Company that appears out of nowhere wasn't expecting her either.

Said company looks bewildered, at first, and then spots her and is instead abjectly terrified, curling up on themself - it's kind of hard to tell under the circumstances if that vermilion ponytail belongs to a man or a woman - as small as possible.

"How did you get here?" she asks, taking the gloves from her belt and putting them on. (They're just cloth, not rubber or plastic.)

"I, I don't know, ma'am," he whimpers, still very curled up. "I'm sorry. I don't know. I'm sorry. Ma'am."

"Well, where were you before and do you have enemies?"

"I - I was - in the red district's parking garage - and - not specifically that I know of ma'am."

"This is my estate in Zorvey in southern Rekk - or you might know Rekk as Echai-a or Aruzon. If I have ever heard of the red district's parking garage, I have not heard of it by that name. Where is it?"

"It's - the district in Sasun, Anitam." He risks a glance up at her hair but the light isn't good enough for him to be sure it isn't navy.

"What continent is Anitam on?"

"...it's... on the east coast?" he says, sounding more bewildered and frightened by the moment.

"Are you educated enough that you could look at a map of the world and point out Sasun, Anitam?"

"Yes."

"I have one in my library. While I go look for that, why don't you come inside and I'll have the cook fix you something."

"- ma'am?" he asks as though she proposed that he eat her alive for dinner.

"It's okay. You don't have to. You just don't then get to complain that I'm a terrible host."

"- I would never, ma'am," he says.

"I'll be right back with a map." She goes inside.

He waits, curled up on the ground, shivering and bewildered.

She comes back with a thick book in a tooled leather cover. There's a fold-out map in the front, showing a sinusoidal map projection of a globe with two large continents and some large islands. The smaller of the two continents is labeled Rekk. It's almost entirely tropical, while the larger continent is mostly north of the tropics.

He frowns at it.

"I'm sorry ma'am," he said, "this doesn't look like - the continent I know."

"It seemed like you were surprised that you were on my balcony, today, but did it surprise you that it was possible for someone to suddenly appear somewhere?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Okay. That also surprised me. Were you around any experimental spells, or something, at the time?"

"- no ma'am?" he says. He doesn't have a lot of room to be more confused, but his eyebrows are now straining even more at the limits of their potential altitude.

"So we both think you suddenly appeared. It'd make more sense if we were both unconscious while someone dragged you here but I didn't notice the sun move and I don't remember being touched right before and I was standing up. But I did have some exposed skin and so did you and we were neither of us on guard, right, I mean neither of us had our gloves on or anything..."

"- ma'am?" he asks with the desperation of someone who is increasingly terrified that they are not having a nightmare.

"Yeah, it's... not a really reassuring prospect, is it. But I was standing up, I don't think I could have been knocked out. Also I saw my housekeeper while I was getting the book and she didn't mention anyone being dragged in and it's the same day as it was before. So I don't think it's actually that someone bypassed the usual precautions."

"If? You say so?? Ma'am???" he manages.

"What?"

"If you say so ma'am?" he says again, slightly more clearly.

"No, I mean... I don't think we're quite on the same page. Why don't you think out loud for a minute, I'm sure you won't be any good at it but I want to figure out what your assumptions are."

"I... may be on... another planet?" he ventures, after a few seconds of deep breaths.

"You know, that might even be true. Is your hair a common natural color for your planet?"

"...it's about half a percent," he says timidly. "Is yours - actually black -"

"Yes, and that's pretty common on Rekk or Miomir. I don't have a precise number per two hundred out of the whole population of the entire planet or anything, but my guess is it's at least half the people in the world. Okay, so I was expecting human species-magic was behind what happened, and that confused me because it could do unconsciousness or blindness or transfer you to a new body if the body had already been brought here in the normal way, and I could imagine someday someone could discover that you can erase memories, but I don't expect human species-magic to pick up a physical body and move it. Something about that sound off to you?"

"I don't know what a human is."

"I'm human. Humans are the people who look like me and can do human magic, which I'm betting you can't. Is that right?"

"I can't do any magic."

