"...okay."

"Is it just that you think that's a weird thing to care about or did your history not invent card games?"

"We have card games but it is hard to imagine people preferring to live in a city to play more of them."

"It's definitely not in the top ten reasons to pick a city but for some people it's their main source of social life."

"People don't... meet their neighbors? Chat with their co-workers?"

"Plenty of people are friends with their co-workers, sure, but the only reason you'd expect your neighbors to be particularly good people to be friends with is if you moved to a city or a neighborhood or a building specifically because it had a lot of people you'd want to be friends with and that goes back to interests. Also most people find it easiest to make friends by doing their interests together. I'm a bit of an oddmind; I can make friends with people just from random conversation, at least if they're the same kind of oddmind as me."

"What is an oddmind?"

"Someone whose brain is different enough from what people generally expect of brains that it's useful to have a word for it, in a bundle of different ways. So not just being especially smart or especially shy or whatever, but whole collections of ways of being different that tend to go together. I'm used to communicating with people who are pretty different from me, so I figured I was a good choice for talking to someone from way far away who wouldn't have a lot of context, and given that you're from another timeline I wouldn't be surprised if everyone from Ibyabek was a bit of an oddmind relative to here, but it would make plenty of sense for you to go looking for people more similar to you than I am to spend time with." They say all this in the same pleasantly neutral tone they'd use to discuss the weather, as though it's a conversation they've had several times before.

"I don't get the sense that many people here are similar to me."

"Probably not, just from having a different cultural background regardless of your fundamental way of thinking. Do you want suggestions for what hobbies you're most likely to find similar people in? They'd be somewhat better suggestions if you show me your test scores but if you'd rather keep those private, or not get suggestions and do your own looking entirely, that would be reasonable too."

"...is there some reason they should be private?"

"Nope! Plenty of people share them. Some people don't share their lowest ones."

He digs up his scores and displays them.

"Looks like you probably want to look into more physical type stuff. Ever played any sports? We won't have the same ones but we might have something similar."

"Yes, we did sports in school. I once played against someone who went on to the Olympics."

"That's super cool. Now I want to hear all about what sports you have!"

"I mostly played baseball."

"How does that work?"

Kyeo can explain the rules of baseball!

"Sounds like fun! I'm surprised people don't get hit with the ball more often. The closest thing here is probably Pileup. It's got the same 'hit a thing and then make it around the polygon without getting tagged' setup but the ball is bigger and bouncier and you kick it, and there are only two checkpoints plus the start, and instead of having to run no matter what you can stay on first or second as long as you want, and instead of being done when you get back to the start you score if you run through start and get to the first checkpoint again. So you can get practically the whole thirty-person team piled onto the second checkpoint waiting for someone to kick it past the defenders so they can all run through in a huge mass."

"Interesting. Perhaps I should learn to play."

"I bet you'd like it!"

"How do people usually pick up new games here?"

"You can do a network search for open pileup games; any group that has room for new people will have a posting somewhere with where and when they meet."

"And they will explain what I need to know?"