves on means we have the time and resources to spend on doing something about those problems, even if the magic itself doesn't help much. The magic is more for things like injuries, or safely fighting monsters, or communicating over very long distances, things that a whole community might need every day but any individual probably doesn't need all that often. Or for emergencies - I have a big weather spell, for example, and most years I never cast it, but when a drought comes around it's a life-saver."

"Monsters?"

"-I guess you might not have them, without magic, most monsters are at least a little magical. My world has all kinds of dangerous creatures out in the wilderness, and sometimes closer to civilization, too, you'll get them going after livestock or things - not just animals, lots of them are smarter than that, or can do their own magic, breathing fire or making illusions or things."

"I think here it's just people and some not very dangerous animals. A spren could kill me or a kid but not an adult female, and only if we weren't careful, we make sure they're dead before we get close when we're hunting."

"That sounds about right for regular hunting on my world, too. Not that we have people the size of your females around, in most cases - there's giants, but they live separately, and most other kinds of humanoids are my size or smaller. By species, not by gender, our females are usually a little smaller but a tall female will still be bigger than an average male of her species."

"Your females are smaller? Don't they have to produce babies?"

"They do. I'm not sure what the difference is that lets it work that way for us - maybe we reproduce less often? We do only have one baby at a time, and it's not really safe to have a baby more often than every two or three years."

"Huh. I guess maybe ours have more kids, but not more at once, it's one egg at a time every case I've heard of."

"I suppose that could be it. I can talk to your scholars about it, if it matters; it's not my specialty at all but I know a few things."

"What kind of scholar?"

"Whatever kind wants to talk to me, I guess. About that or whatever else - I don't really have a plan yet, I figure I'll let people know I'm here and see what happens."

"Soramu's mother is a writer? My mother is a paleoanthropologist."

"Your mother might have a better idea of what to ask, if you want to introduce me."

"Well, she lives in town, we can swing by there after we pick up Dos."

"That sounds like a good plan."

"So what are trains like, anyway? I'm not getting much from the translation magic, just that they're a kind of land vehicle."

"Oh, they're a bunch of connected cars that run on rails."

"Huh! We don't have anything quite like that, it sounds a bit like a dwarven minecart. That's another species from my world, dwarves, they live underground and do a lot of mining and metalwork. Anyway, it should be easy enough to follow the train if there's tracks the whole way."

"Sometimes there's an empty men-and-children car, this far out in the sticks, so maybe you can get on no problem. Station's over there, see? We'll have a little wait for the train."

"All right. They'll want to be paid, though, I assume? I don't have any of your money."

"They don't check at this station. Or I could buy something magic off you, I have spending money."

He thinks this over. "What do you use for money, anyway? It's all metal where I'm from, and I do have some on me, it'll just look foreign."

"I have scrip connected to Soramu's account, mostly, but I also have a regular twenty-hoof bill I picked up off the street the other day and haven't remembered to deposit for her yet."

"- I might need an explanation of how any of that works, actually."

"...I have some pieces of paper that are money. Some of them would make it clear that you got them from somebody in Soramu's family but I also have one that wouldn't and I'll trade it to you for a magic thing. It'll cover a train token and then some."

"Huh, okay. I think I want to wait, though - I get my own spells back every day, but anything else magical I can't replace here."

"You can't make things be magical by casting a spell?"

"Oh. No, I can't; it's possible to do, but it's a special skill and I never learned it, it takes a workshop and I'm on the road too much of the time. All the spells I can cast myself will stop working after a while."

"It's only a twenty, maybe something temporary'd be worth it."

"Sure, let's see - I'm always partial to flying, just for fun, that one lasts fifteen minutes - I have one today that'll improve your eyesight for a couple of hours - the translation spell I mentioned, that one will last about five hours - object-finding spell - I have a couple of divinations, those don't really make good demonstrations of magic but I can spare one if you like the idea, they give information or advice about something you're thinking of doing... I wish I'd prepared a smaller summoning spell, those are fun too but the only one I have today I want to keep in case I need it. Or we could see what my food spell does for you, I took two of those for today just in case but I'm pretty sure I'll only need one."

"What do you mean, see what it does for me? Do you not decide?"

"Not really - it always makes something that's healthy for the species I'm casting for, and if I know what that means I can be a little more specific, but I need enough details to work with, and I don't know anything about what you eat yet. And even then I don't always get exactly what I was trying for."

"We eat spren, pretty much. With condiments and garnishes but mostly spren. Wild's better than domestic by a long shot."

"Huh. That sounds worth trying, at least; the spell's notoriously bad at making anything too unusual but it does wild game just fine. The catch is that it doesn't stay - it'll keep you full if you eat it, that part's fine, but the magic starts to give out after a day if you don't, and it's not really edible after that unless I refresh it."

"Well, if it makes a whole spren then we'd have to have the neighbors over, I guess."

"I can probably feed a decent portion of the neighborhood, if that's what you want to do. Unless your species eats a lot more than mine does, I guess. How big is a spren, and how many meals would you get out of it?"

"A spren's a bit smaller than Soramu and it can feed her and me and my co-mates and our daughter and four sons for about eight days. Used to be longer when Uamok was little."

He mutters to himself in another language, calculating. "Seems about the same, adjusting for size. And I can get enough food for forty-five people my size for a day out of one casting of that spell, or almost a hundred fifty meals if you eat three times a day like humans do."

"Usually only twice a day. They say in olden times people'd get by with just a meal every couple days."

"Well, if you want dinner for ninety the offer's open."

"I'll buy that for twenty," he laughs, shaking his head, "even if you disappear again it's fun to think about. Uun'll be driven spare trying to cook it all but he'll manage and it's good raw too - does it come pre-butchered?"

"It does. I can try for certain cuts if you'd like, too."

"There's always somebody whose favorite is weird glands but for a crowd that's not the way to bet, yeah."

"All right. We can work out the details when we get there."

Bav reaches into a pouch he has strapped to his mid-left leg and pulls out a rectangle of stiff, heavy paper in rose pink. He offers it to Raafi.

Who takes it, looks it over curiously, and tucks it into one of his belt pouches.

The station isn't much farther away. The payment system is a box you drop your money into and a pad of train station scrip that Bav peels a few pieces off for Raafi. "Those are one hoof each, so you don't have to make change any farther, and they say where you got it, so if the numbers don't add up between the box and the pad end of day they can figure out where you spent it and get a description. And it expires in a few days. So it's possible to walk off with a lot of change scrip but you'll get caught and can't save it, you'd do it if you were starving but not otherwise." Bav deposits some of his own family scrip into the box. There's nowhere to sit while they wait for the train.

"That's clever, I'll have to remember that." He seems a little distracted, though, looking around at the station and train tracks and so on.

