A person appears in the corner, off-balance enough that she immediately topples over and lands heavily on the floor. "Owww," she complains, rubbing the back of her head.

"Hey!" says the bartender. "Who are you? We're not open. You have to leave."

"I hit my head! That's bad! My brain is in there!"

She sits up, still prodding gingerly at the incipient bruise.

"My name is Bird. I didn't come here on purpose. How do I leave? ...and how am I speaking this language all of a sudden?"

"Oh, you're lost? You can go out the side door there, the front door will be locked till the bouncer gets here." Bartender points. "Most people learn English from their parents."

"Thank you!" she says, climbing unsteadily to her feet. Her clothes are very weird, sort of a Vaguely Medieval Rags situation, and very brightly coloured. "I didn't learn English from my parents because I didn't have any. Maybe whatever made me suddenly be here instead of in a cave also made me suddenly speak English."

She heads toward the side door, picking her way carefully across the floor in hopes of avoiding another tumble.

The bartender isn't really paying attention. The floor is level and will not try to trip her. The side door leads to an alley with trash bins in it which further leads to a street with cars and pedestrians.

Whoa! Cars are really startling!! They go so fast!!!

She turns to the nearest pedestrian and points at the nearest fast-moving vehicle and says urgently, "What's that??"

"That's a Toyota Camry," he replies, squinting at it, and then he continues on his way.

But what's a Toyota Camry??? Do the fast things come in kinds?

"I'M REALLY CONFUSED," she yells at the universe in general.

"Well you don't have to shout about it!" shouts a guy who is piling fruit up in a display in front of a little grocery store.

"I know! I shouted because I thought it would make me feel better! I'm not sure if it worked or not!"

She picks a random direction and starts walking along the sidewalk. Soon she comes to a corner, where there is clearly some sort of system for determining when it is safe to brave the street where the fast things go but she has no idea how it works and there isn't anyone waiting on her same corner to ask. She turns to continue along contiguous sidewalk instead, and at the next street corner there's a person waiting.

"How does crossing the street work?" she asks them.

"You go when that light turns from a red hand to a white silhouette and then you cross in the crosswalk," says the lady with the stroller. "You can also just go wherever and whenever it doesn't look like there are any cars but if my husband found out I did that with the baby along he'd be really freaked out and yell at me, so I'm waiting."

"...and that light is the relevant one because it's the one that's in the direction I want to go?" she guesses. "Okay, thank you."

Then she fully processes the rest of what the lady said and its implications regarding the contents of the stroller, and starts bouncing excitedly. "—oh! Is that a human baby? I've never seen a human baby before! Can I touch it?"

"No, if she wakes up again I might shake her and then she'd die," says the woman.

"Oh no!" she says, much more quietly. "Okay, I won't bother her then. Good luck not murdering your child!"

The light changes and she squints at it to verify that the situation matches the instructions she was given and then starts walking across the street.

Now she is across the street! So is stroller lady.

Hmm, people around these parts seem to share the apparently-nigh-universal human property of not wanting to continue interacting with her for very long, but stroller lady hasn't outright told her to go away yet so maybe she can venture one more important question. "Have you ever heard of someone suddenly learning English when they didn't speak it a minute ago? It happened to me earlier and it was very strange."

"No, I've never heard of that. I don't know how that happened to you."

"Do you know who I should ask if I want to figure it out?"

"I guess you could try a neurologist?"

"What's a neurologist? Where would I find one?"

"Neurologists are a kind of doctor that specialize in brains. I don't know where to find one, I've never needed a neurologist."

"Well, if you did need one, where's the first place you would look?"

"I'd ask my regular doctor for a referral. Or I'd try the phone book."

"I don't have a regular doctor because I haven't been a human for very long. What's the phone book, where is it?"

"I don't have one with me but they get delivered now and then to all the houses."

"Okay!"

That seems like enough to be going on with and she doesn't want to push her luck too badly on the length of this interaction. She says "thank you!" again on general principle and turns in a different direction at the next corner. Now, which of the buildings in view looks most plausibly like a house...

They're all houses on this block!

She picks the most interestingly decorated one in sight that she can get to without crossing a street first, and marches up to the front door and knocks.

This one has lawn flamingos and gnomes and six windchimes and a pinwheel! The occupant is an older lady in a pink dress that doesn't fit her very well. "I'm annoyed you interrupted me because now I think you're going to take up enough of my time that my tea will oversteep," she says.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" she says. "I'm looking for a phone book so I can find a neurologist so I can get an explanation of how I learned English today. Do you have one and can I borrow it and will that take enough time that your tea oversteeps first?"

"It'll be okay if I'm quick. I'll go get it. Just leave it on the doorstep when you're done with it, don't knock again." She goes and gets a big floppy book and hands it to Bird and closes the door.

Now she has a book! She opens the book and tries to figure out how to find a neurologist in it.

This isn't immediately obvious if you haven't been exposed to the concept of phone books before but if she comes up with the plan of checking in the section sorted by profession and looking under N she can find some.

She tries skimming from the front and then she tries flipping through at random and then she notices that the section she just flipped into appears to be sorted by profession and then she skims through professions until she finds Neurologist and then she has some information about neurologists! What information does she have?

She has their names and addresses and phone numbers!

Well, this lady told her not to knock again, so after carefully memorizing the names and addresses and phone numbers of some neurologists, she puts the book where she was told to and examines her surroundings to try to figure out how this information applies to them. She has encountered the concept of named streets before, and she does notice that the houses all have numbers on them, which allows her to form a tentative hypothesis although she isn't sure how phone numbers fit into it. Maybe if she keeps walking she will either recognize a neurologist-related cross street, or find a person whom she can ask for directions.

She will find a neurologist-related cross street after some tromping, and if she then examines the numbers, she can even find the office! With more tromping. A lot of it. But there's the sign that says "Leigh Ledecky, M.D., Neurology".

