[Rogerroger.]  Thellim enters the huge building, and then has to look up at a lot of signs and read them individually instead of being able to just scan through them and let "American Airlines" leap to her attention.  Seems like the sort of thing that will fix itself with more experience, so she's not worried.

The desk with "American Airlines" over it has what looks like a queuing line... yeah, Thellim is pretty sure that's a queuing line.  She goes to the end of the line, waits, and pays attention to what the people before her do.

The people in front of her go to whoever says "I can help who's next" and then they present their identification and luggage and get papers for themselves and their luggage and then move on.

Thellim goes to the next available helper.  [I'm up,] she brainvoices, and echoes her next words back to Isabella.  "Thalia Jones, journeying under section 114, sponsored by Isabella Swan," she says out loud.

"114, ugh - Barb, do you know how to do a 114 -"

"Yeah, I can help you in a sec," says the presumable Barb.

Barb switches kiosks temporarily with Thellim's helper and does computer things and prints her a boarding pass and writes something on it in purple marker. "Line's shorter right now in that security checkpoint," she says, pointing.

"Thank you very much for your game-theoretic cooperation!" says Thellim.  Whoops, that probably didn't sound like colloquial English, but in her defense what kind of post-apocalyptic language lacks a short word for that.  Thellim quickly turns and heads toward the indicated 'security checkpoint'.

"Weirdo," she can just barely hear the nonBarb agent mutter.

The security checkpoint is a line bottlenecked at a guy who looks at IDs and boarding passes and then further slowed by people putting their luggage and shoes on conveyor belts and going through metal detectors or getting patted by uniformed personnel.

Why... shoes... well, magic, she guesses.  Heck, this whole line could be an arcane ritual intended to scare away plane-eating demons, for all she knows right now.  She'll put the question on hold in case it's easy to answer with Network access and doesn't require bothering Isabella.

Thellim duly puts her shoes and her clothes-in-a-bag on the conveyor belt when it's her turn.

She gets through the security line without incident and can then follow signage to gate A-11 and settle in to wait for her flight.

Thellim wonders if she can become incredibly rich by explaining to these people what a comfortable chair should look like, or if people would just steal the chair designs instead of paying for them and that's why these chair designs are so half-baked.  She wants to halfway-doze despite the noise, but doesn't want to risk missing her flight.

Her flight comes along 45 minutes later and she has an assigned seat between an eleven year old with a video game and an old lady who reads the in-flight magazines advertising weird products.

Thellim will read the in-flight magazine carefully, searching for buried clues to how her new world functions!  It's not like she has anything better to do.  How long was this flight supposed to be, again?

Three hours!

The high-quality glossy paper of the in-flight magazine is full of advertisements basically just asserting that someone's product EXISTS and making NO MENTION WHATSOEVER of any actual ARGUMENTS for why anybody would want to buy this product instead of one of its competitors and the information in this magazine is of NO CONCEIVABLE INTEREST TO ANY NORMAL PERSON and this feels like being inserted into a SURREAL DREAM VERSION of a NEWSPAPER and Thellim is now wondering if people here just BUY RANDOM PRODUCTS on being told they EXIST and everything is very CONFUSING again.

The old lady next to her has circled an advertisement for a cat drinking fountain.

There is an in-flight meal! It's terrible.

No doubt that is what HAPPENS when you spend your entire ECONOMY on CAT DRINKING FOUNTAINS your airplanes can no longer afford FOOD.

There are also peanuts, which are fine.

After the flight, which lands in a completely nondestructive fashion, Thellim can get off the plane!

[Arrivals board says you touched down?]

[We did!  If the plane exploded, it happened so quickly that I didn't notice and I ended up in a very similar plane afterwards.]

[I'll... take that as dark humor, shall I.] Like someone who understands the layout of LaGuardia, Isabella directs Thellim through it until they can meet and proceed to board the train. Isabella is a very pretty person who isn't blanding her face at all, though unlike some people Thellim has spotted she doesn't seem to be actively working on looking nicer than she does when she gets up in the morning. She has a rattan cane.

[Hi!  Pleased to meet you!  I hope that seeing your unfiltered beauty doesn't forever spoil me for all other human beings, but given my probable rising prominence in the world it's likely not too much of an issue in the long run.  Is this a talking-out-loud situation or a brainvoice situation?]

"Out loud's better all else being equal, magic does cost some energy. I will take the remark about my unfiltered beauty as a compliment, I guess. Welcome to New York. I brought you a spare coat." She proffers a blue coat with a furry hood.

"Thank you!"  Thellim starts to put on the coat.  "Am I to wear this because New York's environment is colder, or for some other reason?"

"It's not actually colder in New York than it was where you were, but we'll have some walking outside to do that you skipped on that end, I don't have a car."

"Feel free not to answer if it's complicated, but is there a reason you can't pay somebody else who has a car to drive you places?  I'm still - trying to figure out why some things exist in this economy and not other things, the missing parts can't be random or you'd be missing at least one of the parts in an airplane..."

"Oh, I can, people do that all the time here, but I prefer the subway."

Thellim's impression of the word 'subway' is something like underground-car-tunnel mixed with multi-person-vehicle.  She does not understand why, if they have the technology to dig tunnels, there are cars on the surface, and she doesn't understand why, if you've already expended the land-area to put single-person vehicles on the surface, you'd rather go in a multi-person underground vehicle instead.

"I shouldn't pester you with questions of relatively low priority, but be it noted that I'm still very disoriented about how much I'm unable to deduce conclusions from first principles and observations from hypotheses, with respect to facts like why someone would prefer the subway to hiring somebody else who owns a car.  I know my own world well enough that it compresses to a small number of axioms and I can decompress them.  Oh my ass how does anybody ever think in this language, all my sentences come out way too long and I sound like even more of an overly talkative neurotype than I actually am!"