The station itself is just a roof on stilts, with some fabric walls that look like they could be rolled down if rain threatened but are up right now. The train tracks are, after a few minutes, occupied by a two-car trainlet. Bav walks up to the second car, opens it, and steps in; the front car appears to have a female in it, while the back car has four men and two little boys and a litttle girl not yet much more than Bav's size.

Raafi follows, after enough of a pause to suggest he's not quite traveling with Bav, and peers in. "Mind if I come aboard?"

"What the fuck is that?" asks a male.

"It's a MONSTER," cries a little boy.

"I don't think it's a monster," Bav remarks, "for one thing it can talk."

"I don't think I'm a monster. Or not a scary one, anyway, no claws or anything. I'm a human, I got sent here in a magical accident." He steps inside and out of the doorway, staying right by the wall.

"I'VE got claws," says the little boy, displaying a footful, "so don't you get near me!"

"A magical accident," says one of the adult men skeptically.

"You have DOODADS," says the little girl, "I want that one." She points at the shiniest doodad on his person.

"That's my translation necklace!" he says of the jade pendant. "I can let you borrow it for a minute, but I need it back so I can talk to people."

"She won't give it back," says a person who is presumably supervising her.

"Will TOO," she says shiftily.

"You know, I probably have something better than that in my pocket." He rummages, and comes up with a little chunk of bright orange stone that changes color in an improbable way when he tilts it from side to side. "How about this? We call these fairy buttons, they're a tiny bit magical too."

"I WANT it," she says, lurching forward.

Her dad has a grip on her tail and his own tail and rear legs wrapped around a floor-to-ceiling pole but he is having a hard time hanging on. "Kessamun, your mother'll be upset if you attack it."

"I just want the THING."

"She's all right. Here," he holds it out.

She takes it and steps back to admire it, turning it this way and that.

It'll go through the whole rainbow, if she plays with it enough. "Do you want one too?" Raafi asks the boy.

"NO," says the boy who said he was a monster.

"Me, me!" says the other boy.

He fishes two more out of his belt, one a sunny yellow and the other a bright teal, and holds them out.

The second boy takes both of them and offers the yellow one to the other boy, who is dubious but eventually accepts it.

Raafi seems satisfied with that, and sits crosslegged on the floor, still moving slowly.

"You fold up!" cries the girl.

"I do! It's harder to stand on two legs than on four, I'd get tired if I tried to stand all the way to town, so I do this instead."

She pulls her tail out of her dad's grip and lumbers forward to investigate how he folds. She tries to imitate it to no success at all.

He is maybe very slightly nervous about this but doesn't flinch or anything, and shows her how his hips and knees work. "It's really fine," he tells her father when she's distracted contorting herself. "Most of my magic is healing magic, I'll be all right even if she does take a chunk out of me."

"I do not want to have to explain that to my mate," he says. "And it wouldn't clean the train afterward, now, would it, even if you regenerate by magic."

"Fair enough, I do have cleaning magic but if she really tried to hurt me I might not stay to cast it. I still don't personally mind the risk, it's good when children are curious."

"What do your other doodads do," she wants to know.

Well his clothes and boots help protect his skin, since it's all soft, see, and help him stay warm, too, and his belt pouches work a lot like the pouches people here wear except that they're magical so they can hold more than they look like they do - he takes a series of little notebooks out of one of the pouches that are individually small enough to fit but all together are easily three times its volume - and then this other wooden pendant that he's wearing helps him with his magic and lets people in his world know what kind of magic-user he is and that he can help them with travel problems, and this ring has magic on it that makes him better at climbing, he put it on earlier to climb a tree and see where he was and didn't bother to take it off afterward.

"Why are you soft??" she says. "That's silly!"

"What is a travel problem?" asks the bolder little boy.

"It is a little silly! But there's not very much I can do about it, it's just how humans are. And at home I'd help solve problems like someone not knowing where to go to get what they wanted, or it not being safe to travel between where they were and where they wanted to go, or them needing something they didn't have in order to get there, or if someone was trying to stop them from leaving where they were I'd help with that, or sometimes I'd do things like hire people to go cut a better pass in a mountain range so it was easier for the caravans to get through, or negotiate with a monarch to get them to charge less to let people travel on their roads."

"And you're, what, going to protest train fare?" asks the girl's dad.

"No - well, not yet, anyway, if you think it's too much I'd want to know about it. But I just got here and don't know anything yet, and it doesn't seem like I'll figure much of it out hanging around in the woods."

"What do you want to know? I go to school so I know lots," says Kessamun.

"Sort of everything! The most important things are going to be what kind of work I can do if I want money and whether there's someplace I can stay for a while, but I want to know how you live and what kinds of things you make and how you take care of things without magic that we do with magic, and if there's anyone that I want to make friends with or work with or learn from, and what other places there are that I can go see."

"People can be FARMERS or work in FACTORIES or BUILD things or INVENT things," says Kessamun. "You can stay in a hotel nest. People make toys! And ovens! And books! And lightbulbs! You can be MY friend and we can go to the SOUTH POLE."

"Going to the south pole is the sort of thing I'd do! I'd use magic for the cold, though, do people do it here without magic?"

"Yeah! You have to wear stuff, to keep warm."

"We do that in my world, too, but it takes a whole lot of clothes to stay warm all the way to the pole! It's much nicer with magic."

"And clothes make it hard to play in the snow probably."

"A little bit. Gloves are pretty good, though, they keep your hands from getting too cold and don't get in the way very much. And then you can pick the snow up and throw it at people, do people here do that?"

"Yeah! I can snow all my brothers in the face!" she chirps.

There are several more stops. A couple people decide to wait for the next train rather than get on with Raafi. Eventually Bav disembarks.

"This looks like where I'm going. Maybe I'll see you again sometime, though!" And he stands again and leaves the train.

"Bye, doodad monster!" says Kessamun.

"I can show you to my mother's before I get Col?" suggests Bav, as the train pulls out.

"Sure, that sounds good. Is there anything I should know about her?"

"You said you wanted to talk to her because of her being a paleoanthropologist, right? What else do you want to know?"

"Probably nothing, just sometimes people have quirks. And I haven't been around an adult female yet, if there's anything she'll be expecting of me because of that I don't know it."

"You saw Soramu, didn't you?"

"Mmhmm. I didn't have much time to make mistakes talking to her, though. But if nothing's coming to mind it's probably fine, I assume she won't expect an alien to have perfect manners."

"I've never seen her meet an alien before, but it stands to reason."

"All right, I should be fine then. And are we staying here for dinner, or going back up the mountain?"

"Oh, going back up, but maybe I'll invite my family as long as you're proposing to magic a bunch of steak into existence."

"That's the plan. I think I'll teleport back up, I can bring a few passengers if you think they'd like that. Five males or at least one female, I'm not sure if they'll count for two or four passenger slots at their size."