And does this office contain a human—or whatever, she's not picky, though this seems to be a human town—and is that human (or whatever) a neurologist?

The office contains a receptionist! "Wow, I'm really hung over and wish you hadn't walked in," groans the receptionist. "How can I help you?"

"I'm sorry about your hangover!" she says. "I heard I should talk to a neurologist if I want to find out how I learned English very suddenly earlier today. Is there a neurologist here?"

"Dr. Ledecky is a neurologist. You need an appointment to see her."

"Okay. How do I get an appointment?"

"I can make one for you... let's see... Tuesday afternoon?"

"When is Tuesday afternoon compared to now?"

"It's in four days and two hours."

"How many hours are in a day?" She thinks she knows this one but it's probably a good idea to check.

"Twenty-four."

"Hmm. I will need to eat and sleep between now and Tuesday afternoon. Do you know where a good place would be to find food and shelter?"

"If you don't already have any you could try to find a homeless shelter. I'm uncomfortable with homeless people and expect you won't be able to pay for your appointment so I'm going to un-reserve that time slot now."

"Oh! Paying for things! With money! I have a money!" She digs around in her pockets and triumphantly produces a single silver coin. "...Probably this is not enough money to pay for an appointment. I didn't know I needed to pay for those. If I want more money, how should I obtain it?"

"You should get a job. There might be signs in windows saying who's hiring."

"Okay!" She puts her coin away. "I will find a job and a home and come back when I have both so I don't make you uncomfortable. How much money will I need to pay for an appointment?"

"Five hundred dollars unless you have insurance in which case it's actually a lot more but the insurance pays most of it. We only take these kinds." She taps a sign on the wall. "The paperwork to start taking a new kind is horrendous and the only reason to do it would be to get more patients, and Dr. Ledecky has plenty already."

"I don't have insurance! I will come back when I have five hundred dollars and am not homeless. Unless I find another neurologist first. Thanks for your help, goodbye!"

Off she trots to see if she can find any signs in windows about people hiring for jobs.

The grocery store is hiring, and a temp agency, and a bar!

She isn't sure what any of those things are but she can inquire within one by one as she encounters them. Grocery store first.

The grocery store appears to sell food! It's not immediately obvious where to go for a job as opposed to where to go for food (any of these aisles).

She looks up and down the aisles for anyone who pattern-matches to the receptionist (staying in one place waiting for petitioners to approach), as opposed to looking more like they're here to find food (wandering the aisles like she is).

There are a bunch of people staying in one place waiting for petitioners to approach, ringing up groceries! They're all wearing matching aprons.

She looks for the one with the shortest line and waits in it.

When she gets to the front, she says, "I'm not here for food right now, I'm looking for a job and the sign said hiring but it didn't say who to talk to so I'm guessing."

"I'm annoyed that you were in line in front of me," volunteers the person behind her.

"You should talk to the people at that desk," says the cashier, pointing at a desk labeled CUSTOMER SERVICE.

"Sorry!" she says to the person behind her, and "thank you!" to the cashier, and then she goes over to the Customer Service desk. It's even more receptionist-pattern-matching than the cashiers, but it seems to be a little more out-of-the-way, which might explain why she didn't see it at first.

"Hello!" she says to Customer Service. "The sign outside said Hiring and the person over there said you are the people to talk to about the sign."

"We are!" says Customer Service. Her nametag says TRICIA. "Do you want to interview right now?"

"Sure! What does interviewing consist of?"

"You just fill out this form here and then I'll ask you a couple questions." Form! It wants her name and address and phone number and to know if she has ever committed any crimes and whether she expects she can carry out various grocery store related tasks such as lifting heavy objects.

Her name is Bird and she doesn't have an address or a phone number and she doesn't think she has committed any crimes but can't be sure because she doesn't know the local laws (she scribbles marginalia accordingly) and she totally does expect she can lift heavy objects!

Customer Service beholds this. "You didn't write in your address or phone number."

"I don't have those! I am looking for a job because I want money so that I can afford a home and some other things. I'm not actually sure what a phone is but maybe when I have money I will get one."

"People who don't have a home smell bad after a while because they don't shower or do laundry enough," says Customer Service. "I can't hire you if you're going to smell bad."

"I think I smell normal for a human! I'm not sure though. It hadn't occurred to me to wonder." She wrinkles her nose thoughtfully. "How do people without homes get them, if a job isn't the answer?"

"I think some jobs probably care less if you smell bad, or you could get a gym membership and shower there. The Gold's Gym is doing a promotion where you get the first month of membership free but then they automatically charge you. If you do that and have a place to do laundry too I can hire you."

"I think I can manage that!" she says, envisioning washing her clothes in the same place where she bathes. "Where is the Gold's Gym? I will go there and get a membership and come back."

"It's that way til Water Street and then you turn left."

"Okay, thank you!" And she's off. This endeavour sure has a lot of steps.

There's Gold's Gym!

And what, inside of Gold's Gym, pattern-matches to the receptionist/Customer Service archetype?

This guy at this desk over here fidgeting with a resistance band! "Hi!" he says. "Wow, you're really hot. Do you want to go to a nice restaurant on me and then have sex?"

"—ooh!" she says, bouncing excitedly. "Do you have a human penis? Will you show it to me? I want to see one!!! —oh, but I have important things to do first. I need to get a free Gold's Gym membership so I can have somewhere to shower so I won't smell bad so the grocery store will hire me! After that I can do other things."

"I do and I will! I need to put a credit card for you on file for the membership."

"I don't have a credit card and I don't know how to get one and I'm a little worried that it'll be difficult because things keep turning out to have more steps than they looked like they would!"

"Oh. Well, if you just need a shower you can shower at my place every time you have sex with me!"

"...could I live at your place? Then I would have a home and I would not be homeless and the Customer Service person at the grocery store would not be worried about me smelling bad! Also, what's a credit card?"

