"...well, this sure is...unexpected.  ...At least I was standing up?"  ...She doesn't have the propensity for hallucinations that this would practically require.  Dammit, she's been isekaied and she's in the middle of the woods.  ...Follow the sun, follow rivers.

"...Hello, is anyone there?," she calls out, despite her trepidation.  Someone or something ought to, but this isn't a book.  ...She thinks it isn't.

No one is close enough to hear her call, other than herself. But she does hear it and may notice that, despite being entirely understandable to her, it was definitely not in English, or any language she's ever heard before. The words she said to herself were still in English though.

Following the Sun, she'll eventually exit the forest and find herself looking across wide, terraced fields, which in turn reveal a river, as well as two roads cutting through the farmlands, one on this side of the river and one on the far side.

"...Well, hello, you.  So, what brings me here, of all places, and what brings me here, of all the possible people I could have been?"

...How industrial do the farms look?  Not that she'd particularly know, but...how neat are they, that's a decent stand-in, and is there obvious metalcraft?  Are there power lines anywhere?  How big are the farms?  ...What are the roads made of?  ...Why are there two of them?  ...She doesn't actually expect an answer to that besides 'magic', really, but anyway...

To the roads!  Civilization awaits?

The farms are very neat! So are the trees, actually, they're probably cultivated lumber rather than wild. No power lines, though. The farmland is extensive, extending to the horizon and good way up the sides of the valley (she is in a valley, by the way). The roads look like they're made of stone, but it's all very tidy and solid, more like cut stone bricks than cobbles.

Notably, as soon as she steps onto the shoulder of the road, she instantly feels the atmosphere change. The wind seems to die, the air gets significantly warmer and drier, and if she takes a few steps, she'll notice that she feels lighter on her feet, her strides are longer and take less energy without altering her balance.

She walks down the road, and it continues, and continues, and continues. Maybe about thirty minutes into her trek, she experiences a strange force that pulls her off to the side of the road, before a moment later some kind of cartoonishly stretched horseless carriage-type thing with two big barrels attached to the back of it comes speeding down the road, going the opposite direction as her at probably at least 50 miles per hour, maybe more.

"Ahoy, stranded traveler, please help!"  She waves down the car!

The vehicle (it doesn't look like a car, really, not in any modern sense anyway) doesn't slow. The driver does honk a very loud horn, though. After a few minutes, it blazes past and the force disappears.

...and if she tries running after it any?

Nope! Not slowing even just a little bit! The weird magical effect or whatever that's going on with the road helps her go faster than normal, but even if she follows at full tilt, the vehicle will fade into the distance after a few minutes.

...yeah no she's not following at full tilt.  That's fucking exhausting.  Irregardless, (which is to say, she would not be doing this if it wasn't for the bus), she'll head that way.

She heads back that way, ending up in the woods again. More road. More trees. Nothing much changes for the next hour or so, until she feels the force pull on her again, but much gentler than before. A few minutes after that, another horseless carriage will pull up the road behind her and actually stop for her.

There's a couple of tall men with big mustaches and wearing thick grey coats in it, one in the driver's box and another in the wagon, the latter of whom opens the door and greets her. "Ho there! Need some help?"

"I am in fact so lost that I believe I have ended up somewhere I could not draw a path from my home to.  Yes, please.  Although, uh.  Who are you, exactly?"

"Really? You've got a perfect accent." The man gestures for the woman to enter the carriage. "Anyway, please come inside. I'm Redweld, and that's Welkonn," the man in the driver's box turns and waves amicably, "we're with the Swarthwalls volunteer corps. We got a call from the research facility shuttle bus that someone was trudging down the Old Road and looked like they needed help."

That information gets her to relax a bit.

"It's magic, one presumes.  The research facility?  What do y'all research, then?  Or, no, Swarthwalls is more town-name shaped...anyway - yeah, what sort of research happens there?"

"Magic sounds likely, yeah. Echoic I'd bet, given the location and all," Redweld agrees. "And that's what they study up there, the echoic wind I mean, inscriptions mostly I think. They're also one of major server centers for the echonet, since they were one of the places where it was prototyped."

...ooooooooh.  Magic Internet.  "...y'know, I find myself wondering if they happen to be in a bit of a tizzy over something surprising showing up on their sensors right now..."

Well, that said, she'll get in the car!

"Say, I don't think I've ever seen vehicles quite like yours, before; do you perchance know how they function well enough to explain to a laywoman?  Or, for that matter, how the roads themselves were made so neatly, helpfully, and also resiliently?  I don't believe this is graded at all, and yet rain hasn't started causing these blocks to sink into the mud..."

Redweld closes the door behind her before sitting back down. "I'm no auto mechanic, but my understanding is that when they're stopped at a charging station, the auto's power-store, a spring, a fly-wheel, whatever it is, is loaded up with power. Then when the driver activates the rotor, the power comes out of the store and is applied to the axles to turn them." He shrugs. "If you want a better explanation you'll need to talk to someone else. As for the Old Road, I have no idea. No one really knows how to replicate it, not exactly, let alone how the Road-Builder did it a thousand years ago."

He turns around to check on Welkonn through a little window, who gives a thumbs-up, then turns back to the woman. "So, the bus driver said he saw you headed towards town, but when we found you were walking up towards the facility. Where should we be taking you?"