"One of my brothers still lives at home, I don't know if Mother'll grab my sister or other brother before she leaves, let alone their whole families too, but it could add up to too many people for you to bring. Maybe just me and Col."

"Sounds good to me."

The city has buildings aboveground but also plenty of evidence of underground habitation; the train itself disappears underground after this stop. The doors are all doubled in some way to allow males and children in without requiring them to manipulate doors sufficient for adult females. Their buildings get quite tall in some cases, up to eight stories. There's street food for sale - spren hearts on sticks, spren meatballs in vinegar sauce, fried spren ligaments.

It's probably not the best idea to alien his way over and cast magic on their food, even just to see if it's edible; he refrains. He doesn't refrain from rubbernecking at the architecture and passerby, though. "I'm curious how you build so tall," he says after a bit. "I've seen castles with towers like that a few times, but it's not something we can do easily enough to put just anywhere."

"Oh, I think it's - steel? Maybe some concrete? I wouldn't really know. If you walk the whole way to where Col's staying we might pass one under construction, that happens often enough, and you can see the insides."

Bav's mother lives in one such tall building. There are gendered elevators; they go in the one for men.

"Steel and concrete translate, but I have no idea how you'd put them together for it. Something to look into later, I guess."

He seems a little confused about the elevator car, but follows Bav in readily enough.

The elevator goes up! Bav gets off on the sixth floor and produces a key from his legpouch and opens the door. "Mother!"

"Yik?"

"Bav."

"Bav! Hello," says another male, emerging into the front room. There's a giant nest big enough for a female adult and her smaller family; there's a kitchen off to the left with appliances that do not seem to connect to chimneys.

"Hi, Rays," says Bav. "Is Mother home?"

"Stepped out to help the upstairs neighbors move furniture - what the heck is that?"

"An alien! Calls itself a hummun."

Raafi's stopped by the door again, rather than approaching. "Hi!"

"You found an alien and brought it here?" says Rays.

"It wants to talk to Mother. Will she be back soon?"

"Oh, yeah, she'll be back any minute, what does it want with her?"

"Ask it, it talks."

"I'm male, I'm just not sure how confusing that'll be, humans do it differently. Anyway, it looks like I might be stuck here for a while, and an anthropologist sounded like maybe the right kind of scholar to help figure out what I need to know to live here. Or at least more likely than a writer to know who I should talk to."

"Well, you're about the size of a male, so that's not hard to remember, I suppose," says Bav. "Soramu's a geologist, she wouldn't've been able to help you at all." The door opens again and Bav scurries out of the way to let his mother by without her stepping on him. "Mother! This is an alien called a hummun."

Raafi scurries, too, moving much faster than is really plausible for a second or so. "Hello, ma'am."

"A hummun," she says. "Why is there a hummun in my apartment?"

"Bav brought him, Keshkun," says Rays. "Said he wanted to talk to you."

"What about?" says Keshkun.

"Well, it seems like I might be stuck here for a while - my best guess is that I got sent here in a magical accident last night, that happens sometimes in my world, and my friends may or may not be able to figure out how to get me back once I tell them about it. But if I am stuck here, I'm going to need to know how things work, and it seemed like an anthropologist might have some idea of where to start with that, or at least have a colleague who did. And I can tell you about my world in exchange, of course."

"I'm mostly focused on old civilizations of people," says Keshkun. "But figuring out what hummun are like does sound interesting and I can at least get you common knowledge. You can come in. Don't go in our nest or touch that." She points at a weird sock with a lot of holes in it that's hanging on the wall.

"Yes ma'am."

"You're wearing a lot of... stuff. What's that for?"

He can explain it again. "Humanoid cultures vary a lot from place to place, but it's common for us to cover up at least a bit, mostly for privacy but also to show off and to signal what kind of person we are or what we're doing - this is pretty typical travel gear, it's the pendant that would let people know I'm a professional traveler who gets magic from it. I have some fancier clothes with me too, if you want to see."

"A professional traveler? How does that work?"

"Well, I get magic from it, like I said - there are a few different ways of getting magic, in my world, but a personal devotion to a concept is one of them, as long as I'm living my life for exploration and learning about new places I get magic that I can use for myself or sell. The word for the type of magic-user is a cleric, and clerics of travel tend to be more independent than most kinds, other clerics usually live in groups and do things to help the people around them use their concept well. Travel clerics help people, too, we just don't stay in one place that long, we'll help people we find on the road or go from place to place doing things."

"He's planning to magic up a feast of wild spren, after taking me and Col home also by magic, I was thinking I'd leave him here and bring Col over?"

"Col's one of your boys?"

"Yes, Mother, he was staying with Soramu's brother who offered to teach him to whittle."

"Sure, why not."

"-I expect I'll get wild spren, I won't be sure until I do it. That spell's finicky sometimes."

"Well, if you don't get wild spren, you'll get domestic, right, not a pile of wooly corpses or a tree or something?" says Bav.

"Yeah. That spell always makes food," he explains to Keshkun, "and always the right sort of food for the species I'm casting for, but it won't do anything very unusual and it can be hard to make specific things for a species that eats lots of things. It does make wild game, so I'm pretty sure it'll do wild spren for you, I just haven't tried yet."

"Sounds exciting. Rays, what's for dinner here?"

"- oh, I was going to do sausage with herbs?"

"You haven't started, though? Right, then, we're going out to Soramu's to eat magic food. We'll go to a restaurant if it doesn't work, I suppose," says Keshkun.

"I'll be back in a bit," says Bav, and he lets himself out.

"That seems like it might be a good way for me to make money here, if it does make wild, am I right about that?"

"Oh, absolutely, wild spren is heinously expensive," says Rays.

"Well, that's one less thing to worry about, hopefully. Not that I'm very worried; the main kind of magic clerics can do is healing and there's always demand for that."

"Will that work on us?" wonders another male, poking his head in from a different room.

"I'll be shocked if it doesn't, it works on any species back home. Do you have something in mind?"

"Rays can't sleep in the nest with us," he says.

"I'm not injured," says Rays. "I just have a condition."

"Tell me more about it? My simplest healing does only fix injuries, but I have more complicated sorts that do other things."

"Oh, my spine was squished oddly in the egg," Rays says, "and now if I sleep in a normal position my back hurts so I sleep in that sling there." He gestures at the sock-thing.

"I'd expect a Regeneration spell to fix that right up. It's one of the more powerful ones, though, you might have to wait a few days for me to have room to prepare it. How that works is, spells come in sizes, and I get a certain number of spells of each size per day, in the morning, whichever ones I want from the spells a cleric can cast. There are nine tiers of spells in total and I can cast eight of them right now - that's a matter of experience and aptitude. But Regeneration is a seventh tier spell and I only get a couple of those a day. And then when I say 'simple healing', what I mean is that I can turn any spell I have into one that heals injuries."