"I believe that this is because you're from another planet, because I just saw you appear out of nowhere. No one else just saw you appear out of nowhere. There's another species that also looks human, because they were cursed to reincarnate as humans, and as long as they're trapped as fake humans they can't use their own magic - that was the point of trapping them, because they're universally evil. And that's a way more common reason for someone who looks human to not be able to do any magic than having come from another planet. So anyone besides me and my staff who finds out you can't do magic will assume you're evil and maybe try to kill you. I'm really sorry."

"- ah," he says, slumping a little bit in a way that does not happen to increase the area of the floor he is in contact with at all.

"...Being from another planet and not having magic still doesn't explain something. You act like if you touch anything a spell will go off."

"As far as I know no spells will go off ma'am."

"You can be frank with me or I, the only person on the planet who saw you appear, can go ahead and let you try to make your way in a society you've never interacted with before as a suspicious foreigner who will eventually be revealed as a monster whom it is legal to kill. I have no reason to help you and I have limited ability to help you if I don't know what's up with you. Having just appeared here with no context and no idea of the local culture, you might want to try to walk the tightrope of giving me just enough information to help and not enough information to hurt you, but I bet you can't."

He looks at his elbows, which are pretty convenient to look at the way he's curled up.

"On my planet, ma'am, it is not very illegal to kill me either."

"Thank you." That's not even slightly surprising and barely helpful but it's a step in the right direction so she'd better encourage that kind of behavior. "What can you tell me about that?"

"The half a percent with red hair," he says, "are - understood to be - irretrievably - polluted."

"Oh, are you being considerate of me? Okay, thank you. What effects does this have, is there a way to house you that's both comfortable and safe, how do I clean my balcony or do I just leave you here and have someone toss you food - can you eat our food - is it a problem to compost your waste - I am entirely confident in my ability to eventually figure something out but you'll need to tell me exactly what constraints I'm working around."

"- I have no idea if I can eat your food. We live the same way as other people - of our species, I don't know about you. I think the usual procedure would be to scrub and possibly also sand this floor with a lot of different kinds of soap but I don't actually know. Composting is fine."

"And - it's only touch, right? If I touched you, what would happen to me?"

"- then you would also be polluted. Not irretrievably. You could wash it off."

"...If I did not know that you were polluted and I touched you, what experiences would cause me to realize it?"

"...I don't know. Amentans - my species - usually have a sense for it, or something like a sense. But reds have much less of it, and we're always polluted. So I don't know what it feels like to become that way. You might not have an experience about it at all."

"Okay. So, that's a really vague word, and I'm not sure if it's like... if you drink water that's contaminated with sewage, that's slightly poisonous and you might get sick but you might also not get sick but even if you don't get sick from it no one really likes drinking contaminated water - but if a thousand people do it and a thousand people don't do it you start noticing trends, are there trends in what happens if lots of people touch you?"

"A lot of people don't touch us. They go to great lengths to make sure. We touch each other and that seems fine."

"I'm tempted to stash you somewhere and get you some orphans and see how they do compared to ones you didn't adopt but that seems like a big investment and I don't actually know what I can get out of you yet."

His eyes go very big. "Orphans?"

"New humans are created when two existing humans have sex, and come into being as small approximately helpless creatures called babies. It's possible for them to be created by accident by humans who make bad decisions and can't afford to raise them, and it's also possible for their caretakers to die or become disabled while they're too young to take care of themselves. When this happens, they can be taken to a central repository where they're provided food and shelter until someone else comes along who has the ability and inclination to care for them."

"- and people do that so rarely that there are still orphans around at any given time?"

"If I didn't avoid having sex with men and didn't get lucky with breastfeeding keeping me from getting pregnant again, I could have, what, thirty kids? More if I had twins. Admittedly I don't think people who don't restrain themselves at all usually live that long, partly because having children can kill you by itself. It takes about five years for them to even start earning their keep and if you want them to be any good at anything complicated as adults you need to instead send them to school so they keep not being productive for another five or even ten years, by the end of which time they basically eat like adults. And the kids in orphanages are disproportionately ones who were born wrong in the first place, or were neglected for a year or two before getting dropped off - or worse, they're older kids who did have good families and never stop comparing everyone else to their saintly deceased mothers. Rich people who want kids are more interested in making their own, when they can. And then they have a chance of dying in the attempt, too, just like everyone else. So... yeah, people don't adopt them all, it'd be very weird if they did."

