"Of course they aren't", - reflectively answered the new person. A skinny teenager with a strange, raspy voice - rather low for a woman, rather high for a man, but not impossible for either - in black robes with a bag on their shoulder and a longsword on their hip, they seemed to be as surprised by finding themself in the place as those who stared at them. They looked around incredulously. - "This… this isn't the elven capital".

The nearer out of the two people sitting by wall-desks pulls a handgun and aims it squarely at Apparition. The other four non-table-sitters follow suit. Table-sitter looks in the direction of Apparition, freezes, and says, "What?"

"I said... Wait a second". The teenager does not seem afraid of the objects aimed at them, looking at them instead with... interest? "Where am I? Who are you all? I... I know I am armed, but I mean no harm. I'm not even supposed to be here!"

"No shit", breathes the table-sitting teenager. Why isn't he showing any fear . . . Forget that, why did he just - appear -

Nearer-wall-desk-sitter rises off of their ergonomic wobbly stool and becomes nearest-stander. They look maybe twenty-five. "This", they say emotionlessly, "is the [Refutation of the Protein Delta]*. We are in the middle of a cult meeting. If you don't convince me that you are of no danger to us or our community, I will shoot your heart out."

*This phrase sounds much more poetic in the language Apparition hears.

"Shoo... a cult... OK, this is weird. But really, I haven't heard of your community before, and..." - the teenager seems to be rapidly scrambling their mind to say something, anything. - "Look, if I could just go back to where I was and pretend I never saw this, I would, but I have no idea how I got here to begin with. I sat down in a tavern, and next thing I see is... you guys. I am not going to tell on you, I wouldn't even know whom I could tell! I am... I am really lost. If you want to send an arrow through my heart, so be it."

Nearer-wall-desk-sitter hovers on the verge of a stance change. "Do you have paper and a pen on your person, that you can draw your self-portrait without requiring any of us to distract ourselves taking your picture?"

Teenager's shock at the question was obvious - as well as their not quite understanding what "taking a picture" means. "Would you really trust me if I said I had and then reached in my bag?.. I think I have pen and paper but not ink, as that could spill all over my other belongings. So... do you have ink or something like that for making a picture?" "Making" was seemingly an attempt by the teenager to subtly correct the asker's wording - or, at least, show how it was understood.

"Don't move", says Nearer-wall-desk stander.

Nearer-wall-desk-stander looks over at Table-sitter, who is already reaching under the table and pulling out a digital camera - a little silver box with a black lens on the front - pressing a button with the lens pointed in Apparition's direction - and - without looking away from Apparition - flashing the glowing screen on the back of the camera to where Nearer-wall-desk-stander can see it. Apparition may catch a glimpse of a perfect color image of himself and the room behind him, on that little screen.

Nearer-wall-desk-stander says, "Show it to him". Table-sitter turns the back of the camera in Apparition's direction, allowing him to examine the picture on the screen. It's uncannily perfect, every detail of shape and color replicated more faithfully than the best artist could accomplish given many hours - except for some of the blacks, which aren't quite as black as they could be, and the colors, which are a little too unvibrant.

"Convince me that you mean us and this community no harm", says Nearer-wall-desk-stander. The five-inch, strangely greebled dull metal cylinder he's pointing at Apparition hasn't moved or sagged an inch.

For an uncertain reason, teenager clearly tried to suppress a smirk at "show it to him". The smirk, however, quickly disappears, as they are shown the picture, and mouth opens slightly in shock. This was a picture, merely a picture, but an uncannily good one…
"Magic, - they whisper, then raising their eyes at the Nearer-wall-desk-stander. - I don't know who you all are, except for what you just told me, I don't know where I am, and I don't know what the things you point at me do, although I guess the one in your hand is probably related to your threat to shoot me - does magic push the arrow or is there just a tiny string hidden in the back?.. OK, irrelevant, - the teenager quickly adds. - Anyway, if someone meant harm to you, wouldn't they send someone who… er… isn't a complete stranger to everything? I've traveled most of the continent but never seen anything like… this."

Nearer-wall-desk-stander (N-w-d-s) blinks, looks taken aback.

One of the other people aiming at Apparition lowers his greebled cylinder, asks "How did you get here?"

"I don't know, I've told you!" - the teenager seems slightly irritated now. - "I wish I knew! I was just sitting in a tavern, having eaten my lunch, then I blink, and someone starts talking about snakes, and then you're all here pointing strange artifacts at me!"

Someone else pipes up. "He is right, he did say that before."

The one with the lowered cylinder doesn't reply to that, but his eye twitches. "Well," they say. "What's your name? I'm Pel Hanazanoleo Sareksal, apprentice carplane mechanic."

Stressed as the teenager was, a slight smile crossed their face at that question - or perhaps slightly before?
"Apprentice what, sorry?" - the teenager sighs. - "My name… I usually go by Toy-Mun. It's technically shortened but the full name is too… too full of pathos? It means something like 'wise warrior' or something in an old language, I don't remember."

"Carplane mechanic - I fix and maintenance personal flying cars?" Pel looks stymied, glances around. "Do any of y'all know what 'warrior' means?"

'No's and head-shakes from everybody else.

Pel raises his eyebrows at Toy-Mun. Then he realizes he hasn't reciprocated, and hastily adds "My name meant righteous-indignation in one of the dialects I grew up around. It was associated with a particular meme I disagreed with. Pretty standard story."

Toy-Mun would say they're joking when they said they don't know what a warrior means, but they, on the other side, had no idea what "cars" were, and they would probably find it as funny.
- Warrior? - Toy-Mun bites their lip. - Warrior is someone who fights for a living. No, that went out wrong - not like a mercenary… Someone whose duty is to fight, more like. Turned out to describe me pretty well, although of course no one would know that when I was born and given that name.
It seemed like they almost added something to that but stopped themself.
- So... a cult, you said... Is this an often-found thing here to call one's own community "cult"? Most places I know of regard this as kinda a bad word...

A voice from behind Toy-Mun says, "That's weird. Er, hi, I'm Asic Iya Sareksal. Uh, do people not want other people doing cult things where you're from?" Asic sounds incredulous.

- Hi! - Toy-Mun doesn't turn back - not after being specifically warned to not make quick movements. - And… yeah, kinda? Basically, people who are totally a cult will often say 'we're not a cult, we're a church' or something. So it's... interesting that you use the word without fear.

". . . Okay, any of y'all know what a church is?" says Asic.

"Yeah," says Table-sitter. "It's jargon from anthropology, more or less - a word for an old type of building where the members of a cult that believed in gods would gather." To Toy-Mun: "Why would a cult want to be mistaken for believing in gods? Or am I misunderstanding?"

Toy-Mun looked at the Table-sitter incredulously.
- I think there's certainly some misunderstanding. You have asked me why people would choose to worship gods? You know, those super-powerful beings that literally come and smite those who mess with their plans?

Pel raises his gun at Toy-Mun again. It's the genre-savvy thing to do.

N-w-d-s glares at Pel mutinously. Pel, you moron, if he's a god and was going to smite us, he already would have, and normal-speed bullets probably wouldn't be able to kill him.

N-w-d-s is right but there's nothing to be gained by re-lowering the gun now.

The fourth standing person, smallest and dark-mopped and as yet unheard, pipes up: "If you mean to sell us on the idea that gods really control the world, you're going to have a lot of explaining to do in terms of why they're necessary, given how so far literally every time someone's come up with a supernatural-personal explanation for some phenomenon, they've been wrong and the phenomenon has turned out to be explicable by purely impersonal means just like all the ones before it, and how in most imaginable cases there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Person X would generate a personal-supernatural explanation for Phenomenon Y, but algorithmically the prior is extremely low on Phenomenon Y actually having been caused by supernatural agency." Person4 inhales. Just a little.

Toy-Mun looks at the fourth person. There is a lot of questions in their head about what was just heard, including nearly every word in the last twenty words or so.
- What is "supernatural"? - finally, they settle on the word that has seemed to carry the most weight in the response. - I mean, given we have magic, creatures that can use that magic instinctively are quite natural…

"Define 'magic'," spits Person4, black eyes gleaming.

Toy-Mun tilts their head, clearly surprised.
- I mean... there's this ambient energy around us, and it allows us do things like this... Oof, I'm really bad at this, sword is more my speed, but I guess... Uru'ia tosartu igrael, - they commanded, extending and raising their hand - slowly - and the camera they were shown began floating in the air.

"Oh, so it's, just, like, magnetism or something," says Person4, steam evaporating. "Sorry, I've done a lot of research into the kinds of things people have attributed to 'magic'."

"Well," says N-w-d-s decisively, "given everything else about this situation that makes it unlikely you're part of some classified operation that has access to nonpublic teleportation and telekinesis tech - at least for the practical deception-penetrating purposes of this helpless little cult - I think that pretty well proves you're from another world, which goes a long way toward making you look honest and in good faith here. Asic, Pel, if y'all agree, I think y'all will be fine to lower y'all's weapons for now. We can start taking rolling shifts, me and Kwaiets" he glances at Person4 "first." Pel does lower his gun. Asic, from behind Toy-Mun, grimaces in Toy-Mun's direction.

"You said you were armed, earlier," says Asic. "Sorry, but could you show us what with?"

Table-sitter blinks. "He's . . . got a sword?"

"A what?"

"The giant double-sided knife? You know, what people used for close-range threats before guns?"

"That can't be what he meant!"

(Kwaiets mutters something about agreeing but at least knowing what a sword is.)

"That… that is exactly what I meant, - Toy-Mun looked at them in amusement. - And… I am not going to attack you first but, in theory, no one of you is far enough from me to be individually safe, in case you never met a swordsperson."

"Plausibly, he could be right," says Table-sitter, but everybody else is already backing as far away as the room will allow. It's about a 20'x20' room.

N-w-d-s sighs. "Should I just call a security squad and some physicists or something? Or actually just call the physicists and let them hire their own security squad."

"No!" Kwaiets blurts. Everyone looks at him, except N-w-d-s, who is watching Toy-Mun.

"Are you proposing that we hoard this asset?" says Pel.

("He doesn't mean it in a dehumanizing way," grumbles Table-sitter to Toy-Mun. Then he double-takes, cringes. "Or, I mean, a depersonalizing way . . . ?")

Kwaiets's bearing flickers for a fraction of a second, then becomes impassable as steel. "Yes", he hisses. He meets the eyes of every co-cultist in slow turn. Gravely: "We fancy ourselves we know what to do with data points on natural selection." His eyebrows raise challengingly, daring contradiction.

When none comes: "Do any of you want to look back, twenty, thirty years from now, at the explosion of revelations that comes from this, and be thinking to yourself, over and over, 'I had the chance for that to be me, and I sold it'?"

Table-sitter looks like someone trying to look unimpressed. "Does anyone here want to be looking back at the mess he made of this twenty or thirty years from now, and thinking to himself, 'I could have just done the sane thing and sold off that alien and forever been followed around by my reputation as a responsible contributor to society who knows how not to fight bigger tigers than he can take, instead of the reputation of a child who muddles in things and just makes them worse'?"

"Yes", mutters Pel, at the same time as Kwaiets proudly cries "Fuck yeah I do!"

Everyone by this point is side-eyeing N-w-d-s, who is unreadable.

N-w-d-s says, "All of this is moot if Toy-Mun does not wish to remain in our custody. Especially if he has teleportation powers."

Toy-Mun clicks their tongue, half-smiling. "I don't… I don't know how this teleportation thing happened. I know that teleportation magic generally exists but I am not a practitioner myself, someone else must've teleported me. So that part is moot: I can't promise you I won't be teleported out because I don't know how I got teleported in in the first place. And yeah… I am, personally, of human race. As for the rest… What would such 'custody' entail?"

Kwaiets speaks without waiting. "Employment, essentially. You'd work for me" another challenging glance around "as research subject - temporarily, of course, terms of contract to be negotiated. I would pay you and provide you with newcomer's-guides to Byway, in exchange for you answering interview questions about where you're from, and agreeing to communicate stuff relating to your homeworld with us exclusively until the deal is up."