"You can - turn the spells into healing - but you get whichever ones you want at the start of the day?" says Keshkun. "That seems redundant - I suppose perhaps it wasn't designed?"

"Hm, maybe I didn't describe it well. Every morning I get to pick spells - I get seven first-tier ones, for example, and I might take three that improve my eyesight for a while, three that let me understand any language I hear, and one special healing spell that stops a disease from getting worse that day. I don't take any basic healing spells, because I don't need to - if someone around me gets hurt, I can decide right then that I'd rather have that basic healing spell than one of the others, say the language spell. But if that doesn't happen, I get to cast the language spell instead; I don't have to guess how much healing I'm going to want and fill up on that."

"That makes it sound like you usually do healing unexpectedly? Under some kind of incidental emergency condition, not in a hospital," says Keshkun.

"Oh. Yes. We do have hospitals, but only healing clerics spend most of their time there, other kinds of clerics are usually busy with other things. I'm more likely to use my healing if I have an accident in the wilderness, or if I'm accompanying a caravan and we're attacked, or if I visit a village too small to have its own cleric and someone's been hurt recently - I'd actually lose my magic entirely if I settled down to work at a hospital, since I get it from traveling."

"Why don't people get magic from traveling?"

"I'm not sure! There is a little more to it than that, it might be that you just never thought to try the right things, or it might be that you can only start getting magic in my world or something - we have gods, which might matter. But I'll keep an eye out for anyone who seems like a potential cleric, maybe I'll be able to teach it."

"It sounds like it'd be useful," says the second male.

"Enormously," Keshkun agrees, "sometimes somebody gets hurt on a dig in the middle of nowhere and it takes a long time to get them to civilization, that sort of thing."

"We're good for that sort of thing, definitely. It's also possible to put a spell into a bottle of water to store it for later; that takes special training that I don't have, but once we figure out how to come and go between the worlds you'll be able to buy spells like that - the translation spell says 'potions' is close enough - instead of hiring someone to hang around."

"Huh, you could put those in first aid kits," she says. "You got here by accident? You aren't on a quest to find more planets to sell things to?"

"I'm not! I don't mind, obviously, but I won't be surprised if you have clerics of your own before I have any way to get home, and we won't begrudge them training just because they're from a different world."

"Are you going to bring people with you to the hummun world?"

"Sure, that's what a cleric of travel is for, after all."

"Why's that what you're for?" asks Rays.

"It's sort of - travel is the best, most important thing, right? For me, not for everybody, I do understand that, but it's still good, it's important to be able to go to new places and learn new things and see how it might be good for things to be different, to learn the kinds of things about yourself that you only learn by trying something new or being in a new place and seeing what you think of it. That's - what I'm made of, as a person, is that way of thinking and that kind of enthusiasm for life, and that's what lets me be a cleric of travel in the first place. And I see how good all of that is and of course I want to share it, the world is wrong when that's not something people can have."

"-people at home think clerics are a little weird too, sometimes. If you were wondering."

"I was," confesses Keshkun. "And your mate's all right with this? Does she travel around with you normally?"

"I don't have one, which is pretty common for clerics - everyone knows a partner will come second to our calling."

"Oh, I suppose that makes you pretty ineligible, then," says Keshkun. "Unless you had a very tolerant mate - Bav does, Soramu's very modern -"

"What about Soramu?" asks Bav, entering the apartment with a young boy.

"Very modern," repeats Keshkun. "Picked up your friends at your request, that sort of thing."

"Mother, please, just because you liked Grishaumi better -"

"I'm just saying she's very modern," says Keshkun. "You're going to magic on home now? We'll be there for dinner."

-whoops, family drama. "I'm ready if you are," he tells Bav.

"Ready, Col?" asks Bav.

"Yes Bav," says Col.

"All right, we just need to hold hands-" and shortly they're back outside Soramu's burrow. "That went well, I think. I'm not sure what I stumbled into at the end, there, though."

"Oh, I left my first mate and my mother didn't approve," says Bav. "It's not actually that unusual, she's just old-fashioned." He unfolds the door. "Soramu, can the hummun come in?"

"Sure, all right," says Soramu's voice.

"Thank you!" he calls, once he's in.

"Should I cast the food spell now, give your co-mate a chance to get started with it?"

"Yeah - Sek! Are you ready for a lot of meat to appear - I've invited my family, we've got neighbors too, we don't have to eat it all today, but if you want any of it cooked -"

"Oh - give me a few minutes, I want to get a dressing whipped up for tartare if nothing else - and rearrange the freezer -"

"Leave the freezer, it doesn't last, it'll disappear if we don't eat it in a day or so."

"- well, will our fruitcysts disappear if we gorge ourselves -"

"I can eat a lot!" cries their daughter. "Oh it's so funny looking - it doesn't smell good though -"

"We're not going to eat the hummun, we're going to eat some spren the hummun'll make by magic," says Bav.

"Yes, please don't eat me, I wouldn't like it," Raafi attempts, not very successfully, to deadpan. "Your fruitcysts will be fine; where do you want it, and what kinds of cuts?"

Apparently everyone favors different cuts; Sek comes up with a list, for their family, and a less confident list for incoming in-laws, and for their closest neighbors.

And Raafi casts.

It's quite a lot of meat, and, yes, wild, when they check.

They are delighted and can put away quite a lot of meat. There's enough that Soramu sends one of the boys to go get her mother, who lives within a half-hour's jog. She has to promise to save him a leg for when he's back to get him to do it but then he's off like a shot.

Excellent. Raafi takes the opportunity to cast something to check if he can eat spren - yes - and then goes outside to take a break and write up some notes on the day so far.

The locals FEAST. Keshkun and family arrive after a train amount of time and join in. Everybody's eating as much as they possibly can since it'll vanish otherwise. The females in particular can swallow enormous amounts when they want to.

Raafi hangs back while they're eating, and after a while moves off a little farther and seems to be spreading some sort of cloth out on a relatively clear patch of ground. Then he - climbs down into it? That's odd.

One of Soramu's sons follows him in there.

The space inside the cloth is a rough stone room heavily cluttered with things - some on shelves, many in bags or baskets or piles on the floor, some cloth things hanging from a rack to one side, a collection of decorated sticks nearly as long as Raafi is tall in a basket and on a display board by where the stone is cut to be easy to climb in and out. "Hey," says Raafi, who's waded a little ways in through the mess and is looking at one of the shelves. "Be careful, please, some of the things in here are fragile."

"What are the sticks, are they fragile, can I have a stick?"

"They're walking sticks! Having two legs is more awkward than four or six, humans need a little help sometimes if we're going to be walking a long way or in hard terrain, and a good stick is good for it. I suppose I wouldn't mind giving away one of the ones in the basket, if you see one you like."