"...I believe the facility would likely be quite interested in what I can and can't tell them about recent events, but I'll defer to your judgement, especially if there's any administrative stuff that needs doing."

Redweld taps the window to the driver's box once, and a moment later the carriage rumbles to life, steadily accelerating up to a speed comparable to the bus's. "To the facility it is, then. I think getting a better understanding of what's happened would benefit everyone. There aren't a lot of laws about spontaneous magical displacement, not exactly a common occurrence, but especially with us and the facility at your back nobody's going to be giving you too much trouble." He pauses for a moment, considering something, then makes a bit of a surprised expression. "Oh, I never caught your name, miss...?"

The ride to the research facility from where they picked her up will take about half an hour, which is plenty of time for them to trade questions.

"I imagine it's likely to be flywheels, especially if you can form a vacuum or alter friction...though I vaguely recall something about gyroscopes, which are spinny things about an axle, and rotational motion, not mixing well, from some old sci-fi..."

And as for her name... "Hill.  Maria Hill, a given name and then a family name, as they usually are applied, at least."

Redweld smiles. "Good to meet you, Miss Hill. Or, hopefully at least! And yes, I know some autos have flywheels, I just meant-- well, it doesn't matter." He waves a hand dismissively. "Autos have one sort of power-store or another. Maybe flywheels are the most common. Like I said, not a mechanic."

"My apologies, recent events have revealed that my model of the world was built upon a foundation of sand, on account of not including spontaneous teleportation - and I'm still catching up to that, with the thinking-aloud."

Redweld chuckles again. "Yeah, that's understandable. Well, my brother and I are pretty familiar with Swarthwalls, born and raised here, so if you need help situating yourself as you come to terms with things, we're happy to help."

"Thank you.  I should hope I'll be fine; you seem like lovely people so far, it's just a matter of customs.

"Always the most fiddly things, they are, though; while I'm speaking your language, I wouldn't know if I had cultural knowledge til I found it, as of yet."

Redweld nods along. "Well, you've been perfectly polite so far, especially considering your circumstances. I'm not a lawyer, you'll need to talk to someone at the facility about papers and whatnot, but for the less formal things, we could game out any situations you think of, if you like?"

"...Yeah, I'm sure I'll panic about this whole thing later.  Right now, though, there's things to do.  ....Gaming things out....  I'd hardly know where to begin.  I know too little to suspect what sort of interactions I might need to undertake.  Perhaps starting with anything I might want to know about the researchers, but...what's your society like?  Just, generally?"

Redweld smiles a little awkwardly and rubs the back his head. "They're...nice people, I suppose? Academics? The stereotype is that people who get into echoics tend to embed themselves very strongly in their community, but how that manifests varies a lot and honestly I don't know if it's more than the slightest tendency anyway. As for what society is like, that's a bit broad? Do you still have nobles where you come from? We-- err, that's Dalenmercia, we got rid of ours twenty two years ago, right when we pulled out of the Great War. I don't know if you know about any of that, if you're from real far away?"

"Nobles are very gone, where I'm from; there's a couple ceremonial figureheads that hung on in other nations, but - what, a couple hundred years of democratic rule, for values of 'democratic' that are less than I'd have liked for a while...but it was non-noble, even if I fear they only traded nobles for oligarchs."

"A couple hundred--" Redweld repeats with some astonishment. He's quiet for a moment as he considers. "Sorry. I had been assuming that when you said that you wouldn't be able to draw a line to your home, that you meant you were from some far off colony or the like. I understand now you meant another world entirely." He leans back in the carriage's seat as he processes that a bit more, before a smile creeps back onto his lips. "Well! The researchers are going to be even more excited than I thought."

"That was remarkably perceptive.

"Judging by the fact that you've had a Great War...I'd say my world's probably a good half-century ahead of yours, techwise, considering what I've seen - but, depending upon how the magic works here, I imagine there's fields within which your prowess would astound me.

"We didn't exactly have any, back home."

"Thank you! I'm glad that someone appreciates my talents." He bonks his head against the driver window, and Welkonn taps the window twice, prompting a laugh from Redweld. "And, you didn't have any? How do you-- That's a stupid question. This must all seem like some kind of fantasy to you, I imagine, if you've only heard of magic in stories?"

"It's certainly something!  And I've always wanted to live in a world with magic, so like, I suppose it is.

"...How do we what?"

"Oh, just, how do you know what magic is, if you don't have it? But I know lots of stories where magic is different, so it's no huge leap to think a world without magic will still imagine stories that have it."

"There is so much fantasy fiction, yeah."

Redweld nods to that. "If you're a fan of it, I could show you around the fantasy section of the volunteer library, whenever you head back into town? It might be a reasonably safe place to dip your toes into Swarthwallsian society. It's pretty hard for things to go too wrong in a library as long as you keep quiet."

"Books are good.  ...I wonder if there's magic e-readers...Erm, that doesn't translate very well.  Some sort of magic device you can load arbitrary books onto for portability and convenience."

"Oh, yeah, we have tablets that can do that sort of thing, though they're moderately expensive." Redweld replies.