For a couple of seconds, Toy-Mun is silent, weighing something in their head. Then: "This sounds fun! I'm in. Does this mean I'll need some kind of legend for those… not present here?"

Kwaiets mercilessly suppresses his smile. "No, this is all of us."

Asic pipes up. "Don't you need to get his digital-signature? Or his self-portrait at least?"

"I was going to get his self-portrait," Kwaiets says, extracting a pen and paper from his backpack for the contract. "I'm guessing he doesn't have a digital-signature? What with his ancient-type weaponry, et cetera . . . ?"

Toy-Mun coughed, listening to them somewhat surprised.
- Sure, I can draw myself if you want. Just face? And I meant… if I somehow meet someone not from the… cult, it would probably benefit you if I try to pretend I'm, well, from here?

"Oh, a legend of behavior," says Kwaiets. "Yeah, just face - do they do signature differently where you're from? Hmm . . . a guide will be such an interesting project."

Everyone else in the room (except for N-w-d-s, who remains undisturbed) locks down a very straight face about the prospect of writing a miniCode for the visitor, so that Kwaiets will not get the satisfaction of having interested them.

Kwaiets drafts out the contract, signs it with a self-portrait drawn using a little pocket mirror, and begins passing it around for confirmation by the rest of the cult.

"To start with," says Kwaiets, "we should give you a gun, so you don't have to carry the sword around anymore. And probably a whole makeover in terms of clothes, that'll be the first thing."

(There are still several cult members aiming at Toy-Mun, the vibes not having yet aligned with actually deciding that Toy-Mun is practically safe.)

- Yeah, we sign with our names. I mean, there are magical certifications for, like, really important things, but otherwise just with a name, - Toy-Mun responded. - As for a gun… does everyone carry a weapon here, or is it a thing with your… cult specifically?
When the contract got to them, Toy-Mun bit their lip.
- I think I actually do have a mirror in my bag, although yours seem of higher quality... may I borrow one of yours, actually?

"Generally, people carry weapons, yes," says N-w-d-s, looking mildly surprised. "Are you unusual, in that, for where you came from?"

"It's in the Code because otherwise a psychopathic weapon-haver could tear through the unarmed with no impediment," says Asic. "I don't see what the alternative is."

". . . You hope people aren't born psychopathic, but." mutters Table-sitter, handing Toy-Mun a mirror with an apologetic look.

"Names?" says Kwaiets. "How'd that be protection against fraud at all?"

A "Yeah - what?" from Asic.

"I register that if our intention is to hire Toy-Mun as an informant", interjects N-w-d-s, "we should be recording all our initial discrepancies of - custom, or intuition, or whatever. Not to mention the guide we're putatively writing for him."

Everyone looks at each other guiltily. 

"I'm not doing it", scoffs Table-sitter.

"Fine," says Kwaiets, sitting down at the table and extracting note-taking equipment from his backpack.

(Digital records are much easier to leak without Aliss noticing, and easier for Eav to interpret high-bandwidthly if a full leak occurs. The Refutation of the Protein Delta might take some digital records after establishing additional security, but.)

Everyone has at this point lowered their weapons, and everyone except Pel has re-concealed them.

Toy-Mun takes the mirror and is clearly impressed by how good its reflection qualities are, trying to make a decent self-portrait with their right hand while holding the mirror with their left.
- I am… somewhat unusual, yes. I travel a lot. People who live in a city for a long time usually rely on guards to protect them, - they mutter, tracing their rather thin, "aristocratic" features. - As for a name… I mean, a name is a thing you offer to everyone. If you try using different names in different places or impersonate someone else - why, normally it's going to catch up to you rather fast, even without magic. While a portrait… many people look similar. Or, at least, similar enough so that a small portrait by a hand more accustomed to doing something… else than drawing won't distinguish them. Speaking of appearances, I have to mention that I am somewhat unusual in another regard, too. My body shape is rather… I don't really know the word for it but, basically, it's so thin that it doesn't give away whether I'm a boy or a girl unless you literally strip me down. And you are similar in that regard. Most people back home are… more visibly men or women. I... wait, you do have men and women, right? - Toy-Mun puts the pen down, still looking in the mirror. - People who put seed in others and people who bear children from that seed?

Pel makes a strangled snort, apparently from the effort of violently trying to contain his own laughter. 

"No?" warbles Kwaiets, sounding faintly like he's desperately trying to contain an outburst of laughter himself by thinking of anything else besides the funny thing. "People look very different, it's how we tell each other apart! A portrait of someone that actually distinguishes them is hard to draw if they won't sit still for you, but names are easy to copy."

"We have males and females," deadpans Table-sitter completely emotionlessly, with audible effort, "but 'woman', and more commonly - 'girl' - are approximately the most vulgar things you can say in this dialect. 'Man' and 'boy' are also vulgar but less so."

Pel, incredulous and on the verge of breaking back down into giggles, bursts out, "Do you come from a world where people are just like, 'the women of so-and-so are such and such' in, like, serious podcasts and blog posts and stuff?"

Table-sitter focuses very hard on frowning critically at Toy-Mun's unpracticed self-portrait. N-w-d-s is the only cult member not putting visible effort into not laughing.

Toy-Mun is about as surprised as they are, albeit in a less… laugh-prone way: the topic seems to sadden them somewhat instead.

- Where I come from, 'male' and 'female' are adjectives, like 'green'. 'Man' and 'woman' are nouns, like 'knife', - they repeat carefully. - There is no such… difference in vulgarness, - Toy-Mun does say "vulgarness" not "vulgarity", and with visible uncertainty in the word, too, - as you describe. But I'll try to remember and use 'male' and 'female' as nouns. I... don't really know what a 'podcast' or a 'blog' is, but yeah, if you need a noun, you use a noun. Like, do your laws say something like "all males are to serve in the army" rather than "all men"?

Kwaiets and Pel look at Table-sitter.

"'Army'," says Table-sitter, "is a mostly-antiquated term of art for mercenary pools set to defend the perimeters of whole cities. And no, I've got no idea about 'law'."

Asic (who Toy-Mun may freely swivel around to see, as it's perhaps evident to them that the cult is no longer trying to control their field of view or freedom of movement) says, "It's a technical term for a tenet of a deviant Code which tenet is meant to be enforced by adherents to the deviant Code, despite the tenet itself possibly having nothing to do with NAP violations."

Pel whistles. Asic glares at him.

"Uh, so no, they don't," says Kwaiets, furiously scribbling. He seems like he's starting to enjoy it.

Toy-Mun coughs and does half-turn to Asic. Their pale cheeks redden a tiny bit.
- Er… "deviant"? What exactly makes a Code deviant or non-deviant? That's… normally considered a bad word where I'm from.

"Oh, yeah, 'deviant' is pretty offensive," says Table-sitter. "If you want to be nice about a deviant Code that's currently active you say 'speculative Code', but being polite isn't necessary for the ones that are already buried in history. Also: A podcast is when people publish audio recordings of their dialogues because they think they're worthy of that. A blog post is when someone publishes essays of their opinions on the Internet because they think they're worthy of that."

"What'dyou have instead?" asks Pel, curious.

Kwaiets looks on the verge of overheating from sheer notetaking speed, but doesn't seem to mind, or notice, for that matter.

Toy-Mun makes a pause, trying to understand what was said - and giving Kwaiets a chance to write more down.
- I guess I should be asking what Internet is, but somehow, I am more surprised by your notions of Codes. What is NAP and how is it related to Codes?

Asic literally audibly inhales before speaking.

"Non-Agression Principles are ways that codes specify at which point of violation by others code adherents may perceive themselves as licensed to act in reciprocal violation against their violators, in self-defense. If your code didn't legitimize any violence ever, you'd incentivize a culture of parasitical thievery upon your adherents, no matter how rare thieves were to start with. Just like having people go unarmed."

"The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell," says Pel.

Asic glares mutiny. He wheels on Toy-Mun. "Do you know that the mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell?" he asks, voice brimming with barely-contained outrage.

Toy-Mun doesn't answer. Not because of some malicious intent or secrecy, but because they doubled down in uncontrollable laughter.
- "Non-Aggression Principles"? - they finally managed to squeak. Then, after calming down just a little bit: - Your first instinct was to point weaponry at me, and you speak about non-aggression? And no, I don't know what's a mitochondrion, is that a... tree, like rhododendron?

Asic grins manically at Pel, who fumes.

"I'm sure it was obvious to you, the whole time, that you represented and intended no threat to us," says N-w-d-s to Toy-Mun, "but -" N-w-d-s seems to be struggling for words, for once "- but if weird shit happens, and you get caught off guard because you didn't immediately presume it was a threat and ready yourself in kind, well, that's one of the cringiest ways to die."

"I second that," says Asic emphatically. There's a murmer of assent from Pel. Kwaiets continues to be a steam-powered notetaking engine.

Table-sitter says "Sorry, Toy-Mun, by the way, on behalf of everyone," voice laced with acid. "Sorry," echoes everyone else, at varying volume levels. Everyone sounds sincerely apologetic, but especially N-w-d-s and Pel.

"A mitochondrion is - hard to explain," says Kwaiets absently. "I'll sell nine grams silver, anyone's one to my nine, that Toy-Mun has no idea what a biological cell is."

N-w-d-s and Pel both buy in, and scribble with Kwaiets on little bet-contract slips.

"Do you know what a biological cell is?" Kwaiets asks of Toy-Mun, pen once again ready.

- Apologies accepted, - Toy-Mun chuckles, still smiling. - Sorry for startling you. Anyway… yeah, while self-defence laws are usually included in codes, they are but a small part of what they regulate. I am… not much of a law expert, of course, but this much I know: some regulate keeping a city clean, some regulate what's considered punishable fraud for merchants and stuff. I guess… I guess I don't quite understand how you live without that. And as for biological cell… I don't really know what "biological" means, but a cell is something you put a pet in. Or, I guess, a person in prisons.

"I can settle up now," says N-w-d-s. "Me too," says Pel. They collect around the table again to pay out 1g silver each to Kwaiets.

"I've never heard of a word 'cell' with that meaning, that'd be 'pen'." says Table-sitter. "Did you - just happen to speak basically the dialect we're speaking, already?" Absently: "I wonder if that's related to how he just - showed up here."

"Nobody aim at Toy-Mun again if it turns out there's creepy translation reality-warping going on," says N-w-d-s. "There's insufficient reason to suspect we have power to make him stop, at this point, even if it is somehow his doing, which seems improbable."

Toy-Mun simply nods:
- Judging by the misunderstandings, I'd suspect some good but not too good translation magic at work. But I am certainly not doing this myself. I guess this simplified the matters greatly though, it would be weird to try and speak Common, which you don't speak, to try to ascertain I mean no harm. Anyway… I feel like there is a lot I need to learn here.

(N-w-d-s, who is in the middle of betting Asic at 7-to-3 odds that there won't be creepy translation reality-warping, shows no regret when Toy-Mun says "he" suspects translation 'magic', but feels some.)

"Oh! Do you want your own notetaking paraphernalia, if you don't have any on you?" says Kwaiets, already reaching into his bag again. "Er - I should really ask first, did you luck into having money on you?"

"Can you say something in 'Common' and have it come out so we can't parse it?" says Table-sitter. "Test - I'm trying to say this in our dialect so you can't understand it but it doesn't - feel any different -"

- Your test failed, - Toy-Mun nods. - I guess you're stuck with it now, unless it's different in different directions… - they try to add, speaking each sound of Common as slowly as they can, but it still comes out perfectly understandable, and they click their tongue. - As for money… let me see, I think I might have a few coins back.
Toy-Mun opens their bag and begins to put the contents on the table: a strong rope, a couple of pieces of low-quality paper strung together by a thinner rope, a big bird's feather, and then, finally (although the bag doesn't seem to have been fully emptied), a small sack, which they open to procure a couple of different gold and silver coins.
- These are from Brute - that would be the free city of Brute, a huge trading place but also a known place for crime… These are elven… this must be Terran, I can never track all those lords and their customs in making coins… - Toy-Mun comments lazily, splitting them into different piles.