"You can live at my place if we're regularly having sex and you're not awful to live with! A credit card is like this." He produces his.

She peers intently at the credit card. "What is it for? Why do I need one to get a gym membership?"

"It lets you pay for things with your bank account instead of cash. The gym membership is only free for the first month if we can charge you later because that's how we make money, but people are more likely to try it if it's not going to cost anything right away."

"That makes sense. Okay! What is your address so I can tell it to Customer Service at the grocery store?"

"It's 55 Maple Street but I kind of want to have sex first before I let you use my address," he says. "If you're in a hurry we could lock ourselves in the family restroom."

"Hmm... okay," she says, a little reluctantly but not without excitement. Human penis!!! They're so mysterious! People she has met before now have been inexplicably reluctant to show them to her!

This guy is not reluctant to show his to her! Once they are in the family restroom there it is!

She is so very earnestly delighted by his human penis. It's a funny shape and a pleasant texture and it responds to environmental conditions in interesting ways!

Having sex with Bird may turn out to be a slightly surreal, but on the whole enjoyable, experience.

"That was good," he tells her. "I especially like the thing where you were so excited to see it, that made me feel good about myself. You can go ahead and tell people you live at 55 Maple Street."

"It was very exciting to see! I will go ahead and tell people that. Probably I will see you again either here or at our house later today! Goodbye!"

Triumphant return to the grocery store!

The grocery store clerk will hire her when she provides an address as long as she assures them she'll get a phone number from her new boyfriend in the next few days! She can go shadow Kelly at the deli counter, who has been asking for an assistant.

"Hello, Kelly at the deli counter! I don't know very much about grocery stores but it seems like it will be interesting to learn!"

"You're really chipper and that makes me wistful about no longer being young," says Kelly.

"I don't want a pound of bologna because I think it's disgusting and my wife likes to fry it which smells horrendous but it's on my list and I will pay for it," says a man on the other side of the counter, and Bird can watch Kelly slice some bologna.

"I haven't been a human for very long and so far I am enjoying it a lot!!" she says agreeably to Kelly.

When the man orders his bologna, she tells him with earnest sympathy, "I hope you also buy some food that you enjoy!"

"Nah, she'd catch me if I got Pepsi," he says glumly. Off he goes.

Bird can learn by observation how to handle slicing machines and the scales and how to wrap things up sanitarily.

Humans do such tasks and they do them in such ways! She's very chipper about this.

At some point during the day the manager comes by with an apron and temporary nametag for her and says he'll take the cost out of her first paycheck, which she will get next Friday, and he shows her the schedule, which has her coming in from eight to three every day.

Seems reasonable! Though she might like to have a day off eventually. For adventures.

Sure, she just needs to get someone to cover her shift.

Okay then.

She is now in possession of A Job! This is good. This will result in money, which is also good. She is very diligent about doing Job Tasks up until the point where her shift ends and she can go back to the gym to find her boyfriend and perhaps ask him his name.

His name is Keith! He is very happy to see her! He will drive her to his place, which has no sheets on the bed and shelves made out of milk crates and kind of a lot of pizza boxes halfheartedly stacked in a corner, but does have a real shower in it that works. If she doesn't know how to use it Keith will get in with her and help while talking about how he's kind of embarrassed about the state of his apartment but now that he has a girlfriend who is so pretty and willing to touch his dick he will probably try a little harder for at least a week until he forgets and fails to establish new habits.

She does indeed need help using the shower. She is pleased to receive said help from Keith and his human penis.

"Do you want me to encourage you to establish new habits? I don't think I've ever done that before but I can try!"

"Maybe that will help! I don't know but it sounds worth a try!" He kisses her.

Kisses! What a fascinating human activity!! She has so much to learn from her new boyfriend. She's not totally sure what a boyfriend is but apparently she has one and it's pretty neat so far.

Next time she sees the person who gave her the apron she should ask how much money will be in her paycheck. And maybe what a paycheck is and how to interface with one? Actually she can probably ask Keith that right now. Mid-kiss, she pauses thoughtfully and says, "What is a paycheck and how do they work? Are they related to credit cards?"

"A paycheck is what you get for doing your job, it's money. You can put it in a bank account and then you can use your bank account to pay the bill for your credit card."

"So I should get a bank account," she concludes. "How do I do that?"

"You go to a bank with your paycheck and say you want to open an account and deposit it and then they might have other stuff you need to do like forms to fill out."

"Okay. I hope they will not need me to fill out too many forms or have too many other unexpected requirements like the thing where I needed to have a home before I could get a job or a neurologist appointment." But she is satisfied that probably it will be okay.

She kisses him again. Kissing: a very good human activity.

Oh good!!!

He orders pizza for dinner.

Pizza is a NOVEL AND EXCITING EXPERIENCE which will prompt MANY BOUNCES.

"Beimf humam if fo goog!!" she enthuses half-intelligibly around a mouthful of pizza, which she then swallows so she can enthuse at greater length. "I love human faces and human voices and human clothes and human foods!!! And your human penis!!!" And human KISSES which she will now DEMONSTRATE on his FACE.

Keith is 100% on board with this plan. What a good kissable gropeable girlfriend who is excited about pizza and his dick!

She IS, she is SO excited about pizza and his dick!!!

After dinner, possibly guest starring another appearance of his dick, he wants to run out and buy sheets! Does Bird want to come?

Yes! That sounds like a fun and novel human activity!

"I feel lots of pleasant human emotions about you!" she informs him as they head out. "It's really nice!"

"I like you a lot! Possibly more than anyone I have met before, even my mom! I knew getting laid would be important to my self-esteem and mental health but it turns out it's a much bigger deal than I knew!" says Keith.

"Aww! I'm really happy that I contributed positively to your self-esteem and mental health!" She extrapolates from the concept of kissing a little and affectionately bumps her cheek against his cheek.