The boy seizes one with a painted red spiral down the length of it and carries it back up the stairs, where Raafi can spot the kids playing catch with it between visits to the Meat Heap once he emerges.

He's picked up a new adornment when he does, a slim silver armband decorated with curls and curlicues, and a bag of dried fruit to nibble on. He wanders over to where the kids are playing.

"What's the new doodad?" asks Bav around a mouthful of filet.

"Shrinking spell, since some of your architecture is a little awkward for me at this size. I can only use it once a day but it might come in handy sometimes, I might as well wear it."

"Huh, awkward so you'd want to be smaller? You're not much taller than a female or much heavier than a male."

"It's not bad, but it's not very comfortable to have to duck down to get through a males' door, and the females' doors look heavy. I've been fine so far, I'm not complaining really, but if I have the doodad anyway I might as well wear it."

"How small do you get?" asks another male.

"About half this size," he gestures to waist height. "And it lasts for a couple of hours if I don't end it early."

"Is the doodad used up then? Seems like a waste of a doodad."

"This one, no, I can use it once a day. I do have a few things I can only use once, but I'm saving those."

"Makes sense," says Bav. "Thank you, very much, for the food, everybody here's going to remember this for years, it's as good as wild and a hundred times easier."

"You're entirely welcome. Has anyone been asking to meet me?"

"Lots of people want a look at you, I don't know how many of them have anything to say. Mother's over there if you wanted to continue the conversation, I don't know if you're good at telling us apart, we can't mostly tell other species apart."

"I think I'll be okay with it once I've had some practice, but the pointer helps." He looks where he's been pointed.

There is Keshkun, demolishing a pile of steaks.

He wanders over, aimlessly enough that if anyone wants to stop him to chat they shouldn't be put off.

"Can I touch the weird stuff on your head?" asks Uamok.

"Oh, sure - gently, please, it's not very sensitive but pulling it would hurt. It's called hair."

"You're like a wooly," she says, and she gently, no claws, pets his head, though it does take her a moment of calibration to pull back the pressure to something that doesn't bend his neck.

He tolerates the mistake gamely and leans into the touch a bit when she eases off. "I'm not sure what that is."

"It's an animal a little bigger than your head with wool. There's lots of kinds, some of them have wool with weird chemicals on it but some of them are okay to pet."

"I guess I am a little like a wooly, then. My hair will grow out, though, eventually, if I don't find a way to get it cut."

"What do you cut it with? You could get wooly shears, maybe."

"That might work. We have special scissors for it at home, and some people make a career of cutting hair, for people who like fancier styles."

"Huh. Once I saw a wooly with a decorative haircut but I don't know if they needed special shears for it."

"I think it's just that hair scissors are finer and sharper, for detail work. The tricky part is going to be finding someone to do it for me, I bet. I'll look all funny in the back if I try to do it myself."

"You could get a mirror?"

"Some people can do it that way, yeah. I never figured out the trick, though. I guess I'll try again if I need to."

"I can try if you want but probably it'd be easier for a boy."

"Probably. It'll be a couple months before I want a haircut, anyway, I can wait and see who I know well enough to ask then. Or I can let it grow out, that doesn't hurt anything, it'd just be a little strange for me since that's one of the ways you tell human males and females apart, is that males don't usually let our hair get too long."

"...but then you could just let it get long like you said and nobody would know you were a boy?"

"Well, yes, some humans do something a bit like that. But I am a boy, it'd be strange for people to think I wasn't."

"I guess maybe boys wouldn't rather be girls, even though being a girl is better," muses Uamok.

"I'm not sure being a girl is better! It's definitely not that clear among humans, it's not very common for a human to decide they would rather be the other sex in the first place but it happens about as often in either direction when it does."

"Huh! Do they really want to - fit in small spaces, or -"

"Well, for humans we're all about the same size. But some people like being taken care of, or keeping house, or being the one to look after the children - those are mostly female things, for humans, we do it a bit differently, but I wouldn't be surprised if your males like them too."

"Huh! Maybe they do. I should ask Zoi."

"I'd be curious to know what he thinks about it."

"I'm going to move in with him soon. I've been putting it off since I don't think Mother'll keep sending me what they catch out here if I'm in the city, though, and domestic spren is not this good. Your stuff is great though." She has a couple handfuls of lightly sauced tartare, and stuffs one handful into her mouth.

"Glad you like it. You know it probably makes more sense for me to stay in a city at least part of the time, if you want to bring me with you - I can't settle down, exactly, I'm not happy that way and I'd lose my magic, but with people not knowing what humans are I can't just wander into town like I'm used to doing when I want conversation or a roof over my head for a few days, and a city has the most stuff, if I have to pick one place to get people used to me."

"And then you could cast that spell every day and I could get some? Yeah, sure, I can look for apartments that have enough room for a hummun visitor."

"Sounds like a plan. Should I go in with you to meet Zoi?"

"I'll see him at school tomorrow, my school has boys. I could show you to everybody at school!"

"That sounds like a fun way to spend a day, sure."

"I don't know if Mother'll want you in the burrow overnight. And I'm not sure where you'd sleep, there isn't room in the nests."

"I have camping stuff with me, I'll be fine outside unless you have a lot of predators around."

"Nah. Well, there's bugs, I don't know if bugs would try to eat you, but no big ones, spren are the biggest animals around and they won't come anywhere near where people live."

"I bet I'll be fine, then, the bugs I've seen so far haven't been that intimidating. And if they do try for me I can do magic about it."

"I guess you can! What magic would you do?"

"Well, usually if something startles me awake I'll teleport a little ways away, because I always have that spell on me and it gives me time to figure out what else to do. And then today I didn't know what I was going to find, so I have a few different spells I could use from there - I have one that turns me into a living statue for a little while, and one that lets me summon a big monster to fight for me, and I can fly for a little while if I just need to get out of range and wait for it to go away, and if it was something really big like a forest fire where I had to leave altogether, I have one that'd let me turn into a cloud and fly all the way to the city. Tomorrow I'll probably only prepare the monster spell - I like having something around for emergencies, and I can summon different kinds of monsters with that one and ask them to do different things, not just fight."

"That makes sense! What other things do the monsters do?"

"I usually summon elementals with it, they're a kind of monster that's made of rock or water or air or fire, and they can do different things depending on which one of those they are - I'd want a water elemental to put out a fire or save someone from drowning, or an earth elemental if I needed some rocks moved or if I was trying to get to something that was buried, or an air elemental to fly around and look for something, or a fire elemental if I needed a very hot fire, or needed one someplace and couldn't get there to make it myself."

"Wow. Please don't start a forest fire."

"I won't. It's been a long time since I've had a fire get away from me even a little bit."

"Oh good. You seem like a very nice alien."

