And then what a lovely night it is to be alive.  In . . . a desert?  Some sand's blown on top of the blanket and into Anda's face.

It's starting to get a little cool here, in the valley between two dunes, but there's a short gradient of light off over that way where the sun must have just set so it's probably going to get colder shortly.

What . . . in the void . . . ? Lucid dream, or a truly wild prank, probably. It's a bit too detailed for even a really lucid dream, but that's the sort of thing dreaming-Anda thinks all the time. On the other hand, Kayto[A] would totally pull something this wild if A could be sure Anda[B] would end up more amused than pissed. B's handcomp has no signal, which is more of a dream thing than a prank thing.

Well, there's no percentage in lying around confused. Time to get up, gather up the shirt and blanket, and start walking. Downhill, to the extent that that's an option.

. . . And then pause and scuff a large spiral deeply into the sand with one shoe in case it turns out to be important to find this area again, not that that's likely to last very long what with the sand and the wind and such. But if it is Kayto doing a surprise puzzle hunt it'll be done soonish because Anda's got work tomorrow.

The little valley is pretty enclosed; there might be some down around but going some amount of up seems likely to be a prerequisite to finding it.

Fortunately Anda is only mostly water and can pursue less-local minima with whatever amount of lookahead can be gained from going up a dune.

The most general downwards slope trends thataway, slightly off from the sunset.  A third of a full turn away from that direction is - a speck, maybe.  Is it a light source?  It's not fire; the hue is closest to blue or purple when it's anything at all.  It might just be a star; the stars are so very bright and clear out here, or it might just be a strange glint of the remaining sunlight off an oddly-angled bit of sand.

Anda[A] heads for the speck, intrigued. The stars are fabulous and A keeps pausing to stare. A has never been in a desert before and everyone who said they're very nature-releasing-the-mind-to-limitless-expansion* was totally right. 

*Translator's note: this word is also quite long in Convergentlanguage, but sounds much better.

Anda can't identify any constellations.  The speck grows larger and of a less dubious existence as it's approached.

After quite a walk, it resolves into definitely-an-object although still not any particular one.  And then, quite abruptly, a more certain though still distant light joins it.  After wobbling around for a moment, it starts getting bigger a lot faster than walking towards a stationary object would imply, especially with the other point of comparison still in sight.  Bits of the second thing become visible as it approaches - a probably-human silhouette at the crest of a dune, the shadow cast by its own light on a hill behind it revealing a flat, rectangular base.

It almost looks like it might be floating, or flying.  But there's no sound of a motor even as it approaches and no way it could support a human's weight while gliding unaided in the patterns it seems to, so that's probably a trick of the inadequate light.

Anda has always been complete pants at constellations other than the north spoon and the hourglass* and doesn't realize anything is off.

This whole situation is very portal-fantasy and Anda is daydreaming about having some kind of Adventure in it, and the electric-scooter/dune-buggy/hoverboard/other is excellently on theme. More importantly the pilot/driver/other probably has some useful worldbuilding dump/quest hook/lucid dream content/other. Anda waves enthusiastically.

*What many earthlings call the big dipper and Orion, respectively.

The figure doesn't visibly wave back.

The source of light reveals itself to be a lantern with the back half opaque and no sheen of glass; it dims a good few seconds after it's gotten close enough to be annoyingly bright.  It hovers above one corner of . . . a piece of fabric?  The illuminated portion is embroidered so densely that whatever's underneath is completely covered, though whatever it is has fringe.  The embroidered object also hovers, with no visible or audible mechanism and despite the person perched atop it.

"Name?" asks said person, dryly, reaching for something at her side.

"Anda Vrin-Vanse. I'm, ah, quite lost and my handcomp has no signal; may I borrow yours? Also I'm unfamiliar with your vehicle and would love an explanation."

The stranger[A] appears to be from one of the cultures that does headgear instead of bracelets for approachability, and Anda[B] super doesn't remember what headgear means what, but A approached B and immediately asked for a name so clearly A's open to at least some interaction.

"It's a car."  She looks over a tablet-like object which Anda can't see the screen of; the lantern obligingly tilts to light it without any apparent action on the stranger's part.  "What do you want the handcomp for."

"To to look up where I am and how to get back to Bridgecity. That being where I was before someone apparently moved me in my sleep." This sounds like complete nonsense and Anda is totally dreaming. "I am aware that that sounds ridiculous."

"Hm.  - Try this first," the stranger instructs, floating closer to pass Anda a waterskin embroidered less densely than the 'car' but not by very much.

