In fact it looks very very unlike her solar system. There's what might be a gas giant which is normal, a binary pair of planets one sandy, the other red, a blue planet with a brightly glowing moon, some weird irregularly shaped thing that almost looks like a giant plant and finally a blue green world with what looks like an atmosphere. The scale is all wrong though, the planets are far too large and far too close to the sun. Something isn't right here.

...What the hell.

Step one: figure out where in the universe she is. (Though the laws of physics should be consistent everywhere within a universe, and they don't look like they're running on familiar principles here - could she be in a simulation? A very obvious one, though... But some supervillains are bombastic idiots, and while Zenith stays out of the hero-villain games she's massively high profile for a super.)

Step two: ???

Step three: strangle Jack.

Now that she has her priorities settled, she starts working her way toward the blue green world, thumbing down the output on her gizmo even farther. It behaves, this time.

The weirdness continues. This planet is maybe a half a kilometer in diameter but still has an atmosphere. There seems to be at least one settlement in a crater just below her. 

Wow. Tiny baby planet. Her power's going to be basically nonexistent if she wants error margins small enough she won't keep teleporting past the planet...

Ugh. She hates ramping down that far.

She sets up some sensors, first, saving the data about this solar system onto a separate drive. Turns most of them off, then fixes a few to her suit to monitor her own approach to the planet. Like whether she accelerates towards it at a rate normal for Earth's gravity once in orbit.

She then ramps down anyways, aims for the outskirts of the settlement -

Arrives in solid rock.

Sighs, and teleports straight 'up' in a short hop. Her 'stubbed toe' range is larger than this planet... She ends up well outside of it again, trying to work herself down a teeny tiny bit at a time. She can take pretty bad falls, but not all of her instruments definitely can - so she's slow, and cautious, and tries very, very hard to get herself just above the planet's surface on her final jump.

It actually works, wonder of wonders.

She finds herself beside a small stream.

Usually the stars are a lot less clear than this from inside an atmosphere. (Or, well, from inside Earth's atmosphere. Definitely from inside Venus's atmosphere.)

She stares, for a moment, soaking the strange world in. It doesn't feel like any simulation she's been in.

She takes readings, then, methodically. Gravity's Earth norm, despite the tiny size... Collects some samples of the grass, dirt, stones, and water - she luckily hadn't filled all her sample containers with asteroid innards. Mostly because asteroids are even more obnoxious than planets to land on. And then she stows all that, and she orients herself to face the settlement, and she starts walking.

It's actually just a little ways down the river. There's a path beside the river after a little ways and then it becomes a wooden bridge to parallel a small waterfall and then she's just inside the settlement. Still on a ledge in the crater wall.

She examines the settlement from her perch, listening. Is there an obviously 'important' building? (By human standards, of course. She doesn't know which ones aliens or simulated people might use.)

The largest building by quite a margin is to her left. There's also a platform with what looks to be a small spaceship on the other side of the crater otherwise all the buildings look to be about the same size.

She heads over to the large building, idly snapping a picture as she walks and then stowing everything she's carrying.

There's an obvious entrance, to either side of the entrance are pictures on the walls and straight ahead there are two blue skinned aliens looking at a statue of some kind.

Deep breath. This is either a terrifyingly immersive and comprehensive simulation or a genuine first contact scenario. Absolutely no sweat! 

Whichever's true - she needs to find out information about this world, and it really is unlikely to hurt to behave like this is, actually, humanity's first alien contact.

She steps into the hall, clearing her throat.

Both aliens turn around. The taller one on the right says something in a language she doesn't recognize.

She belatedly flicks on her audio recorder. The pickup's not the best - it's meant for her to record voice logs - but hopefully it'll get some of the language.

If she was on a movie or something she'd say something cool and impressive and quote worthy.

Unfortunately, she's a dork.

"Hello. I'm very lost."

"...But I come in peace!"

That's probably important to tack on.

...Possibly she should've flicked on the audio recorder a few seconds later. That's going in the official record, isn't it.

The shorter one thinks for a moment and then says something to the taller one and they both walk through a door to the left with what appears to be a gesture to follow.

She follows.

The alien leads her to what appears to be a broken piece of wall with a spiral and a star shaped symbol on it. They point to the spiral.

"I don't know what that is," she says, probably uselessly. She - looks away? Maybe hopefully demonstratively. And shrugs, hands open.