"Thanks. Oh, since I'm thinking about it, I wonder how long your species lives? It varies quite a lot at home, from one species to another."

"Oh, about twenty-five years? I think there was a male who was thirty once."

"Oh, huh. That's short, compared to humans - I guess I don't know if the years are the same length here, they're about three hundred sixty days at home? And humans'll get eighty to a hundred of them, sometimes a bit more."

"Our years are five hundred and seventeen days," says Uamok. "But it sounds like hummun live a long time!"

"I guess we do. I'm kind of old for a human, I'm a little over sixty of our years, but I guess that won't be such a big deal here."

"Is it a big deal in the hummun world?"

"It can be. Our world has five common species of people, and humans are the shortest-lived of them, so it seems to the other ones like we get old very quickly, and they're not always kind about it."

"That's mean! Are hummun going to be mean to us about getting old faster than them?"

"Well, it's hard to promise anything, of course. But I wouldn't expect us to, we know that that hurts even when it happens by accident."

"How's it happen by accident?"

"People not thinking about what they say, mostly. Or sometimes making rules about how old you have to be for something without thinking about what that means for other species, but that's not so common, the other four species vary too so they're usually already thinking about it at least a little."

"Like how I couldn't have a bank account till this year?"

"Mmhmm. I've heard of people running into that exact problem with dwarves, actually, where they'll try to move into a city that's almost all dwarves and the dwarves don't believe them that a human is an adult at twenty and beardless instead of forty. -beard is the word for the hair on my face, dwarves have big long beards once they're adults."

She pets his face. "And yours doesn't get longer?"

"It can; not like a dwarf's though. And it's hard to keep clean if I let it get too long."

"Oh, I didn't even think of that. I don't know if people wash woolies. The woolies probably wouldn't like it."

"I don't know; most animals at home don't need to be washed but there are some exceptions. Humans wash ourselves, though - some big cities even have heated bathhouses for it, those can be really nice."

"We have baths! But we don't have to get soap in between all those - is that thousands - of little hairs."

"Probably thousands, yeah. It's not that hard with the kinds of soap we use, the soap gets into the water and the water gets it everywhere it needs to go."

"I guess maybe that would work. Wow." Pet pet.

"Mmhmm. I generally bathe in private but I could show you some soapy water sometime if you want to see what it's like."

"We have soap and water, I know what that looks like, I just didn't know how you'd get it all through your hair enough to clean all the little bits. Why in private?"

"For a couple reasons, but the main one is that where I grew up it's a little bit taboo to let anyone but your mate see you without clothes on - I'll do it if I need to, but I haven't needed to often enough to get used to the idea, most people in my world think it should be that way."

"Awww, that's cute actually! I heard somebody say you don't have one though."

"I don't, yeah. There's a couple reasons for that, too, but the main one is that I'm a cleric - we get magic from being very devoted to a concept, and everyone knows that we'll be more interested in that than in any mate we end up with. And travel clerics don't ever settle down in one place, so it's especially rare for us to find partners."

"Couldn't you find a mate who was a cleric too?"

"That's how it usually works when we do partner up," he nods. "I think humans might be a little less interested in having families than your species is, though - still interested, most of us do find mates and have children, but it's not that surprising that someone who was busy with something else wouldn't spend time on it - I have a brother and a sister and as far as I know my sister never took a mate, either, she's been busy with church business. Six of my brother's seven children are partnered up, though, that's a more normal number."

"Your sister doesn't have one either! Oh no, your parents must be so upset!"

"Oh, she's got a very prestigious job instead, they were very proud of her." He sounds kind of bitter about this.

"They won't have any grandchildren!"

"-you don't count lineage through males? We do. And seven grandchildren from three children isn't many, but it's respectable."

"Oh, I mean, they might have grandchildren but they might also not, you know. I don't call Keshkun Grandmother because she's Bav's mother and we aren't positive who's my father. I just call Mother's mother Grandmother."

"-huh, I really can't see humans thinking about it that way. Usually it doesn't come up, we usually pair up one and one or it's one male with a few females, sometimes, but I've met a couple of human families with more than one male and they all just thought of all the children as belonging to all of them."

"One male and a few females? How many females do you have? Don't they fight? And anyway it doesn't matter much to Bav if I'm his, because I'm definitely his mate's and anyway he raised me, but Keshkun isn't raising me."

"I think this has to do with how humans just have less of a difference between males and females - we swap it around, too, males are more likely to be in charge among humans, but either one can go to their parents and go 'this is how I want things to be' and have about the same chance of them listening to them. And we might like babies a little more, too - does your species ever adopt children?"

"Not, like, for fun. If my parents all died I'd take care of my brothers till they found mates. If somebody really important needs an heir and can't manage to have a daughter they probably have some way to deal with that."

"Well, that'll do it. Humans like raising children, and we get just as attached to ones we or our children adopt as ones we have ourselves."

"But I didn't say your brother would be sad. I thought your parents would be."

"I mean they might have been a little disappointed that they never got to see what kind of children she would have, but that's not the same as not getting grandchildren at all; they did, through my brother, and that counts just fine for humans, because they know they're his and because they care less about that in the first place. And we do swap it around, remember, they might have been happier to get grandchildren from him than from her."

"Yes, it makes sense if they know they're his."

"Mmhmm. We really do count adoption just the same, though, too. Like - it happens in humans sometimes that someone won't actually be interested in partnering up with someone of the other sex, and will take up with someone of the same sex instead, and of course they'll have to adopt if they want children. My brother's younger son is like that and my brother and his mate don't mind at all."

"Whaaaat, that's so weird! How would they even mate?"

"They end up getting pretty creative with it, as I understand it. But they seem happy enough with the arrangement."

"Huh. Hummun sure are strange."

"A little bit. I'd say that's a species thing but that one isn't even, the other humanoids are just the same and some species of people are even worse."

"Worse?"

"Oh, like goblins don't come in male and female at all, they're all both, except sometimes they have a weird year and start changing to be more like a humanoid male or female, as adults, without any warning at all about who's going to be what. Or some species of fae are only male or only female, and mate with other species to get more of them. Or dragons, which are giant magical lizardy creatures that can shapeshift, and every once in a while someone will find out that, surprise, that stranger they spent a night with wasn't what they looked like at all, and now they have a half-lizard baby who can spit sparks of electricity when they get cranky."

"Oh no! That's so complicated! I like our way better. I don't think dragons or fae will have a lot of luck here, anyway, people want families, not to just randomly wind up with babies and no help taking care of them."

"Yeah. And those things are rare, anyway. But my world certainly does get complicated."

"Will a lot of hummun and other things come here?"

"I'm sure you'll get tourists and merchants and things. I haven't seen anything yet that would draw a lot of immigration but there might be something, if there's work we're better at doing or something like that."

"Well, there's magic."

