And now they’re somewhere else!

Their surroundings are relatively unremarkable, and also very unaesthetic, with the exception of some sort of... ambulatory... plant... thing... about ten feet away from them? Something that looks more like a plant or a mushroom or something similar than like anything else they’ve ever seen, at least. It - moves away from them, with some complex arrangement of its limbs, somehow, and produces a sound.

That's very strange!!  It has so many textures!  Some things have that many textures but - different, somehow.  And some people have that many textures but not all connected to each other like that, at least that they've seen.  And people couldn't line up with the ground like that.

This is too confusing to formulate a specific question about; they project an intentionally-vague ?? to the general area on the off chance there's someone around to explain.

The extremely textured ambulatory thing tilts its head, makes another noise, and - little sparkles dance around its hand?

Hmmm.

Their current form is a bipyramid with a five-pointed star for its base, in crystal, flashing and fading through different colors which mostly but don't entirely stay within the red range.  They are surrounded, in three-dimensional space, by glitter, and by a halo of shadow only perpendicular to wherever they're viewed from; a distorted and colored view of what's behind them is visible through them unobstructed by the dark.  They are about two feet tall and hovering about that height off the ground.

Their movements, when they are not traveling, are a fairly simple loop: they spin, gently, and bob up and down at a rate of once every few seconds.  Their halo expands and contracts like breathing, and their glitter swirls.

The textured thing had not previously moved in a way that made any sense at all, but the sparkles - those move in a comprehensible way and on what is recognizably a loop.  So maybe this could be a person???  It follows that people would have different fashions in entirely new places; maybe there's a whole colony of people who all came here and figured out how to be all - articulated - and have made lots of advances across all sorts of fields.  Although if that's the case then why hasn't it said anything.  - Maybe it's expecting them to say something first?  Besides just the fact that they're confused??  They project the concept of a greeting.

The textured-articulated person carefully projects the exact same greeting-concept back at them.

!!! oh !!!

how [the concept of something connected to itself moving relative to itself]; how [line up with ground (obvious: people do not line up with the ground normally)]; others here?; how many; how [sound [specific: the first one made earlier][specific: the second one made earlier]]; [name/identity]?

Their new acquaintance replies with the previously communicated ‘??’ concept.

??[??]

??[??[??]]

This is very puzzling.  They don't have an immediate response.

greeting; [unintelligible conceptual noise]; [unintelligible conceptual noise]; send smaller concepts/discrete questions??

Hm.

[name/identity]?

Their interlocutor makes a sound - “Lucas Beineke?” - and sends a conceptual representation of that sound.

What a strange name-slash-identity.

'Lucas Beineke?' they parrot, telepathically.

‘Lucas Beineke’ [affirmative]; [name/identity]?

They send theirs!  It is both long and dense, and contains a lot of information about their aesthetics and personality, and does not contain any phonemes or telepathic equivalents thereof.

. . . Lucas Beineke asked for small concepts but you can't really compress an entire person into that small of a concept.  Although Lucas Beineke apparently did, albeit in a way that sure does leave a lot out.

send following question[small concept]??

. . . . this person's syntax is very confusing.  They resend . . . . just the first chunk of their name?  It kind of almost hurts to do that but they can pretend they just got interrupted instead of having cut it off deliberately and that helps.

negative; send question[new[not involving name/identity]][if preferred][small concept]??

how [sound [specific: the first one made earlier][specific: the second one made earlier][specific: "Lucas Beineke?"]]

vibration [via physical movement[physical movement of the tongue and throat]][used to encode concepts]; English [pattern of encoding concepts into vibration]

elaborate [tongue and throat]; give examples [Eng - oh right, discrete questions.

Tongue[located in mouth[primary opening of head]][tentacle[very articulated and mobile part of a body]][manipulates sound by contact with other parts of mouth]; throat[connection between head and torso][contains ‘vocal cords’[narrow passage for air][air pushed through vocal cords[vocal cords produce vibration in air by opening and closing]]]

That doesn't sound immediately replicable, which is sad.  give examples [English]

““Hello!” - ‘Hello’[greeting] - My name is Lucas Beineke” - ‘’My name is’[indicates name/identity of speaker will follow]; ‘Lucas Beineke’[personal name/identity] - “and I’m going on a walk.” - ‘and’[conjunction][second clause occurs simultaneously with first clause]; ‘I’m’[indicates action or status of speaker will follow]; ‘going’[indicates movement]; ‘on a walk’[indicates movement is leisurely[undergone for pleasure][slow]][indicates movement is via placement of lower limbs on ground]

They project rapt attention, lightly, throughout the explanation.

It aches that they can only do one question at a time and they get stuck for a bit trying to decide which one should be next.  All of them seem more important than each other!  How are they supposed to pick.

‘Lucas Beineke’ is going to try to just passively translate his words into nested concepts as he goes along.

”I was... having an uninteresting walk... and then you appeared! It was very exciting. Um. I’m a kind of person called a human, although I’m an unusual kind of human, and it seems like you’re a different kind of person than that? Humans are born in a process called reproduction, into biological bodies, and your body doesn’t seem very biological. And most of us can’t communicate telepathically. And it doesn’t seem like you know very much about us. Um. Do you have a small concept for the kind of thing that you are?”

This!  Is not helping with the having-too-many-questions!  Except for how it is that's some pretty useful information.

They send the concept of people - thinking beings capable of acting on the world rather than being acted on - rather than successfully deciding on a question.

“Are all of the people you’ve previously encountered, um... abiotic?”

They belatedly process that biological is the thing that plants and fungi are, and that plants and fungi are physical, and so this ?person? is ???physical???

They send an echo of this realization closely paired with immense confusion.

“I usually think of people as being non-physical entities located in physical bodies? Like if they were a - plant, only, um, if instead of growing flowers the plant grew a person and then the person was all attached.”

They make a physical plane (invisible, obviously) and use it to push some leaves on the ground into a little pile, clearing an area of open dirt.

observe [action just taken]; connection? [to ideas conveyed [by Lucas Beineke][recent]]

“I don’t... think... that I understand?”

They repeat moving the leaves around.

observe [this particular action]

“Um. I did understand that you were moving those leaves around, I just wasn’t quite sure what that was meant to imply?”

stand by (difficulty phrasing)

human [physical substrate, grows soul]; [my species] [soul, grows physical substrate]; [observe: [symmetry, inverted]]?

“- oh! Yes, that does seem very symmetrical. Um. How do your souls come to exist?”

Project [completion, satisfaction]

“What kind of project?”

Project

“I think that you need to put more... nesting... into that, for it to make sense across our culture gap?”

[art?]

[creation] [accomplishment] [pride]

“- you were an art project?”

incorrect.  realization [conversation topic [uninteresting/unimportant]]; propose [conversation topic [Lucas Beineke][this location][humans]]

Lucas does not think that that is how conversations work but he’s hardly going to insist.

“What would you like to know?”

The crystal-person doesn't know that that's not how conversations work so they are!

[[Lucas Beineke] [this location] [humans]] unknown unknown (comparative disadvantage at aiming specificity)

“Um! - we’re currently in a forest? Forests are areas that are mostly free of people, where plants get to grow? I live in a place where more people are, a kind of building -“ he has to pause for several seconds to create a sufficiently nested definition, there - “called a house; there are, um, a lot of buildings in the world, and the world has about eight billion humans in it.”