This brushes against Maria's linguistic download, which elucidates that 'tablet' here refers to a magical item, a plate of solid metal with a magical inscription that allows it to possess many functions similar to those of the electronic sort of tablet that she is familiar with.

"Eee!  You do have something I'm incredibly impressed with!  Do you have networking?  -- of course you do, what sort of echoic anything wouldn't do networking?"

Redweld smiles. "Exactly right. It's been something of a revolution. I know among the wealthier circles, people are saying it's going to be even bigger than automation was." He sighs a bit darkly. "Hopefully it doesn't bring another Great War with it this time, though."

"I should hope it won't, based off of historical precedent - what causes wars is the opposite of interconnectivity, in most cases, and I have a vague impression that you're not actually resource-constrained in a way that leads to the sort of imperialistic bullshit my homeland or the British Empire got up to.  If everyone's just...getting along fine in their own space, and then you add the means to talk to people a world away?  Assuming there's no crazy dictatorships out there...Boom, war's gone; people don't want to hurt their friends.  ...I wonder if your magic can into space..."

Redweld grimaces. "Dalmerc got up to, uh, quite a bit of imperialism before the war, actually. The colonies were all granted political independence after we abolished the nobility, but in practice there's still a lot of...economic entanglement left to sort out, if you know what I mean? Regardless, I'm hopeful that you're right, and if your world is that much more advanced than ours, in most areas at least, I don't think I'm being unreasonably optimistic to do so."

He gets a bit of confused look for a moment at that last bit. "'Can into space'? You might be showing just the hint of an accent there. I'm not sure exactly what you mean?"

"Sorry, our version of the echonet has developed a whole dialect from its text-basedness and ubiquity - and the fact that it encodes messages in specific ways.  I'm practically more a native speaker of that than garden-variety English - which is what I'm composing my thoughts in before I speak them, as of yet."

"Economic entanglement...

"Given the historical precedent of the British from my world, one would want to be extremely careful that such a relationship does not become a loop of resource extraction to Dalmerc fuelling lack of manufacturing in local economies fuelling poverty across said nations fuelling resentment in said ex-colonies fuelling radical actions such as terrorism, but some level of economic entanglement, especially for specialty goods, is actually quite desirable from a war-avoidance standpoint - if politicians can be trusted to be rational-ish actors instead of jingoistic demagouges with a superiority complex.

"...Excuse me; I have some opinions about certain public figures back home."

The way Redweld sighs with some dejection tells Maria that, unfortunately, the situation is much more like the former than the latter. "I think you'd find many like-minds at the volunteer corps, certainly I think my brother and I would be two. Unfortunately, the industrialists played a large part in helping overthrow the nobles and have gained a great deal of popular support for it, and they're naturally not very interested in stemming the flow of lucre into their purses, no matter whence it flows."

"Sell them on it being cheaper to have factories local and upsell finished work as exotic," she almost instananeously suggests.

"...But yes, fuck the capitalist overlords just as much as the feudal ones; at least nobles theoretically had a responsibility to the people whose lives they could ruin on a whim.  Ugh.  Not that industrialization itself is an inherent evil, but concentrating the profits into the hands of a couple dozen men who won't bear the costs of the externalities industry imposes...That way lies the ruin of the species."

Redweld nods. "We-- our colleagues in Wallermoth, mostly, are working on something like that, I believe, and yes, it's remarkable not only how selfish but also how short-sighted they can be, and how that stands in stark contrast with the picture of forethought and wisdom they paint of themselves." He gets a fierce, almost angry look in his eyes. "The amount of time and effort it took to get the limits on poetic inscriptions act passed through parliament was unbelievable, considering the sort of chaos that might have been caused if we didn't."

"The limits on poetic inscriptions act, you say?  I have no idea what those consequences would be, but...I imagine they're quite real, if you say so.  What sort of inscriptions are there, and what's the problem with poetics?

"But yes, single-minded pursuit of a bigger number in their bank account...that's how 'industrialists' just are, most of the time."

"Oh there are inscriptions for--" He slaps his forehead. "You don't have magic. Uh. There are four 'winds' of magic, as we call them. The poetic, the metabolic, the echoic, and the chorismic. Put simply, the poetic creates things, the metabolic changes things, the echoic connects things, and the chorismic destroys things. They all have rituals and they all have inscriptions. And, it's well-understood, common knowledge really, that poetic, metabolic, and chorismic effects have sort of, cycle of dominance? A poetic effect will overpower a metabolic one, metabolic overpowering chorismic, and chorismic overpowering poetic, but just a few years ago there was some new research that there's more to it than that. Every time we perform a ritual, or more importantly, every instant that an inscription is active, it sort of weighs on the winds, suppressing the wind it dominates and feeding the wind that dominates it. There was already a slight upward trend in reports of spontaneous chorismic activity around that time, and projections indicated that if the production of poetic inscriptions continued increasing at the current pace there would be mass spontaneous chorismics, globally, within fifty years. Basically an end to the world, at least for human habitation."

"...oh, wow, that's...huh.

"I wonder..."

"...So there's a way to harvest energy from just, like, heat differentials; I wonder if I could dust off the old 'these aren't actually perpetual motion machines' blueprints and stick some mixed poetic-chorismic inscriptions on 'em.  Maybe even a metabolic one, just to be sure the balance is maintained..."