This makes him giggle and kiss her again. Somebody yells, "You look happy and attractive and it makes me jealous and I'm probably going to masturbate about it later!

Bird yells back at them, "I hope you have fun!"

"I will but only until I get off and then I will be consumed with self-loathing and eat an unwise amount of ice cream!" snaps the yelling person.

"I'm sorry!" she says. "I wish I could help with that but I don't think I can!"

At the store there are many kinds of sheet to choose from! Keith has basically no opinions and if she doesn't either he will buy the cheapest kind.

She wants to touch all the kinds of sheets and then after doing some quick math in her head she points at an option in the lower-middle of the price range and says, "That one is the best amount of good to touch for the amount of money it is. And it's a pretty shade of blue."

"Okay!" says Keith. He buys them. She can see his credit card in action.

This is useful knowledge to have! When the transaction is complete, she kisses him again.

"Your public display of affection irritates and disgusts me," says the cashier in a bored tone.

"I think you'll feel better when you meet someone who wants to touch your dick!" says Keith brightly, and he and Bird and sheets can go home and sheets can go on the bed.

As they are putting the sheets on the bed, Bird speculates, "Would that person feel better if I touched his dick?"

"Well, probably, but it'd make me really upset."

"Oh!" she says, surprised and perplexed. "Why?"

"Well, it makes me feel really happy and special that you want to touch my dick and it wouldn't feel very special if you wanted to touch lots of people's dicks."

"Well, when I first touched your dick I was mostly interested in it because I'd never seen one before, but now I know you and I feel all these pleasant human emotions about you, and I care more about making you happy than about making strangers happy. So I probably won't touch that guy's dick. But I'm a little sad about it because it turns out that making people happy feels really nice and I like doing it. I guess there are lots of ways to make people happy besides touching their dicks."

"Yeah, most people only touch one person's dick. Or two if they're queer. You could bake people cupcakes or something."

"Cupcakes?" she says, perking up. "What are those?"

"They're like cakes, only little! They're sweet."

"I want to learn how to bake cupcakes!"

"Well, we can go to the grocery store on my next day off and get cupcake stuff. I think there's usually recipes on boxes of cake mix."

Happy little bounces.

"Awww you're so cute!" Kiss.

Bouncy kisses!!!

He will tuck them in for the night when sleepy and kiss her goodnight and sleep with his arm over her.

So much cozier than sleeping in a cave!

In the morning, the first thing she says is, "How do I know what time it is?"

"You look at a clock. Like, I have one over there." He points at a clock. It says it's 7:30. "I think I would have an especially good day at work if you sucked my dick first."

"Okay!"

She does that, and snuggles him, and then gets her apron and her nametag and makes her way to her Job, where at the earliest opportunity she will ask how much money is in her paycheck.

It's nine dollars and fifty cents an hour!

Neat! If she understands the situation correctly, she will have five hundred dollars within a week!

"Actually a lot of that goes to taxes. We automatically take those out of your paycheck, which you could consider a favor since it makes it less likely you'll surprisingly owe thousands of dollars on tax day, or you could consider it an inconvenience because it means you have less money on hand in the short term, but we do it whether you want us to or not. And then there's the apron money but that's less than taxes."

"Well, accounting for taxes, how much is it?"

He gives her a number that makes sense in light of Fractious States tax law.

This will get her to five hundred dollars rather slower than the other way. Perhaps she should look into other neurologists to see if they want less money.

"I'm kind of alarmed to discover that we have hired a deli counter girl who needs a neurologist," says her boss, but he sends her off to work.

"It's because I want to understand how I learned English spontaneously the other day!" she explains, and she goes cheerfully to the deli counter to do her job.

Her job involves a lot of meat and cheese and weighing things and packaging things! Some people express attraction to her or spontaneously mope at her about their various personal drama:

- "My son never calls me and it would be better for my self-image if that were genuinely completely baffling but I actually think it might be because I was a terrible mother to him and don't feel capable of change."
- "I'm getting married next week! At the time of the proposal I thought of it as settling but I've gotten to like her more since then."
- "Wow, I really want to see your breasts. You should probably not take that as much of a compliment, it's true of nearly every woman I see."
- "I don't know the difference between provolone and meunster and I'm worried this betrays some fundamental lack of discernment in me."
- "I'm really overwhelmed and upset that you're out of the kind of roast beef I like! I was relying on that roast beef for my day to go as planned and now it's not and I'm maybe going to cry!"
- "You're not Kelly. I have a parasocial relationship with Kelly because I restock the employee fridge with stuff from here every day and I resent that you're not her."
- "Your nametag says Bird! That's an unusual name and makes me wistful about having been named something more interesting than Lisa."
- "Your hair is beautiful. If I find any of it in my turkey I will sue this store."

She expresses sympathy to people who are having a hard time and happiness to people who are having a good time and also has some other responses.

"Don't worry, I don't know the difference either!"

"I picked my name myself! I like birds because they don't live in caves or eat brains!"

"I am reasonably sure there is none of my hair in your turkey! I like having hair. It's pretty and nice to touch."

Everyone finds this basically unremarkable as a way for her to behave, though Kelly does offer Bird samples of provolone and meunster so she can experience the distinction.

This is a very interesting distinction and deserving of focused attention!

"The first time I tasted cheese," she muses once the ritual is complete, "I tried to eat the entire rest of the wheel of cheese because it tasted so fascinating. That turned out to be a bad idea. I ate too much cheese and made myself sick."

"One time I did that with ice cream when my parents left me alone in the house long enough that I went shopping," Kelly nods.

"What is it like to have parents?"

"I like it okay but sometimes my dad gets on my back about not giving him grandkids."

"Oh! Grandchildren! I hadn't thought about those! That must be interesting. I don't think I want kids myself. Making an entire person seems like a lot of responsibility."