"I refuse to be stuck with anything," says Table-sitter, because he's the only one who feels the need to clarify that this is true of himself. The rest treat it as an unsaid given. "How would you expect the translation 'magic' going on here to work, such that we might investigate it?"

Kwaiets and Pel ogle the foreign coins appreciatively.

"I have four clean notebooks, and six gel pens with full cartridges. I'd sell them at half a gram of silver per notebook, a quarter gram of silver per pen - er, silver is currently worth a sixty-fifth what gold is, by weight, around here."

"I have two clean notebooks I'd sell you at a quarter gram," says Pel.

Kwaiets eyes Pel's notebooks. "A third, then. And mine are bigger and nicer." He shows them off to Toy-Mun.

Despite the previously-established expectation that they would be providing for Toy-Mun's basic material needs as part of their employment of Toy-Mun, it's not really occuring to anyone on a socially-relevant level (except to N-w-d-s as a quiet note of discord) that they should be giving them notebooks. That's just not what you do?

Toy-Mun is somewhat saddened but not really surprised by their haggling over notebook prices instead of sharing. Their eyes flutter over the notebook while they speak, slowly:
- Now, I am not a mage from the Academy, either, but… imagine a spirit - a being of sorts - that knows both languages and hangs around translating between the two to the best of its ability. This isn't literally how it works but it's fairly close by results - including occasional mix-ups. I remember how my fencing teacher occasionally used that to speak in Elvish with me if he struggled to find the words in Common… A-anyway. As generous as your suggestions probably are, - Toy-Mun certainly seems somewhat sarcastic, - a gram is… much less than any coin here, I think, so do you expect me to cut them up somehow?

Table-sitter's eyes bore into Toy-Mun. "You've had the experience of translation 'magic' before? Do you think this is exactly the same thing? How would you know if it was different? And - if you don't know exactly how it works - how can you be sure there isn't a spirit 'inside the box'?"

Kwaiets, for his part, looks puzzled. "I was going on the default assumption that whatever denominations you do have, we can make change for it -"

With one motion, N-w-d-s opens his own backpack, strides across the room, and sets two notebooks and three pens (of varying quality and usedness) in front of Toy-Mun. Everyone stares at him. "Since y'all seem to have forgotten in the last two minutes", says N-w-d-s, "the presumption that y'all are Toy-Mun's custodians, fit to actively advise him, also requires y'all to provide for his full need."

Kwaiets makes a face, seeming to think of responding indignantly on Toy-Mun's behalf. Kwaiets's face shades vaguely into an embarrassed face. "Ohrightsorry. Toy-Mun."

Toy-Mun's eyelashes flutter, and the pale cheeks redden again.
- Thank you… I don't think I've got your name, actually? The others have mostly named themselves but you didn't… or have I just forgotten? - Toy-Mun makes a pause, allowing N-w-d-s to introduce themself. - As for why I don't expect there to be a spirit - beside competent mages saying there isn't, that's… kinda not in the habit for them? I've seen spirits, they're generally not what you'd call… eager to help for nothing in return.

N-d-w-s holds up a hand, locally-courteously. "I'm Henreyyah. Henreyyah Anilon Sareksal, lab sanitation."

Table-sitter says, "Oh, sorry, I don't think I've introduced myself either. I'm Scoryu, packaging." He would follow suit and say his middle and last, but surely Toy-Mun will have picked up by now that they're all Sareksal, and dumping another middle name on him would just add to a probably-already-unmanageable memory load.

Scoryu resumes his intense face. "The reason I'd expect there to have to be a spirit involved in translation magic isn't that I came in with a high prior on spirits doing things in general, it's that - it seems like a spirit-complete task, to really know two languages in the sense that you can make all the subtle little decisions involved in mediating between them."

"You should look into programmatic translation," says Asic in Scoryu's direction. "It's surprisingly possible - to do at all, not at remotely human-passing quality - with giant unwieldy parsers and lookup tables." Asic squints. "I can see a really big program pulling off something as seamless as this, or just a really smart one."

"From what I've seen, that seems right," says Henreyyah (in tones of weak corroboration, not decisiveness).

Scoryu frowns but shrugs the spirit question temporarily aside. To Toy-Mun: "Can you give us a rough run-down of the spread of common or prominent types of plants, animals, et cetera - living things - where you're from?" The Refutation hasn't even started asking the really relevant questions! Scoryu scrambles to ready his own pen and notebook for this.

"Were there any separate populations of humans - or any sapient animals, actually - who couldn't interbreed with each other?" says Kwaiets. It seems unlikely, but it's be stupid to miss the quickly checkable gold vein if it was really there.

Toy-Mun clearly (for someone knowing the hand-shaking custom) reaches to shake Henreyyah's hand before thinking twice of it and removing the hand when understanding their gesture was different.

- I mean, there are many plants and many animals, I don't think I can quickly give a full rundown. Now, sapients… yeah, that's more manageable. There are humans, like myself, then there are elves, angels, tigrans, dragons, demons, nagas, and shapeshifters… I guess sahuagins, vendigoes and trolls are sapient too, although they are too aggressive to talk to or mate. Oh, and goblins. I don't know if you would count undead and spirits as sapient animals, but they're there, too. Shapeshifters can mate with whoever except another shapeshifter, producing their own kin. Tigrans can otherwise only mate with tigrans, angels can't mate with demons, dragons, or their offsprings, and nagas, I think, have reptile-like holes so they can't really mate with anyone. Hell if I know what goblins can mate - they're, like, three times shorter than me, and I am not too tall for a human myself. Other half-bloods are fair play - for instance, a human and a dragon produce a dragan, so does an elf and a dragon. Offsprings of dragan are also dragan, so dragans have their own kingdom.

Literally every member of the Refutation tries talking over everymember else, for several iterations, before the cacophony dies down enough for ordered, clearly comprehensible responses to be heard:

Pel: "- now hold up, shapeshifters, I don't wanna get my hopes falsely up here, they can change the shape of their bodies at will - ? -"

Scoryu (pen practically vibrating with readiness): " - we don't need you to list everything, just, the genera" Scoryu begins sketching something on the notebook in front of him while he speaks, but doesn't show it to Toy-Mun yet "like, we have - plants and -"

Kwaiets interrupts - "Don't bias him -"

Scoryu: "He didn't understand the question, I have to clarify by example - we have plants, which are nonmotile things-that-can-reproduce, and animals, which are visible motile things-that-can-reproduce, and microbes, which are things-that-can-reproduce that are too small to see - within animals, which is the most exciting one that everybody naturally gravitates towards so you always might as well get analyzing animals over with first - we have worms, crawly limbless animals, bugs, animals with segments and lots of limbs and hard outer shells, tetrapods, animals with bones inside and four limbs if you don't count the tail which is just an extension of the backbone - you have a backbone - those are the main ones but if you go deeper into tetrapods -"

Pel (muttering): "But 'snakes aren't four-legged' -"

Scoryu: "Yeah, I just said, worms are limbless - "

Asic (giving Toy-Mun a selection of vivid no-bleed artist's markers): "As you see, Toy-Mun, they're really going to want you to try with the whole 'sketchy first-effort blind categorization of Life' thing -"

Henreyyah (in a note passed to Pel): One yours to my 2gs at least 80% of the 'sapients' he's describing are basically speciated human ethnicities you won't be able to distinguish when he draws portraits of them question mark

Pel (return note): Pass, are you trying to put one over on me? I saw his self-portrait, I'm not sure I could tell them apart if he tried to draw me and you.

Toy-Mun puts their hands to their ears and waits until
- Stop… Stop… Stop! - they beg. - You are all speaking at once. I know what animals and plants are, not sure about those "microbes" thingies but they're probably also there. And I know what worms, bugs and snakes are, and, although I don't think I've heard "tetrapod" before, it seems fitting for the beings with bones like you and me - beasts, birds, fish… I guess our general divisions of animals aren't too different, so let's get back to that shape of bodies thing? - Toy-Mun coughs pointedly and begins to sketch some kind of green-blue lizard with bird wings. - Shapeshifters can change their bodies at will as long as they've sworn service to somebody, yes - although it's limited, they have, like, an appearance per race, they can't, say, copy my face and pretend they're me. Demons and dragons also have human forms, but… these are different actually, now that I think about it. Demons' natural forms are very varied but usually come with some sort of scales or horns or something else weird - they're a very, ah, varied race but usually huge. And they can basically contract themselves to look more human-like - or elf-like. And dragons… oof. Well, a dragon's natural form is something like a huge lizard with wings - except wings can be feathered or bat-like, and they tend to have fire breath, acid breath or some other weird mouth attack - I knew a girl with ice breath. Sorry, a female with ice breath. That's her - she's rather small for a dragon, but still, perhaps, me and a half in length? I am really not that good of a painter. That doesn't look like Lin at all - although, I guess, it does show the general idea, - Toy-Mun moves the picture to the closest person - which would probably be Scoryu. - Then, when they need to, they hide their bodies with magic and extract their human-like bodies - or, again, elf-like. I won't try to draw Lin's human shape, with my skills that would probably not help - although she does have fuller lips than I do, like most gir… females. Elves are quite similar to humans, except for the pointy ears and - oh, yeah, living for freaking hundreds of years, while I'm lucky if I live one hundred. Most other sapients are closer to elves in that regard, except tigrans… sorry, I'm rambling, ain't I? - Toy-Mun sighs exasperatedly and closes their eyes, massaging the eyeballs with fingers.

The room gets a lot quieter as soon as it becomes clear that Toy-Mun is serious.

"I was joking," says Pel weakly. 

His brain seems to be taking a few seconds to boot up again.

"Do you know what happens if a shapeshifter takes a small form, enters a sealed container, and then tries to take a larger form again? Does it not work if certain things aren't inside the container to begin with?" Pel doesn't want to be offensive by asking in this condescending way, but instinct says just asking Toy-Mun what shapeshifters are made of won't get him an answer. Pel has very trustworthy instincts, and he's impatient.

Scoryu is staring at the picture of Lin's dragon form. He begins, absently, to try to copy it in a more pseudo-realistic style, getting everything wrong with respect to how Lin actually looks, of course.

"Shapeshifters have to swear service to somebody - you mean, just to be clear, that they need an apprenticeship's worth of training? Even to hone natural-born ability?" says Henreyyah.

Kwaiets writes.

Toy-Mun sighs exasperatedly, opening their eyes.
- No, Henreyyah, I meant exactly what I said. Their abilities are unlocked by an oath of service. Instantly. But, if they then break their oath, they… well, die, I guess. Never actually seen that happen. People say they can give their oath to an idea rather than another person, but I don't know how that would work, either. And no, Pel, I don't really know what would happen with that container - except you would get a very angry shapeshifter in any case. I think a demon would be limited by the container because they literally visibly contract and decontract - unless it's too brittle, of course - but no idea about dragons or shapeshifters. I am but a human myself, and not exactly a scholar, either.

"Do you have first questions for us?" says Kwaiets. He gets the sense they've taxed Toy-Mun's patience, somehow, which is not a situation Kwaiets wants.

- Oh, a couple of thousands, - Kwaiets's sense seems obviously on point, but Toy-Mun is seemingly relieved by their words. - Let's start with the obvious ones. Judging by some of your questions… you asked about separate populations of humans and only then corrected to "sapient animals". Should I take this as humans being the only kind of sapients in your world, able to interbreed with one another freely - well, gender, health and age permitting? Speaking of, how long do you live? How old are y'all now, for that matter? I am twenty-five myself. Years, not… not something else, in case it needs specifying.

"Three hundred and sixty-five day years? Twenty-four hour days?" says Scoryu. (Asic bets against it. Everyone except Henreyyah buys Asic's odds. The rest of them are starting to get credulous that none of their ordinary intuitions apply.)

"Just humans, yes," says Scoryu before Kwaiets can take point. "I'm fifteen."

"Nineteen," says Kwaiets.

"Sixteen," says Pel.