What? Oh, maybe the stranger[A] thinks Anda[B] is dehydrated, because B's talking like a crazy person while in a desert and not dressed for the weather. A has a reasonable argument there, honestly. B takes the waterskin and drinks a bit, most expecting water but mentally prepared for the possibility of an electrolyte drink.

It tastes at least mostly like water, but it's kind of astoundingly refreshing so maybe there's a little of something else mixed in.

"Any idea who would have moved you?"

"I have a friend[A] who might have moved someone[B] in B's sleep as a prank, but not very far and given the terrain around here I think I was moved upwards of several hundred kilometers. And possibly drugged to sleep longer and that's not my friend's style either. So I don't know. What's the nearest city to us?"

"I dunno what they call it, I don't live there.  Go ahead and get on the car."

Weird thing not to know but okay. Anda gets on the car. Which is a very weird contraption as well, though probably just because of being optimized for dunes and not because this is a portal fantasy with hovercars even though that would be extremely cool.

The car on closer inspection just seems to be a heavily embroidered piece of fabric, lacking any moving parts with which to contrapt.  Despite this it supports Anda's weight just fine.  The stranger picks up a sack and sets it down again a few inches closer to Anda.  "If you're hungry."

And then they can zoom off back the way the stranger came from, much more slowly than a train goes but at quite a clip for an unenclosed rectangle hovering less than a meter above the sand.

"Thanks. I really don't understand how this vehicle is moving at all. Uh, is it safe to talk while you operate it?"

"Yes."  The wind creates less inconvenience to conversation than one might expect.  "I'm not a seamster; it probably works however flying carpets usually do."

"Flying carpets like the fiction trope? From the stories with the talking horses and the sandserpents?"

". . . No."

"Okay so it is using magnets or a fan or something and isn't a plot hook for a LARP. Sorry, I'm trying to figure out why I got put here and my top hypothesis is still 'surprise puzzle hunt'." Does Anda's handcomp have enough signal to look up real life flying carpet technology yet? No? Rats. 

"It's using magic.  - What's that."

"Is this a LARP or are you actually claiming this vehicle is nonreductionist. True answers only please. Not that I don't appreciate you picking me up whatever it is."

"I'm not a philosopher either."

"So, I can see how that is the sort of sentence someone would produce in response to the thing I said, but it doesn't actually answer my question about what physical principles you believe are involved in the function of this carpet. I was under the impression that nobody used the word 'magic' to refer to nonfictional things. Unless you were being sarcastic."

"Cars fly because of magic, true answer.  What's your thingy."

Someone on this conveyance is a fascinating case study in epistemic failure and it only probably is the one who's not fully oriented to time and place. Or this actually is a portal fantasy plot. "It's my handcomp. It's a portable computer that usually has a network connection but currently doesn't."

"That's not a handcomp," and then she frowns.  "That's not a pocket," she tries, which is weird because she uses the exact same phonemes as her first statement to do it.

"Auugh, what did you just do with your voice words??"

"This does translation."  She touches her headscarf demonstratively.  "But sometimes it's not great at it."

". . . Magic translation." That sounds insane but also there really isn't a better non-dream explanation for what Anda[A] just observed. It's a very good thing A is already sitting down so A can't fall down. "What language are you speaking on the other end? Is it connected to software translation or is the magic doing the computation? Is it interacting directly with my brain and I'm just perceiving it as you emitting sound waves?"

"Zhmir.  I don't know, it was a gift and I'm still not a seamster or a philosopher.  But it's probably not part of the innernet."

"Okay so is this the normal world--I mean the world I started in--but magic's a secret or did I go to a parallel universe? Uh, does this universe have Karna Farlee-Bakh* and zebras and Antarctica and the great ziggurat at Pern Khalorn‡?"

*A person with a similar slate of accomplishments to Isaac Newton.

‡A city in what Earth would call the Nile River delta.

"Zebras is the only thing this," headscarf touch "turns into something I've heard of."

"Probably a different world, then, and not the distant future after magic gets invented. . . . If I don't pop back to Firstplanet next time I sleep everyone[A] is gonna think I'm braindead, aren't A."

She shrugs, or maybe doesn't react at all and is just shifting her position.

"How long were you alone in the desert?"

"Not very long, I think. Less than an hour after I woke up, and I wasn't hungry or thirsty like I'd be if I slept for more than an hour or two."

"Hm.  Well, I'll get you to the city, and if it's possible to get in touch with wherever you're from someone there probably will."

