There appears a very tired-looking teenage girl carrying a newborn baby.

Peressa startles, slopping her drink over her sleeve. She hisses a mild expletive and sets down the glass before grabbing a napkin and scrubbing at her sleeve. 

"Who are you?" she asks, in her own language, which has no shared etymological history with English. 

"Sariaaaaah I think I'm seeing things - Sariah?"

She frowns. 

She doesn't speak every language on the planet, of course, but she's familiar with all the major language families. That didn't sound familiar at all. Maybe something that sounds different than it looks?

"Miss,* are you alright?"

*Actual word is an ungendered polite word to address a younger person.

"Hi Sister Hallucination! Please don't start melting I hate it when that happens." Her baby goes "nnnng" and she bounces her a bit.

Yeah, she definitely doesn't recognize that. 

She holds up two fingers in a universal "wait a moment" gesture, picks up her tinynet, and looks some things up. Then she asks whether the mysteriously appearing girl speaks a handful of particularly representative languages of various language families, and the two most populous isolate languages. 

"Is that Norwegian? Or, like, my brain's idea of Norwegian?"

She frowns, and turns to her quasiportable computer, flicking it on and opening video recording. 

"Can you say some more things?"

Rebecca does not understand this request but after a moment she starts singing to the baby.

She starts streaming the video to a linguistics discussion group, marks it as "weird," and texts some of her friends to look at it and back her up. 

After the song finishes she starts pointing to things and naming them. 

"Sister Hallucination I am soooooo tired."

She nods and stops the stream and hesitates and looks at the baby and directs her to the bed. She can sleep on the couch tonight. Thanks be that her husband is out of town. 

Rebecca collapses in the bed and arranges the baby snuggled up to her nursing and sings and sings and sings until finally the baby is asleep and then the instant she's let the nipple fall out of her mouth Rebecca is unconscious.

The video has received more than a handful of weird-upvotes from people she didn't personally direct to it but hasn't gotten much more than that yet. Some people are speculating excitedly in response to it. She has to say firmly that she sent the poor girl to bed and will not be waking her to interrogate her about her language. 

She sets things out for breakfast the next morning and speculates wildly with everyone else for a bit, then retires to the couch to go to sleep herself. 

Rebecca sleeps - interrupted frequently by nursing breaks for the baby - for a total of fourteen hours, though at one point she does stagger around long enough to find something recognizably toilet shaped and pee in it before collapsing back into bed.

By this point breakfast has been long eaten and the leftovers set in the chiller. 

Peressa has been NOT waking up her guest because that would be terribly rude of her and also she probably needs it. What was up with the baby, anyway? Was that her baby? She's so young...

There is food out, anyway, some kind of sandwich on round bread slices. Peressa gestures to a plate other than the one she herself is eating from when Rebecca comes in. 

"...th...anks," says Rebecca, and she takes and scarfs down the sandwich with the non-baby arm.

The sandwich has vegetables and cheese and a kind of meat she can't identify. 

"Are you feeling better?" Peressa asks, even though she knows she won't be understood. The concern in her tone will probably come through. 

"Um, thank you for your hospitality Sister Hallucination. I... thought I slept enough but..."

Peressa slides a sheet of paper across the table to her. It's a printout with various character systems, none of which Rebecca is liable to recognize. 

Squint. "I can't read in dreams."

She slides another sheet of paper across the table. This one is blank and accompanied by a...pencil? It looks sort of like a pencil, anyway, with a much higher graphite-to-wrapper ratio, and the wrapper seems like it's made of tightly-wrapped paper instead of wood. The eraser is also sticking out of the wrapper instead of being attached by a metal doohickey. 

...Rebecca will, uh, sing the alphabet song and write out the alphabet? What does this dream person want from her.

This seems to be the thing she wants! She looks pleased and takes a picture of the alphabet paper and types furiously into her tinynet. Then she would like to exchange more words with Rebecca if Rebecca is okay with that. 

Rebecca is less tired now but still not brilliant at languages or anything. She will identify the carpet and the window and the furniture and introduce herself and Catherine.

Peressa seems less interested in teaching Rebecca her vocabulary than in learning Rebecca's. She introduces herself when Rebecca does. 

Eventually, after enough English words have been collected and posted to the linguist group, Peressa retrieves a spare tinynet, fiddles with it for a moment, and hands it to Rebecca. 

It seems to be open to some kind of language app. The app has the words RABAKA AZ HER above a typing box and a keyboard with the latin alphabet in alphabetical order and a completely unfamiliar layout. If she taps on the text, the box says, "Rebecca is here?"

"Wow I can read in this dream but the spelling is super bad!"

Peressa makes an encouraging noise and taps on the text input space. 

Rebecca types REBECCA IS HERE.

The app chimes brightly and displays another line of text. 