"Twenty," says Asic.

"Twenty-two," says Henreyyah.

"Humans used to live a hundred or so years max," says Kwaiets, "and the oldest person alive now is only a hundred forty, but lots of people think that senescence repair biotech has reached the point where babies being born now, with all the zygote enhancements, won't have to die of old age at all. Maybe not us either."

- Three hundred and sixty days in a year. Twelve thirty-day months. And yes, a day has twenty-four hours, - Toy-Mun answers slowly, trying to remember everyone else's age. - Why the extra five days? And… did you say "senescence repair"? Like, you repair old people's bodies so that they don't die? Like an old vehicle or something? And what does that… jay-goat thing has to do with anything?

"Oh, right, you don't know what a cell is." 

There's something that feels wrong, about just haphazardly beginning to explain Science to Toy-Mun without any sort of elaborate context, preamble, or contract, but then again, Toy-Mun probably feels that way about his world's lore. It's only fair. And, for that matter, efficient. As pointman on this project, he makes the call that no elaborate preamble will be required for haphazard Science explanations henceforth.

"A zygote is - well, first, cells are - " he turns the page of his notebook, sketches out a honeycomb-looking matrix contained within a lens-like circle, with an arrow to a human arm "- the components of anything living, they do the work to maintain your shape and temperature and memories and all the stuff like that that would by default fall apart. Well, everything about your body does that, to some extent, but anyway that's what cells are for. When your body needs new cells they divide, and each new cell is a perfect copy of the old one. When a new animal - new living-thing of any kind - needs to form, it forms from a cell of each parent, if they're sexually reproducing. A zygote is the cell that forms, then, the first cell of a new person."

Kwaiets further draws an abbreviated sequence of a zygote dividing into a baby, to demonstrate. The labels are of . . . questionable usefulness, but this is a limited fragment of Kwaiets's attention, and hurried.

Kwaiets's notebook page

Toy-Mun looks at the picture. Then at Kwaiets. Then at the picture. A pun briefly visits their head: "His name is Kwaiets because of the ability to make the room go quiet."

After quite a pause, they finally respond:
- So… you want to say that we are all giant honeycombs? Well, not with bees and stuff, but like - we have these small similar parts we're built of, and they are perfect copies of each other? Why aren't we… just blobs then? We have eyes and muscles, and skin, and bones, and hairs, and… mating parts, these all seem rather different from each other. You're telling me they're all honeycombs of the same underneath?

"- Right, sorry, that's on me. It's efficacious for a lot of purposes to round to 'exact copies', but cell production for beings with multiple cells actually involves a lot of speciation."

He points to the circle in the middle of one of the cells. "Coded instructions are in there, and sometimes - not always but often - when the cell divides, at least one of the descendant cells modifies the field of instructions it's allowed to use. This is reversible for any instruction-bubble - nucleus - if you take it out and put it in the jelly of a different cell that's specialized in something else, you can make it act as instructions for that cell type instead, because each nucleus actually has all the instructions - but nigh-irreversible for the cell as a whole."

Toy-Mun draws a line to the small circles on the tables and furiously scribbles something. The writing systems certainly seem not touched by whatever translation magic applies, but Toy-Mun does mumble under their nose, which gets translated as "nuck-lee-jus", suggesting that what's written is "nucleus".
- Wow. That's… certainly an interesting view… - Toy-Mun pauses for a couple of seconds. - How did you learn all this? I presume these… cells are too small for an eye to see, like those "microbes" you spoke about?

"Yeah. You need basically a tube containing a series of magnifying lenses to see them, backlit so enough light gets to your eye."

- Interesting… - Toy-Mun furrows their brow. - OK, I think I got it. That thing you mentioned, seemingly as common knowledge. Something-something powerhouse of the cell. What does it mean? Is it, like, a ruler in the cell or something?

(Giggle.)

". . . Tyrannical-enforcer?"

Somehow Scoryu is afraid Toy-Mun said that even though he isn't sure whether he heard 'measuring-stick' instead, which'd form part of the far more sensible question.

"I'm not sure what you mean - it's a powerhouse? A place where energy in a non-useful form gets converted into energy that's in a form your power grid is set up to use."

- Well, not every ruler is tyrannical but that's closer to how I had understood, - Toy-Mun nods to Scoryu and looks at Kwaiets with clear surprise. - Power… grid? Why would you put your energy in a grid? I feel like we… might not mean the same by energy?

"Right, sorry, network, not grid. Grid is for textbooks."

For an alien, he sure is a pedant.

Kwaiets HATEs him.

- O... K... - Toy-Mun is silent for a moment, then their face brightens. - Oh, like a powerstone! Mages charge those to later reuse when their own energy is low!

The translation sure is getting funky!

"You mean, like, some kind of chemical battery?" Translation issues incoming, ho boy . . . "Like, a box with one substance in one side and another in another, and there's a concentration gradient of something between them, and the 'powerstone' gives you a portable way to exploit that?"

Toy-Mun looks at Asic somewhat incredulously.
 - Box with two substances sounds like a mad chemist's experiment, yes, but powerstones have nothing to do with that. They are usually gems. A mage infuses them with magical energy for storage when they feel well, then taps at it when they've exhausted their own resources but need to cast something. I don't think I've ever used one, but my teacher did once when a hailstorm threatened to damage our house.

Hm.

"Where do you get these gems?"

"Later - we're doing biology first, unless y'all object?"

Nah, biology first seems smart.

"I think on the whole we really would like to see your life-clade top-level sketch, if you can make a quick one? If it's not blocking feel free to ask us questions during, too."

Toy-Mun nods and tries to make a sketch. While it is rough, it seems they understood what a clade is. The first level is two circles of "living" and "undead". "Living" gets split into "plant", "mushroom", and "animal" (which is, by Earth measures, rather progressive for a quasi-medieval society to recognize rather than lump plants and mushrooms together), "undead" - into "spirit" and "embodied".

- I don't really know where those microbe thingies would be if we have them, - Toy-Mun notices and, after a short pause, adds: - And gods… it just feels wrong to classify them under "undead", but there is some similarity between gods and spirits.

"Do you have vampires."

"PEL!"

"Everybody SHUSH we are doing BETS ON VAMPIRES Y/N."

Final pool positions:

Scoryu - holds 3 shares of 'no vampires'

Henreyyah - holds 1 share of 'vampires'

Asic - holds 6 shares of 'no vampires'

Kwaiets - holds 1 share of 'no vampires'

Pel - holds 5 shares of 'vampires'

Total payout: 72gs (share price of 5gs decided at beginning by Kwaiets)

Everybody looks at Toy-Mun with some degree of obvious - fear? Wariness? Helplessness? Shock? Hard to say.

Toy-Mun has already learnt better than to interrupt their - pretty weird in their eyes - proclivity for bets. It doesn't mean they're halfway happy about it.

- Yes, humans and elves can be turned into vampires. Other races, I think, cannot. Vampires are vulnerable to silver, fire and sunlight. Why, do you have vampires? And what's up with all this betting anyway? What are you going to bet on next - whether I'm male or female?

"Well y'alls's silver is now vulnerable to vampires.

I guess."

"That - can't be right - has to be a translation issue -"

"Immortal, feed on the blood of ordinary people, formed from a mortal by the infection of a black-box parasite that follows no familiar principles of biology and reproduces on the scale of millenia and that's why you're not one despite living in a world that has them.

You're not one, right."

"- You know, that doesn't sound like such a bad idea for a next bet, actually -"

"He doesn't want us to, Asic."

Toy-Mun chuckles:
- Quite observant, Scoryu. I am not a vampire - though it would normally not be wise to trust someone on such questions, any silverware would give me out if I were one. They are quite rare, they require either magically fueled desire to live or a mutual blood exchange - so it's not like they turn everyone they feed on into new vampires. And… If you want to know something about me, just ask.

Babbles! Stops and starts! They REALLY WANT TO KNOW what the labor about vampires and DO NOT KNOW where the labor to start!

"- let's just - do this breadth-first, okay, everybody? For all we know every item is gonna open up this many new nodes and we might as well orient ourselves.

Sorry about all the pauses to bet, Toy-Mun. Just, rare opportunity. We can ease up now.

How about 'animal' - Scoryu is right, it's a good starting place - what subcategories go in there?"

Pokes Toy-Mun with one of his silver coins before passing a bunch of them to Pel in exchange for some bet-contract slips.

Toy-Mun allows the coin-poking. Silver does not seem to do any harm.
- Huh. Well, there are fish, there are bugs, there are worms, and there are beasts, - they respond slowly. - And birds - although, I guess, they are pretty similar to beasts, and things like griphons suggest there's room for transition, so let's fold birds under beasts, too. I mean, there are also magical constructs, which are whatever their creator wants them to be - say, a mimic can shapeshift to different objects… I have a counterquestion, if I may: why betting? Are you just that addicted to gambling? Or is it somehow a... standard thing in your society?

Scribble scribble scribble "- do you know of lizards and alligators, andor also of, like, capybaras and monkeys, and if so, which forms the central example for 'beast' and where do the other ones go? Um, anybody else feel free about the betting."

He looks around, sees the vote of their eyes is for him. Others clearly wanted to butt in with a unilateral answer, but things are calming down back to civilization as time passes and it becomes less likely the stranger will vanish the way he came, and those others have inhibited themselves.

"It's to keep our words, the things we profess to believe, meaning anything? You can entertain bullies and long fruitless discussions about nothing, at cult, if at no point do you challenge others to put their money where their mouth is." 

Toy-Mun scratches their chin - which is clean, with no obvious signs of a stubble.
- Don't know what a capybara is but monkeys and lizards are all beasts, - they respond slowly. - A typical beast would be… a wolf, I guess? As for bets… interesting. We would challenge to combat if we believe someone's lying - not to death, for small situations like this, but still - but if you are serious about that non-aggression thing, I guess it makes sense that you went for money instead.

"- it does tend to destroy a lot less incidental value, settling your contests with money. Although that's genuinely unintuitive to some primitive cultures, which - hm - actually - has your home culture invented computers, washing machines, andor some kind of lights that aren't fire?"

Visibly moves to bet and stops itself short!

"- are humans beasts? How does the ability to shapeshift get in the 'magical constructs'?" Scribble scribble scribble

- "Primitive" is not a nice word, Henreyyah, - Toy-Mun responds with a clear scowl. - I don't know what a computer is, but washing and lights can be done with magic. And I have no idea how mimics work internally, I just know that they are no good. As for whether humans are beasts… I mean, people will be offended if you tell them so, but in terms of how bodies work, a human or an elf is not that different from a monkey, or a tigran from a leopard. We bleed, we mate, we have bones. Beings of magic such as dragons and shapeshifters are more complicated, of course, but if a dragon and a human can mate, then at least the human-like body of dragons is beastlike. And by the same token demons and angels probably are beasts.

<💭>. . . Oh, right. Other cultures have inscrutable norms of etiquette that you must follow, too. The more inscrutable the more distant they are from yours, and Toy-Mun is an alien, so.</💭>

Angels and demons (and implicitly humans) are 'probably' beasts? Where is the ambiguity coming from? But he doesn't ask that, there's a priority line of inquiry -

"Tigrans are like leopards in the same way humans are like monkeys, but tigrans and humans can mate with each other?"

"Objectively, modulo anthropics, that's much weirder than vampires being real, but I'm still hung up on the vampires and I think that's reasonable."

<💭>It's definitely just a translation issue somehow - I can take Pel into a corner where we won't interrupt Toy-Mun, and bet him about that - wait shit Henreyyah asked about blood and immortality and transformation a minute ago and Toy-Mun gave confirmatory answers - holy fucking wizards,,,,,,WHY,,,,,,,,,</💭>

"It's not necessarily weirder than vampires being real, even modulo anthropics. That depends on whether Toy-Mun's world has reified the plot-conceit where vampires have to feed on human blood specifically.

Or sapient blood, I guess, in Toy-Mun's world's case."

