Toy-Mun follows Kwaiets's instructions on fastening the seatbelt and nods.
- Magnets… these funny little things that attract iron? Interesting… if the magnet is so strong as to move the whole train, why doesn't it drag my sword out of my hands?

Stupid parts of his brain entirely aside, that's a strikingly good question from someone out of a distant Past - or would Kwaiets himself have been as childishly fresh-eyed about maglev, pulled from the same history?

"Very good question. I imagine your sword would be affected if you held it right between the train-magnet and the rail-magnet - while the train was floating stopped, some of them do that - like, inside the shielding, but I don't actually know how they build these things strong enough to float the train without wreaking havoc on all the surrounding metal. But, I mean, one thing is that the magnets are working on other magnets attached to the train, which lets them be weaker, more discriminating, with respect to metal, than if they were just pulling the metal in the train itself. You know how two magnets repel each other more strongly than either attracts metal of the same weight?"

- Oh. So they kinda move each other but compensate each other for the rest? That's sma-a-a-a-a... - the end of the phrase is eaten by a huge yawn. - How long is our trip expected to be?

"Just a minute. I live a decent chunk of the city away, four miles or so, but this thing is going - I guess you wouldn't share our units, or do you? Two hundred plus miles an hour?" He's already looking something up on his pocket encyclopedia. "Like if you stacked a tiny, but regular-speed, racehorse, on top of another racehorse, and had both of them run top-speed, and repeated that for four more tiny racehorses on top of the initial two, it'd be going as fast as the top one." That will sound like a really dumb thing for him to have said in a number of possible scenarios, but frankly he nerdsniped himself and he's not ashamed of it.

- Two… hundred… miles… - Toy-Mun bites her lip. - I'm not sure our miles are exactly equal, either - they can differ a bit even between countries - but mile is, like, a lot. A human is lucky to pass two per hour by foot, maybe three if running. So, if we go for a minute… there are sixty minutes in an hour, right? In your world, I mean? Then… this thing covers in a minute a travel distance I'd need more than an hour to cross. Impressive.
These mutual calculations were themselves likely to take a minute or so, so they would probably be stopping right about… now.

"Yeah, I was gonna say it's weird you know any 'mile' given that it's, yeah, a unit, so it's regional and not just language-specific - Aineh, so not that regional, but still - and our miles are smaller, you cross six or seven in an hour, running - anyway." He stops as the train does, pretty much right according to Toy-Mun's expectations, and leads him out into a smaller, less ornamental, less crowded, station. 

"- anyway, wavelengths," he continues as they ascend back to street level. "Turns out rainbows look that way because when light hits a drop of mist, it gets fanned out into its constituent components - they get sorted - and some colors aren't atomic constituent components of light, just the ones in the rainbow are. The thing they get sorted by is frequency, which bears some resemblance to the pitch of sound - higher sounds being made of more vibrations per unit of subjective time, which corresponds to being crammed more densely into units of subjective space." He'll see if Toy-Mun has any questions or comments about that before deciding what to say next. It'll be helpfully-calibrating whether Toy-Mun has any existing idea of pitch as frequency - it's a low-tech discovery, but a high-intelligence one.

Toy-Mun follows Kwaiets, returning the swordbelt on their hips. As he explains, he's met with… a blank stare.

Then she speaks slowly and carefully, as if Kwaiets's words hit something.
- You want to say… that, say, my voice is like it is… because something here, - she touches her larynx - well, something around there, at least, - vibrates, and does so slowly compared to most wo… females?
By Earth measures, her voice is rather low (although not out of realm of possibility) for a female. Not that it would necessarily say anything to Kwaiets.

"Yeah - if your voice is abnormally low for females where you're from. It sounds normal to me." His voice would strike an Earthling as uncannily androgynous, but to him it sounds 'normal female'.

Again, the evidence has come up in favor of "Toy-Mun's society knows nothing, but Toy-Mun is capable of deriving the implications of anything in a flash." He isn't sure what to make of that, except for part of his hypothesizing mechanism to raise the possibility that 'Toy-Mun' is actually some kind of noticeably poorly done lure or testing apparatus courtesy of the eldritch interventionist simulation masters from beyond the void, and doesn't truly possess the history he claims at all.

"It's much harder to detect the time frequency difference between light vibrations than sound vibrations, but anyway, it turns out light works the same in any ways, if not most. The light in the ticket machine was emitted by something creating much more frequent vibrations than the energy releases that create the light you see. Although once you start talking about mechanisms for emitting light as opposed to sound, you bring on the necessity of a whole other group of paradigms."

They've entered a hallway - tunnel ? - under a six-story building with window glass so thick an Earthling would wonder whether it was meant to be bulletproof. This one is lined with entrances to stairwells and elevators. Kwaiets leads them into an elevator, presses '3'.