The spelling and grammar are both atrocious. They've got a lot of linguists working on it but the material they have to work with is limited, and to start out with all they have to go on with respect to letter-phoneme correspondences is the letters' names in the alphabet song. But as Rebecca corrects more sentences the sentences do get less egregiously terrible. 

Okay, she'll... do that then.

It takes a long time before the app and/or the linguists are reasonably satisfied with their translation. But eventually Peressa taps into her own tinynet, and a tinny voice says, "Are you alright? How did you get here? Where are you from?"

"Uh, I'm fine, I think this is a dream, and I'm from the Salt Lake area."

"It doesn't seem like you're dreaming from my perspective. What evidence would convince you this isn't a dream? What's the Salt Lake area?"

"I dunno? It seems like it kind of has to be a dream, right. It's the area around Salt Lake City? Which is near a lake. Which is salty."

"There are multiple salty lakes in the world," she points out. 

"Yeah, it's the biggest one though."

She pulls up a three-dimensional rotating world image that mostly matches Earth's. "Here?" she asks, pointing to the Dead Sea. 

"...no... I think that's not a lake." She tries to spin the image around so she can point out the Great Salt Lake.

She examines it. "I think the people there speak," and she repeats the name of one of the languages she tried earlier. 

"Nuh-uh, we speak English in Deseret."

"Nobody in any of my linguistics circles has heard of your language before."

"Well that's because you're a dream."

"I know I exist because I am a thing that knows things."*

*Clumsy translation of the local version of cogito ergo sum.

"Well, yeah, you'd say that."

"I suppose I would. Assuming that either this isn't a hallucination or the hallucination is going to continue indefinitely, what do you want to have happen next?"

"Can I have another sandwich or something? And water."

She pours her a glass of water and assembles another sandwich out of ingredients from a weird fridge. 

Om nom.

"Who's the baby?"

"Catherine. Like I said."

"Is she your sister?"

"No, I'm her mom."

"How old are you?"

She clutches the baby a little closer and doesn't answer.

"You just look awfully young. Did your implant malfunction?"

"My what?"

"Birth control implant?"

"I didn't have one of those?"

This makes Peressa look absolutely baffled. She pokes at her tinynet for a minute before saying, "I think we might be having translation issues. Can you tell me, in different words than were given to you, what the thing I asked about and you said you don't have is?"

"You think I'm too young to have a baby but she's mine and you can't have her!"

"--What? I'm not a kidnapper!"

"Good!"

"I'm concerned you might be in a bad situation, I'm not going to make your situation several orders of magnitude worse!"

"...well if I'm not dreaming then this is sure some kind of situation!"

"Your situation sounds like the plot of a book about things that don't exist."

"You got me there! I don't know what happened."

"I would ask you what happened right before you appeared here but you seemed very sleep deprived and might not remember."

"I think I was just walking Catherine."

"Do you live alone? Babies need a lot of nighttime care, I'm waiting to have any until I've got at least two reliable alloparents lined up."

"I live with my foster parents."

"That's good."

I don't know if we have any way of getting you home."

"I'm sorry."

"Guess at least I've got Catherine."

"That's a lot better than not. So, uh, what's your universe like? What other languages are there?"

"...Spanish? Portuguese? Japanese, Chinese, Arabic..."

"Which ones of those are related to English?"

"The first two. Oh, and French, I think it's related to French. And... German?"

"What does the relationship look like? What language families are the other ones part of?"

"I... don't know? I know some songs in all those languages though. Phonetically, I don't know what all the words mean."

"Oh." She sounds disappointed. "Well, I'd love to have those recorded, but I understand if you have other priorities." 

"I guess I need, like, a place to stay that isn't your house."

"Yes. I suspect that there aren't procedures already in place for fictional-situation refugees, but there are procedures for people who need to cut all ties to their past, so hopefully that should generalize? I'm going to message the Department of Lifestyle Circumstances." 

"...people who need to cut all ties to their past?"

"It's not usual," she clarifies, "but sometimes there's a bad case of abuse or a stalker or something and somebody needs to just completely eradicate their previous social ties." 

"...why don't you just arrest the stalker or whatever."

"We...do? But sometimes the victim is that badly traumatized or afraid that the reform program will let them out before they're really ready and they'll relapse."

"Huh. Okay."

"It's really really not common, the Department of Lifestyle Circumstances handles a lot more stuff than just that." 

"Then I guess we can see what they say about me and Catherine."

"I guess so!" She puts the tinynet down. "I suppose I'm your host in the meantime...do you want to prioritize learning our alphabet?"

"I guess that's probably a good idea."

She writes it down and starts pointing at different letters and assigning phonemes. 

It's not the most fun Rebecca has ever had but oh well.

Peressa is occasionally distracted by how adorable the baby is. 

Yes, she's a VERY adorable baby, isn't she just. Since Peressa has claimed not to be a kidnapper and all she may hold the very adorable baby if she likes.