Redweld grimaces slightly. "Maybe? I'm not an engineer of any sort, I don't know whether such a design would be feasible. Off the top of my head, if the poetic and chorismic inscriptions are equally powerful on their own, the influence of chorismic might overwhelm the poetic, but you could probably account for that by increasing the baseline power of the poetic, or by factoring in a metabolic influence. I'll mention it to some of the tech people at the corps, or you can if you come visit."

"I'll certainly be planning to do something like that.  And not as stupidly as the people who sold the patent for insulin for a dollar, rather than setting up a licensing agreement."

Redweld nods. "Sounds like a plan." He chuckles. "It's looking like you're going to be making two splashes in the near future. And, what's insulin?"

"A chemical; part of human biological function, produced by the...pancreas?  Involved with the intake and metabolism of sugars.  There's some people who don't produce their own, and some for whom their response is dysregulated in other ways, and both of those cause diabetes, which can go...pretty badly for people, if untreated; blindness, circulation issues on the level of gangrene, looming threat of death via sugar-imbalance, other shit I don't remember.  I don't know the synthesis, unfortunately; perhaps I'll be able to speed y'all towards it regardless, though.

"...Most of the random knowledge I have is hobbyist-level, honestly; my professional training, however abortive, was, funnily enough, in stuff like writing scripts for echonet devices - though I imagine you don't have anywhere near the available level of abstraction I did.  ...Still do, actually, with my phone, come to think of it...though that's not a general purpose computer and I don't have the tools to make it so unless I figure out something magicky to let me safely test, disassemble...experiment, generally.  Let alone the consideration of electricity."

...She then mutters "I'm not inventing the TIS-100, nuh-uh," like she's warding something off.  "...but would it actually work, infrastructurally speaking..."

"Huh! We knew a kid who died of diabetes, back when we were just kids ourselves. I never knew what the actual mechanism of the disease was, and certainly we don't have any medicine for it. And, that's perfectly understandable, It sounds like there are quite a few fields where your world is at an advantage, so there's no way you could be a professional at all of them, nor is there any particular reason why you would be a professional at any of them, right? Unless you were sent here intentionally, but if I'm honest you don't seem very prepared for this if you were."

"Maybe whatever grabbed me couldn't give me time to pack," she quips.  "...Hey, any comment?", she directs at thin air.

<No- no- no comment.> Maria's own mental voice says, emanating from a new 'mental direction' which Maria did not previously realize was there.

"...Apparently, their comment is 'no comment'," she says, the words spilling out of her mouth in abject bemusement.

<...Who are you?>, she sends back.  <Why did you pick me?>

<I'm Echo! You're interesting.>

Redweld watches her with fascination. "Really! From another world and Recognized...I suppose it makes sense, anyone brought over from another world must have the winds' attention. You're communing with it now?"

"Yes; apparently, Echo believes I'm interesting."  ...There's clearly a part of her that doesn't, from the seeming disbelief in her voice.

<Is there a preferred presentation I should undertake when referring to you?  I don't imagine you to necessarily have much concern for petty mortal genders, but you do have sapience as far as I can tell, so I'm asking.>

Redweld nods again. "It's the echoic, then? That makes some sense, I suppose, to bridge gap between worlds?"

<Anything is fine!>

"I really can't quite imagine what else would have; theoretically it could have been a spontaneous or wind-directed poetic effect, but that seems...a stretch, though it's also definitely not impossible, because you can describe a human in finite space, information-theoretically speaking."

<There is more of all of us in each of us than none! It wouldn't be entirely wrong to say your recreation was poetic in part.>

"I wonder what your-- You probably don't know what an invocation is. So, when I said that each wind has rituals and has inscriptions, there's also a sort of third thing? But only the Recognizant have them, they're invocations. Or, I guess technically rituals and inscriptions are just 'types' of invocations, but there isn't a third word for these that's separate from just invocation. Anyway, they're sort of like rituals? But, also pretty different. They're usually just a short phrase, or even just a word or sequence of sounds or hand-signs, rather than a long script for a bunch of people to all do, and their power isn't based on how difficult and complicated they are the way it is for rituals. Every Recognizant only gets one, unless they get Rexognized by a second wind anyway. They're part of how new rituals and inscriptions get made, since each Recognizant can sort of, mold and grow their invocation, and then have their invocation studied and scanned and whatnot, which gives the elements that anemonomasticists use to invent new replicable magic."

"Oh that's interesting.  I'll see what I can do."

<...So I heard there are invocations?  That I could learn-define-grow-shape?  Who, uh, starts that process?>

<You are not at the right stage yet. Probably it will exist by tomorrow morning, maybe soon if we focus on it for a few hours. For now though we can do more things that are not exactly invocations! Like how I gave you the local language.>

Redweld nods once more, seeming to have exhausted his supply of ready topics. Then he turns to watch the trees blur by outside the carriage.

"Oh, that's interesting...'for now, we can do more things that are not exactly invocations, like how I gave you the local language.'  Quick, get me untranslatable books.  ...Dunno if that would actually work, but heck, I want to at least try it."

"...How fast is this car going, anyway?"