<💭>Toy-Mun sure doesn't know how the internals of anything work for someone who takes offense at being called primitive! Probably more tact than that is warranted if I want clarificatory answers out of him, though . . . ugh, tact . . . come on, Asic, dig deep, where is your tact . . .</💭>

"Everybody, please, let Toy-Mun answer!"

Reluctant/abashed silence.

Toy-Mun coughs:
- No… Tigrans only mate with other tigrans and shapeshifters, as I said, and vampires definitely can drink animal blood. There are actually some subdivisions between tigrans too, some are more like lions, some are more like leopards - but they're generally, you know, big-cat-like. It would sure be weird if I could mate a tigran… I mean, I can and I have, but it would be weird if it produced children.

Having understood what they've just said, Toy-Mun gets a furious blush.

Oh shit his face is red because he's mad at us because we didn't remember what he said! We had one job!

He squints at his notes. Yep, that's definitely what that squiggly loop besides "TIGRANS" was originally supposed to mean, before he "corrected" it.

"Well, that's less confusing! Also -"

He forgets all his other priorities, and the Refutation's newfound standards of decorum. He needs to know.

"Is there some reason that most of them still feed on humans most of the time anyway? Like - that it's more nutritious? Or just tastes vastly better?"

Toy-Mun almost visibly sighs relief seeing that their mating history doesn't seem to have bothered the others much.
- Vampires are power-mad undead monsters. Just like rape isn't just about mating, drinking blood doesn't seem to be just about hunger for them. You seem to ask an awful lot about them for a world that doesn't have them, though, so… what are your vampires like?

". . . Rape is about mating?"

"What's rape?"

"When a male just forces sex with a female. When it gets to be frequent in a population, you start seeing things like duck corkscrew vaginas and female dragonflies and damselflies with the ability to eject unwanted semen."

"- well I know what that is, I just didn't know the word. Yeah, how would that not be about mating? What else would it be about?

Um. Our vampires are. A fake invention that we put in stories to make them sexier. Hence everyone's reaction."

- How is a bloodsucking monster se… wait, don't answer that, I think I got the idea, - Toy-Mun nods. - As for rape, it's nearly always done for punishment or humiliation rather than just for mating: those who can get away with rape and not have their mating parts chopped off can normally also afford seducing someone by less… violent means. By the way, for the same reason it happens male-on-male somewhat often - more often than desire to actually mate another male is found, I'd wager.

He glances around while scribbling, now with added care and spaces between everything. "- Is this a thing we know of, that happens anywhere on Gahai. Rape-as-display-of-power, of the kind that would happen indiscriminately of recipient sex."

"- yeah, primates, dolphins, some ruminants, weirdly."

"That's hardly most of rape, though, even within those species, most rape that happens is about mating."

Back to Toy-Mun. "So. Before Scoryu cut in, I was going to - tigrans. What are they like?" Kwaiets is maybe about to explode from curiosity, but not obviously so if you don't know him and aren't very skilled at people-reading.

Toy-Mun evidently isn't - and would find the curiosity normal anyway.
- Have y'all missed the chopping-off part? Most men - sorry, males - have a... mindless fear, I'd say, of even the tiniest threat to their mating parts. As for your question, Kwaiets… - another piece of paper is torn from the notebook, and a quick sketch of what can only be described as a bipedal leopard and a bipedal lion comes in. Pointing at the leopard, Toy-Mun goes: - The standard tigran is like this, with yellowish-to-brownish fur all over their body - I think I saw a grey one once, though. The ruling caste is like this, - the other picture gets pointed at. - Wo… females have breasts, like humans and elves, although, just like elves, rarely too big - this is different from other big cats, whose nipples are normally too tiny to even be called breasts - and, I think, there are usually more than two in those, while tigrans have two just like us?

A quick look around. Pause. Obvious careful thinking.

- You… do have breasts, right? Your females? The… humps of fat around nipples that begin to grow when the girl reaches a certain age?

Choked snort.

". . . No?" He pauses writing momentarily to squint at Toy-Mun for hints that this mostly-apparently-human alien is ethnically divergent from Gahai humans in other equally-major ways, and . . . does not have enough experience with this to tell at all.

The drawn tigrans are FASCINATING. Everyone takes every possible opportunity to stare raptly. Scoryu tries to draw more 'realistic' versions, again with questionable results.

Now this clearly piques Toy-Mun's interest. Their cheeks blush further.
- So… if I drew this before… you would decide I'm exaggerating? - the next picture is that of a naked human girl head-to-toe in profile, with what would've been called by Americans a C-cup and somewhat-similar size of buttocks. Obviously, Toy-Mun themself doesn't seem to sport such shapes.

Somehow this is managing to keep getting weirder.

Scribble "Why are breast sizes so important?" He has inferred this from Toy-Mun's apparent attention to that part of the drawing! "Is that one - normal?" 

This seems to be a somewhat personal issue to Toy-Mun: their speech gets faster, their cheeks blush again, and they stop correcting themself when saying gendered words.
- Many human and tigran men find larger breasts and, ahem, butts more attractive. There are girls with bigger shapes than this, there are girls with smaller - variation is huge, and there's only limited link to how big the woman otherwise is. Elves tend on the slimmer side, so usually more like this, - an elven girl's outline appears nearby, with A-cups and smaller butt - though the picture also sports a pointed ear. - And some win a f&%king prize-of-suckiness and stay almost flat like a twelve-year-old forever. Although it does have its benefits, of course, not limiting movement and all. Next you tell me your females don't bleed every month or so?

"- Oh no, we have that, that sucks. It's one of the things like bad backs and clumsiness that's obviously the result of a recent hard evolutionary bottleneck focused on the human nervous system, though the story about how is kind of winding.

How common are breasts, in your animals? What do they do?"

Breath in. Breath out.
- Other than attract male ogling? Well, you feed your children with the nipples, but that happens in beings that don't have these humps of fat around them, too. I don't know why some beasts have bigger ones, like cows or humans, and some don't. I'd bet that it was selection of sorts: men preferred slightly breastier women, they left more children, girls among those were breastier, and so on, like when you select for a dog breed or something. And I have no idea how or why this started. But it certainly does give those… less curvy… reasons to hate their own bodies.

"Uh, our cows don't have anything that looks like that? Neither do any of our species!" Scribble scribble "If your humans and your something-that-evolved-from-lemurs-or-literal-cats both have them, I'm guessing it must be pretty widespread among your mammals?"

"Figuring out the meta-rules by which things are selectively-bred into existence is this cult's entire thing, by the way."

- It's… well, other than in sapients, it's mostly found in beings that are kept for milk, like cows or goats. For those, it's rather easy to imagine they were selected for that because it's easier to milk them this way. Oh, and elephants - no idea why those have breasts, but they do. Speaking of… what are ways your men and… SORRY! males and females are different? Is there any way you can tell one's sex without baring their mating parts? Because we kinda have many, although I somehow managed to skip, well, most of these. Which was very helpful, too - our societies are… mostly strict about which sex should do what, and in different ways across countries and races.

"That blows! How so?"

<💭>Nailed it. Tact master, master of tact.</💭>

"Um, we can just tell? Females have - faces that are thinner, and just - differently shaped. There are body differences, females are thinner-shouldered, softer, usually shorter, but those are less obvious under clothes or from a distance sometimes, and the face is definitely enough anyway. Can you not - tell, which of us is which?"

Toy-Mun looks at them in clear surprise - and, seemingly, an attempt to evaluate who's who.

- If I were pressed with a blade at my throat to give an answer, I would wager Scoryu is female and others are male, but I would be very unsure - none of you sport clearly manly shoulders, square jaw, facial hair or… well, anything recognizable, really. Could you have said whether I'm male or female before I threw a tantrum about girls who hate themselves?

"Well, you didn't let us bet on it, so now we don't know, do we."

<💭>'Blade to my throat', arcana what an idiom in lieu of betting culture</💭>

"Um, I mean, how does the sex-restriction thing shake out? For your race, and 'country', for example."

Toy-Mun smiles ruefully:
- Indeed I didn't. Let's just say that in my village, when a girl picks up a sword, she risks way more than money. Women are expected to stay home, tend to household, and obey their husbands… the men that chose them. And yes, I said "chose them" - a woman would have little choice herself, it would be arranged between the families. I guess it's not too surprising I stole my father's sword and ran away after he died, along with my older sister. To give an opposite example, demons have female rule, and tigrans have a complicated system with female priests and male rulers. Is this… sufficient info before you tell me who's who among you? - Toy-Mun's voice - now it seems rather safe to assume "her" voice - shakes a bit on the last phrase. - Or do I first need to place a bet?

". . . Gahai used to be like that, hundreds of years ago. We shaped up once we got richer and smarter. You can bet if you want?"

They seem to be getting used to the gender words! Except for Pel, who is mostly not. Baby steps.

"The - gendered pronouns - do you want us to use those to refer to you?"

"- okay, so, let's have Toy-Mun bet, or not, and sex ourselves, and then I was going to try and figure out the convergent breasts mystery further but that's clearly just leading us into the weeds and anyway I was originally aiming at tigran psychology because that's vastly more important and, oh yeah, we're a psychevo cult, so we'll cover that next."

Murmers. Abashed assent.

Toy-Mun clicks her tongue.

- No, there's definitely no need for a change in pronouns… I am rather accustomed to pretending to be whichever sex fits the situation. Which my body thankfully allowed - if I were like this, - her finger caressed the C-cup girl picture, - it would be much more difficult. So use whatever's convenient - although, if you're interested, what you used before got translated as the male one. And… As you may have noticed, I don't share your proclivity for bets. I've stated what I thought, now just tell me where I was mistaken. Unless, of course, you are now uncomfortable sharing this information, which wouldn't even be strange if you outgrew such inequalities centuries ago and now see me speaking about them as something real.

Cough. "Well, you clocked me." Stupid smirk. "Girl." Bow. 

He's nursing a bruise about it, but only evidently so to co-cultists or skilled people-readers.

Snicker. "Shut up oh my sir. Boy."

"Male."

"Female." Not grimacing! He is not grimacing. This is like the doctor's office. That's what interviewing an alien is like.

"Female." Asic is second-tallest next to Pel, and not very distinct from him facial-bone-structure-wise either. 

"Right, so, tigrans! Can they generally integrate seamlessly into human institutions? How could you tell if someone was a tigran, if you just had an epistolary relationship with them and they were adopted by your relatives, say, as a baby? And somehow it'd never at all come up what they looked like.

Also feel free to ask your own questions anytime you want, we've been slacking on that."

Toy-Mun turns to Kwaiets and Asic. She might not be from a betting culture but focusing on mistakes is evidently still among her habits. Looking between Asic and Pel and not noticing any substantial differences, she sighs.

- Tell me if you want me to use "he" for all of you anyway… Tigrans tend to be violent and fanatical to their Blood Goddess - I wish I were making this up, they literally call her that, other peoples call the same goddess by name. But, I guess, if a tigran were adopted and raised in another culture, it wouldn't necessarily transfer. It's just… not a frequent situation. I am a vagrant, but most people stay with their races. Or go to the city of Brute, which is… a hellhole of its own. One interesting tidbit is that they never kiss each other - but that's probably because of how their faces are, well, cat-like and not quite suitable for that. This also explains why they always retain some accent in Common - but I guess it wouldn't show up in writing. Now… this does make me intrigued. Is adoption to a faraway land a common practice among you?

"- the mode around here definitely isn't to 'she' anybody, we don't have that any more than we have breasts.

Um, adoption - I think adoption from a faraway land is more common than adoption from a nearby land, modernly, just because it's not much inconvenience to transport a baby to you from the other side of the world, relative to how much the baby costs, and if you're a prospective adoptive parent you're definitely going to search the whole global market and probably your optimal baby-match is not going to come up anywhere very nearby."

<💭>Balls, tigrans are a distant outgroup to him, and he wouldn't know them from a dirty sock.   . .  Well, more fun for us, unraveling it all!</💭>

- Why? - Toy-Mun looks at Scoryu in clear surprise. - If they live close, it's more likely they share your other… proclivities and values, isn't it? Or is your world that… uniform? And wait, did you - did you - did you just say "the baby costs"? As in, you pay for adoption, not vice versa? Like… what?