Aww! Awww! Peressa would definitely like! She is very careful and occasionally glances up at Rebecca to make sure she isn't overstepping anything. 

It gives Rebecca's arms a break! She will try to learn this here alphabet.

Peressa helps despite being slightly hindered in pointing at things by this adorable armful of BABY. 

Eventually she hands the baby back and checks her tinynet. "You have an appointment with a social worker tomorrow at the fourteenth hour," she reports. 

"The fourteenth hour from when?"

"Oh, uh, midnight."

So like... two in the afternoon. "Okay."

"What do people count from in your world?"

"Also midnight. But the numbers roll over at noon."

"Oh huh. I know at least one culture that does units of twelve but their units are twice as long as an hour."

"People say twenty four hour time makes more sense but I'm just not used to it."

"Sure, cultural inertia, happens all the time. Nobody except tiny splinter groups speaks any of the conlangs designed to be efficient and even they generally speak something else too I think."

"Yeah, there you go."

Peressa makes dinner (stir-fry over rice; the stir fry contains some kind of spice blend Rebecca doesn't recognize, mushrooms, vegetables, and more Mysterious Meat) and offers Rebecca and Catherine the use of some spare pajamas and does Rebecca want, I don't know, calcium supplements? Milk has calcium in it so maybe a breastfeeding mother would want those? Peressa has not done that much research into postpartum nutrition. 

"I had some supplements I was taking but I don't know if calcium was in there specifically. It can't hurt probably?"

Peressa makes a note for the social worker to look into postpartum supplements and lends Rebecca her calcium supplements and general-purpose multivitamin on the grounds that that also can't hurt. "And I have iron supplements but I mostly just take those when I'm bleeding or going to donate blood but if you want them they're in the grey bottle."

"I think these'll do me." Nom.

Peressa retires to the couch again. In the morning there is the sound of sizzling and the smell of some kind of sausage. 

Rebecca and baby again sleep intermittently and rise late. Mmm, sausage.

The sausage continues to be less than identifiable but this is less remarkable in sausage form. The sausages go on bread with a slice of something that looks sort of like egg white and a thinner slice of something that looks sort of like egg yolk and some kind of sauce. 

"What is all this?" she asks after she's had some.

"Sausage and egg and, uh," she looks something up on her tinynet. "Fish and things sauce." 

"What kind of sausage and egg though. It's not like the kind we have."

"Duck sausage, ostrich egg."

"Wow! Okay. It's pretty good." Nom. "I think sausage at home is pork usually and the eggs are always chicken."

"Always? Why?"

"I dunno. Maybe you can get some other kinds some places but it'd be weird. I never heard of people eating ostrich eggs."

"Huh. Maybe nobody domesticated ostriches. We only eat eggs from domestic birds."

"I think ostriches aren't domesticated, yeah, they just run around in Africa and... kick things?"

"Ostriches kick," she says agreeably. "Eggs are very nice but there's more variety in meat, but of course not every meat tastes good in sausage."

"Yeah, duck sausage is less weird. Still not usual but not weird."

"Ostrich egg is convenient, though. The eggs are very big."

"That seems... less convenient."

"How would it be less convenient? There's more food in one package."

"Well, yeah, so if you can't eat that much at once the rest goes bad."

"Hard-boiled egg doesn't go bad very fast."

"I guess if you eat it every day and like them boiled it works."

"I keep it in the freezer if it's going to go bad otherwise."

"You can freeze eggs? I didn't think that would work."

"...It works for me, but I've been known to have more permissive tastes than some people," she allows. "I don't know how well it works in the general case."

"Well, this is all tasty," she says. Omf nomf breastfeeding is hungry work.

"Thanks! I don't cook much but I can throw things together."

"Me too pretty much."

Two o'clock comes around. Her appointment is, it turns out, a remote one; Peressa sits her in a very comfy chair in front of her computer-thing and opens a zoom-like video chatting app and puts up subtitles and routes them through her machine translation app. 

"This is pretty neat."

"Which thing?"

"The translation doing subtitles on the video call."

"Oh! Yeah, it's an accessibility feature. Some people turn it off because they've had too many teenage boys turning every other word into 'fart' or something."

"Pfft."

Okay who is this appointment with.

The window flickers on as the social worker logs on. 

"Hi! I have been told that you're apparently from an alternate universe and there's linguistic evidence to back it up. My superiors are still assessing the evidence, but at least for the moment, we'll assume it's true. How are you doing?"

"Surprisingly okay, I guess? I'm going to miss people but at least my baby is here."

"What are the circumstances under which you came to have a baby? Please understand, I don't say this out of any concern that you might be an unfit caretaker, but most people who have children as young as you have some kind of problem, and if you have one of those problems, I want to help you."

"I don't have the problem anymore, he's back in my world with everyone else I've ever met, but how long do you people wait?"