"I just didn't want to be pregnant. It sounds really unpleasant. And I don't have a husband anyhow."

"Oh, is being pregnant usually unpleasant? I didn't know. I haven't heard very much about it."

"Some people don't mind it but some people get awful complications! And they get huge. I don't want to be huge. It's hard enough staying under two hundred pounds as it is."

"Is staying under two hundred pounds important?"

"It's a big round number and that makes me feel like it's a more important threshold than going from one eighty seven to one eighty eight."

"I thought I heard that bigger humans were better off because they have more food and can survive lean times more easily, but maybe I am confused!"

"Oh, I think that was true back when there were more lean times. Now, well. Here we are in a grocery store!" She gestures at the food all around them.

"This grocery store does have more human food in it than I had ever seen in my entire life before I appeared in this town, but I hadn't seen very many human settlements before then so I wasn't sure how normal that is!"

"It's a big store!" agrees Kelly, handing somebody their deviled eggs and potato salad. "But there are lots of big stores."

"Now I wonder how stores this big stay supplied with food!"

"It comes on trucks from processing plants which get it from farms! If you get an opening shift at some point you can see some of the trucks."

"Neat! I look forward to that!"

"The manager always likes to put new people on shifts in the middle of the day but in a few weeks you can get other hours if you want."

"Probably I will still be here in a few weeks and I can ask for an early shift to look at the trucks!"

"Yup!"

Her shift goes by basically uneventfully. She is entitled to a half hour lunch break and may buy food with an employee discount to be deducted from her next paycheck.

Buying food with an employee discount seems worthwhile on consideration! She does that. It is good to be well-fed. Human bodies do all sorts of inconvenient things when you don't feed them. (They also do some inconvenient things when you do feed them; she takes care of some of those on the parts of her lunch break where she is not eating.)

...the sheer delight involved in Bird eating ice cream for the first time may be slightly alarming to passersby.

"Are you okay?" asks Tim From Produce.

"Ice cream is even better than pizza!!!!!!!!"

"Huh, I think ice cream is kind of overrated. I don't have much of a sweet tooth."

"I wonder what it is like to taste things the way you taste things instead of the way I taste things! The way I taste things makes ice cream better than pizza. Currently. I used to taste things a different way than that but it was worse."

"I guess we'll never know," yawns Tim From Produce.

"I already ended up tasting things differently once! It could happen again," says Bird. "But probably not."

"I used to hate broccoli," nods Tim From Produce. "Now I keep having to stop myself from sneaking a floret while I'm working." He finishes his Dr. Pepper and heads back to Produce.

Bird's lunch break ends and she goes back to work. After work she intends to use her employee discount to buy cake mix, and then perhaps she can learn how to bake cupcakes.

She can buy cake mix! The cake mix also calls for an egg and vegetable oil and recommends adding frosting.

That sounds complicated. She will bring the cake mix home to Keith and ask him which other ingredients and/or tools this project needs and which of those ingredients and/or tools he has already.

Keith kisses her when he gets home! He has eggs and vegetable oil but not a cupcake pan or frosting. They can go back out to the grocery store together for those things and anything else Bird would like to have around to eat!

Bird would like to try many new foods! She will accept recommendations but doesn't want to repeat anything unnecessarily during her first few days with access to a grocery store. (She does express a wistful desire for more ice cream, though. But if she eats ice cream now, it will interfere with her ability to try more different novel foods, and what if one of those is even better! No. She will be strong. Novelty above all.)

Keith will try to help her find new things! He is not a man of particularly refined palate himself but perhaps she will be impressed by canned pineapple and cinnamon bread and storebought garlic knots.

Perhaps she will!! She is excited to try them, at any rate.

They can take home all their groceries and he can put a frozen macaroni and cheese in the oven and try to help her make cupcakes.

Between his broad familiarity with human cultural background and her attentiveness to instructions, they will probably manage a decent batch of cupcakes out of this box of cake mix!

And, once the frozen mac and cheese (solidly pleasant) and the cupcakes (!!!) have been sampled, Bird is going to propose CELEBRATORY POST-CUPCAKE SEX because WOW they did a GOOD.

Keith is super up for this! So to speak!

Yes, that does appear to be the case!

And after celebratory post-cupcake sex, and post-celebratory-post-cupcake-sex cuddles, she requests writing materials with which to draft CUPCAKE PLANS. There were multiple cake mixes in the store! There were multiple frosting options, and other decorative tools and materials into which she did not delve! She is going to be systematic about this! She is going to learn all there is to learn about cupcakes!

Keith can find a beat-up yellow legal pad and a pen with his dentist's office's contact information on it.

This suffices. Bird inscribes PLANS.

...the English alphabet is deeply inadequate and after wasting one page trying to draw up charts and to-do lists in it, she turns the page over and starts inscribing intertwined nests of sharply angular lines with the occasional English word sort of tucked in there like strange ugly fruit sprouting from a very geometric tree.

"Whoa, that's kinda pretty," says Keith.

"Thank you! It's the language I spoke before I was human. I can't pronounce it anymore but I can still write it."

"You spoke... a language before you were human?"

"Yes! Before I was human I was something else. Then a lot of strange things happened and now I'm here."

"What... were you?"

"I can't pronounce the name for us anymore and I don't really know how to translate it into English. We think very differently. I like being human much better because humans feel more feelings and the feelings are nicer."

"I feel kind of weird about the fact that no normal human has ever wanted to touch my dick."

"I don't think I can help you with that. I think even if I had always been a human I would probably not be a very normal one."

"You seemed normal apart from wanting to touch my dick and being really happy up till now!"

"That's really surprising! In my limited experience of humans not many of them seem to think I am normal! I guess it is more usual since I came here. Maybe the humans here are more similar to me than the ones where I was before."

"What were the other ones like?"

