"Like if you're new in town, you mean?"

"Yeah, I was thinking about whether I want to keep living in a city where no one is at all like me or move someplace like this and maybe make human friends."

"Well, sometimes people bring stuff to new people who move in next door, and you can join clubs or take classes or meet people online."

"...Huh. Where's online?"

"It's not a place, it's sort of like writing very fast letters?"

"...Is this your world's version of the thing where if you're not too worried about privacy you can talk to anyone anywhere any time?"

"I think it covers most worlds but yeah."

"Convenient." And probably something to ask the people whose job it is to handle first contact about rather than a random glass vendor. "Have a good day," he says, since that's apparently an authentic human conversation-ender.

"You too!"

He heads back to Thelm Ret and the shop he knows to be staffed by people who've familiarized themselves with the inferential distance they're closing and waits for a few other people to be done asking about immortality and terraforming and space travel before asking if there's a guide to the internet.

"There is a very brief localized one, twenty rings, initial reviews suggest it is not especially helpful and a second edition is expected in response to feedback in the next few weeks. If you want an Allspeak installation there's more of a selection and the guides are cheaper, though the installation itself is 55 rings."

...If the one written for his background doesn't cut it the others probably won't either but he'll go ahead and read a cheap one with Allspeak just in case.

The cheap ones are written from the assumption that your society has not invented the computer, which is at least true. It doesn't make allusions to anything Har does have but it starts at an appropriately elementary level.

Well, okay, he can... sort of work with that.

So next he needs a computer. How much for the chip kind?

160 rings.

He can cover that! Even having recently been fired he can cover that, if only because he's counting on there being ten million or so people in the multiverse for every defense mage.

He sits in a tree in a publicly visible park with his computer and goes through the tutorial and then checks if they've got internet here or if he needs to go visit another planet for that.

There is internet, but it's pay as you go (there's an explanation in the popup asking for a code input that in most places it's provided as a public good but locally it seems that there's a lot of interruption to nonmagical wifi, so they're having to supplement with a lot of crystal ball repeaters and those aren't trivial).

If he's going to end up doing a lot of this it's not worth doing it here.

He goes shopping for a tent - they're selling on clearance now, with fabric suddenly absurdly cheap - and asks an illusion mage to enchant his shirt to hide him from scrying and spends an unexpectedly long time haggling over how many rings that should be -

(It turns out the ring is suddenly very unstable. It was threatening to deflate dangerously when it became clear there were suddenly orders of magnitude more people who might ever want to use imperial rings, and then the imperial government started offering approximately-zero-interest loans with extremely lenient penalties for default and now it's inflating, maybe, except no one's particularly sure because it's not clear anymore how to measure it because low-skill magic has always been one of those things, like the price of peaches, that people can treat as having basically unchanging value over time, and now instead of about one in twelve each type of mage is about one in 429,981,696 or something but not quite, even, because force magic's not any more valuable lately and void magic suddenly has value at all...)

- and he ends up trading magic work for it, because defense and illusion are still worth about the same relative to each other. And... he got fired recently so no need to quit, he doesn't especially want to talk to anyone from Anavel Sani again, he doesn't have friends in Thelm Ret...

He changes shirts and spends some time standing outside the alien shop muttering scryably that he should've realized the e-reader would be redundant with the computer and is annoyed about that, and then goes in and trades the rest of his rings for something else and buys more law codes and a pass to go anywhere in Vanda Nossëo and asks how to go about immigrating.

"It depends where you want to immigrate to. Do you plan to have a permanent residence or be an itinerant?"

"I don't know yet. I like Icefalls but I wasn't there very long. I was planning to be there for a while and look up information about other places online and try to make friends and maybe move near them if that worked out, or stay in Icefalls if I like it and they like me. Might also depend on where they have the most work for me."

"Do you want a referral to a job counseling office?"

"I might, depending on how much that costs."

"The referral is free - we have a deal with them - and they charge a small portion of your future earnings if they successfully connect you to a job."

"I'll pass."

He can immigrate as an itinerant and then settle in Icefalls if he winds up wanting to stay in it. He can go to this office just down the block from Edda Station 1 and they'll set him up with a UBI account and unique identification.