They're on a gravel road, on a mountainside.

The air is clear, fresh, and temperate.   . . . But it smells of ash?

A string of towers strung with telephone wire hugs the road at a short distance. A little ways down-slope (maybe a dozen gross meters) there's a grey-brick-and-wooden building, smaller than a barn but not by much, overlooking a twin pair of train tracks that shoot off past distant mountains in either direction.

Up-slope, maybe another dozen gross meters - they can't quite see, it's somewhat obscured by a drop-off, but it looks like a few cabins are up there, each separated from the others by at least its own dozen gross meters or so. How many, they can't tell, but there are at least a couple pretty distant ones.

Even though it's midmorning and warm outside, smoke is evidently rising from one of the nearer chinneys. That's where the ash smell was coming from.

Blech. The ash smell is very unpleasant, and he kind of wants to stop his rhythmic-tentacle-emergence-and-retraction-to-detect-scent-instinct. But he doesn't want to do that, because he has to orient in What Is Apparently The Afterlife?

The two drones pulling them along have stopped. Understandable. 

Building with locomotive tracks down, and cabins upslope. Such chimneys would never fly in the cities: you would get sued into oblivion. They've put a lot of effort into building chimney designs that don't make everyone have to breathe in awful ash.

Hm. Where to go. Downslope seems more promising – he thinks that that building is some sort of train station, and that he could get a train somewhere. Somehow.

...maybe they'll take Imperial rupnu? He still has his wallet.

He orders Rend and Las to keep going downslope, but at a leisurely pace, rather than the brisk walking pace before. 

How does the landscape change as they continue on the path? Does the scent of the air change?

The air becomes gradually less smoky as they descend.

There's an area of gravel next to the two-story train station (the train station and the area of gravel are both this side of the tracks). There's an automobile parked on it, a truck with big tires supporting a closed rear box and a simple, but not un-aerodynamic-looking, one-seater cab.

Up close, the train station (?) is dignified, if simple. The windows - four on each floor, this side - are big and clean, offering good views inside - at least, the two (both on the ground level) that aren't obscured by heavy black curtains drawn shut. Each window appears to open into a separate, small room, about the size of a large bedroom. One of the unobscured rooms contains a plastic folding table propped against the wall, an ergonomic wobbly-stool with a bright red seat, a mini-fridge (plugged in), and a lean-and-tough, but not fancy, motorbike - all leaned up against one wall, like the room is more storage than habitation. The door from the little room to the interior of the building is closed.

The second-floor room with the uncurtained window looks empty.

The outside of the building has big varnished-wooden-looking double doors, with one-way glass reflecting outward.

There's no sound or sign of right-this-minute human activity in the vicinity.

Thank goodness. It is very pleasant to have clean air.

Ooh, an automobile. He correctly identifies that it is one, but doesn't recognize the make. Automobiles aren't really all that popular – most cities ban them because of the smoke, and if you want to travel in the rural areas, taking the steam locomotive is faster and cheaper. If you have to travel over rough ground, drones are better – they won't get stuck.

He has the two drones park the carriage off the side of the road, leaving Las to look after it. He brings Rend and Ders along with him, walking a little behind him.

Okay...the curtains are definitely not train station-like. And the table with seat and refrigerator and motorbike are also definitely not train station-like. He's going to guess that this is actually the house of someone who doesn't care much about aesthetics and wants to be Left Alone. In that case, he should probably leave. People in rural areas can get Territorial about their property – more so than usual – and he does not want to deal with that today: he might be inadvertently trespassing. Although they didn't bother to mark their land with fencing, or signs, so perhaps not? If you want an Imperial court to respect your right to use violent force against people who refuse to leave your property, you have to like, clearly mark that it's private and not public land.

The trio are going to walk to the double-door, whereupon Damin will knock thrice, but not say anything.

There isn't any answer.

There are, however, little plaques on the doors just below the windows; the one on the left door reads "SES KIVRJ RESORT | KEYHOLDING GUESTS WELCOME ANY HOUR".