"Mmhmm. That'll get you some immigration - Pelor will want to put a church here, I'm sure - but maybe not a whole lot of it, spellcasters aren't all that common."

"Who's Pelor?"

"Pelor's a god, I don't think I've explained those yet - so clerics get our magic from devotion to a concept, right, have you heard about that? Gods work sort of the same way, but they're not just devoted to the concept and get magic from it on top of having an otherwise normal life; they're made entirely of the magic of a particular concept or handful of concepts being important, and that means they're much more powerful and even more focused on just those things, with a much broader perspective on them - the god of travel is called Fharlanghn," he touches his pendant, "and he knows much more about travel than I ever will, because being a god lets him see more of what happens with it and because he's been around so much longer, gods are immortal. So usually clerics of a particular thing will also follow the god of that thing, because they know so much more about how to do it right, and because their perspective lets them coordinate more - it's not common for gods to talk to their clerics, I'm not having a chat with him every week, but once a year or so he'll send me a message saying there's work to be done in some place or other to make it easier for people to travel there, or to help people who need to travel suddenly. And it also helps clerics work together, if they're all following the same advice about the best ways to do things - not so much for Fharlanghn's clerics, with that, since his advice is for us to go see whatever seems interesting to us instead of sticking together, but for example he says that when we are working together on a problem we should make sure to listen to everyone, since even someone very new to being a cleric might have seen something that lets them give good advice in that particular case."

"So clerics have an advantage at working together because of our gods, and most gods' clerics form groups to do that, called churches. Different churches do different things, depending on the concept they're about; one of my favorites is about pleasure, and holds art classes and massage lessons and fancy dinners and gives away nice food to people who wouldn't be able to afford to get it themselves, as an example. And Pelor is the god of community and healing and the sun, and his clerics run hospitals and take care of orphans and try to give away enough food to keep anyone from ever starving, and every week they have a meeting for anyone who wants to go to it where they talk about what the community needs and how to be a good neighbor. It's the most popular church in my world, most places people live have one of Pelor's churches at least close enough to get to if they really need it."

"And some of those will come here and do the food spell? They'll get lots of people's attention if they do the food spell."

"You might actually want the pleasure goddess - Lastai - for the food spell, Pelor's clerics will be more interested in using their magic on injuries and things unless it turns out that domestic spren is bad for you somehow. I'm friends with one of Lastai's top clerics, though, I shouldn't have any trouble talking her into sending somebody."

"Healing injuries is good too but right now I'm not injured and I am full of about four times as much wild spren as I'm usually served in one sitting."

"Mmhmm. Well, you can have both, they don't get along completely uncomplicatedly but they won't fight or anything - Pelor's church thinks that the taboo on letting people see you without clothes makes humanoids better neighbors for each other, and Lastai's thinks it's bad to make people wear clothes if they don't want to."

"...are the Pelor hummun going to try to make people in hospitals put on clothes? That seems like it would be harder with an injury."

"I wouldn't expect them to. I think they only expect it of humanoids, and even if they decide you should, only wearing clothes in hospitals wouldn't really help anything, the idea is that having something private with your mate makes that relationship more special and stronger."

"It does sound cute but I think when I move in with Zoi and whoever else the special thing we have together will be... an apartment... also I think probably wearing clothes would make it very hard to have sex."

He laughs. "That's part of the idea, yes."

"Why do they want that to be hard?"

"Well, part of why it is how it is is that we've been doing it this way for ages, and the most important part is covering up the sex bits, so everyone is used to only seeing sex bits when they're about to have sex, so now if you don't wear clothes, as a humanoid in my world, everybody thinks you're doing that for some sex reason, and that's very distracting, and also upsetting if you think what's happening is that someone is doing a sex thing to try to steal your mate, or if it's your mate and you think they're trying to get someone else's attention. And Pelor's people think - well, two things, the first being that since everything is mostly okay how it is and it'd be a big mess to try to fix it, we should just keep going how we are, and the other being that even if things weren't like this, it'd be distracting to have people going around naked all the time just because it'd be less clear whether what they were doing was a sex thing or not, and having less of that kind of distraction lets us work together better - we don't have sex in public for pretty much the same reason, it's not how things are done and it'd be strange and distracting and upsetting for someone to be doing it all of a sudden. But Lastai thinks that that isn't giving people enough credit for being smart, and that you could just say, okay, this is allowed now, if someone does it all it means is that they want to and if you don't want your mate to go after other people you should talk to your mate about that, and she thinks that stopping people from doing things that make them happy when you could solve the problem another way instead is bad."

"- oh, we just have sex in public," says Uamok. "Which sounds a lot simpler than all that. How do you even know if somebody's got a mate, do you just have to be like 'hi my name is Uamok and I have one mate' or -"

"Most human cultures have some way of marking it; in mine it's rings, if someone is wearing a ring on this finger they're taken. Special adornments are pretty common in general, some places do skin paint, some places do special haircuts, that kind of thing. Dwarves do that, too, they braid their beards in special ways to say a bunch of different things about themselves, and that's one of them. Some places that are much more formal about it have specific ways you'd ask, or specific people - there'll be one person or a few people who help everyone in town find mates, and you never approach someone yourself, you go to one of them and tell them what kind of person you're looking for and they'll introduce you. And then this isn't common in humans but in a couple of other species you wouldn't necessarily find out at all until you'd been seeing someone for a while, and it's totally normal for people to let their mates have casual relationships."

"Wow. I think some places have matchmaking here. I sort of did that, I told all the girls in school that I wanted the sort of boy who goes to school and they should set me up with their brothers if they went to our school, and then I had Zoi."

"Sounds like a good way to do it. Is he studying something interesting?"

"Zoology!"

"Nice! That's a pretty popular topic for our scholars, too, and always important."

"I mean, you have monsters, that might make it more important."

"Well, that, and it's good to know things about the wilderness in general, to know how to use it and how to avoid wrecking it."

"Yeah, that's true. I study lots of different things, I haven't gotten specialized yet."

"That's good too. Do you have a favorite so far?"

"No, or I would've specialized! Uun tells me that I seem to just like being in school more than I like any of the content."

"Hm - how do you feel about math? One of our kinds of magic anyone can learn if they're clever enough, and it's not like math exactly but it's pretty similar to it."

"I like math!"

"Well if it turns out I can get home soon I can take you to meet some wizards and see if their magic looks interesting. They can do the widest variety of kinds, though most of them specialize at least a little - they can't make food the way I can but they can change animals around and make new ones, maybe you can figure out what's going wrong with domestic spren and fix it altogether."

"Oooooh, that would be amazing. And I'd be rich!"

"Mmhmm!"

"Is the tuition really high? Oh, and I'd have to learn the langauge."