"I'm not sure how to describe them! I didn't understand them very well. The humans here are easier to understand. I think the humans here say more about what they're thinking? The other humans didn't usually explain things like why they were in the moods they were in, unless I asked, and sometimes not even then."

"Huh. Well, I'm glad you like being a human. I like that you're a human."

"Being a human is pretty great!"

"Oh good. Where are the the thing you used to be?"

"In a cave, very far away. I don't know exactly where, or how to get back there from here. I'm not sure I could get back there from here. Which might be good, because I don't want to go back there."

"Okay. And the things aren't going to like come here or anything looking for you?"

"I think that's really unlikely! I think I'm much harder to find now than I was when I was closer to them, and they didn't show up looking for me then."

"Okay, cool. I guess that's sad for them if being their thing isn't as good though."

"I think they mostly like it better than I did because they mostly have different priorities than me."

"Oh. Cool." He pets her hair.

She continues planning Cupcake Science.

What new wonders await at work the next day, besides the fact that she's giving all her coworkers cupcakes?

Well, there are customers. "One of the small containers full of potato salad please. The sale of meat is morally reprehensible and I'm better than pretty much everyone I meet."

"Wow, that's a thing to say," she remarks as she fetches potato salad. "I don't really understand about the sale of meat being morally reprehensible but in my experience thinking you're better than someone in that casual sort of way often leads to eating their brains so I'm a little bit concerned right now!"

"Eating someone's brains would be even worse! I had no idea there was enough brain-eating going on to be described as 'often' and am really concerned about that now not only because it could cause an outbreak of prion disease but also because of all the implied murder!"

"Oh, don't worry, I'm nearly sure my native country isn't on this planet," Bird assures her. "And I don't know what a prion disease is but I don't think we got them."

"How did you come to be nearly sure your native country isn't on this planet?"

"Well, first I left home because I didn't want to be there anymore, and then I traveled some distance underground by myself, and then I accidentally became human, and then I found a human settlement where the humans were very different from the ones here, and I already spoke their language a little because there are some humans where I'm from, but the humans in the settlement mostly seemed to not want me around, so I left, and then a very novel thing happened where one moment I was traveling underground again and the next moment I was in a human building in this town, and I discovered that all of a sudden I spoke fluent English, a language which I had not heard of before I arrived. So I think that whatever happened might have transported me a very long way. I'm not confident that I'm in a different universe than I started in, but I'm reasonably confident that I'm on a different planet, because I think if I was on the same planet, this town and the places I'm familiar with from before would have more in common or contain more general awareness that places like each other might exist. I think this town contains very little general awareness that places like my native country and the nearby human settlement might exist, and I think the reverse is also true."

"...why are you working at a grocery store if you're an alien?"

"I was wondering how it was possible that I suddenly knew a language I hadn't before, and I asked some people, and the clearest advice I got was to try asking a neurologist, but the neurologist's receptionist wanted me to have five hundred dollars and a home before I could get an appointment, and I did not have either of those things, so I asked for advice on how to get them, and following the advice led me here."

"Did you tell any of the people you asked for advice that you're from another planet?"

"I was very confused and wasn't sure I was from another planet yet! Being sure I was from another planet took time."

"I think possibly more people would be interested to know about that! But it's possible I'm overestimating most people's interest in things in general, I do that sometimes."

"I am not good at estimating how curious other people are going to be about things because I am more curious than nearly everyone I have ever met."

"Where have you been staying?"

"With Keith! I met him at the gym when I went to try to get a free membership for a month so I could shower and avoid being a smelly homeless person, and he said I could live in his house if I have sex with him, so now he is my boyfriend."

"That was a remarkably irresponsible decision on your part but you don't sound sad about it so hopefully it's working out for you. Does Keith know you are from another planet? Are you human enough to get pregnant from having sex with him?"

"I told him yesterday! I think maybe he has conflicted feelings about it. What was irresponsible about that decision?"

"It's sudden and based on things other than personal compatibility. Plus possibly you could get pregnant, which you seem unlikely to be able to deal with well."

"I think I am really unlikely to get pregnant because of the nature of the magic that turned me human. I don't really have a good point of comparison for how sudden it was but Keith did not seem to mind. I think you might be operating from a confused understanding of my perspective and priorities."

"Yeah, that seems likely both because of you being an alien and because of how this conversation has gone. I would like to talk to you more about you being an alien but not hold up the deli line, can I meet you when you're done with work?"

"Yes! My shift ends at three PM."

"I would appreciate it if you'd meet up with me then but kind of expect you to flake due to base rates." And off she goes with her potato salad.

Well, if the stranger who has not given Bird her name or any contact information shows up at the grocery store again at three PM, Bird will be on the lookout as she leaves work!

Yep, there she is sitting on a bench out front with her twelve-year-old next to her. "Hello!"

"Hello!" says the twelve-year-old.

"Hello! Oh, you have a smaller human! Hello smaller human! What developmental stage are you?"

"I'm twelve! That's preadolescent. I'm in the eighth grade. My name is Elspeth. I think it's cool that you used to be an alien!"

"I also think that's cool! I didn't like being an alien much, but I'm very excited about being human, and I think I appreciate being human more than I would if I'd been born this way because I remember what it was like to be a worse thing. Worse for me, anyway. The other aliens thought being an alien was better but I disagree."

"What kind of alien were you? What was bad about it?"

"Well, we lived in a cave and ate brains and didn't have art or strong emotions. I didn't like eating people's brains because there's people in there and I didn't know what I was missing about art or strong emotions but I did know I was missing something, and I wanted to find out what it was. Also there were the mind-controlled slaves but I feel more conflicted about those because one of the strongest emotions an alien of my kind can feel is the loneliness of not having any mind-controlled slaves and so it makes sense that everyone who could afford one had one because of how much it hurts not to."

"Whoooooa. What a weird kind of alien to be. Why is it lonely to not have mind controlled slaves, why don't you just have friends instead? What did you look like?"