The one on the right, which is in much smaller lettering, says that an attendant will be available to assist with any difficulties over a two-hour window that - and then the plaque lists out a rotating schedule that is in no time system Damin is familiar with, hours apparently translated into several different systems for the reader's convenience, and dates demarcated by the phase of the moon. The moon is currently out, and waxing crescent (judging by the sun's angle it seems to be morning, or late afternoon, or Arctic noon but these are mountains and the snow caps look pretty high up?) but unless he can tell exactly how many days it's been since it was last full, he won't know when to expect the attendant.The plaque then lists a local radio frequency in cycles-per-second and a Net server (addressed 3 ways) that are listening for customer calls, and 8 differently-formatted call-tags by which a resort attendant can apparently be contacted depending on the caller's chosen phone company.

Next to the door, affixed to the wall, there's a map showing the location of 8 other Ses resorts, and a few other resorts, along this two-dozen-mile stretch of track.

There's a keypad next to the doors, and a keyhole on one of them.

Oh, so it's like, a chalet or something. Who would go to this resort – it looks terribly drab...not important right now.

The more pressing issue is that he doesn't know what the time is. This is not the way to tell time in the Imperium. The Imperium is sane and has a single way to tell time, with adjustment for time zones. The differences between the formats are big enough for him to see that they are not time zone differences.

Which would imply that he wouldn't be able to read it...except he can.

Internal screaming.

He is going to, for a moment, act like a drone and wrap that screaming part of him with a neat red bow and push it away. That present can be opened later.

It is definitely not the arctic unless whatever planet he's landed on – he's not even sure whether he's on Zmavliterdi – has scorching hot tropics. Actually, it's definitely not Zmavliterdi because there is only one sun in the sky. 

The internal screaming is becoming harder to suppress. He grabs Rend's arm and starts stimming with it, squeezing the drone's forearm.

Radio frequency? He has no radio. What's a 'Net'? Based on context, it's another way to contact customer service. Same with the 'phones'. 

At least anyone who's here is not going to be the landowner, so the chance of him getting chased away violently simply for stepping into the vicinity is much reduced. Hm, what weapons does he have, anyway? He has an old pistol, a whip, and a knife. Not a lot. He should have taken Konrad's advice to be better armed when he goes out. Sigh.

Hm. What options does he have? He can try to go back to the carriage and travel along this path, to see if he runs across anyone. Alternatively, he can try disturbing people here to see if any of them are occupied and can help him.

The prospect of disturbing aliens is mortifying, so he's going to get back on the carriage and see if he encounters anyone along the path. He can try the 'disturb aliens' strategy as a last resort at the last resort if he doesn't come across anyone.

Unfortunately for Damin if he was hoping to get somewhere else, he'll notice as soon as he looks that the gravel road stops clean at the station building and its parking lot. If he wants to go anywhere else, it looks like he'll have to follow the tracks.

There are strips of gravel flanking and separating the two sets of tracks, but not wide enough to fit his carriage - if he wants to take the carriage up or down the track, at least one of the drones will have to walk between one of the sets of rails, or else the going is going to be very rough indeed.

Just great. If he was sure that the tracks were made for drones, then he'd happily go on them, but they could be steam locomotive tracks. Indeed, this world looks more advanced in transportation technology, what with the sleek looking automobile, so it's more likely to be some sort of locomotive. He would prefer not to get squashed under one. He supposes he could have Ders stay back and be on the lookout (and hear-out) for an incoming train, but the point of having a carriage is so that you can relax and take in the scenery. He's going to discard that train of thought.

Okay, back to the door. The keypad and call-tags both use numbers, right? If so, he's going to try one of them on the keypad. Does that work? He'll try it only once. He suspects that only controls the door and doesn't do any calling, and he also suspects that Something Bad will happen if he tries an incorrect passkey combination too many times. That's just good design.