"Transportation is cheap enough that people can just go where they're most needed. It's been that way for a couple hundred years, give or take, now. It makes the world more uniform than it was before that, yeah -"

"You get people paying for people to parent their child? Wouldn't that cost strictly more than just paying for ordinary part-time childcare themselves, or am I missing something?"

This seems to be the first time Toy-Mun is genuinely dumbfounded to the point of being unable to speak.

- Er… you… you adopt children of alive, functioning adults? Not orphans? - she breathes out, finally, with tone clearly to the tune of "do you also eat them for breakfast", although she doesn't say that latter part out loud.

Multiple people finally get it through their thick skulls that Toy-Mun is from the Horrible Flaming Past.

"It sucks that you've been mysteriously and in uncertain permanency torn from everything you've ever known, but I think you're going to like at least several things about the way modernity works. Such as that childcare is so cheap that with some frequency someone will have a baby and not hugely want it, and someone else will not have a baby but want one, and the second person will pay the first person to take their baby.

Or is 'childcare is so expensive that everyone has to do their own best to keep their children from dying, - which is a thing that happens - like it or not' not what you were talking about?"

Toy-Mun blinks. Then blinks again.

- What exactly do you mean by "which is a thing that happens - like it or not"? Is there some magical spell that prevents children from dying in your world? No, wait, I distinctly remember you saying you don't have magic. I can't say that what you describe could never happen, but most people would be very suspicious of intentions of the buyer. As in… preparing such bought children for brothels would be among the better plausible outcomes.

After a short pause, Toy-Mun deems it necessary to add:
- And "better" does not mean "good": I've seen the girls - it's mostly females - who work in brothels, it's not a good job.

"Why would training them to - farm, or make shoes, or something - be worse?"

(Scoryu, as unobtrusively as can be managed, offers odds on the hypothesis that it's because babies bought for farming or shoemaking training are bullied into keeping that same job for life. No takers - the Refutation agrees, it seems inevitable that Toy-Mun comes from a culture that's that worst kind of broken.)

Toy-Mun's gaze turns decidedly sad.

- You… have no idea what a brothel is, do you, Asic, - this doesn't even sound like a question. - I guess that's how it is really supposed to feel when you get in heaven…

A pause.

- Apprenticeship for farming or making shoes or other such craft would be a near-ideal result, but this is not what I meant. Remember, we've just discussed rape? What happens in brothels isn't normally considered rape because they are paid for it. Otherwise, it has all the hallmarks of it: you come, you mate in whatever way you want - normally disregarding the worker's desires, if this isn't obvious - and then you pay and leave. And it is more often than not a job chosen out of despair or because one was sent there without much choice. In theory, it is possible to earn enough and leave. In practice, most are stuck. I have had multiple occasions to think whether I would be better off there, at least fed and in warmth, even though my holes would become abused in ways I don't even imagine possible - and I have a good imagination and some pretty diverse mating experience for my age. I chose to remain a vagrant and often sleep near the road, hungry and cold. And I maintain it was a better choice.

Another pause.

- So yeah, now I see why you don't use the nouns. Some of you are female, in the sense of having the parts… some of them anyway, - Toy-Mun caresses the naked picture's breasts again, - but none of you are women. In a sense, even I don't qualify as one, because I managed to avoid all that and live as I please, more or less. But let's just say pretending to be male was beneficial somewhat more often than not. Although, I guess, being one of the few male workers of a brothel is even worse.

It's . . . good that he's not bent on seeing us as women like the meanest least charitable* stereotypes of ancient people would be? We reckon?

*read: factually accurate

The bet about farming/shoemaking defaults, having been premised on an error.

"We know what a brothel is, it's just - ours don't suck by way of being absurdly coercive like everything in the deep past did. They're normal workplaces where the employees can do whatever they want when they go home, and can quit whenever they like, and most people would quit if their boss ordered them to let their . . . holes . . . get more . . . abused . . . than they would otherwise have chosen."

A short, hysterical half-giggle escapes Toy-Mun's lips.
- No. You don't. You really, really don't, Kwaiets. What you described is a courtesan's work, it's… way better. - A cough. - Of course, it also requires being attractive. Which I could never boast. Being a brothel worker - a whore, as they're usually called - doesn't, it just requires having holes and not literally decaying.
A short pause.
- Oh, and yes, while this is not my area of expertise, male whores also mostly get… used as holes rather than the other way around. Most buyers are male anyway.

A long-ish, sad pause.

- Anyway. As I said, this is far from the worst of what could happen to a child sold elsewhere. Apprenticeships are a different thing, they normally don't imply full adoption if you have parents that can feed you. How did you… how… how did you manage to stop everything from sucking?

"Well, then, I'll just insist that you don't understand what a human is because real humans don't have b -"

"Time and brainpower-elbow-grease! Do you want further elaboration?"

Toy-Mun narrows her eyes, looking at Asic. Before, they mistook her blushing for being mad. Now, they saw her actually being mad. Her nostrils flared, her face paled back, her pupils seemingly contracted, looking for weak spots.

- Oh, really, Asic, - she just said, folding her arms under her breast - which wouldn't even fill an AA-cup but which was still a bit outlined by that gesture under the dark vest, seemingly intentionally. - Yes, Henreyyah, I would love further elaboration. Seeing as we seem to harbor many… illusions about how a world inevitably works, which happen to be disproved by the other's experience.

"??? Yes really???"

"So, humans. Only sapients on our world - this is not essential to the not-suckery, just an incidental feature of the situation. They start out as just really intelligent biologically successful apes with absurd brain capacity, a lot of which is used for intergenerationally transmissible firmware and anomalously abstract reasoning. But their lives, modulo complexity of politics and techniques, are still not hugely different from chimpanzee lives - stay fed, stay warm, evade danger, evade illness, evade ostracism, have kids, help the next generation."

"Then one guy - be it regretted that history lost the many true names of the people who were this one guy - was like, 'You know how plants just keep growing over and over again, under the right conditions? Maybe we could just reliably create those conditions and then we'd have a predictable harvest and we wouldn't have to worry about wandering around for food so much anymore.' As it always is, it was way harder than it sounded, but that one guy - bless his many instances - was so right that most of the holdout bands who didn't adopt farming initially were eventually physically displaced by those who did. Those who weren't physically displaced, were out-reproduced and overshadowed. It turned out there was a lot more to farming than just allowing your little band to stay in one place. You could support quadratically more people in the same land area by optimizing both the growing conditions and the heredity of the crop plants themselves."

"Agriculture was more time-intensive per calorie than hunting-gathering for a while, and settlements had people who didn't know each other by name, and that created new problems that had to be solved with new institutions of arbitration, but if the effect of settlement was really overall bad for the people in it, they would genuinely have just gone back to living the other way. If you live in a settlement, even if more of your hours are nominally eaten up by food production than would have been the case for your hunter-gatherer ancestors, the rest of your hours are entirely, predictably, structuredly free. Want to get really good at just making shovels? Plows? You can do that, in those extra hours, without worrying that it'll end up advantaging you literally not at all in the end, because hey, your city will predictably be here, and predictably need these things, basically, regardless of what happens in the next few years. People had a sturdier social foundation on which to build things, and they did. And so there were better shovels, better plows. Eventually, techniques for making better metal and better stone. Preparing food faster, washing clothes faster, making cheaper paper . . . and each of those industries became a social-island-of-stability-and-predictability unto itself, a platform for further optimization by experts within it who could then see something to gain thereby."

"Your world is already to that point, I know. My meaning is - people in your world don't have enough choices, by a long shot, as to what they'll do with their lives - which of course is dependent on who they can associate with, because anything you produce for money must be sold to some reliable consumer who understands that, be that the market or your boss - but they have vastly more such choices than their ancestors who lived in the first settlements, who had vastly more such choices than early humans who scraped by in bands of 50 people - assuming your lineage's group size wasn't too different from our own."

"Take that process, of settlement, of increasing industry, that your world has already undergone, and extrapolate it, and it turns out that within a few thousand or hundred years, you get almost-costless universal food, almost-costless universal housing, with plumbing and effortless temperature control and light at night, cheap clothes and transportation and childcare and info-recording-storage-and-transmission, cheap easy-to-use self-defense weaponry so even the physically weakest people don't have to worry about meeting overwhelming force, and - it looks like, pretty soon - immortality."

"But the structure underlying all that technology, the essential thing to why life doesn't suck here nearly so much anymore - is that even the least trainable people have multiple bosses to choose from. Our least-skilled have thousands of of times more options for bosses, than when our world was around your world's level of development, if I'm reckoning right."

"If you run a factory, and your employees have other factories they can go work at instead, you can't be a tyrant even to your dumbest employees, or they'll take that choice - at a wage cut, even - and you'll be left at a disadvantage and, in the limit, run out of business."

"Thus, the future dissolves tyranny. Not perfectly, yet. Wherever there's a monopoly, because somebody's figured out how to do something new, little tiny tyranny-bubbles still happen. The future future is expected to be better. We're working on it."

At first, Toy-Mun is still seething due to Asic's comments. However, as she listens to Henreyyah, her face slowly relaxes, and she puts her arms down, seemingly enamoured by the prospect.

- I don't know what a factory is… but yes, it's often down to choice. And to who gets it. When it's "work for me or starve", it's not much of a choice. And, I guess, armies can just leave their tyrant if they have other ways to survive. But magic is a huge factor here. A small group of archmages can hold thousands of people of lesser talents in fear and obedience. Hell, one archmage can hold a city. You didn't have magic, so when you had this… weaponry… you got an edge against tyrants. And gods… after years of vagrancy, I tried to return to dismantle the tyrant in my home village, putting on a mask of an old hero. That's when I met the She-Wolf - a motherly goddess, supposedly, but she was nowhere near motherly. She didn't even let me to get back to the village, she cursed me halfway and I had to deal with that instead. Well, first she held a trial over me with northern spirits. Gods literally intervene to stop change. To hold everything under their control, because it's more convenient to them as-is. I am glad you avoided that.

While speaking, Toy-Mun begins to absent-mindedly sketch a wolf.

"I've never met a problem that trade and time couldn't fix, but, yeah, those are sure some foreign and nasty-sounding problems."

"You have - gods, too? Is that what he - er, she - looked like?"

"- Yeah, remember? That's what - I've been putting off that part of the investigation because we have almost no framework for dealing with it, relative to evolutionary stuff, and also it's in no way our comparative advantage."

"Oh. Right."

kill him kill him kill him, there'd been a lot to keep track of, between the 'magic' and the vampires and the breasts and the sapient leopards, and it had all just kind of blurred together, but that's no excuse.

- Huh? Oh, yes. Well, at least that was the shape she showed me - a huge wolf, twice as tall as me while standing on all fours. Others might see a different one. Actually, now that I think of it… Angels have a floating city that's somewhat more - I guess more similar to what you described? But only angels - and some half-bloods if they are deemed worthy - are allowed there, so they're unequal in another aspect. I've never been there, obviously, seeing as I am, well, human, - another dagger-stare at Asic. - I guess I should give a quick rundown here? There are - well, were, they were shattered into many shards by elves of the past - two sisters who created the world - The Great Mother, or Theon, and The Blood Goddess, or Shar. Then there are two dragon progenitors, husband and wife. Then… humans of the southern lands deify some of their kin, but they're not, like, real gods, they just got shards of power of the two sisters and used them well. And we the Northerners have the many spirits led by the She-Wolf and her children. She's sometimes also called The Great Mother, but that would only add to the confusion - She-Wolf is not the same as Theon. I guess nagas and sahuagins may have their own cults, don't know enough of those. That's all… oh, no, not all. First dragans were created by the Rebel, not by interbreeding, and dragans view him as god - but I guess he's as much of a "god" as Southerners' "gods", just a guy who got lucky. Hm. Coming to think of it, the dragon progenitors weren't seen for many centuries… but they can't be just guys with shards because they are recorded before the goddesses' shattering.