"...I will adopt some kids if this would be - useful to you."

"I will let you know if I decide committing to buy food for them and also you seems like a good idea. I am more likely to decide this if you, uh, ever at any point tell me how you make yourself useful if no one can touch you."

"It seems possible... that on this planet... it is not actually a problem if things come into contact with me?" he says tentatively.

"You haven't even explained why it was a problem in the first place!"

"Amentans care a lot about it. They think it evolved because of disease risk. But they keep caring about it when there isn't a disease risk. If you don't... then maybe it isn't a problem, for you."

"And you... used to be a disease risk? And stopped? Is that it?"

"We handle things that are disease risks, as a caste."

"Ohhh, okay. Now, see, if you'd led with 'I clean the horse manure off the street so people don't like being around me' I would have known what you meant. Do you happen to be good at anything else or is that the kind of job I should be finding you?"

"- I don't personally do that, I handle customer service and sometimes drive when the regular drivers are out sick."

"What exactly does that entail?"

"I answer emails and sometimes voice calls from clients from whom my business collects garbage, and I drive a garbage truck when the people who normally do that are unavailable."

"...What are emails?"

"- they are letters sent as information alone without physical paper having to make the trip," he says slowly.

"Do you know how to make them yourself or just answer other people's?"

"I can send them but... it requires devices that I don't know how to make."

"...And it's not going to be useful to ask 'do you know anything useful that we don't' because of course the answer's going to be yes but you don't know which things yet."

"I suspect maybe what I know is mostly things about devices that you may not have. Do you have... plumbing? Cars? - you mentioned horse dung and that sounds like perhaps you don't have cars."

"They pull vehicles. They're not the best choice for Rekk, really, the climate doesn't agree with them. We do have plumbing, though I don't know if it's different from yours."

"I was not a professional plumber but may be able to reconstruct some things about how our plumbing works if it's better. Which I am starting to suspect it may be."

"Plumbing innovation is the sort of thing that's worth going out of my way to keep you alive. I can get you a meeting with someone who'd know more than I do about how plumbing works but I need to have some idea what to tell them that doesn't look like a paper-thin lie."

"- I think your teeth look weird. Do my teeth look weird to you." He displays them. He has six teeth between each pair of canines, not four, and they're small.

"Very, yeah. The thing is, I hear about unique birth defects sometimes and I've never heard of an alien before."

"My hair grows in like this. If you pull one out it will be red at the root too. - I have my pocket everything with me." He pulls it out; it notices it is being handled and displays the time and his number of accumulated notifications (zero).

"What is that?"

"My pocket everything," he repeats. "I don't have a way to charge it here. It will stop lighting up in a few days, faster if I use it for more than keeping time. But maybe enough people could see it in the meantime?"

"Yes, that seems like it should work. Do you want me to throw a party where we show it to people?"

"...that sounds better than being murdered?"

"I am entirely competent to throw a party on short notice. What does your pocket everything do, though?"

"- on another planet not very much. It can play music. And show pictures of things that I saw and wanted a picture of at the time. - the music will not be in this language, which, I don't know how I speak it, it seems arguably stranger than being here at all."

"...That is also weird. Maybe I should invite some linguists to the party, too. And people who've studied the history of music. Will tomorrow be soon enough?"

"Yes, it will still have charge then."

"Okay. And if it's not magic then is there a simpler thing, or a prerequisite field of study, or something, that I should invite people who know about?"

"Do you have electricity at all, or people who study - lightning, or the way things can zap you when the weather is very dry -"

"I will see if I can get anyone who plays around with electricity to come."

"There's probably no real chance of getting this charged but if there's... magic... then that could surprise me." He is uncurling very slightly at this point.

"Mermaids make life, I don't know if your thing is alive enough for that to help. I'm not very sure what dragons and phoenixes do, we don't see much of them."

"It's not alive at all."

"Even though it does things? Hm. Well, was being unverifiably polluted your only objection to coming in and letting my cook fix you something? I suppose actually we should give you a small amount of one thing now and a small amount of something else later and see if you feel sick, only we don't really have that much time before I have to throw a party and you should probably be seen eating something at it..."

"Yes, that was all - uh, why is it important I be seen eating something -"

" - You know, you're right. It'd stand out for you not to but ideally no one's going to doubt that it's because you're an alien and worry it's really about poison."