The Something Bad may be Something Good, in the sense that it's likely to raise some alarm that causes someone to attend to him. The Bad part is that their prior will be hostile and might try to shoot or detain him, and he really does not want to be shot or detained.

He's going to circle the building to look into the windows. Are there people there now? If not, he's going to knock repeatedly on one of the windows, one that looks like it's a living room or some sort of central location in the house. 

A signal light above the keypad flashes red for a few seconds, and then the pad is quiescent.

Only one set of curtains on the front of the building (which has similar double doors to the back) is pulled back. It has exactly the same dimensions as the other two unobscured rooms from the back side, and contains a clothing dresser made of dull black plastic, a little box fronted with mesh that Damin may or may not recognize as a radiation space heater, a couple 2-dozen-packs of toilet paper, stacks of cardboard half-crates containing yellow cans labeled KIDNEY BEANS UNSALTED in little black lettering, and some other miscellaneous plastic bottles of soap and junk on the dresser.

Nothing will happen as a result of any of his knocks.

He startles momentarily with the eerie red light, but fortunately resists making noise.

He does not recognize it as a space heater and will think it's some sort of cage or container. Also, wow. For a resort room, that is a very depressing looking room...oh! It's the drone's room, of course, what with the organ meats. Wait, no. Oh. Kidney beans are legumes. 

He's half tempted to knock some more, but he thinks he's going to stop now. What to do. Hm. He's neither hungry nor thirsty, as of now, and it doesn't look like the sun (singular!!) is going to set anytime soon. Should he just wait?

He'll try both screaming and knocking.

"Help! Help! Help!" He tries to say the Imperial special phrase to indicate a true life-threatening emergency. It is not a criminal offense to utter it even when one doesn't believe that, but people will be very mad at him if they feel he misused it. The sanctity of that phrase is a public good, and indeed, there have been some proposals to criminalize (albeit minorly) its utterance in cases where the speaker doesn't actually believe they're in one. These proposals were rejected with wide margin, since the Imperium can only judge actions, not beliefs, and it would be dangerous to permit it the power to decide what was an emergency and what was not – this is something for individual people to decide.

In any case, being transported to an alien world after your seeming death does constitute a true life-threatening emergency to Damin, so he says it, although hearing the words he's now uttering – which he is sure is not Imperial – he can tell that what he's saying doesn't have the sanctity of the Imperial phrase.

A 5' 7" person with short black hair, wearing a black sweater-and-jeans-and-bulging-plastic-trash-bag-slung-over-his-shoulder, sprints-half-slides down the gravel once he reaches the inside of hearing distance.

"What?" he will yell, to the tentacle-having guy that is screaming Help help help into the lodge.

A person...alien...child? The person's body structure looks eerily similar to remna. But he has hair. He's not going to pattern-match remna bodies to this person, since clearly his life cycle must be different.

"Hello. Please help me. I am lost." He is very quickly doing the rhythmic-extension-and-retraction-of-tentacles thing, unconsciously – it's an expression of high excitement or arousal.

What does the person smell like? He's half tempted to flick his tongue at him, but in Zmavlimu'e – well, not that any social norms would transfer – it would be considered either very slightly rude, or flirtatious. Neither of which he wants to convey.

It's giving creepypasta, to Naxi's senses.

Naxi is already here, but he can at least come out of this more Tezh The Caver than Beh Drowned.

"Sure you are." He drops his trash bag, darts off the road, breaks a branch off the nearest tree, and brandishes the sharp end at the thing. "Please give some sensible explanation of who you are, why you're here, and what you want from me."

How did it even think that would work.

Sigh. Damin highly doubts that the alien would be able to take all three of them, especially since, apparently, he is unarmed save for the stick. One assumes that if the alien had a gun or something he would have brandished it already.

"My name is Damin Bales Sertes. I live near Kosfor City. This is going to sound crazy to you, but I appeared near here after I died. Yes, this is not what I thought I would have gone. I would appreciate directions to the nearest large settlement where I could find help."