"Thank you." It doesn't feel likely, that Anda will be able to get home easily from here, but that's clearly a prior acquired from fiction and maybe in real life once someone has been magically transported to another universe they can get back and forth easily, what would Anda know.

"Do people show up from other worlds a lot, around here? I don't think it's ever happened where I'm from."

"Not that I've heard of.  But I don't live out in the middle of a desert because I like to keep up with all the latest goings-on."

"Valid." Anda[A] shuts up for a bit, contemplating what jobs A might be able to get if A's stuck here and whether random aliens can learn to make magic rugs or you have to be born with it and trying not to be sad about all the plans A had and the people A's going to miss. 

The initial speck in the distance has by this point in their flight separated into a little cluster of light-dots.  By the time they're most of the way to it, the lights reveal themselves to be lanterns of the same sort which beams out into the carpet's path.  There are also a number of small tents, some in a huddle and a few more scattered, set up on a stadium-sized patch of confusingly-lush grass.  Several dozen sheep are currently making their home there as well.

Well crud, if the people[A] here live in tents Anda[B] feels bad about imposing on A by being randomly homeless. Hopefully B'll be able to find a job quickly. "Person from an alternate universe" is a good sign for comparative advantage and a bad sign for transaction costs, but probably humans everywhere need someone to supervise the kids and keep the account books and clean things and suchlike even if Anda isn't well-positioned for any fun technological synergies.

"What's your name?" If there's about to be more people around it's going to become useful.

"Neidura.  . . . I forgot yours."

"Anda." Forgetting a name after hearing it once is so not surprising. "Hello, Neidurah," Anda repeats back to fix the memory and check the pronunciation.

"Oh, it wasn't vv-something?  - Hello."

"The full name is Anda Vrin-Vanse, but the Vrin-Vanse bit is only important if you know another Anda and need to specify which one. It's my parents' given names, so like my dad is Vrin Sandel-David and so on." Hopefully Anda isn't the local language's word for "butts" or something.

"You'll have to switch the order if you want to use mail and be on the census and stuff."

"You do it in the other order? Neat. Some Firstplanet cultures still do that but you can generally tell which is which because of the hyphen."

"It used to be the other way but then there was some seamster thing and everyone swapped when I was a kid.  We don't really do hyphens."  The carpet comes to a stop.  Neidura slides off it and the lantern bobs along to stay a convenient distance in front of her.

Anda follows. "You don't do hyphens in your names or like in your whole language? If I try to focus on what actual phonemes you're emitting I totally lose the semantic content so I have no idea if you've said a hyphen yet, sorry."

"I meant in names but my scarf already tripped up on your not-a-pocket, so who knows."

"Do you call them pockets because they fit in a pocket and do arbitrary things?"

"No, it's because they're pockets."  Neidura pauses and pats a flat fabric pouch attached at her hip; the lantern moves over to light it.  It's intricately embroidered and has a hand-sized slit running vertically down it.

"I'm very curious how that does a set of things that would make it analogous to a handcomp but I recognize that you didn't sign up for the explain technology to aliens job so if you aren't having fun we can skip it. Also everything you have is gorgeous, is that important to the magic or are you just very cool?"

She snorts.  "I'm not very cool.  You can put stuff in pockets - writing or drawings - and then anyone else who has one can take out the pattern of it."

"Oh, wow, that's cool--does it do audio or video? Is the text searchable, like, if I wanted a document with the word 'hypothetically' in it but didn't care which document could I get some arbitrary ones or do I have to know exactly which document I want?" Are there fabric software engineers. That would be the coolest thing of all time.

"You can do random ones with whatever.  They don't move or make sound."

"Huh, neat. Mine would do audio and video except it can't reach Firstplanet from here, but it's still a camera/clock/spreadsheet maker/notepad/calculator/music player/to-do-list with the books and photos and music I happened to already have on it, except it's about to be a paperweight because I'm turning it off to save the battery. Can magic produce electricity?" 

"Probably, it does other weather."

Neidura takes the food sack (which is unembroidered) off the carpet and sits down in the grass, extracting a handful of nuts to chew on.  The carpet drifts down to rest on the ground.

"If the translation thinks 'electricity' is the same word as 'lightning' then the answer as far as my handcomp goes is probably 'no' for the moment; I would need a very small amount of lightning happening steadily for a long time instead of in flashes. Maybe I should try to invent it or talk to a magicologist or a physicist about it or something; it's very useful."