"It's on the high side, but I don't know what the exchange rate will be like, and you do have more technology than we do, I bet you'll be able to manage it. Or they do offer scholarships for promising students. The language could be a bit of a problem but that's the sort of barrier it's my job to help with - I can teach you while I'm here and if you're still not comfortable with it when it's time it I can get you a translation necklace of your own."

"Oh, that sounds fun! You could teach the language to a whole circle - well, I think whether there should be boy teachers is still under discussion but I bet they'd let you since you're not a person boy."

"I doubt I'll be around long enough to teach a whole class on it in one go, but if they don't mind me doing it a bit at a time when I'm around, sure."

"Not every circle is necessarily a very formal one that matches up exactly with the school schedule," she assures him.

"That sounds like it'll work fine. Do they do lots of informal classes like that? I might want to take a few, if there's anything that doesn't need too much background."

"There's clubs and things, and one-time circles on very specific things like hivebugs or whatever."

"Sounds like I'll be able to find something interesting. What are the circles like, is there anything I should know about them?"

"All the students stand in a circle and if there's a teacher the teacher's in the middle? And you stomp on the ground if you want attention."

"I think I can work with that. In my world usually have the teacher stand by a wall, with everyone looking at her or him, and then she or he can hang things on the wall for the students to look at, or write on it, if it's the right kind of wall for that."

"Very big lectures are sometimes like that! Little classes it's nice to have outside."

"How many students would you usually have in a class?"

"Oh, like ten."

"That'll do it, I'd expect more like twenty usually. I bet yours are nicer, though, you get more of the teacher's attention."

"Yeah, twenty sounds too big - sometimes they let it get up to fifteen, if a lot of people want in."

"Wow. I think the largest lecture I've ever been to was a couple hundred, that's not common but it happens sometimes, when you have someone famous giving a talk on something popular."

"I haven't been to any of those but I think they exist."

"Well, we do a whole range of sizes. If you go to wizard school I'd expect some of your classes to be twenty or thirty, and some to be bigger and either just be lectures or be ones where you'll break up into groups to do things with a few of your classmates, and then if you're studying something unusual or have a question that's too specific for the whole class to want to hear, your teachers will have time set aside to meet with you. Or if you think you'll have trouble in a school set up like that you could take an apprenticeship, that's also pretty common for wizards."

"It sounds fine, probably? Just like it couldn't be very discussion-oriented, it'd be more like reading a book. Is that what the small groups are for?"

"Mmhmm. Or they assign a reading ahead of time and whichever students are interested in talking to the teacher about it do and the rest listen, that works pretty well for us."

"Are most of them not interested in talking about it?"

"Mm, if you started a conversation they'd probably have something to say? But they might not think it was interesting enough to talk about in class, or they wouldn't want to say it if someone else already had. And some humans don't like talking in front of groups very much."

"Huh. I guess maybe boys are like that but girls aren't."

"Well, we're used to having different species of people around, I expect we'll be okay getting used to you."

"Different... species of people...?"

"I know that translates oddly, since you only have the one word. There are lots of species that do person-things in my world, so we have names for the different species and then a word for talking about all of them but not animals. If I'm going to do a language circle I might ask the students how they think it should work, whether 'person' should be the word for your species or whether you want to use it to mean all person-ey species and come up with something else for yourselves. Or do something else, I guess."

"Off the top of my head I'd say 'talkers'."

"Sure, that works. -not all species that are smart enough that we count them do talk, but it's a pretty good way to guess, at least."

"...why don't they talk?"

"Some of them can't make enough different sounds for it, I don't know if that's all of them. They still learn languages, though, and you can tell them things just like any other talker."

"Yeah, I think if they can understand talking that counts just fine."

"Yeah, that's how we see it. And they're not that common, either. Anyway, there's all kinds of species of talkers out there who work different ways, it's not going to surprise anyone that people aren't the same as humans at everything.

"Oh, good. It sounds so exciting! I should tell Zoi we might be going to another planet. ...and maybe pick up some more mates sooner than later since I won't be able to meet them in class there."

"Maybe! I expect it to be at least a couple of months, though, for my friends to find the right sort of expert to figure out what happened and for her or him to get to where I was and see if the magic's still there."

"Oh, a couple months should be enough, we'll start a new term and I'll have actual classes with them."

"Sounds good. Do you have a break between terms? Is there anything I ought to make sure to see before I'm busy ferrying people back and forth between the worlds?"

"We have a few days off between. Uh... do you mean like tourist stuff?"

"Mmhmm. Or if there's something that might not be interesting to tourists but I'd want to tell them about back home, but tourist attractions are more interesting, honestly."

So she can tell him about a pretty mountain known for good hiking and views at the top, and the biggest inhabited cavern on the continent which has a mall and pretty lights and carvings in it, and the art museum, and the theater, which is currently playing Misokun's Truth.

"Well, I'm always partial to theater. Are there any of those you'd be especially interested in?"

"Zoi liked Misokun's Truth and I haven't seen it."

"Sounds good. Give me a bit to figure out who'll buy magic spren and it'll be my treat?"

"- oh, you're probably going to have a hard time with money - you don't have a bank account and I don't know if they'll give you one -"

"Hm. I'd expect them to figure it out, they're going to want people to be able to pay me, but maybe paper money makes that more complicated somehow."

"Well, you won't have a problem if people pay you in cash, but males do a lot of the grocery shopping and they don't have cash usually, they have scrip. And to cash scrip you need an account. I guess I can do your accounts if we're going to be hanging out a lot but everyone will think I decided to mate with an alien."

"And that'd be pretty awkward, yes. Well, I guess I'll talk to them at the bank and see what happens."

"I can come along to verify you can do magic, if you want."

"If you're not busy."

"Well, if you want me there you'd have to go after I'm done with school, but you were going to come to school."

"Sure, that sounds like it works out. And then I'll need to figure out who to sell to - I was actually thinking of restaurants, not families, they can take a whole casting at once and I won't have to explain every time about it fading."

"Oh! That should work fine and the restaurants'll have female owners who can pay you cash."

"Mmmhm. I do want to see what happens at the bank, it'll matter for when other talkers want to come over, but I won't worry much personally if they can't help me."

"All right, after school tomorrow before I get a train back home."

That sounds like a plan; they can do that, then. Assuming nothing more interesting happens in the meantime than Raafi getting nibbled on by a giant caterpillar in the middle of the night, anyway.

He does wake up with a giant caterpillar on his leg but it doesn't seem to want to eat him; it has laid a row of eggs down his shin.

Gross, but probably harmless. He scrapes them off and prepares Neutralize Poison and Remove Disease with his other spells for the day, just in case he ends up feeling odd later, and heads back to the burrow.

Presently out comes Uamok with her school things in a bag on her leg. "Hi, hummun! I forgot your name."

"Raafi. Or I answer to Traveler, if that's easier to remember. I'm not sure I caught yours?"