"I should definitely test things to see if I feel all right soon, though, so if I don't I have time to try other things before I starve."

"Yes. Are we definitely not worrying about whether you'll track invisible dirt through my house?"

"If you aren't worried about it I don't imagine it's in my interests to convince you to be, as no clean Amentans look to be dropping out of the sky," he sighs.

"If this is a mistake I can have the housekeeper wash everything anyway. Possibly except my books but I don't let arbitrary people touch my books anyway. You're welcome to come in and touch inanimate objects that aren't in my library or my bedroom or behind a lock of any kind and aren't the personal possessions of my household staff or of any guests of mine. I don't normally add conditions that explicitly but that's not anything that isn't generally understood to apply to most people, I'm just being explicit because you come from a very different context."

"That's understandable." He gets up, a bit stiffly.

She gathers up her letter and writing supplies and, carefully avoiding actually touching him, holds the door open. "Anyway, I didn't catch your name. I'm Tema Miara, second part of that is a hereditary surname."

"I'm Nelen Suta, second part of that is a job name."

She shows him inside. The building is airy and seems like it probably gets a lot of its light from the sun, though today is too overcast for that to work well, and there don't seem to be any electric lights. She has some fancy silver candlesticks.

Her housekeeper is lurking near the stairs down, obviously waiting to see the mysterious alien and not even really pretending to be productive.

Nelen smiles at the housekeeper - toothily, in case that helps - and waves a little.

"Nice hair," the housekeeper says, waving back.

"Tyela, this is Nelen, who is apparently an alien. Nelen, this is Tyela, who works for me."

"It's nice to meet you, Tyela."

"You too," Tyela says.

Tema heads down the stairs, gesturing for Nelen to follow, and points out various doors that lead to various rooms on the way to the kitchen.

Nelen follows, tentatively but keeping up with her.

The cook can be found exhaustedly flopped on a couch doing something that involves herbs and flower petals. He has matches out but hasn't lit any yet, and puts them away in his pocket when he sees Tema and Nelen. He has substantially darker skin than Tema and Tyela.

"Chanai, this is Nelen, who is apparently an alien who appeared out of nowhere. Nelen, Chanai. So I need help figuring out what aliens can eat and I am going to throw a party tomorrow so I'm leaving Nelen here with you while I go talk to people and you need to cook for a crowd of science types here to find out if Nelen is really an alien and ask him about plumbing. Yes, I know it's on short notice, apparently his alien magic thing is going to give out soon."

Chanai blinks and smiles and rises, pocketing an amethyst as he does so. "Pleased to meet you, Nelen, would you like to try one berry and see if it gives you a stomachache? I just got a basket of them."

"I wonder if maybe I should try smelling things and see if any of them smell - foody? Before I actually taste anything."

"Makes sense to me. Come on, the kitchen's this way."

The kitchen is in fact that way and contains a bowl of fruits and some eggs and flour and several jars of pickles in various states of pickling and an icebox which Chanai would rather not open any more often than absolutely necessary.

Nelen sniffs a fruit. "- it smells nice?" he says. "Not familiar, but nice."

"Can't disagree with you there. Of course, so do some poisons."

"Well. Starving would... also kill me. Is this a kind of fruit you just bite into or does it need to be opened?"

Chanai can provide all necessary fruit instructions.

Nelen samples the fruit, finds it pleasant to taste, and finishes it on the theory that while a serious poison test takes longer the mainline options here are "everything here is inedible to Amentans" and "he can eat like a local".

The latter hypothesis is not immediately falsified.

"If you want to talk about this world or your world or get oriented more while we see if you get sick I have some time."

"Yes, please," Nelen says. "How do people here live - maybe, uh, what's a typical day for a normal person like here?"

"Well, a typical person probably wakes in the morning - humans spend most of each night unconscious for health reasons - and eats and then goes about their work. They might eat again in the middle of the day and again in the evening. Their work is, um, statistically it's farming or weaving but someone in each household will also need to buy and prepare food and clean the house and so on. Normal people visit the market themselves or have someone in their family do it. Of course, Tema has servants instead. Normal people do small magics when they need them, as they can afford the materials - you caught me in the middle of setting up a sleep spell, though I was using some of Tema's imported materials to see how differently they worked and most people don't use imported southern herbs just to see what changes. Sleep is the most common thing for a normal person to use magic for, but doctors tend to know how to numb people. It's normal for people who work in groups to tell stories or sing while they do. If there are very young children in the household, someone has to take care of them; when they get slightly older someone has to be around and ideally show them how to do useful things. A typical day is almost consumed by work but there are lots of holidays."