"Cool," she says through a mouthful of nuts.  ". . . If you want a hug the sheep are soft and nice.  Just so you know.  Whenever."

It's tempting, but Anda would end up regretting it; lanolin is sensorybad.

"I appreciate the sentiment but I think I'm okay. Uh, is there some kind of plan for like, what people in this society do if they end up out of a job with nowhere to live but can probably get to net productive with a bit of help?"

"There probably is but I don't know it.  Sorry."

"I'm glad you're helping me and will attempt to be enjoyable to help. Can you explain how your government and society and economy work in general?"

". . . No.  - Or, how do you mean?"

"Hmm--how many people live in this group of tents, do they interact much with other groups of tents, how are scarce resources allocated, when there's disagreement how does it get resolved, stuff like that."

"Well for starters, this is a campground, so only me and the sheep live at this group of tents.  Everyone else comes in from the city for a weekend or a month or something, and they bring stuff with them and sometimes give it to me, and if there's disagreement sometimes I kick somebody out."

"Ah, okay, that explains a lot. So probably if I want to participate in society I should go to the city? I assume if you wanted an assistant shepherd you'd've hired one already and I don't know anything about sheep."

"Yeah."

"Is there a better way to do that than 'wait until the next time a camping party[A] wants to go home and see if A'll give me a ride'? Also how many people have the magic translation things and how expensive was it, possibly my top priority should be trying to learn your language."

"It was a gift and I wouldn't notice if someone else had one on too, but they've got to be pretty common what with all the portals.  And I can get you to the city next daylight."

"Thanks! Portals are cool. Can anyone learn magic or do you have to be born with it or something?"

"Anyone can."

Anda rocks side to side in excitement. "Eeeeeeeeeeeeee can you teach me the basics for six-year-olds?" If this magic* has translation of languages from other worlds then either Convergentlanguage is really convergent or it has black-box-mental-components and who even knows where it's keeping its compute, but Anda[A] already let it interface with A's brain and nothing bad happened and Neidurah seems to be fine too. So it's probably the awesomecool kind of differentphysics and not the terrifying kind. Though separately it's weird that a world would have differentphysics and still have humans.

*Literally humanusable-differentphysics, but handily abbreviated for, originally, the use of fictional characters.

"Uh.  People are faster at sewing than other things, and the more you do it the faster you get, and luckier, and the more fun sewing is to you.  And they can make stronger artefacts after more practice, from slightly convenient clothes up to tents and mannequins.  And portals."

"Oooooh, are the tents bigger on the inside? Does the being-more-fun get to the point of being an addiction risk if you started out already thinking sewing was a lot of fun?"

"Yes and yes.  Or, there are people who spend more than eight days nearly every real day sewing.  I wouldn't want that but I don't much like it in the first place."

"Woah, that's so much time! Do they age eight days in that time or just one?"

"I mean they're not really living eight days' worth.  Just one."

Anda[A] cannot say anything for the next several seconds because A has been PUNCHED in the FACE with DESIRE.

"It sounds like, if we had that kind of magic back home, only a tiny handful of top experts would be able to make a living doing it because everyone would be doing it for free all the time. Is that how it goes here or nah?"

"It takes a long time to become opalescent, barely anyone can go as fast as that.  But I've sure been given an awful lot of free artefacts I didn't ask for."

"I'd ask about your economy but there's no way any of the units will translate and I should just hang around observing the standard of living . . . Does all embroidery count as magic or do you have to do something specific to attach the magic to it?"

"All of it, unless you make it not on purpose."  One of the sheep starts wandering in Neidura and Anda's general direction.

" . . . Is the half-embroidered shirt in my pocket liable to do something dangerously random?"

". . . I don't know.  Maybe.  What sort of things were you thinking about when you were making it?"

"The block printing class I was going to teach tomorrow . . . the giant camping event I was going to go to at the end of the summer . . . how lovely the weather was . . . self-insert daydream in a fantasy novel where it's the bronze age and parrots are big enough to ride . . . normal stuff."

This magic system is still incredibly cool, but burn it, Anda had plans. . . . though come to think of it, maybe there's still an Anda[A] back on Firstplanet who woke up from the nap like nothing happened. After all, if this place actually has different physics, then A couldn't've travelled here from there, and would instead have somehow come into existence with A's memories, which one wouldn't expect to have any effect on the original instance. Anthropics probably suggests the Anda on Firstplanet is dead, actually, but as a wise person once said, "If you get hired to deal with anthropics, octuple your fee."