He realizes that this language lacks imperative strength and desire strength markers. He would have wanted to use [highly recommended] and [I really want this and would be extremely dismayed if you refused but do not wish to/cannot inflict force on you].

The two drones behind him now stand in front, but they don't approach any farther than a pace in front of Damin, nor do they speak. The gun is with Las, but the whip is with Damin – not that that's going to be terribly useful in an actual fight – but Rend has his knife. Much more useful than a stick, he'd reckon.

Well. Naxi hadn't noticed the other two wiggly guys. Also, the screaming guy's story sounds too weird and un-optimized-for-controlling-him, to probably be false. Naxi drops the stick to signal his sanity.

"Nearest town is three dozen miles that way -" he jerks his head right down the railroad tracks. 

(He smells ashy, because it was him burning his burnable trash up at the resort.)

Should he just go that way? He thinks not. He has no government papers, and doesn't know how to navigate the local Culture, Which Is Clearly Very Different. So it would be good to have a guide of some sort.

"Would you be willing to act as a guide to the local culture for me, and perhaps accompanying me to the town? I know virtually nothing about this place.

Am I correct in saying that you are an alien? Relative to me, at least. You have hair, and you do not have back-tentacles, or head and shoulder shell-plates."

. . . Ugh. He's tired and he came up here to get away from the feeling that at any time someone's emergency could get sprung on him. This is just. Ridiculous. He tries to levitate, that's how he's trained himself to test for being in a dream. Nope. The world does appear to be spinning a little, though.

"Yes, I'm an alien. I've never heard of Kosfor City, and I obviously don't know for certain but my best guess is that it isn't anywhere on this planet, whether or not it is in fact anywhere else. You won't find anyone who looks like you here, I'm sorry to tell you. On this planet all the reasoning creatures look like me, pretty much. It's weird as sin that you look basically like us, actually, except for the back-tentacles and head-and-shoulder plates. I would suspect this of all being some kind of prank by people with access to secret biotechnology, but my instincts are actually telling me otherwise."

His instincts are also telling him that his best choice here is to do something totally insane.

"I have a two-seater carplane, with room in the back of the cab for two more. If y'all want me to take y'all to town, the one-way trip should only take twelve minutes or so."

"Oh, I see." Tragic. And yes, it is eerie how similar they look.

What's a carplane. Oh! A flying automobile. Wow. Their transportation technology is way ahead of Zmavlimu'e. 

This does not bode well for his prospects for self-defense.

"Hm, that could work, although I have three –" this language doesn't have the word for drones. A pause.

"My three...workers...I want them to come with me. Only having space for two extra could work, if I have them fold up very efficiently, although they don't have specific training in being transported. I also don't want to give up my carriage, since it has my luggage in it.

One of them is guarding my carriage, which apparently survived my death intact. I was planning to take the carriage to town, but I didn't want to risk the possibility of a locomotive coming down the tracks and flattening us. How fast do your locomotives travel? If they're slow enough, I would risk the trip."

Naxi appraises the carriage (how big is it? will anything stand out to him?), then looks up and down the line.

"I'm not sure if any on this line go this fast, but it doesn't go any faster than eight dozen miles per hour. It's just diesel, and not very optimized diesel."

It's an open air carriage with two benches seating two each, although given that Zmavlire'a are bigger, you could potentially seat six humans comfortably provided they're not too big. The back seats fold up to double as extra storage for luggage, which is currently its current configuration. There's only two luggage bags, though.

It's elaborately decorated in a rococo style, although blue rather than white is the predominant color. It's made of wood with plaster and paint, and has brilliant blue cloth curtains and cushions.

Plans.

He and Ders could step off and have Las and Rend pull the carriage off the track, but it's three dozen miles away – an unusual unit of length measurement, which apparently the Mysterious Language Granting Entity has seen fit to give him intuitions for. That will be an exhausting twelve hour walk. He and the drones will definitely be very hungry and tired after that. They'll probably have to take a break three quarters of the way through.

