:I am slightly starting to wish we'd gone with the plan of arriving in the wilderness and camping out for a while until we felt ready to contact the locals!: Leareth is going to find this place so overstimulating. Which does leave Melody very relieved that he asked not to be conscious for the travel over; this is daunting enough without also having to juggle Leareth's emotional state, and she honestly has very little idea how well or poorly he's going to cope. :- It's fine. I'll manage: 

One of the Quendi on Maitimo's staff, who is very tall and, close up, visibly not-exactly human, marches through the Gate and follows Melody to the nearest of the benches pointed out, where he deposits a limp, sleeping Leareth before breaking into a run back to the Gate. 

:Sorry: Vanyel manages, and ducks back across, and the Gate snaps down and vanishes. 

Great. Now what. 

Melody...is maybe just going to sit down on this bench as well and wait to see if anyone approaches her and what they say. 

The lady takes another picture. Taps on her phone a little bit, texting her husband.

"Do you... need an ambulance?" she asks, when she's done with that.

Melody squints at her. :I have no idea what that is, sorry. I– right, I should explain. My name is Melody and this is Leareth and we - came here from a different world, using transport magic called a Gate - what you just saw - because there's a war there and it was too dangerous for him to stay. I think we should probably talk to someone from your local authorities but I confess we did this all in a massive rush and without really having a plan. ...Your world isn't at risk from the war, or, er, not more than it would have been either way, we aren't traceable to here: 

"Uh. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and call an ambulance. In case you have the space flu."

Melody is suddenly feeling very, very tired. :...All right. I appreciate your help. What...is going to happen once you do that. I still don't know what an 'ambulance' is: She could maybe get further if she were reading surface thoughts more thoroughly but she tries not to make a habit of that. 

"They'll show up with a truck and paramedics and take you guys to a hospital. They'll have an iso room." She's typing to emergency services in the process.

This continues to consist significantly of unfamiliar word-concepts flashing by in the woman's surface thoughts too quickly to parse, but Melody is making somewhat more sense of it now. :So like a - wagon? And trained Healers and they'll take us to your equivalent of a House of Healing. Um. Are there likely to be...loud noises involved. Or a lot of people at once. - I'm trying to decide if I should wake Leareth and explain the plan or if I should at all costs not let him wake up until we've arrived wherever it is and can be left in peace and quiet: 

"Sometimes ambulances make loud noises, yeah, if the road's crowded. Is he allergic?"

Is he what. That is also not entirely parsing. Melody frowns, trying to decide how much to say. 

:He, er, had a very bad time of it during the last war in our world, that was a couple of years ago, and he panics or gets scared about a lot of things, still. It's likely to come up for a lot of different things but noise and crowds seemed like obvious ones to check: 

"I don't need his entire medical history, 'he's allergic to loud noises and crowds' is enough for calling an ambulance." She adds to the text.

It turns out that Mindspeech is not an instant solution to speaking totally different languages because Melody still isn't following what that word means. Hopefully whatever is actually being communicated to the Healers responding is accurate and not totally misleading. 

She starts fidgeting with her sleeve, catches herself and tries to stop, and then finds herself instead smoothing down her robes across her lap and twisting the strap of her pack between her fingers and tugging absently at her ear. 

The local considers giving Melody a spare fidget toy and then realizes that her least favorite is now the property of her second daughter. Oh well.

The ambulance, when it arrives, doesn't have its siren on, though it does have flashing lights. The paramedics have full face masks on, and gloves, and they set about putting Leareth on a stretcher.

Melody stares at the ambulance in some amazement. Glances over at the woman, since she doesn't want to distract the Healers. :How...does it move...?: 

Leareth was managing to sleep through someone talking nearby, but it's a lot harder to sleep through being TOUCHED and PICKED UP, which is also an extremely disorienting thing to wake up to, and he has no idea where he is - extending his Othersenses doesn't help with this, Melody is there but other than that everyone nearby is a stranger and there's absolutely no sign of wards or shielding or actually any kind of magic whatsoever, other than his own shield-talisman and Melody's - 

- right, he was expecting to wake up in unfamiliar surroundings, they had that entire conversation before he asked to be sung to sleep. Which means everything is...probably still going according to plan? And next up in the plan is that Melody will handle explaining things to the locals and he just needs to stay calm until something is sorted out. 

Leareth would still intensely prefer that things be going according to a different plan. This plan is stressful. He cannot really do 'stay calm' but he can at least manage holding still. In some sense, holding still is the easiest way to respond. He's not sure he could move even if he wanted to. 

Oh, he's awake. Somewhat non-ideal. 

:Leareth, we're in the other world. Van dropped us off in a city. One of the locals - wanted to call in some Healers to take us somewhere and, er, I think make sure we're not carrying a disease from our world? Other than that, no problems. Would you rather be asleep until we get to wherever we're going?: 

:...No: He is, instead, going to read everyone's mind (a lot more thoroughly than Melody has been doing) to try to form his own sense of what sort of place they're in and what the locals are thinking. 

Woman who called the ambulance: tries for about a second to come up with a concise explanation of electric motors, decides to just fall back on "It goes by electricity," is now trying to recall exactly the circumstances under which she gave her daughter her least favorite fidget. It's not the same one that daughter's been coveting, that one she still has...

Paramedic 1: the iso seems like overkill but he broadly approves of "if somebody wants an ambulance they get an ambulance" as a policy and they did already have iso gear. These do not look like aliens though. They look like folks. Mnemonic for safely transferring onto a stretcher goes like...

Paramedic 2: Guy's not unconscious any more. Does look kind of out of it. Is this lady his wife or his friend or his sister or what? Is she going to come with in the - oh, right, she's supposedly an alien, that's what the iso gear is for. Oh, she should - "Ma'am," he says to the ambulance-caller, "if you think they might have something you should go straight home and hole up in an isolated room of your house, and then we can get you the quarantine reward to keep doing it if they turn out to have something."

Ambulance-caller nods. She can swap rooms with her brother-in-law who lives in the attic, he'd rather have hers anyway and his is inconvenient to get in and out of but ideal if you aren't going anywhere.

So far everyone sounds calm and helpful? Though also it seems like maybe Melody has not, actually, explained very much of the situation to them. This is moderately stressful - what if they don't want to keep being helpful once they have context - but Leareth is not eager to be the one explaining. 

Melody follows them into the ambulance. :Thank you so much for your help: she says to the woman who called the ambulance for them. And to the paramedics, :- er, I think I owe someone a more thorough explanation of why we're here and, um, some of the background, but I can wait until we get to wherever we're going, if that's easier: 

"- whoa, you really are telepathic," breathes Paramedic 1.

"Give us the twelve second version?" says Paramedic 2, as the driver (who is mostly thinking about not hitting anything, and about the music he has on) pulls out of the grocery store parking lot.

Twelve second version, right. :Er, there's a war in the world we're both from, called Velgarth, involving some very powerful gods. Leareth played a key part in winning the last war with a similar enemy, which we won a couple of years ago. So he's especially likely to be a target now, and he was - injured, in the last war, and isn't fully recovered. And for complicated reasons isn't allowed in the place where we're evacuating the rest of the noncombatants. We have magic that can transport people between worlds, and - we don't actually know very much about this one, just that it's inhabited and has cities, but staying here seemed like the safest option. We won't cause any trouble: 

"Gosh," says Paramedic 1. "Uh, I guess we aren't exactly the people you'd go to about that but I'm still curious?"

Paramedic 2 has processed the implications of the telepathy and is now trying desperately not to think about sex and failing.