"Okay. Most of that is familiar, I guess," says Nelen. "What does a sleep spell do?"

"The target is unable to wake for a while and doesn't automatically wake afterward - it's certainly useful for people who want to keep prisoners unconscious for hours but it's much cheaper to just give yourself some help if you find yourself lying awake all night."

"So it's for insomnia? All right. What kind of holidays?"

"What kind? Well, I suppose a lot of places have some kind of independence day, and there are some that have to do with annual cycles. Then there's Sealing Day and the anniversary of the death of Liru-a's first emperor and the Day of Revolution which has nothing to do with anyone's independence day, all happening within a few days of each other, so people tend to treat the whole week as one long holiday. And in some places full moons are always holidays, sometimes only for a subset of people. And then there's Sacrifice Day, which is more fun than it sounds."

"What's fun about Sacrifice Day? And what's Sealing Day?"

"Sealing Day is the anniversary of the defeat of a species that used to live on our planet that was wholly and inherently evil. Sacrifice Day is - originally, the idea was that the gods gave us a lot of blessings so we should be moved and pay them back out of gratitude. These days, it's broader, you don't only make offerings to the gods - you don't even mostly make offerings to them - you mostly give to your friends or the poor or both, and get together with your family for a big meal together where you list things that have made you feel grateful or made you feel inclined to help others."

"- how did it happen that there was a species that was wholly and inherently evil?"

"I expect the gods probably made them that way, but I'm not sure I know what you're asking."

"My planet doesn't have gods, so I don't know how they work. If gods made them that way I guess my question is why the gods decided to do that."

"I have that question about almost everything the gods decided, and answering it about any given thing doesn't suggest an answer for anything else. That feels - related to why educated people tend not to believe the gods are ongoingly active, honestly, but there's no better answer for where all this came from in the first place."

"- my world has people on it and no gods, but it also doesn't have magic, so I don't know."

"How did you figure out that it has no gods?"

"I guess we didn't? It's sort of like asking how we figured out that it didn't have any other sapient species. We didn't think there were supposed to be any and none ever presented themselves."

"Huh. Well, how do you think your world started to exist?"

Nelen can attempt to give her the layperson's understanding of the laws of physics and evolution if that is what he wants.

"...Hm. Well, I don't have any reason to think that isn't true here but I wouldn't really expect I'd know."

"That's fair. Magic would be hard to explain but if it's all about herbs and it just does things like sleep and numbing maybe it's just drugs, I don't know."

"You mean because the herbs might contain some substance within them that causes sleep? They do, a bit, if you just eat them, but I don't know of any that move your soul into a jar if you just eat them. There are substances that kill you, but that's very different."

"- move your soul into a jar?"

"It's not uncomfortable, at least from what people who've experienced it have said. It's like being asleep."

"How is it different from being asleep?"

"When you sleep, your heart beats, you breathe, and if someone shakes you you'll probably wake up. And when you sleep, if your heart stops beating, you'll probably return in a new body as an infant and not remember anything unless you do a lot of work to recover your memories. When your soul is placed in a jar, your body dies, and you can be put in a new one without properly going through death and rebirth, so you have more continuity."

"- where do the new ones come from?"

"Uh, a normal way for rich old people to source new bodies is to round up half a dozen beautiful, healthy people aged fifteen through twenty or so, and pay them all a year's wages to enter a lottery, and put the winner of the lottery in a jar for a while in case better options come up. In some jurisdictions, condemned criminals' bodies are made available, but that's not allowed here out of concern for the incentives it creates. Or do you mean where do human bodies come from in full generality?"

"I meant the first thing. Wow."

"Do people where you're from just vanish forever?"

"Yes."

"Like mermaids. I'm sorry."

"Mermaids are another species here, right? They don't do soul jar things?"