"None of that sounds dangerous but I'm not a seamster."

"Is the dangerous stuff the intuitive things--don't sew angry, don't sew while thinking about explosives or radioactivity or whatever?"

"What's radioactivity."  The wandering sheep arrives and nestles its head in Neidura's lap.

Awww, what a good sheep. "It's a property some substances have that can make you sick if you spend too much time around them without safety gear. I wouldn't worry about it; you're not likely to run into any if this planet doesn't use them for anything." There, that's true and seems unlikely to cause problems.

"Okay that's good.  I don't know about anger, I think it depends on how you direct it.  It's fine at least some of the time."

"Any other things that are definitely dangerous? Do the people who spend eight days every day sewing have problems with remembering to eat and stuff?"

"It's not really living faster; they have to eat after they come out of sewfall but not while sewing.  . . . Sewfall is, however many actual hours they spent sewing they have to sleep after, and you can't really wake them up from it until they're done.  For opalescent seamsters; it's different at lower levels."

Anda does some mental math. If you spend N hours sewing and have to sleep for N hours afterwards that's a straightforward win at a 3x multiplier even if you assume that the sewfall-sleep is in addition to your default sleep needs. Any sort of connection to Anda's own life has to wait on determining whether world-jumpers/spontaneously created people can learn magic sewing and how good at it Anda in particular can get. Back on Firstplanet Anda was pretty much exactly average at everything, but here, who knows.

"Can you explain the levels? Also 'opalescent' is an excellent name for a type of awesomeness." Wait, what if one can actually use magic to make some part of one's body opalescent. That would be the best one of many awesome things Anda has learned today.

" - I'm sorry you appeared near about the worst person to explain any of this.  Unless you're lucky to have appeared near a person at all."  She petpats the sheep.  "The levels are peridotious," (which she pronounces pɛərədoʊʃɪs, except for how she doesn't because she isn't actually speaking English) "ambrious - spessartescent . . . something red?  Amethystic sapphiric and opalescent.  Time stuff doesn't start until spessartescent and it's at one and a half hours to one, goes up from there."

"You've been really nice and helpful and I'm not lost in a desert so I'm very glad I landed near you! Are they just called what they're called because it's a cool set of words or do the colors mean something? Is there a sharp transition from each stage to the next or is it more of a fuzzy spectrum with arbitrary lines drawn on it?"

"I think they just go in rainbow order because people think that's cool too.  I know item tiers are sharp divides but I don't know if it's the same for seamster levels; I've stayed peridotious."

"Green yellow something something red purple blue is rainbow order? Is that a translation thing or--or--no it's gotta be a translation thing, if rainbows were actually in a different order that would be even weirder than magic. Or I just misunderstood what order the words go in, could totally be that."

"Green yellow orange red purple blue white-everything.  I don't know why they split it like that."

"Huh, yeah, if someone from Firstplanet was going to split the rainbow somewhere weird it'd be between green and yellow." Shrug. "Kind of a weird question: are there any, uh, important legal or social distinctions between the levels or is it just like a cool thing with no implications beyond how much magic stuff you can make?"

"I mean no one's going to be peridotious at my age these days unless they swore off sewing on purpose and probably became a hermit.  Is that what you mean?"

"No, I was, uh, checking that people didn't decide to make a caste system out of it, because historically my planet tended to make caste systems about things for no good reason--and sometimes used color labels for them, which is why it occurred to me--and levels of magic skill would totally have been the sort of thing people four hundred years ago would have been super obnoxious about. We know better now, don't worry."

"Maybe I should move to your world if I get the chance; seamsters are all kind of obnoxious even if not really in different ways by level."

"It's a pretty nice world! Anything you'd like me to tell you about it?"

"Why are your clothes so neatly-made without seamsters?"

"Machinery! We have machines for all kinds of things--harvesting crops, making various objects, the handcomps I mentioned earlier, transportation, heating and cooling and lighting and plumbing, making parts for other machines . . . . It all runs on electricity, which is lightning but going through wires instead of the air in precisely controlled amounts."

She fiddles with her headscarf.  "Say part of that again?  'It all runs on lightning, which is lightning but . . .'"

Ooh, the translation has a "listen to the phonemes for loanword reasons" setting. Which is now making Anda[A] think about how the words for the levels were words A only sort of knew. Maybe it was going by morphemes and unremembered heard-it-once? Anyway, A repeats the last sentence.