"Twenties or thirties, usually. In your universe, do people not get fitted with contraceptive implants as a matter of course?"

"I think maybe they do that in Canada, because Canadians are loons who have a TFR of like negative two or something?"

"'TFR' isn't translating, could you rephrase that?"

"The F stands for fertility but I forget the rest of it. It's a number that says how many babies you're managing to have but I don't know if it can actually be negative even if you let people have abortions which I think Canada also does."

"You're saying they have a reproduction rate below replacement?"

"Yeah, they won't let anybody have a baby till they're like 21!"

"Having a child younger than that isn't illegal here but it isn't encouraged and most people choose to wait. People tend to want enough children, on average, for starting later than biologically feasible not to be a problem."

"Well yeah but -

- OH I get it you don't have bitoxiphosphene here!"

"...'Bitoxiphosphene' isn't translating either."

"It's this chemical that people used a lot of that turns out to wreck women's reproductive systems, but it does it, like, over time, so a lot of girls can have kids when they're fifteen and not when they're twenty, or whatever."

"Oh dear. I'm sorry to hear that--do you know anything about its chemical structure?"

"Nnnnnnot so much. I think it has a circle part and then something sticking out like -" She gestures. "But I don't think I could draw it or say what's in it."

"Okay. Does it collect more in some parts of the body than others? Do you object to doctors taking a blood sample to see if they can identify it?"

"Ugh I hate needles but if you have that thing that lets you get lots of vials from one draw they can have some next time I need bloodwork for something else I guess. It mostly only hits the human female reproductive organs, not animals or, uh, lungs or anything."

"Okay. Thanks, I'll write that down. Can you tell me about your education so far?"

"I'm in high school."

"The individual words translated but the concept did not."

"I'm in... the school that people my age are usually in?"

"--Okay, but I'm not assuming that what that looks like is the same in your universe as it is here."

"I have... math and seminary and English and history and chemistry and choir?"

"Seminary isn't translating. Can you say what kind of math you were learning? Where you were at in chemistry?"

"We were doing the thing where you figure out how much of each thing you have to add so there aren't any leftovers in a reaction... and geometry... and seminary is where we study Scripture."

"'Scripture' also isn't translating."

"...books about God?"

"Oh, religion."

"Yeah!"

"Comparative religions, or just yours in particular?"

"I mean, most people consider the Bible scripture but we have other ones too."

"Sorry, that didn't come through quite right, can you rephrase?"

"...I'm a Mormon, Mormons have as scripture the Bible and the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price and Doctrine and Covenants. Most religions agree on the Bible but not the other parts."

"Most, really? That's interesting."

"...I mean I don't know very exactly how many but I know more that do than that don't."

"Fair enough. What do you want to do for a living? Give me an ambitious answer and a practical one."

"I want to be a singer but if that doesn't work out I was probably going to be a nurse or something? I don't know if you need as many nurses without bitoxiphosphene though."

"It's a lot more necessary than it is pleasant. It's a very practical job plan. What kind of living arrangement do you prefer?"

"I'd been living with my foster parents but like ideally one day I'd get married and live with my husband."

Nod. "I'm looking into public housing you can be placed in for the moment--we can't give you your foster parents, I'm sorry to say; if you really wanted to marry immediately you could probably manage it but in general one gets better results by being a bit picky. But I can get you a solo apartment or something with more internally shared space."

"It's probably going to be impossible to marry somebody who is also a Mormon, isn't it. Uh shared space might be good if people'd want turns with the baby?"

"Yes, that's the sort of thing I was thinking of. People shouldn't have to raise children alone. Do you want something temporary or do you want to be matched with an eye to long-term alloparenting."

"How does that... work... here? That sounds like that weird thing Cascadians do instead of getting married..."

"An alloparent is a platonic companion who helps rear a child. Lots of couples will move in with another couple and raise their children communally, with only one couple having an infant at a time so as to double the labor available for caring for each child."

"I guess that might be cool once I'm married but I'm not."

"Are you on any medications we should be figuring out how to replace?"

"Just painkillers and I can probably do without."

"No postpartum depression, no anxiety worth treating?"

"Yeah."

"That happens to be very convenient right now. Don't hesitate to reach out if that happens to change." Type type. "Alright, I'm going to get you set up with an online assistance account, and we can start off by finding you a housing assignment and a language tutor, with an eye to testing into an educational program once you're sufficiently competent in the language, does that sound alright? Remember that it's fine to say no."

"I don't see why I'd say no? That sounds fine? What else would I do?"

"You might have some other idea that I hadn't thought of, or you might find it important to clarify some detail before I actually started doing anything, or there might be some other reason to say no. It's important to have social support for not just going along with whoever seems like they know what they're doing if you have a reason not to."

"Okay. I don't think I have to clarify anything particularly."