"Generally that is taken here to mean 'not shared with other residents'."

"In that case, I don't think I want an apartment on this planet."

"Okay, you can commute to work by bus if you prefer from a residence on Har; do you want help with that or are you familiar enough to manage?"

"I haven't used the buses much."

So the guide can show him how the bus route between here and Har goes.

The bus route isn’t hard to memorize. She gets kind of subdued and sulky about it, though. (Why couldn't the other worlds just be better. Why couldn't there be a place that wants her magic and has basic normal amenities and recognizable conventions around the use of words in advertising?)

"And of course if you later decide you want to hire a Hari mage to address your scrying concerns you can most likely arrange it with the landlord of the apartment."

"I'll probably wait until I've saved enough to hire a legal expert to explain your truth in advertising laws. I got tired in the middle of trying to read all the foreign law codes."

"Perfectly reasonable. Do you want to learn to do shopping near your job site or will you skip that since you're living in Har?"

"Might as well learn."

Here's a Vanda Nossëo grocery store! It's really big and colorful!

"How do they indicate which species will be healthy eating which foods?"

"They have ingredients lists. Particularly common species sometimes have logos with relevant certification lists, but caralendri aren't common here."

"I see."

"You could perhaps ask for accommodations from whoever runs the store if the ingredients lists won't suffice."

"They should for familiar things that aren’t... umbrella terms lumping together different species... I suppose I could also see if there’s a market for a caralendar poison tester."

"There might well be!"

"Is finding that out within scope for the job I've already hired you for?"

"Nope, you hired my agency to find you a job as a void mage."

"I suppose so. Well, what next?"

"Is there anything else you think you might need to succeed at your job?"

"Yes, but - so, I said 'private', and you thought I meant something else, and so I almost purchased something not fit for purpose. And I need to avoid that and the converse but I don't know what I don't know."

"Hm, I think if the thing you are thinking of relies on Hari magic you will need to be much more specific, but I wouldn't expect the same thing to come up with any desiderata that have nothing to do with it. It's possible that there are ingredient list translations that will attempt to render something as an approximate where you needed it to be exact, for your health concerns, so you might want to talk to the grocery store worker about looking up pictures of ingredients that you aren't positive about."

"...I suppose that makes sense."

"Are there other important ways caralendri differ from humans? You have humans on Har, though of course if you have something in common with another populous species that'll make it easier to accommodate."