They have angels, too! Of course they do! The Refutation can mostly, now, compartmentalize away this minor distraction and follow the rest of the exposition.

(They've come up in lists of sapients, before, but before the 'vampires' thing, it was written off as metaphor or translation issue.)

"If you're a real human, then we have real brothels!"

He imagines trying to explain to the Scoryu of five hours ago how he ended up in this conversation. His model of his past self becomes wary, skeptical, and hostile.

"- okay, major crux, here, what exactly is a dragan?"

He sits and gets out notetaking materials with Kwaiets, Scoryu, and Toy-Mun at the table.

He follows suit.

- Dragans are scaly people kinda like humans but longer-living. They come about in two ways. There are first dragans, that were created from humans with dragon blood by alchemy by the Rebel, and there are half-breeds that result from a dragan mating with someone or from a dragon mating with someone who's not a dragon. So yeah, not all dragans are half-bloods. That's… a weird story. Do... do you have half-breeds? Maybe not of sapients, but somewhere?

"Who was the rebel? I know you mentioned dragons before - presumably they're very like humans, but scalier? Anybody feel free on the half-breeds thing." Write write write

"- well, if two creatures produce offspring, their offspring is half like one parent and half the other. Sometimes two creatures are just far enough apart that they can produce offspring, but their offspring won't be fertile - horses and donkeys making mules for example. But mules aren't exactly a 'breed', since they can't breed."

- Yeah, we have mules too! - Toy-Mun nods: finally something familiar. - And as for dragons - as I said, two shapes, one human-like, one like this, - she digs out Lin's picture from the pile. - I guess we're all getting tired and forgetting things. And for the Rebel - I don't remember too much. He was a chemist… a dragon chemist probably, I'm not even sure there were humans around yet? No, wait, there must've been since he used someone to create… No, I'm pretty sure he was a dragon. Oof. Since it seems I'm going to be stuck here for some time, where can I... rest?

All getting tired and forgetting things, they are! There are a lot of things, but that's still definitely no excuse!

"You mean for the night? You can stay with me, if you want. If you don't mind I was planning on picking up a temporary mattress on the way home, and sleeping on that. If you'd like to do that now, that's totally understandable."

- Yeah, this… this does sound reasonable. And - I don't know what's your custom for this but I guess it will be somewhat easier for me to share the living place with a... female. Although I've had many roommates of all kinds, so if you live with something else, it's not a problem… I'm rambling again, ain't I.

Toy-Mun stands up and moves the chair away, carefully holding their sword's hilt by a clearly practiced movement so that it doesn't intervene.
- Let's go.

He rapidly starts packing his stuff, making eyes at the others to do the same so it looks like they were all going to leave at this time anyway.

Wow, look at the time! We sure are packing.

Nod. "You . . . ready?

I don't . . . it'd be horrible if you felt like you're not allowed to go wherever you want, talk to whoever you want. We lucked into first dibs on making you an employment offer, and if we suck relative to other people you talk to, we actually wouldn't be up-to-Code people if you felt like you couldn't quit and go work for them, on account of us."

Several people had further last-second points of confusion about dragons but fine, they guess, it can wait. Unless Toy-Mun quits right here in which case it may have to wait forever. They'll still find out eventually-eventually, once the real scientists have sifted through it - wow what a painful thought.

Toy-Mun rapidly collects back the few possessions taken from the bag and nods.

Kwaiets's further words cause a slight smile.
- Thank you, but it will be wise of me to exercise caution at first. I don't know most rules of your world, written or unwritten, and I wouldn't want to accidentally give someone a reason to… what was the word, "shoot" me? You five at least already know that I mean no harm by such things. Well, unless I've managed to offend Asic already, in which case - apologies.

<💭>Aaaaaaaagh! No! It's not like that!!! This isn't the Past!</💭>

"You've offended the shit out of me, but I'd rather you walk now and tell the whole world what assholes we were, than think that anybody stands even a one in a million chance of shooting you over it. People don't do that, in the Future. Ever."

Vague gesture in Asic's general direction. "He speaks the truth, and not exaggerated."

"- We just - you just materialized here from Somewhere Mysteriously Else, you could have been any kind of threat, you could have been anything, we might not have had the chance to draw our weapons later." Eyes wide, willing Toy-Mun to understand. It's true Scoryu himself didn't draw his weapon, but he would have if things had been just slightly different, even if he doesn't like how it all ended up looking.

- This was a reasonable decision, - Toy-Mun nodded. - I do not hold offence at you over that, I would probably draw weapons myself in your place. Hell, if you didn't draw your weapons immediately, I would probably draw mine, just out of fear. I apologize again, Asic… it is clear we might use some terms differently, even if the translation magic makes them sound the same. I hope we will meet again and clarify more… after we rest. I don't know about you, but for me It was already evening after a long travel - before I somehow blinked and found myself among you.

<💭>. . . Alright, all seems fine.

Now nobody re-screw this.</💭>

Nod. "Well, you can follow me, if you're ready. The others will - probably take a while to get going." (Read: they'll probably stay here for a few hours and finish the meeting as planned.) He grabs his backpack and shifts toward the door.

Toy-Mun follows Kwaiets, bag over their shoulder, sword nearly - but not quite - touching the ground with each step. They allow Kwaiets to go through the door first.

"If it happens that this's farewell, you're cool!"

"And terrifying!"

"Highest power*!"

*Greeting, meaning 'may you attain the highest power possible to you'.

"Highest power!"

He opens the door to a brightly-lit, fairly wide hallway and heads through.

- "Highest power?" - Toy-Mun quietly asks Kwaiets as they go down the hallway. - Why… It seemed formulaic, like this is something akin to "farewell", but why "highest power"?

Oh, right. Toy-Mun has spent this past fraction-of-an-hour inundated with more cultural foreignness than the Refutation can realistically have been keeping track of to suppress. Not ideal congenial-subconscious-associative-conditioning work on their part.

"It means 'may you attain the highest power you can'. What do they say instead, where you're from? If-you-want-to-say.*"

(It's concrete, and fairly long, but friendly, punctuated at regular intervals by identical doors - presumably to more meeting rooms identical to the ones they were just in. At each end are enormous windows full of nothing but - starry? - black sky. It may not be clear that it's even sky at first. They round a corner and there's an alcove, from which, down an orthogonal hallway, another enormous black-sky window becomes visible. Through this one, there are the lights of the city, chaotic yet ordered, like a galaxy made impossibly tight and immediate.

The alcove has elevator doors. Kwaiets pushes a button.)

*Gahai is a more-guess-than-ask culture made up of insatiably curious, and also unpredictably intensely secretive, people. 'If-you-want-to-say' is an extremely common discourse marker there.

- …"Good luck", I guess? Or just "goodbye"... - Toy-Mun doesn't seem much interested by windows - whatever else, starry sky is certainly something they've seen a lot, and position does not seem good enough to estimate specific star map differences, not when they're on the move anyway. The new window, with lights of the city, is marginally more interesting. The elevator button seems more interesting, and they point to it. - What… what did you do? This looks like a trap trigger.

. . . Where the pyre is Toy-Mun from?

"It's - an elevator. It just - takes us up and down, faster than stairs. We can take the stairs if you want, there're just, eight flights of them."

The doors open. Nigh-perfect soundproofing was concealing an amicably chatting group of ten, mostly middle-aged, all lugging musical instruments - drums, or variously-sized wood-framed contraptions of strings andor hammers. A couple of them look curiously at Toy-Mun mid-conversation, but mostly they move around Toy-Mun and Kwaiets and stream down the hall.

Toy-Mun moved around and let them come through. The sword at her hip was probably somewhat surprising, while the instruments, while unusual in details, were basically recognizable as something one plays music on, even if hammer concentration was surprising.

- No, I like trying something new, - Toy-Mun declares happily, stepping into the elevator. - Do you… tell it where you want to go?

"This looks magical, but probably just some mechanical contraption", - she decides internally.

"Just -" he gestures at the panel with buttons labeled '1' to '10' - "what floor, but yeah. Can you - just automatically read, here, too?"

- Not… really, no, - Toy-Mun shakes her head. - But… if I had to wager a guess I'd say these are numbers?

"Yeah." He has no idea how impressive that is, actually; maybe Toy-Mun's home culture names floors. Actually, why would you have a reified convention of numbering floors if you didn't have elevators?

He presses '1'. No one else arrives in time. The doors close. "I just pressed the one for street level." There's a slight, almost imperceptible acceleration. "I'd say it's dickish of whoever implemented the translation . . . field . . . over you, not to also give you the ability to read, but that'd be presumptuous. For all I know, it's all enormously costly." Maybe Toy-Mun will want to remark on that. If not, he'll stop with the mentally taxing subjects of conversation and let Toy-Mun rest.

Toy-Mun shrugs, still looking at the number signs, clearly trying to remember them for later, then copies them to her notebook as they go down.
- These are certainly normally different spells, but I don't know how strong the transporter is and so whether they can support both. Or, perhaps, it is intentional - to let me learn your language anyway, through its writings, while not leaving me without any communication before I manage that. And… this goes two ways, I guess? I could teach you Common via writing, even if everything I say with my mouth gets translated.

"- at what the frick point will it stop translating, if I learn Common?" The question is rhetorical, but after he asks it he realizes that Toy-Mun may know something.

The elevator doors open into a ground floor that's . . . apparently mostly sidewalk. They're in a little steel-and-glass cubicle, open to the world and to several others of its kind, dotting the underside of the building. There's a computer kiosk here, though all electronics are currently tucked away discreetly under plastic shutters.

Outside, a couple dozen people walk or run past in lights cast from fixtures on the ceiling, lights held in their own hands, and lights from unseen sources that pool in walkways and against other big buildings' facades. Mostly, the people are alone, wearing backpacks, and headed somewhere quickly (yes, even the sixty-year-olds!) but not worriedly. Mostly, they're dressed plainly, for chilly weather, pants and coats and partial facemasks and sneakers. When someone's wearing something odd, it's boots or a hard hat or a utility belt or some kind of Large Pack containing Strangely-Shaped Equipment. Neither hairstyle (buzzed, waist-length, everything in between) nor clothing style seem to track size (sex?) or age at all, except that the people with the weirdest equipment tend to be the oldest.

The only thing audible is a faint rush. This place seems pretty well soundproofed. 

- No idea… - Toy-Mun responds and is then slienced by the view. - Wow. These are… all tall. Buildings, I mean. And well-lit. It wasn't as obvious from above.
The equipment seems unusual, both at the kiosk and in large packs on people.
- What is… sold here? - she asks carefully, pointing at the kiosk: the trappings were sufficient to recognize a selling place, but not its goods.

Only the feet of the closest buildings are visible, below the rim of the concrete ceiling of the rent-a-meeting-room building they're still under, so Toy-Mun must be making inferences.

He keeps his face very neutral. He's not sure what face he would be making otherwise. Earnest insistence? Reverent awe? Stupid smug pride about something he didn't create himself?

"Wait until you see the tops," he says, stupidly glibly.

"Oh, this is -" he undoes the main shutter revealing the computer terminal and keyboard, and flips a little switch. A welcome message glows in white letters on the screen. "It says, 'Welcome, Yan Meeting Space Rental Members. Please enter your customer code. Prospective customers, press YES.' It's for - messages to management, getting a temporary key, and stuff like that. You can also buy a membership here." It's also for signing in and out of your room so the staff know which ones are unoccupied for cleaning, but then Kwaiets would have to explain why he's not signing out of the Refutation's room right now.

Toy-Mun looks at the screen in clear awe.
- Magic, - they exhale silently. - No, wait, y'all were very insistent you don't have magic. How does this work?!

"It's - in fact very difficult and impressive-looking on the inside, sort of a gridded fascimile of - the tangle of 'biological cells' in your brain that makes you able to think, only this one's not as smart as a frog. It's - in principle you can do it with literal levers and switches but you need thousands and thousands of them to do anything complicated so this one is made of little tiny 'transistors' that function as - gates for the flow of electricity, which is just a kind of substance that can be elicited from all materials, some more easily than others, if you didn't know that."