"I think they have souls but if anything happens - if a human doesn't jump to another human body, they'll still come back, just with amnesia. No one knows of anyone ever recovering memories of having been a mermaid. I'm not totally sure what happens if you target them with human magic since it's all touch-range and mermaids rarely have much to do with humans. I think I've heard of someone casting a spell on a mermaid?"

"Huh. I wonder if I have a soul. - but don't urgently want to check."

"Well, you don't have to check by taking a new body, all human spells target the interaction of body and soul in some way."

"If you did a sleep spell on me would I have to eat herbs? I want to see how the fruit sits before I try anything else."

"You don't eat spell ingredients. I mean, some of them are edible, at least for us, but that's not how you use them in spells."

"Huh. Well, I don't usually have trouble sleeping. But I also do it every day."

"If the days here are a different length, or the same length but it was a different time of day where you came from, maybe you'll want a spell tonight. If the discrepancy's in the right direction."

"Yeah. I have been here for -" He looks at the time on his everything. "About twenty minutes. That's about one seventy-second of a day."

"I didn't see you arrive but it doesn't sound obviously wrong."

"And I would usually go to sleep in another couple of hours but I can stay up late if that's wrong for local time."

"Hm, I think you're more likely to be slightly early than late relative to the local time."

"I can also go to bed early. Being suddenly in a different universe is a little tiring."

"As you like. You can at least watch me set the spell up - there's a last step you can do any time after you've set it up, it doesn't usually go off instantly."

"I'm curious, if that won't interfere."

"It shouldn't. Come on, I left some of the materials back where you first met me."

Nelen follows agreeably.

Chanai sets up with his tiny candle and explains the fencepost problems that make it more efficient to do two of these at once and explains how the various components contribute and then burns tiny amounts of herbs and chants a bit and does something with the amethyst. It takes a few minutes.

It's interesting sort of in the way watching TV is, at least, even if there is no immediately visible special effect.

And afterward nothing still happens, but Chanai announces that he's done and starts cleaning up the ashes and putting things away.

"Speaking of sleep, uh, where will I be doing that?" asks Nelen.

"Oh, this house has more rooms than she's using right now, I can show you a couple you can probably just pick from."

"Thank you. I want to make sure I understand all the alien things so I definitely won't need to wake anyone in the night."

"...Well, I'm not sure I know everything an alien from another planet might need to do in the middle of the night, but I can show you the rooms."

In particular Nelen wants to make sure there is a bed, and inquire about how cold it gets here and whether there are spare blankets in case he and locals have different temperature needs, and make sure that there is a bathroom-like situation he can use without irrepressibly screaming about it (or at least get the screaming over with while everyone's awake).

There are canopy beds, more than there are rooms, and there are blankets in a closet and he's welcome to take some. It doesn't get very cold here, never snows or anything, all the ice is imported; it sometimes gets extremely hot instead. There is a bathroom-like situation - an outhouse without plumbing, over a deep pit. It is up to Nelen whether he wants to scream about that.

He will make a sort of alarmed whining sound without opening his mouth. Is there at least a good way to wash up after visiting the pit.

Sure, there's a fountain in the yard that dispenses water that might be clean. Soap also exists on this planet, though not any of the fancy modern kinds.

...okay. He isn't even meso by general population standards, it's just, it's a hole in the ground?! But a fountain and soap will do the trick.

Chanai is a little concerned for him, actually. Is he going to be okay anywhere less upscale than this.

"- if they don't have holes in the ground presumably one can be dug? If they don't have soap and running water at all then, no, not really, I believe there are ways to cope with that but I don't actually know them."

"...I see."

"I've lived in a city where everywhere has running water and soap all my life. Sometimes something breaks, but usually then you can go to the neighbor's."

"Are you rich or just your planet?"

"Just the planet. I'm in the poorest percentile."

"Wow."

"Yeah. I never really thought about what I'd do if I traveled back in time to when Amentans were this poor, let alone if I appeared on a new planet somehow."

"Shame, that."

"Yeah. I think there are - popular nonfiction books about what you'd want to do if, hypothetically or in a daydream or something, you did time travel to the past. But I didn't read any."

"Also a shame. Think you'll be all right for now?"

"For now, yes."

"All right. Let someone know if you do end up needing anything else."

Nelen nods, and fidgets, and waits.