"Wait, what? I've never heard of-- I've never heard of someone coming from another world, either. You're going to be a lot of firsts, I guess! And, uh, probably about 60 miles an hour? We're another 10 or 15 minutes away from the facility at the moment, I think."

"Damn, you have really good engines and-or roads given the fact that your cars' aerodynamics are, frankly, shit.  Wind resistance actually starts to become a problem at speeds like that.  That, or the units aren't converting by math but directly."

"Oh we'd be going half that or less if we weren't on the Old Road, for just what you said, yes."

"...Hmm, now how would I do roads if I was working within this system...

"...how did the one example do it, let me think it out and tell me if I'm wrong...

"It's not etched, unless there's something on the underside, if that even works.  I do actually think it might work that way, but still, that's a lot of etching and if these roads don't predate industrialization I'll eat my nonexistent hat.  So it was done by either a ritual or a recognizant.  Not sure which, at this time.

"Now what wind would...

"...It would be truly elegant to use the onrushing motion of a vehicle to throw a pedestrian out of its way, and these roads...if they're a master's work, they would be - and it can't be poetic.  These roads are metabolic, which has me wondering just what the metabolic can metabolize.  Can it consume frictional forces?"

Redweld nods along. "Ah, right, sorry. The Road-Builder is not just a, uh, title for an unknown creator. He's actually relatively well-documented in the historical record. He was definitely a Recognizant, and definitely of the metabolic wind, though depending on who you ask he might have been Recognized by as many as three, and I might be misremembering, but if not then anemonomic scans of the Old Road itself indicate all four winds being present, to varying degrees. They also aren't consistent. which implies that the metabolic component, and probably the echoic as well if I had to guess, are actively modulating their own and the other two's influences."

"As for what the metabolic can metabolize, I don't know the exact limits? I know that it's not, uh," he gestures vaguely, "very abstract? You can't, say, convert an emotion into energy. An angry person isn't actually any more energetic than a calm one, despite the common sense."

"That makes more sense than anger being energetic, to me; emotions are just different patterns in the brain.  You'd want to gather not from the anger itself, but what it makes someone do.  ...You could probably stop a surge of anger with chorism, though, in at least some part, because it's hormonally-mediated...The human body is a bunch of - hm, you probably don't even have duct tape - but still, pitch, baling wire, and some metaphorical arsenic - a fever is the body trying to kill the very tiny organisms that cause disease by having more heat tolerance than them, fun fact."

Redweld nods, as he suspects he's going to be doing a lot in the near future, rubbing the back of his neck in preparation. "Yes, I-- we have some knowledge of how the brain functions, and you're correct there are several chorismic rituals for emotional regulation, my brother and I have had...personal experience with that. And, duct tape is a tape you put on a duct, I assume? I can imagine maybe as a way of showing whether it's flowing and in which direction. Or maybe to patch a hole if it's sticking tape. though I'm not sure why you'd call it duct tape then."

"It was indeed invented to patch ducts.  Pretty strong stuff; there was a crew of - theatrical engineers, best-guess approximation, their stock-in-trade was taking all those old 'a watched pot never boils'-type sayings and apocryphal occurrences and seeing if they were real - who made things as varied as cannons to boats to survival gear to trebuchets out of the stuff."

"Fascinating! There's a niche genre of teletheater that I think 'theatrical engineering' would be an apt description, something my brother and I watched quite a bit when we were young, and these fellows sound like they'd have fit in quite well."

"They literally did both engineering-for-teletheater - television in my language - and engineering but theatrically!"  She grins.

"Yes, exactly right. There's a whole little sub-culture of people who develop the engineering skills for teletheater production who then go on to put their work into the spotlight, especially as the echonet becomes more widespread, cheaper and easier to access. I should show you some. Welkonn watches a few of them religiously." This prompts a single knock on the window from the aforementioned brother.

"Ohh, this is great.  I'm going to live through the great revolution that is the birth of the Internet, do cool magic, and keep y'all from doing some stupid shit!  Aggressive implicit type conversion," she grumbles.

...She almost seems eustressly overwhelmed by the idea, of the vistas spreading out before her; her eyes water a bit, and she can't seem to stop smiling or drop her 'victory pose' - a fist pulled in, clenched tight in satisfaction.  "We're gonna do great things."

"Are you...alright?" Redweld asks with some genuine concern.

"I dom't know, but I think I'm better than I ever would have been back home, and isn't that sad?  But I'm just...too excited to properly care about that!  There's science to be done!"

"Well, I wouldn't say that it's hard for being Recognized to improve your life, but, I'm glad that you're feeling good about things. And indeed there is! In fact..."

The carriage begins to slow down significantly, then turns off the magical stone road and onto a short dirt path, continuing to slow down until stopping at a metal gate. Redweld gets up and out of the carriage, and Maria can hear him speak. "We're with the volunteer corps. We found a lost woman down on the Old Road after receiving a call from the shuttle bus, and we believe she's been newly Recognized, and wants to speak with the researchers."

"Oh, wow!" A young man's voice, maybe around the same age as Maria, maybe even a little younger, exclaims. "Right, yeah, let me open this up for you. I hope it goes well!"