He's not sure they can eat the food here anyway...but considering that possibility is pointless: if the food here is inedible, they didn't have long to live anyway.

He, Ders, and Rend could board the carplane – still unbelievable that they have flying automobiles that go that fast – and leave Las to guard the carriage with the pistol, but that would mean splitting up, and also losing their strongest weapon. Leaving Las with the knife or nothing would make leaving it to guard the carriage pointless. Also, while they could take on the alien with the three remaining, even unarmed, that assumption goes out the window the moment they step on the carplane, which could have all sorts of weapons or other trickery.

He'll probe for more information.

"The town is three dozen miles away, but are there any settlements or shops in between? Are there any non-track roads that also lead to the town?"

In the initial shock, he hadn't noticed how trippy the carriage was. For that matter, their clothes. Kaleidoscopic fractals . . . It's deeply unsettling, like something conceived by a sick sadistic fiction author from a more broken universe where fiction is routinely written for the sole purpose of making the audience unsettled. 

"There's a rest stop about twelve miles that way -" he points toward the town "for hikers and such, trails branch off it into the mountains - and a service road wide enough for the carriage goes between the rest stop and the town - Washa - although there'll be automobiles on it too - but it seems counterintuitive to take that route when you could just - wait until tomorrow morning, when the next train stops here, and buy passage. Even if the seats are all taken, you could get emergency passage in storage. I think it's more likely than not they'd have unbooked space to take your carriage as far as town, too, although I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Oh.

Unless - do you have any cash* on you?"

A thought occurs to him.

"If you're an alien, how do you know current Vaxilal**?"

*Literally, physical money

**Most dialects on Byway are named after their locality, although the particularly fast-changing language spoken wherever the Heart (Center City, Nexus, etc.) burns, has in recent tradition donated its working title to the planet, for those who speak it. Over the last grossyears most dialects have converged to become mutually intelligible to some degree with the Central Language, now known to itself as Byway, but lack of perfect mutual intelligibility, to those of Byway, bears the same degree of cultural markedness as total mutual unintelligibility might in some other places. In large cities, failure to demonstrate proficiency with this year's set of idioms and colloquialisms is generally perceived as imperfect speech by those who know better - although the standard of articulateness expected can vary wildly between urban/urban-coded microcommunities separated by but short geographical (and today, in the age of the Net, informational) distances.

A few people in Zmavlimu'e deliberately wear patterns that have optical illusions on them, but this is generally considered to be an annoying thing to do.

Oh, right. He had thrown away too much of his old priors, and failed to realize that a train station would have to have trains regularly pass through it. Fortunately, his facial expression changes only slightly. We love having tutoring from politician parents.

"I thought that there wouldn't be space on the train for my carriage. At what times does the train stop here? You have multiple ways of telling time here, right?" Which makes no sense, knowing the time is supposed to make it easier to coordinate, not harder, and unless people here are moving at relativistic speeds, it can be safely assumed that time is passing at the same rate for all of them.

I have Imperial rupnu, but I intuit that it won't be accepted here. Hm. I have gold coins – each one gram in weight. Would that be acceptable? Would someone else trade tickets for it? How do you buy tickets, anyway?" He has five of them, each minted six years apart – there's a design competition every six years over what design gets to be placed on them. He could also trade some of the stuff in his luggage, but that seems even less likely to be accepted as currency.

"I don't know," he confesses. "Whatever process transported me here saw fit to also give me knowledge of Vaxilal, to the extent that teleology can be applied to it. My last memories were of the bridge we were crossing collapsing, and of all of us dying. Do you know of anyone here who has arrived with their last memories being their death?"

. . . Yeah, Bywayeans don't generally pattern their fabric at scales smaller than bold stripes and patches made to flatter the form of the human body itself. Naxi has never seen anything a sixth as dizzyingly ornate as rococo.