 - Hm, - Toy-Mun ponders, still following Kwaiets. - Coming to think of it, your voices were all rather too similar to each other for the three females to two males composition. Yeah, women can have a voice up to full interval* higher than me or maybe even a bit more, I'm at the lower end of what's possible, probably due to a throat disease in my childhood. Men can range from something a tad higher than my voice to an interval* or two lower. Anyway, yeah… this idea of sound as vibration and light as vibration with colors working like pitch is interesting, even if it's a bit hard to wrap my head around it.

As they enter the elevator, Toy-Mun remembers something else.

- You never answered: do you live alone? Or is there some other roommate we'll have to… introduce me to or something?

*Octave is meant. Kwaiets somehow knows this but also does know that the word used is the same as the generic word for "interval".

". . . Huh. I don't remember how much there is off the top of my head, but there's definitely not that much separation between male and female speaking pitch here. As you've already noticed.

. . . No, yeah, I live alone. Sorry that you've lived your whole life in the Past where housing was so expensive that people had to live together. Uh, you wouldn't have any idea of the purchasing power of gold here, but the pay algorithm in your contract should, within realistic parameters, pay out enough for you to rent your own place in like six days. Which will be convenient, since I take it you don't want to be switching residence to whichever Refutation member has a day off and can work with you, even in the meantime?" He's genuinely unsure.

The elevator doors open. This hallway is narrower and shorter than the meeting-room one, but similarly bare and giant-windowed. He heads for his door, which is in sight.

Toy-Mun blinks.

- Given the physical differences, I think my world isn't your past - not directly, - they calmly comment, following Kwaiets down the corridor. - As for your question… it kinda depends on how quickly I adapt, doesn't it? If I'm still helpless in a week, renting a place of my own would make as much sense as if I were a two-year-old. Of course, if you five are accustomed to living alone, I might be a burden for you? - they add, half-asking, half-stating.

"- it's your employment arrangement! It's kind of weird, but however you ended up working at this stage, your employer would want to pay your housing. Someone who couldn't, wouldn't be able to hire you, given the practicalities, which would suck for them."

He reaches his door and fumbles in his backpack for the key, finds it, turns it, opens the door.

An Earthling would call it 'studio'. An Earthling who was being precise would call it 'efficiency'. Before that, though, an Earthling would be like, 'wait, there's no kitchen? do you guys have a communal kitchen?'

There's a bed folded up and shoved against a wall, a standing desk next to a huge bordered pane of clear glass on another wall - all the walls have huge bordered panes of clear glass on them - some stools, a huge beanbag, a door that's ajar to a bathroom, and one heck of an investment in books and ergonomic book storage technology, with some of the book storage technology repurposed to store clothes in one corner. There are grates in the floor and ceiling, and electrical outlets. The only apparent decoration besides the big dark panes is a cleanly screen-printed tapestry of a descending, labeled Tree of Life Command-hooked to a wall. The floor is all easy-to-clean, heat-insulating black tile.

Toy-Mun comes to the tapestry first, carefully examining it. Books were kinda expectable, foldable bed was unusual but still recognizable as a bed, and the rest was, well, mostly ignored.

- Wow. This painting looks… interesting. What's on it? And… how is it made?

Then, matter-of-factly:
- Oh, and are we sharing a bed, or should I try my luck with… whatever this is? - they point to the beanbag.

"- Air mattress!"

"- oh, the tapestry. It's a Tree of Life, like we were talking about earlier, see the little crocodiles and stuff - it's, um, stencils, over the fabric, and a roller marked with different dyes - or did you mean the fabric itself -"

(it's woven, coarse and heavy, but soft and free-moving)

- he's once again surprised Toy-Mun is this curious. Most people are usually too tired, or too distracted, or too focused, to be this curious, most of the time. It's always self-congratulated as such a particularly modern virtue, that adult moderners are able to maintain any inner children at the ready at all, and know when to use them. Historicals kept their heads locked on the road ahead, blinders on, in survival mode, all the time. Or at least, that's what he'd thought. Toy-Mun isn't that. 

To be fair, even from what little Toy-Mun had told about themself it was kinda easy to get that Toy-Mun was unusual for their time… They follow the lines of the tree of life with their fingers, nodding to themself.

- Wait. Did you just say… "air mattress"? You can't make a mattress out of air, can you? - Toy-Mun turns to Kwaiets, looking as if they expect this to be a joke.

"- right, uh, no, it just inflates - " he presses a button and the thing starts pumping air into itself. He throws it on the ground.

"To be clear, I'm sleeping there. You take the bed."

There's visible relief on Toy-Mun's face.

- Thank you, - they nod and take off the belt with the sword again, putting it and their bag near where the bed would land, but not actually under it. - Can I... unfold it now, or is there anything more we need to do?

He starts unfolding the bed. It goes quickly and obviously isn't difficult.

"Er, if you meant before sleep - do you want to eat first? I can list out the prices of everything so you can pay me back when you're rich if you want."