There's a bit of squeaking as the gates are opened, probably a bit in need of greasing, as Redweld walks back up to the carriage door and offers his hand to help Maria step out. "Welkonn will park the auto while we find some researchers."

"Sounds like a plan."

She hops out on her own - she is very tall - but nods thankfully to Redweld nonetheless.

Welkonn drives the carriage around once the two of them are out of the way.

Inside, there's a lobby with plenty of seating, with a tall (though not as tall as Maria) dark-skinned woman sitting at the front desk, waving at the two of them as they come in. "What brings you two to the Swarthwalls Echoic Research Facility today? There was some unexpected activity picked up on the scanners, just so you know, so even if you have an appointment there may be a bit of a wait."

"We're actually here about that..." Redweld says, looking over to Maria and waiting, in case she'd rather explain herself.

"Hi!  I'm pretty sure I was that unexpected activity and I have so many questions!"

The receptionist makes a surprised expression, before quickly schooling it into a smile. "Oh, wow! I'm sure you do! Ah, let's see..."

She picks up a metal plate from a slot in the desk and holds like a phone, speaking into one end with a distinct 'talking to Siri' manner, with strict cadence and clear enunciation. "Office of Director Goodbarthson."

She waits for a moment. "Exactly right, sir. One of the volunteer corps members says he's brought the Recognizant, a young lady, they're here in the lobby right now. Yes sir." She hangs up, placing the plate back in its slot. "The director wants tests to make sure we have everything straight. Please head down to the scanner bay," she pulls out a little map of facility, indicating the location and giving some instructions on to navigate there, "they should be getting ready for you right now."

After navigating various hallways, descending a couple flights of stairs, and passing several painfully academic-looking older men rushing around the facility, they arrive at a large room dominated by a single and towering construction, a sort of metal tree with what must be at least dozens of different instruments tipping its branches. Some are vaguely recognizable to Maria, but many are utterly inscrutable, including a large number of seemingly featureless flat metal panels sticking out at various angles.

Attending to this construct are several lab-coated scientists wielding more metal plates in their hands. One of them, a thin man, not old but not young either, with shortly cut black hair, seemed to be watching the door that Maria and Redweld entered through and quickly walks up to them. "So, which of you is the Recognizant?"

Redweld gestures to Maria, and the scientist turns to her. "So, uh, we're still setting up, since we just got word a few minutes ago. If you have any questions about what we'll be doing, what we're measuring, that sort of thing, I can take those now? I'm researcher Orchard, by the way." He offers a hand to Maria.

"I have so many questions, and they start with how are you measuring and what are you trying to measure, in the first place?  And how the heck does that work at all, wouldn't you want to isolate these from eachother so their emissions don't interfere with other scanners'...oh, but you could actually be doing interferometry of some sort - okay I'm almost certain that that's just a buzzword, but if you're going to be shooting shit at me and measuring what spalls off I want to know what beforehand, that's dangerous - or maybe it's compositing if this is mostly passive...but really, why are they all on a big tree?  Surely you would want more degrees of freedom and less sticks-bashing-into-eachother?  And I'm sure it's possible to coordinate..."  Her hands move, as if trying, and probably failing, to sketch out a more free-moving sensor setup that probably involves gimbals and gyroscopes.  "Anyway, yes, hi, you may call me Maria; pleasure to meet you, I hope."  And she does, after a moment, remember handshakes exist!

Orchard shakes her hand, and Redweld's for good measures, then takes a deep breath. "Alright, let's try and answer those one by one. The array here," he gestures to the tree, "Is mostly echoic reduplicators, tuned to various quantities and qualities. There are some chorismic distinguishers and ananemonic sensors of various sorts, but echoic is definitely the predominant mode of observation, this is an echoic research facility after all."

"The array at the moment is tuned mostly to echoic activity signals, mostly in the local range, since we were...looking for you, basically. A good number of the devices will stay on that, the Swarthwalls have a relatively rare sort of echoic, uh...the common parlance is 'resonance' but it's not a literal sound, to be clear, but now that we have you here the instruments are going to go back to whichever project they were being used for earlier today, or whatever they're scheduled for next. I don't have the itinerary memorized, sorry. I was working on some astrometry when things went crazy."

"The array is shaped like that because it's part of how the array integrator lets all the instruments work together. The instrument limbs all help connect the individual inscriptions to the integrator, which shapes the exclusion zones of the instruments they're holding so that they don't interfere with one another. You're right that some of the ananemonic devices still get in each others' way though, so we keep most the rest of those on the roof or in the storeroom by the external staging area. It's a bit of hassle to work with the array sometimes, but it's better than having to space every individual instrument hundreds or thousands of feet apart."

"I hope that's a good start? Sorry if that didn't make much sense."

"A-ha!  Yeah, if chorism works like so and this is more a radar than...you probably don't have the analogy I'm trying to make, actually, but I think I get the difference, maybe?  It's not 'try to resolve one thing in a small area really well', it's 'try to resolve lots of things everywhere at once'?"

"Correct! Oh! Sorry, to be clear, the array isn't actually what we're going to be scanning you with, that is in an isolation chamber, over there," he gestures to one of the other doors on the far side of the room, "since we don't want to catch anything else. Uh..."