"Time?" Naxi's eyebrows pucker, like the absurdity of what Damin's said is impeding his thought. ". . . Generally people tell the time by the schedule of a local train* they're familiar with. If they move too far away from their longitude of residence, they'll switch to using a local stopscore**, or if there isn't a very nearby station big enough to have a stopscore, and you'll be staying a sufficiently short time for it not to be worth bothering to learn the nearest - such as now, for me - or it's your permanent resisence but the nearest is sufficiently far away, you'll just count hours from a local stop you keep track of. Although that last method is less common now that we have the Net." He glances back up the road. "I don't have my device on me, but I checked not long ago, and it was around 3:00 counting from the time the train stops here, and 5:00 by the train-schedule-time-convention under the Ect station in Washa." He side-eyes the alien. "Do they tell time somehow else where you're from? Sundials? But you seem to know what a train is. 

I guess maybe if you're using gold for currency trains're not that widespread yet. I s'pose you don't have psystims*** then. You don't have coffeeboxes, or anything?" He stifles a semi-hysterical laugh. "Tea bricks? Most people don't take that stuff these days, you have to carry around bigger scales and do more random testing since the brands are so little-known now, and of course plant material is just bigger, but I've been surprised in the past by what people can get away with carting up to counters." Frown. "Once or twice.

No, I have emphatically never heard of anything even vaguely like your story happening. Was stuff in the range of sudden death-based teleportation normal where you're from? And why do you know about relativistic speeds? Again, if you don't mind answering." Naxi has no clue what could possibly be going on here.   ". . . Where are you from, if you don't mind saying?" He strains his memory through the impression of ADRENALINE. "You said your name was - Dalim? And - what were you guys's?" He looks at the two drones. "I'm Naxi Ashtego Vaxilal."

*This word in Vaxilal covers both aboveground and underground trains.
**Meaning 'train-schedule-time-convention'.
***Meaning 'small-individually-dosed-stronger-than-natural-psychostimulants'.

...how do you develop flying automobiles without having coordinated time? Coordinated time seems so...basic...compared to that.

Is their society in fact currently collapsing. Are they a group of people using the remnants of the technology left behind by a more advanced race which has now gone extinct, and which they cannot reverse engineer.

"Why don't people coordinate on a single time zone scheme so everyone only has to learn a single one, and you don't need to specify which one you're using?

We used to tell the time with sundials, but that was more than a dozen gross years ago. Nowadays we use mechanical clocks, though there are prototypes for quartz clocks which exploit its very stable vibration when electric current is passed through it, which have the potential to be much more precise than mechanical clocks.

Trains are widespread where I'm from. All major cities have one, and many smaller cities link up to the tracks between the major ones. However, their spread is hampered by the fact that trains emit terrible smoke because of the fuel they burn, and no one wants that near them. So, train stations have to be placed well away from the cities proper, until or unless we develop smokeless train technology.

We have tea and coffee too...I'm surprised that our biology is so similar that we experience the same effects from them, and indeed, even have the same species...but maybe we're referring to something different. We do not use those for currency – tea bricks and coffeeboxes degrade over time, and gold does not. Gold retains its commodity value even when exposed to harsh conditions such as violent forces, moisture, many chemicals, and oxidation from air.

No! Definitely not normal, which is why I was asking. I know about relativistic speeds because people figured out that time and space are related, did experiments about it, and validated it. And then I read the paper they published. It's a relatively recent discovery, I think about a dozen and eight years ago.

I'm from the Imperium, near Kosfor City. That's in the province of Sranam. My full name is Damin Bales Sertes, but 'Damin' will be fine. The...workers' names are Ders and Rend," and he points to each one as he says the name. Each drone bows when pointed to.

"I would like to reiterate my request for a guide to navigating your people's culture and civilization correctly," given that it seems to be laid out so illogically, "and if you are unable to render this service for me, I would appreciate being directed to someone who can."