The alien imitates the gesture. They point at the placard near the wall and then at Zenith.

She hums, then pulls up an image of the Earth on her visor, taking it off and turning it around to show both aliens. She points to the planet, then herself, then zooms out from the planet, points to empty space beside it, switches to an image she took of their planet, and points to the empty space beside it.

The alien nods and smiles. They lead the way up a circular ramp built around an enormous tree trunk to a room with a large telescope, a ball and stick model of the solar system that's moving on tracks and two large computer consoles.

The alien walks over to the console and starts bringing up pictures and labels in the weird script they seem to use that's composed of lines of varying lengths.

The first three pictures seem to be of stars of varying types and the label seems to be the same for all three.

The alien fetches a paper and a pen of some sort and tries to give them to Zenith.

She takes them, looking with interest at everything (and recording, of course).

She pulls up images of stars of other types on her visor, next to an image of one of their labeled stars.

The alien mimes writing on the paper.

She writes (and says) the word 'star'.

The alien dashes to the other side of the room briefly and gets what looks like a tape recorder. Then they say a word and gesture at Zenith.

She repeats herself, smiling. Then, a pause, and: "Do you want me to just talk naturally?"

They pause for a few moments and make a few aborted gestures then stop and go back to their computer. They demonstrate and solicit words for several other astronomical terms. They also provide the name for their species "Hearthian" and try to solicit a name for what sort of person Zenith is.

Human!

She does record words on her paper - good to leave them with a dictionary, and she tries to write neatly though she's not very good at this - but she also continues pulling up images and words on her visor, and she starts seriously prodding towards technological compatibility, sketching out diagrams, pulling up relevant textbooks for reference sometimes. She has a ridiculous amount of media in her storage, mostly text, but some music, comics, and movies and the like - if they have a program that can analyze languages, and they can get their computer to talk to hers, she can dump so much on them.

The taller Hearthian returns, and with them is a second shorter Hearthian. This one has some sort of strange device which they link to the larger computer with a cable. It sends out beams of light which play over the screen of her device. All three aliens are talking quickly to each other and taking turns typing things into the computer or fiddling with the device. They might be at this for a little while.

She patiently tries to nudge them toward illustrating some of their technology to her - do they have the concept of wireless networks, maybe? Obviously their protocols won't be directly compatible, but that might be the easiest to make compatible...

It takes them a little bit but they grasp her request. It seems that their technology is a mix of native design and reverse engineered tech from some other civilization. It takes still longer to get across the idea of wireless networking. They bring up what seems to be a control console for a satellite orbiting their planet and take pictures to demonstrate their wireless networking. It doesn't seem like they've invented things like network packets yet though.

That complicates things... The clunkiest option is probably just flashing her screen through everything as fast as they can scan, but that's also an easier option for their apparent technology gap... Of course then she needs to know how quickly they can scan.

After a bit of experimentation it looks like they can handle a block of text every three seconds or so. Two of them are working to backfill bits of translation from the associated images using both consoles in the room and manually ferrying storage media back and forth.

The tall one holds the scanner and sometimes contributes to the other two's conversation. While that's going on they introduce all three. The tall one is Hornfels, the one who stayed is Halite, and the one who came later is Sylvite

She makes sure her pronunciation of their names is right, grinning, and introduces herself as Zenith.

She even makes a little illustration to communicate what her name means.

Hornfels attempts to reciprocate. As best as they're able to communicate Hornfels is named after a type of rock while Halite and Sylvite are both named after crystals. If she's particularly interested in geology she might recognize the specific types.

She knows just enough geology to know what weird crystals are worth collecting samples of, so doesn't recognize the types.

"It's nice to meet you," she says, grinning.

Hornfels does their best to keep Zenith entertained and interested while the other two work. After a few hours of work and several dozen local 'days' with no sign of any of the aliens looking to go sleep, they get a translation system working. The initial version involves Zenith's device translating her speech to text and then a Hearthian device scanning the screen. In the Hearthian to English direction a cobbled together Hearthian device let's them type messages which are translated in the other direction and displayed in English for Zenith to read.

"I think this is working now." Sylvite types.

"I think it is too!"

"It's wonderful to meet you. We knew from the Nomai that there had been other sapient species but you're the first sapient beings we've been able to meet."