He processes that he may have completely misinterpreted Maria's questions and begins again, "For you specifically, we're going to be using just a smaller ree-dee and dee-gee, for now at least. Just to make sure that you're actually Recognizant and not some hoaxster or deluded or something. Not that I think you're lying, or that the volunteer corps would lie about this! Just, need to make sure, right?"

"Yeah, I picked that up eventually.  And as for making sure I'm not a fraud - I would too, in your position.  Expand those abbreviations, if you would?  Ree-dee and dee-gee?  And then I'd like to know what they do, of course.  I'm regrettably entirely unlearned in the field of wind-tech, for all that I know random stuff about everything else."

"Oh, right, yes, ree-dee is short for reduplicator and dee-gee is short for distinguisher. They, uh, reduplicate and distinguish signals? That's not helpful." Orchard considers this for a moment. "So, the winds have, uh, 'resonances' like I mentioned before, and Recognizants carry some of that. With enough precision you can figure out a lot, stuff about their invocation especially, but in a minute we're just going to be checking if you 'have' any 'resonance', above the norm for ordinary people anyway."

"That makes sense!  ...What sort of signals; is there a particular medium through which they are carried?  Have you tested them in a vacuum?"

Orchard wags his hand uncertainly. “It’s a pretty popular idea that there’s a sort of ether that the winds flow through, but that isn’t really borne out by the data. I think it’s mostly people being biased towards thinking of the winds as being…windy? Because of what we call them. As for what the actual medium is, it’s not totally clear that there is one? All of these do work in a vacuum, up to the limit of their durability anyway. Some of the inscriptions are surprisingly fragile to metal dust deposition.”

"...huh.  Waves must have a medium - unless they're also somehow particles, looking at you photons - that's how you have waves in the first place.  But then there's the whole quantum uncertainty principle business, so maybe it's some weird probabilism...And how the heck is there a mind running off of space, anyway?  Like, I can hold a conversation with Echo at the very least, and I don't think it's -

"<Hey, Echo, quick question, what's 213 times 7471?  Times 3.  'cause I know I'd have to solve that longhand.  My apologies for the math, but...gotta check my assumptions, you know?>"

"Also does anyone have something I can write on?"

“It’s not entirely clear that they are waves at all? I mean, you can make a reduplicator or distinguisher that scans for waves of various sorts, but that is not the only sort of signal it can pick up. I might be using the wrong word for that I guess? The plain dalmercian and the technical jargon have diverged a bit and I’m not really much of a science communications guy. Oh!”

Orchard fiddles with the metal plate he’s holding, whose face seems to transform into paper. “You can write on this, and just tap here,” he indicates a little rectangular symbol with five dots in it, “if you want to type instead of hand-write.”

After waiting exactly as long as it would take Maria to do the arithmetic on paper herself, and indeed possibly at the exact time Maria finishes the calculation if that is what she is going to do, Echo answers, <4,773,969!>

"...Impressive." 

Maria is waiting for Echo to answer first; no cheating!  "Annnnd Echo just told me the answer was...4773969; let's see if that's right..."

Yeah she'll do some math.

213 * 7471 * 3

639 * 7471

213 * 22413

426 0000

+ 42 6000

+   8 5200

+      2130

+        639

4773969

"Well, Echo can do math.  Or simulate me doing math.  And is probably sapient.  This sure is a thing."

Orchard grimaces at 'probably sapient' but doesn't actually comment.

Over on the far side of the room, the door he pointed to earlier opens, and another scientist on the other side calls out, "Isolation chamber 3's cleared out!"

"Alright, we can head in there. It might take a bit longer to find the spare equipment but we'll be out of people's way at least." Orchard leads the two of them into the room, receives a metal trinket from the other scientist as they vacate the room, then closes the door once Maria and Redweld are inside. "Anyway, any other questions?"

"I'd like to know from what direction you objected to the 'probably sapient' claim, but that can wait a bit."

“It’s not anything really scientific, it’s just…” Orchard has an awkward look. “Echoics are pretty much the only ones who say that about their wind, and they tend to get kind of…weird about it? I’m not really sure how to put it more politely than that. There aren’t any, uh…”

He searches for a word. “No ’outside’ reasons to believe the echoic wind is any more of a person than the other winds, and in my opinion some fairly strong reasons to think why its appearance to its Recognizants could be misleading.”

"If it's literally echoing me, it's as sapient as I am, I should think.  Brains are pretty complicated, and there's probably a way in which my go-to analogy wouldn't actually pan out here - for the record, if you have the concept of the halting problem, and you might actually - actually let me just explain it real quick to make sure we all understand eachother regardless - There's a class of mathematical constructions with which you can definitively encode a programmable 'machine' that you cannot definitively prove will ever stop iterating for all possible programs; this is a Turing machine where I'm from, after the man who fornalized them.

"Such a machine is Turing-complete.

"And it is another fact of Turing-complete systems that they are isomorphic to one another - that you can transform any one into any other with enough math.

"And thus the analogy: If Echo is emulating my brain, which I believe it is - and furthermore possibly must to communicate as it does - then it is sapient, because a copy of me is also sapient, by the transitive property, and an emulation of a copy of me is thereby sapient as well.  This is simply Turing machine isomorphism in action."