"I could draw what I looked like if I had something to draw on and with but I don't. The loneliness is sort of hard to explain but I'm definitely not any less of that kind of lonely now that I have a boyfriend, I feel happy human feelings about him and they're really nice but the other thing still hurts. Less than it did when I was still an alien, though, so that part is nice!"

"So you are experiencing an alien urge to have mind controlled slaves?"

"Yes!" she says with the same upbeat demeanour as usual. "I don't want to and also can't, though. Or—I guess 'don't want to' is complicated. I would be really excited if someone volunteered but I'd be concerned that they might not understand what they were getting into and I wouldn't want to try it unless they were sure they really wanted to and I was sure they really understood, and I don't think I have the right magic anymore to do the thing properly so I would have to find a way to reinvent that without being able to reference my original biology to do it and I bet that would be really, really hard."

"What do you even do with mind controlled slaves? Is this separate from the brain eating?"

"Mostly separate. Alive slaves are expensive because everyone wants one, and slave brains are usually very bland because it's the depth and variety of experience that gives a brain its flavour, so the people who own a slave usually aren't the ones who end up eating the brain. I've never had one so I'm not sure what it's like, I was really young when I left and I wasn't very good at upholding my society's standards of behaviour so I probably wouldn't have been able to afford a slave for several more centuries."

"How come you weren't good at that?"

"Your species lives centuries?"

"I wasn't good at it because I disagreed with most of my society's priorities! I thought it was sad that we ate people's brains, and I was conflicted about the mind-controlled slaves, and I wanted to go out and live a life with lots of deep and varied experiences myself instead of eating the brains of other people who had, and I thought that even though we were much much smarter than most other kinds of people and lived longer than a lot of them and had mind-control magic, that didn't mean we were better than everyone and should enslave them and eat their brains and also be really condescending about it. —also this language is really bad for answering multiple questions at once, I can't say two different things at the same time. My native language was good for that but I can't pronounce it anymore."

"What are the other kinds of aliens on your planet?"

"There were humans there but they seemed different from the humans here, although the differences were subtle and might have been mostly cultural. There were a lot of other kinds of people that mostly don't have names in English but a bunch of them were pretty similar to humans I think. Just about the only kind of people that my society respected was dragons," she borrows the term from Common, "because they could live as long as we could and often lived longer, and they could be as smart as we were and were sometimes smarter, and they were often much more magically powerful. But I think even though people respected them, they were usually kind of mad about it. My society wasn't very nice."

"It doesn't sound it. How exactly did you determine how smart you were relative to humans? You don't seem like an unusually smart human in casual conversation but I suppose it's possible turning into a human made you stupider."

"We can measure a lot of things about minds with the same magic that lets us control them! I didn't keep all my advantages but I can still think on multiple separate attention tracks, which humans can't ordinarily do, and I seem to think almost as fast as I used to, and be almost as good at doing math, and I am okay with trading a little bit of intelligence for the ability to feel human emotions because human emotions are really really nice."

"Do you know math we as a planet don't?"

"I haven't looked into local math because I'm not especially interested in it but I very well might! My society did know a lot of math that local humans didn't, and I think a lot of people thought humans weren't smart enough to learn some of our math at all, though I'm not sure they were right."

"So was your society really technologically advanced?"

"We had really different technology from this society. It's hard to measure who is more advanced because the priorities were so different. I think so far I like this society better, though. Grocery stores are really neat and as far as I know they don't contain any brains for sale."

"I think you can get monkey brains in some parts of Asia but don't remember where I heard that. Did your society have radios or anything? How about magic, like what transformed you, do you know how to do any of that?"

"All the magic I knew how to do was magic that worked based on alien biology I don't have anymore. It takes a long time to learn the more universal kinds. I know a little bit of magical theory but not very much. I'm not sure what a radio is to know whether we had them, but we did have time travel at one point, and then stopped having it on purpose for complicated reasons, but I think the Elder Brain still knows how to reinvent it if we need it for something."

"The Elder Brain is an astonishingly stupid name! I'm also really curious about the complicated reasons. Do you want to come over to my house for dinner?"

"Hearing you call things stupid for shallow reasons reminds me of my society's inadequate justifications for enslaving people and eating their brains and makes me sad! I would love to come over to your house for dinner, I expect it to involve lots of novel experiences."

"I don't want to enslave anyone or eat their brains and consider my unwillingness to do that one of the many ways in which I am better than most people although I think in that particular respect I am not especially unusual in this day and age! Our car is this way."

"We're not going to have brains for dinner. We're going to have lasagna."

"Lasagna is a novel food so I am very interested to try it!" she says to Elspeth; and to Isabella, "I think your shallow dismissal of perspectives you don't seem to understand could be dangerous in the same way that my society's shallow dismissal of less intelligent species was dangerous, because it enables you to think that other people's well-being and preferences are worth less than your own because you consider them inferior to you! But I'm not sure of that because I am unsure of most things because I am deeply and intensely aware of the vast amounts of context and background information that I'm missing at all times!"

"If you are aware of a perspective from which 'the Elder Brain' is not a stupid name, or observe me making any decisions based on it being a stupid name which may harm people, I invite you to let me know."

"It's an imperfect translation but I have an expectation that most other translations I could have tried would also have sounded stupid to you because you lack the cultural background to understand them in depth and I can't pronounce multiple distinct words at the same time with my human mouth."

"I wanna be able to pronounce multiple distinct words at the same time."

"I want that too! It was really useful and I miss it a lot especially now that I'm in a conversation with two different people at the same time and sometimes get asked several questions in a row and have trouble prioritizing which to answer first and sometimes can't say all of the answers in sequence while taking what I think is probably a reasonable length of conversational turn! Judging lengths of conversational turn is hard."

"How do aliens do it?"