"We haven't met any other aliens, either! Sapient or not. We don't have records of others, though we've sent out messages to nearby stars. Just - guesses and hopes."

"How did you get here?"

"A teleportation accident," she explains, pausing to translate 'teleportation.' "I was trying to return to my home planet, but my equipment malfunctioned."

"Fascinating, I wonder if your teleportation functions using the same principles as ours? So far we've only used it to retrieve probes."

"Ours is powered by a sort of machine attached to specific people, which does different things for different people. We didn't actually make them, and we're unsure if they're natural to our species or if they're the result of extraterrestrial intervention. Mine allows me to teleport with whatever I'm carrying, but other people get abilities specific to them. I can use equipment to make my teleportation work better, though, which we invented, and that equipment is what malfunctioned."

"What other sorts of abilities do people have?"

She hums. "There's a wide variety. Most of them fit into a classification scheme, though not always neatly."

"The most common overarching categories are based on what a power affects - personal, external mental, or external physical. Personal powers can affect your resistance, your capabilities, or your physiology. 'Resistance' is a bit of a weird category and generally covers advanced healing, resistance to powers, and resistance to damage. My teleportation is a personal capability power. External mental powers can influence perception, thoughts and memories, or control actions. They're fortunately really rare. External physical powers are the broadest category. They can control substances, items, the biology of others, fields, or the environment, or can temporarily create things, or can project what would normally be personal powers onto others."

"Everyone seems to have the same... We have a technical term for it, but - 'scale' of power for their primary power, with no real limit on 'secondary' powers. Secondary powers always support and activate with a primary power, and are basically just the things required to survive using it, like my ability to adapt to environments I teleport into. You can have multiple primary powers if they're related, but each will individually be weaker than if you had a single power."

"There's also powers that all supers have, which are considered fairly minor. When we manifest, there's a wave of 'perfection' that cleans and fixes everything in our immediate vicinity, including anyone injured or sick. The perfection wave reshapes our bodies to our ideal. It has... Sort of echoes? So if my ideal body changes, my actual body would slowly reshape to fit. It's possible the perfection echoes get weaker over time, but we don't have enough data to be sure."

"I wonder if we'll ever find out how that works? Probably not any time soon, I guess. Anyway, now that we've got working translation what would you like to do next? Do you need to sleep soon?"

"Not in the next few hours."

"I wouldn't mind looking around some, actually. Part of my mission is exploring new worlds - and it'd be really excellent to start getting records on things like cultural exchange to take back to my people. It'd be the sort of thing everyone would get very excited about while follow-up missions are organized."

"Sure, I'd be happy to show you around the village or the planet if that's what you mean. If you mean the rest of the solar system I was supposed to launch my own exploration soon."

"Any and either! But the village or planet seems a good place to start."

"The village is closest since we're already here. Though it's pretty small compared to the planet let alone the solar system. Would you like me to show you our museum first or do you want to get outside?"

"The museum would be very interesting!"

"Well that's easy it's right down the ramp." Sylvite leads the way down the ramp and then shows off the first exhibit. Zenith might recognize it. "This is one of the first pieces of Nomai writing we found it got us started towards deciphering their language and it's part of why we were so well positioned to translate your language."

She examines it, making appreciative comments (and recording, of course) and asking a bit more about its history and cultural role.

(And, onward of course...)

"This is one of many pieces that references something the Nomai called the Eye of the Universe. It seems to have been really important to them. That spiky symbol is how they represented it. This wall section is from an installation on The Attlerock, our planet's moon that seems to have been intended to locate the eye apparently without success."

"Moving on, we have another example of Nomai ceramics, this seems to have been a container of some kind, we're not sure what the purpose of it was. It's also worth noting that while these ceramics are ubiquitous everywhere we've found Nomai constuction we've never found any tools obviously related to making them."

"Next we have a complete Nomai skeleton. For some reason we've found a lot of Nomai skeletons in their settlements just scattered mostly haphazardly. It seems like something unexpected happened because there's very little sign that the skeletons were moved after they died. We have no idea what it is that might have happened though."

"Fourth, we have an example of our reverse engineering efforts. This is what we call a 'little scout' it's a small probe we launch to ensure that areas are safe before going there personally. It's equipped with reverse-engineered Nomai teleportation tech to let us safely retrieve it if it's in a dangerous area."