Orchard sighs. “I am really not the person to talk with this about. I’m sorry. Maybe one of the others can. I think Dr. Bald was the one who explained the theory to me, but honestly, it’s not important. As long as you’re willing to do science you could be one of those wind-worshippers like at the data center downtown for all I care.”

"Anyway, yes, this is not the experiment we're running, so...Let's do the thing, shall we?"

“Still waiting on the—“ Orchard is interrupted by a knock on the door.

He opens it and receives another metal plate from the person on the other side, before turning back to the two of them. “ Could you wait outside, sir? I don’t think it’s likely you’re a secret Recognizant but it’s better to be sure.”

Redweld looks to Maria. “Are you all right with that? Given your circumstances, I understand if you might feel vulnerable.”

"..."  She huffs a breath, because Redweld's right about that.  "Well, I'm already here.  So let's just get it over with?"

"Alright. I'll be just outside the door. Make some racket if something goes wrong." Redweld then leaves, Orchard closing the door behind him and the placing the trinket he got when they first entered the room into a slot on the door.

As soon as he does, a red light above the door turns on and all of the sound from the other room, and from the rest of facility in general, goes almost dead silent. Orchard fiddles with the metal plates, the paper-like surface disappearing from one, then he taps them against each other and holds one out towards Maria while looking intently at the other. "Alright, ready to go. Uh, you shouldn't actually feel anything during this, this in particular is a totally passive scan, but, if you feel something anyway let me know."

Then he starts waving the plate he's holding out up and down while he walks around her, a bit like someone using metal detector wands at the airport security check.

"...wow, I bet I could hear my heartbeat in here."

"Probably!" Orchard adds without looking away from the one plate. A minute later, he's walked a full circle and starts fiddling with the settings again. "Alright, that's sweep one-- wait. You mentioned the echoic, what am I doing." He fiddles some more, and suddenly very rapidly fiddles a little bit more. "Wow! Okay, definitely Recognizant, or something like it, maker and waker." The last bit has the sound of a swear, though a slight one.

"Or something like it?  I have my own thoughts, but I hardly want to influence yours..."

"I definitely don't! I honestly don't know what would make your readings that high two or three hours after your Recognition, unless you've got an absolute monster of an invocation right off the bat somehow. Anyway, that's all we're doing for now, whatever's going on, you're definitely something special."

Orchard heads back to the door and removes the trinket from it, the red light turning off and the sound returning as suddenly as it vanished, and Redweld is indeed still standing outside. Orchard leads the two away from the isolation chamber, shouting "Isolation chamber 3's clear!" as he does so. No one comes to use it, so he goes to a little station close to the door that Maria and Redweld originally entered the scanner bay from and puts the door-trinket and the scanner-plate away into slots for each.

At the same station, he picks up a plate from a different slot, holds it phone-style. "Office of Director Goodbarthson." A short pause. "Orchard sir. She's definitely something echoic. Honestly the readings were too intense to really parse, even now, so I struggle to think of anything it could be other than Recognition, and even that shouldn't be this strong." Another pause. "Right away director."

After hanging up, he turns to Maria and Redweld. "Alright, the director will see you in his office. I've got to get to my own meeting in a minute, so you can head to the front desk and ask for directions if you need them."

Orchard promptly heads away himself, out of the scanner bay and off to parts unknown except for presumably being elsewhere in the facility. "I actually know the way myself. Come on. And, how was it? Didn't take very long." He asks as he begins to lead Maria to the facility director's office.

"Was fine, just standing there while he went all waving a scanny plate at me."

"That's good. Do you think you're going to mention the whole 'transplant' situation to Finstead--? That's the director, I mean. I can understand keeping it under wraps but it sounds like they might have some inkling that something's different about you anyway."

"Oh, probably, eventually.  If nothing else, I believe it to be evidence in favor of 'the Echo is sapient'.  It picked me out of an entire multiverse to...echo, I suppose?  And holds opinions on me, that I do not hold myself.  On the other hand, I want to let them come to their own conclusions."

Redweld simply nods to that.

It's a bit of a trip to the director's office, going from the sub-basement all the way up to the top floor, but even eventually they make it. An inconspicuous door at the end of the hallway with a little plaque labeled 'Facility Director Finstead Goodbarthson'.

Redweld knocks on the door, and it's promptly answered by a tall and broad-shouldered man, nearly bald and with a salt-and-pepper beard. "Ah! The other Foundry brother, and our Recognizant. It's good to make your acquaintance."

He opens the door wide, revealing his office. It's pretty cushy, with soft carpeting, gentler lighting than the relative sterility of the hallways and scanner bay. There's a big desk, a set of filing cabinets and shelves full of office supplies along one wall and bookcases along the opposite, with the wall across from the the door dominate by a large set of windows, currently mostly blocked by curtains, with a reclining chair and small table by the window. Standing next to the desk is the familiar form of Welkonn, who gives Redweld and Maria a friendly wave and smile.

"Please come inside, I know the Foundry boys prefer to stand but feel free to sit if you like, miss. Can I order anything for you now that you're here? I don't know if you've had anything to eat or drink recently. Maybe a coffee?"

"I've never found coffee to be particularly my thing, but I probably wouldn't say no to snacks."  And she sits!