"Electricity," she repeats to the sheep in Convergentlanguage.  "Do you have electriciters?  - It kind of sounds like your magic is electricity instead of sewing and if it is then maybe seamsters won't be able to charge your handcomp."

"Electricity isn't--okay it is a sort of thing people do in that it's going on inside our bodies all the time, but there aren't people who produce it directly as a voluntary action, there are animals that do that but that's not important, usable electricity is produced by machines people build. If this world doesn't have the same exact electricity as my world then my current body is a superficially identical but structurally massively different object from my previous body and the same with my handcomp. Which I'm not ruling out, mind you! But it would imply a degree of sophisticated mimicry that would seriously increase my credence that I was brought here by an intelligent agent or a mechanism created by one." Anda[A] makes a lot of hand gestures while saying this and sounds entirely cheerful about the possibility that A's body is secretly not what it looks like.

"Huh.  . . . How would you . . . tell . . ."

"Well, I could produce some electricity and find it works differently than I'm used to, or I could start having some kind of horrible medical problem that can't happen where I came from because it's a problem that only happens to local biology, or I could discover that my handcomp charges itself when spoken to, or any number of other things. Right now nothing has happened to raise the possibility to my attention though, it's just a common fictional trope and also you asked."

"Huh," she repeats.  "Well if you start having a horrible medical problem let me know; I do have a first aid kit."

"Thanks. Don't worry, though, if I was going to I expect I already would have. Anyway, yeah, we have machines for stuff and I don't know enough about most of them to reinvent them here even if you didn't already have magic for a lot of it but if you have any engineer friends we could have fun and maybe make something cool."

"I don't have . . . friends . . . but there are people in the city who would.  Probably.  It has basically all the people so there's gonna be someone."

"I should write down everything I can remember of my world's technology at some point so I have a big reference people can look at. And so I don't forget stuff."

"That sounds like a good idea."  She doesn't get up for paper or anything.  "I was going to go to sleep soon, you're still not tired or hungry or thirsty?"

"I could go for some food, and then I should try to get on the local sleep schedule even if I'm not actually tired. Is 6-8 hours a night a normal amount of sleep here?"

Neidura scoops herself another handful of nuts and then passes Anda the bag.  "Unless you have items about it, yeah.  But in the city I don't think there's much of a schedule because they just have night whenever they want, or they have it different times in different places and it doesn't matter because all the places are next to each other."

"That sounds amazing."

"Most people prefer it."

Anda[A] eats some more nuts and then inquires as to what sleeping locations Neidurah has available.

She consults a piece of fabric from her pocket before answering.  "The purple, orange, red, and green ones are empty tonight.  Take your pick; they're all the same."  Sheeppet.  "And I'll be in that one if anything comes up."  She points to the biggest tent, one in neutral earth tones.

"Thank you. Until tomorrow, then." Purple tent!

The purple tent is mostly unembroidered but has some beading on the bottom edge and around the door flap and some simple designs in spines every so often.  There's no internal support structure but it does have a hammock, a small water skin, and a rug made out of braided scraps of fabric.

Anda takes a while to fall asleep, but eventually manages, curled up in the hammock and under the picnic blanket.

And in the morning (when A's back to being only as disoriented as A was yesterday), it's time to go to the city!

When A steps out of the tent it becomes immediately clear that there was some kind of magic climate control going on inside. It's definitely not unbearable out in the morning sun but there is a very noticeable step up in temperature.

Neidura has some sheep chores to do before they can leave, and she detours to have a chat with one of the campers - there's only one translation artefact around so the discussion is half incomprehensible and mostly inaudible besides, but from what Anda can pick up it seems to be something about emergency protocols.  She walks away from the conversation with a little basket full of mixed berries she didn't have at the start.

"Breakfast," she offers, along with the bag of nuts from last night and a smaller sack of dried fruits, once they're back on the car.

"Thank you."

Blargh, temperatures. Also A really hopes the city will have opportunities to shower. There are rentable showers[B] at home but A's never needed to use one and has heard B are kind of ass. Being homeless in another world is definitely ass.

At least there's fruit and nuts. Everything's better with fruit and nuts!

The temperatures get less blargh, or at least don't continue to get more blargh as the sun rises further, once they've gone a ways on the carpet.  It's a little too comfortable to just be the breeze from carrying on at a decent clip.  Netra doesn't initiate conversation until a colorful dot appears over one of the dunes, half an hour into the ride.  She passes Anda a bead on a necklace-length wool string.  "Once you get a shell you can use this to talk to me.  Let me know if you make it back to your world."