"This is another piece of Nomai technology we've salvaged. It does something to gravity we're not exactly sure how but if you get close enough to it you'll fall towards the wall. The ramps help you switch more smoothly."

"Okay..."

She goes closer, focusing a few instruments and also mentally trying to get a feel for when and how suddenly the gravity switches.

It switches pretty suddenly, about a meter and a half away from the crystal. Somehow it effects her entire body or none of it. Depending on how exotic her sensors are she might be able to figure out that it is directly manipulating gravity but only for nearby objects.

"Huh!"

Some of her sensors are indeed exotic - some supers have very strange powers, after all, and it turns out that super-made equipment is both well calibrate to detecting weird physics and also very sturdy, especially if she's teleporting everywhere with it.

She plays with the boundary a bit, grinning.

The crystal's effect applies to entire objects based on the location of their center of mass. If she enters it's area of effect it also does something to rotate her around to be orientated in the same way relative to the apparent gravity, reversing this effect when she moves out of its range.

"This is cool!"

"It is, we've been able to tweak the range a bit. There's also a second mode that we call lift mode where they move objects in a specific direction at a specific speed towards a specific endpoint. We use that on some of our spaceships."

"Very neat - some supers can do effects like this, but we've yet to get it fully incorporated into any reliable technologies."

"Yeah, Nomai stuff is incredible, I wonder sometimes if they did something to cause some of the weirder phenomena in our solar system but it doesn't quite add up."

"What's some of the weirder phenomena?"

"Every planet in our system has something... odd. There's the underground siphons here on Timber Hearth, the super-tornados on Giants Deep, the black hole in the core of Brittle Hollow, The sand transfer between the Hourglass Twins and then there's Dark Bramble.... the plant that destroyed a planet and took it's place."

"Huh."

"Does the Dark Bramble also threaten anything approaching it?"

"It seems mostly static now, we check it with our telescopes regularly and it doesn't appear to have grown for longer than I've been alive."

She nods.

"There's a lot of what I'd consider physical anomalies in your system, actually - the scale is very different from what I'm used to, for one."

"Oh? What do you mean?"

She summarizes the differences she's noticed in gravity, and the general size and scale of planets and the distances between them - her solar system is massive, with proportionately far more empty space.

"Wow... I wonder why things are so different. And I wonder what else is different, if something fundamental like gravity works differently..."

She hums, nodding. "I'll collect as much data as I can - sadly, I'm not a physicist, but the ones back home are pretty smart."

"If you can make the trip it would be great to hear what they say."

"I'd be surprised if I couldn't - and shocked if they didn't come after me. We bring our astronauts home, always."

"Maybe you'll find out what happened to Feldspar. They were our first astronaut and one day they just... stopped responding on the radio. Feldspar hadn't even told us which planet they were on."

"I'm sorry."

"How long ago was that?"

"A few million seconds ago." (There are about thirty million seconds in an Earth year)

Math, so -

Less than a month, probably. 

"How long did they have supplies for, do you know?"

"Probably about three times this long."

"I might be able to find them, then - I'm hoping to explore your system at least some."

"I hope you do. Everyone will be very happy."

She nods. "It's important to bring people home."

"It is," they pause for a few moments.

"Anyway, our next exhibit is this fish type thing. It seems ok in water but it also survived in space latched onto one of our space ships after the ship passed near Dark Bramble." The fish is about a meter long from tooth to tail.

She squints at it.

...She's not entirely positive what anglerfish look like beyond 'many teeth' and 'head bulb' but that does look anglerfish-y. 

"Do you know how it survived in space?"

"We don't know. We only have the one and dissecting it seemed like a bad idea given that. We haven't explored Dark Bramble practically at all. It's bigger on the inside than the outside and the visibility is very poor. Most of the explorers are too spooked to risk it."

"Well, I'm very hard to spook, if you're looking for an explorer."

"It also might be where Feldspar is. They were always very interested in pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible. They were the first Hearthian to be intentionally launched into space."

"I'll look for them."

"Thank you. We've put up several photos astronauts have taken but the next significant exhibit is from our studies of astronomy. Specifically it's about how stars develop. Based on our research one day our star will go supernova."

Oh she knows a lot about cosmology and star development -

What follows are some very,  very technical questions. 

Syl knows some but the questions go beyond the scope of their knowledge. They suggests that Zenith find Chert on the Ember Twin if she wants to know more.