"Both participants in a conversation can be speaking and listening on multiple tracks simultaneously! But even before I left I knew that humans can't speak and listen fluently at the same time, not even with only one track of each."

Bella lets them into the house. "Ned, I have invited an alien over for dinner!"

"She usedta eat brains but doesn't any more!"

"That sounds incredibly concerning even with the last clause!"

"I don't want to go back to eating brains! One of my favourite things about being human is all the brains I'm not eating! Instead I can eat human food which tastes better and has more interesting varieties and doesn't make me sad!"

"Well, the lasagna will come out of the oven in about ten minutes. Where did Bella find you?"

"In the grocery store!"

"She's working at the deli counter. She only recently became confident she is an alien."

"I was always confident I am formerly nonhuman but I only recently became confident I am from a different planet," she clarifies.

"Members of other species from this planet aren't aliens! It would be surprising if we discovered some of them were language-using sapients on or above our level, but I wouldn't call them aliens."

"Are humans from a different planet aliens, or not?"

"It's very weird for there to be humans on another planet and I'm not sure if I want to declare them aliens or not."

"Anyway I think it makes sense that when I was confident of being formerly nonhuman but not confident about whether I was on another planet when I wasn't human, I was uncertain about being an alien in an importantly distinct way than the way I would have been uncertain about being an alien if I had been uncertain about the formerly nonhuman part too."

"I suppose that does make sense."

"Why do you work at a deli counter?"

"When I arrived here I was curious about how I suddenly knew English and the first advice I got was to ask a neurologist and the first neurologist I found had a receptionist who told me I needed money to afford an appointment and a job to get money."

"I... guess that makes sense."

"Are you still planning to get a neurologist appointment?"

"Probably! Why, do you have an alternate suggestion?"

"I don't expect the neurologist to know, since aliens suddenly appearing and knowing English for no clear reason aren't a known phenomenon. Or for that matter non-aliens suddenly knowing English for no clear reason."

"That doesn't sound like an alternate suggestion to me!"

"It's not, but I think the neurologist would be a waste of your money."

"What else do you expect I could do with five hundred dollars that you expect would be worth more to me than a neurologist?"

"Many people find it useful to have savings in case of unexpected eventualities."

"I had no money at all when I first encountered humans, and have yet to encounter a use for money that looks like it will use it up faster than I can make it in the long term, so I think I am content with my current plans unless you have a compelling argument for why I shouldn't be!"

"I mean, I don't have anything against neurologists, you can give one your money if you want, I just think it's not going to help you at all."

"I am also curious about several other aspects of my brain besides the sudden English, since it appears to be capable of some things that human brains normally aren't!"

"I think brain scans probably cost more than a consultation appointment."

"If so, I will learn more about that at the consultation appointment!"

"That's true. I'd offer you a referral but I don't know any neurologists I want to refer people to, I'm the wrong kind of doctor and so's he."

"Which kinds of doctors are you?"

"I'm an epidemiologist."

"I'm an otolaryngological surgeon."

"Those are interestingly shaped words!" she says. "It took me a noticeable amount of time to grasp the meaning of otolaryngological, which has fascinating implications about my Sudden Knowledge of English! I would previously have expected that all the English words I encountered would be ones I either knew immediately or didn't know at all, but this one was neither!"

"Wow, that's really interesting! It has roots which appear in other English words but it is itself fairly obscure."

"I wonder if I derived its meaning etymologically from other known words too quickly to consciously observe the process, or if I have a store of vocabulary knowledge from which the most obscure entries take some time to arrive once I hear them!"

"Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis!" chirps Elspeth helpfully.

Blink. Blink. "...what an incredibly specific word!"

"Doctors have those!"

"I see!"

Ned gets the lasagna out of the oven.

Bird bounces excitedly in anticipation of the lasagna.

She will get to eat some! "I'm self-conscious about not having something home-cooked to offer a guest but we work very long hours and convenience food is important to making that work for us," he remarks as he cuts a square of it for her.

"I know how to cook but only scrambled eggs, potato wedges, and bean soup."

"I'm very excited about novel experiences and this is a novel experience so I think you have fulfilled my needs as a guest very well!"

"Oh good."

"What do brains taste like?"

"The brain-eating-alien sense of taste hs a much narrower range of available sensations than the human sense of taste! There's a dimension of intensity that varies with the breadth and depth of the brain's experiences and the nature of the brain, and a dimension of flavour that varies with the content of the experiences, but if you have eaten both ice cream and pizza you have experienced more flavour variation and viscerally pleasant eating experiences than a brain-eating alien is capable of."

"The poor brain-eating aliens. And also the owners of the brains."

"I agree on both counts!"

"Am I correct in thinking there's no way to reach either set of people?"

"I have no idea how I got here and no knowledge of how to get back, but that doesn't mean a way doesn't exist, just that I don't have access to it."

"Hm. Well, I'd really like to know how but I don't see any obvious way to make progress on the question. You were turned into a human first, right? And spent some time being a human on your planet? Does the planet have a name?"

"I know its name in the brain-eating-alien language that I can't pronounce anymore but it just means approximately 'third planet from local star'. I don't know its name in any other languages."

"What's the closest you can get to pronouncing it?"

"Hmmm..."

She frowns a small frown of concentration, makes some sounds with her mouth that frankly do not sound like they belong in any language at all, then shakes her head. "Sorry, I don't really think there's enough overlap between the way brain-eating aliens naturally speak and the ways humans can speak to make this work. I could make up a name for it? I could... use the word for 'third' in the human language I'm familiar with from that planet? That would be 'Sarn'."

"I guess we can declare Sarn to be its English name, being as we are English speakers."

"That seems reasonable!"

"It's not a very clever name but our planet's name just means 'dirt' so I guess it's consistent!"

"I think there are occasions where simplicity is more important than cleverness and this might be one of them!"

"I don't think clever names are harder to remember or anything. But it doesn't really matter."