Again he has the sense that he's giving away the Future too cheaply, too casually, and again he reminds himself that Toy-Mun is expected, for his part, to have similar flippancy with the insanely valuable secrets of his own strange Past. It still doesn't sit right with him, having everything be stored in informal social debt, which can be defaulted on at any time without recourse for the 'violated' party, but - with Toy-Mun being a hapless newcomer to the Future, with his entire employment with the Refutation being based on him being a hapless newcomer to the Future, Kwaiets can't see how to set up their 'tuition contracts' any other way.

Toy-Mun half-closes her eyes, clearly overwhelmed.
- Electricity. Like… the thing lightnings strike you with. And these are artificial brains? No, I guess I'm too lost for today. Let's just… continue on our way.

He wants to quiz Toy-Mun further and find out exactly how much he does know about electricity, but he nods and opens the door. Chilly-but-not-freezing air rushes in, and two distinct major waves of sound: a chorus of high, thin drones, and another of fast, severe chopping rhythms. Both sound distant and muffled. A few conversations of paired passersby are audible, but the words are indistinct. 

He leads Toy-Mun between widely-spaced support pillars, out from under the meeting-space building.

And the concrete-glass-and-steel figures rise five to fifteen stories above them, higher toward the city center, circled and crossed everywhere by glints tipping and silhouetting small, lithe propellor aircraft. The sky is paled a little by the lights that mark out the outlines of all the buildings to help them steer clear. Stars are visible, between clouds, but not many.

Most individual Gaha'eka, given the choice, would have chosen a 'sensible', restricted color palette, for the night lights of Sareksal. There wouldn't be much consensus about which parts of the color wheel to involve. White is the most common color, but some people thought that obviously carplane-clearance beacons should be orange, others that they should obviously be green, or blue, or red, or magenta. It all serves.

At street level, pedestrian paths spiderweb wildly but forthrightly between buildings, into the distance. One gap reveals a straight-cut road traveled by automobiles. A few less straight lanes carry human-powered wheeled vehicles.

Neither the pedestrian paths, nor the occasional wide gaps representing nature-parks and statue displays, are all that brightly lit. Carplane pilots need to be able to see obstacles well in spatial advance of meeting with them, but pedestrians don't, and have good night vision, and also generally carry personal lights. What's a violent crime?

"Sareksal," he says, strapping on a mostly-redundant habitual headlamp and starting down a path - covertly watching for Toy-Mun's reaction.

- Since it didn't get translated, I guess it's the name of this place, - Toy-Mun chuckles, following suit. Automobiles almost prompt the obligatory "horseless carriages" line… almost, as something else catches attention. - It's strange. You can clearly afford making a lot of light, but your paths aren't all that brightly lit. Reminds me of streets of the city of Brute - but that one almost officially supports its pickpockets, I'd be surprised to see such motivation here.

He zips up his coat and flips the hood up. "'Pick-pockets'? Oh, right, you wouldn't have a light - here." From a deep coat pocket, he extracts a bulky, mildly greebled-looking plastic cuboid, works his fingers on it. For a moment, white text flashes on a tiny screen as it did at the kiosk. Then a light flares into existence at the center of one edge. He hands the thing to Toy-Mun as they walk, then glances at his robes. "Are those alright for the weather?"

Having taken the light, Toy-Mun nods, lighting their way.
- Thank you… As for weather, I come from the tenebrous glaciers of the northern islands that are only theoretically islands because the glacier doesn't melt in the summer, - Toy-Mun snickers. - So yeah, I'm definitely not cold here. Pickpockets are… well, thieves that try to take things from your pockets or bags and leave unnoticed, hence the name. And they, of course, operate best in places that are dark but full of people, where you can't notice the thing in time and will have too many people to blame when you do. Do you not have thieves? People who take what's not theirs?

He leads them into a wider stream of people. There's a solid white line painted down the middle of the cement path; everyone is walking on their own right-hand side. 

". . . No? Don't you - have a Code? And stealing - that's basically the definition of cringe, it seems like everyone should be able to figure out for themselves that that's cringe anyway. I don't think there was even a problem with bald stealing back in the feudal days, or the State of Nature."

Toy-Mun also follows on the right side. Her brows raise at the Kwaiets's reaction:
- Ack, of course stealing is illegal. But when it's steal or starve, many… choose the risk of getting caught. I remember catching a guy who tried to rummage through my bag - he was so thin even my waist was wider, and it's not something I can often say about another adult. I didn't even report him, it would only bring sorrow. And yeah, while officially stealing is against the law - the Code, if you prefer - everywhere, unofficially rulers of the city of Brute have some kind of agreement about it and basically don't stop thieves unless forced to. Also, what's "cringe"?

They turn a corner onto an even wider path. A stretch up ahead, a metal-and-concrete tunnel entrance yawns its mouth up against the side of the road. People hurry up out of, and down into, it.

"Cringe -

okay, just to check, you know what hunger, sleepiness, dread, startlement, panic, joy, grief, revulsion, sympathy, rage, fury, indignation, elation, horniness, guidelessness, surety, uncertainty, self-doubt, confusion, surprise, boredom, loneliness, protectiveness, love, spite, resentment, shame, guilt, awe, jubilation, curiosity, enthusiasm, and pride are? Not to mention, like, heat, cold, thirst, hypomania, suspicion . . . "

This is less like he's giving away the Future and more that he's giving away himself. This isn't a list he'd go down for his cultmates, as they wouldn't go down theirs for him.

(He wouldn't be able to give the true answer why on the spot if you asked him. He'd confidently spew something he's spent some time making up to "explain" it, though.)

Toy-Mun puts their index fingers at their temples, slightly pressing them as they go, and sighs.
- Urgh, not so fast - but I think I got all of those except elation, this sounds like some fancy word with vaguely-good feelings. Was this list supposed to help me with what cringe is, except some sort of feeling?

They reach the tunnel entrance. The stairs heading down into it are brightly lit. There's a divider, and railings. The floor below looks decently populated. A few people loiter outside the entrance, or just inside. These are likelier than the ones with somewhere immediately to go, to glance uncertainly at Toy-Mun, but the glances don't appear to be connected to any plans for action on the part of the glancers.

He starts down the stairs. 

". . . How about embarrassment?" He's hushed his voice some, conscious of potential eavesdropping. "Elation, and cringe, explanation-promise-this-conversation*."

It's still not likely that Toy-Mun would end up with all Kwaiets's exact words except - which ones - except the big societal-anchor one and - not its complement exactly, elation, but . . . what - is it - ?

*also a common discourse marker in a society of curious recluses who are given over to impromptu informal best-effort single-blinded scientific polls and have a strong sense of conversational transactional fairness.

Toy-Mun nods:
- Yeah. Embarrassment is an often-felt emotion. It's when you are… ashamed? Like, you did something wrong - or maybe said something - and it came up in a dialogue? Oh, and there's also what we call "Dragan embarrassment" - it's when you're embarrassed for someone else rather than for yourself.

<💭>Okay, yeah, 'dragan' (and probably the related 'dragon' and 'half-breed') is one of those foreign-culture concept-balls that it was totally fair of us to be dropping, because the ball is slathered in pig fat. At least insofar as it's fair for anyone to ever be dropping any balls, which is of course 'not', but</💭>

"Yeah, that's not - shame is when you've done something your parent - in the old vulgar psychiatrist jargon they'd say your father - would be sad about, see? Cringe is when you've done something society will update its opinion of you downward for. They're both negative social feelings but they're otherwise not that similar?

Elation is - what happens in the moments between achieving an unblemished victory and needing to deal with the responsibility of defending it, the pure emotional reward you get for winning something."

The subway station is rectilinear and mostly utilitarian but the floor is paved with some kind of polished white stone. It's indeed pretty populated! He heads for a map, so he can show Toy-Mun where they're going while they wait.

Toy-Mun blinks. Then blinks again.
- I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you have a disdain towards a gendered term here, too, but I wouldn't say I associate shame with my father more strongly than with my mother or my teacher. Elation… yeah, the feeling is known to me, though I'd probably just say I'm glad.

She follows Kwaiets, looking around.

- But cringe… this sounds very strange. How would you know what society thinks? And, perhaps more importantly, when you know, why would you care? You can be afraid of consequences, of course, but what you describe didn't sound like fear, it sounded like something from… from within. If I followed what society wants, I would be stuck in a marriage with an unwanted man in a frozen hellhole - or probably already dead from ch-childbirth… - Toy-Mun clearly shuddered. Strongly.

"...you just - know? Like you know society wanted you to be stuck in a marriage, only felt - and more about career, I think, than anything to do with mating life - do you not have that?"

Toy-Mun shakes her head. Then thinks a bit.

- Others having that feeling would… actually explain quite a lot in their behaviour. But I don't have it, and I don't know the word for it. It probably saved my life, too.

"Someone having it, or you not having it? Saved your life, that is."

<💭>This is our breasts, isn't it.</💭>

- My not having it. If I had it, I might not have had the guts to run away and would be forced into early marriage and… you know, birth. - Again, the mere thought seemingly sent shivers down Toy-Mun's spine. - You can see, my hips are quite… narrow for a female. I probably wouldn't survive my first child.

"I'm sorry." He gropes for some way to counter Toy-Mun's doubtlessly biased gratitude for his own observed history, to illustrate how an extra sense wouldn't really have hurt him - but he doesn't have enough information. It's frustrating. "Was that - frequent? Did you have access to good data saying whether it was frequent?"

<💭>Toy-Mun is from a farming society, right? I don't think the rate of maternal death for poor farming societies on Gahai, even for young mothers with the narrowest hips specifically, was ever above a few percent.</💭>

"Not that you didn't have justification to treat forced childbirth as murder, or something, either way, I'm just trying to understand your world again." Clumsy.

Toy-Mun hugs her own shoulders, clearly looking vulnerable.

- We buried someone because of that once in a year or two. Usually a young and skinny girl, which bill I would definitely fit. And we weren't too big a village. Nearly everyone knows someone whose mother died this way, I guess… Although rich people can afford magic to survive a womb dissection. Our village definitely couldn't, it was only done if… if the woman was already doomed anyway.

He - commits to asking about the village size later. He probably won't actually remember, not in the near term, but he really doesn't want to press Toy-Mun further now about what seems to be a sore subject while he is supposed to be getting rest.

There are two sets of tracks running through the station, entering from and then disappearing into dark tunnel. On each side of the track-pair is a wide waiting-platform. You get to the train on the other side by means of a little pedestrian tunnel scooping underneath the tracks. They're already on the right side for their train. Knowing there are a couple minutes left before the next train arrives on the opposite set of tracks and has whatever effect on Toy-Mun it has, and a few minutes between that one and the one on their set of tracks that will take him home, he gestures toward one of the big color-coded subway maps of Sareksal, posted on the wall for travelers' convenience.

To a glance, it looks like an anatomist's attempt at faithfully capturing the inner piping of a creature once possessed of radial symmetry, but since dead, deformed, and the remains fragmented, until only splinters suggesting the shape of the original thing remained. On closer inspection, the lines are far too clean and straight to have been done by hand, and the labelled nodes, in discrete sizes, with further tags decoded by a detailed legend, are far too confident to reflect a state of ignorance on the part of this cartographer as to the true nature of his subject's parts.

He touches a finger to the glass, above a red star shape about halfway outward from the creature's center. "That's us," he says. He slides his finger outward from the star, along a silver stream - bending, weaving, crossing other streams - to a white, medium node about three-fourths of the way out from the heart. "That's the stop where we're going. My apartment building's a two-minute walk from there."

Toy-Mun looks at the lines, even tracing the silver stream after Kwaiets's finger with her own - still hugging herself with the other hand, as if having forgotten it's there.

- Beautiful, - she slowly says, not having quite regained calmness, but getting there. - These are… roads, right? And, since so many people are here, standing, waiting… They don't have a vehicle of their own and waiting for one to go and pick them up? That's a very cool idea.

An obvious reminder that "stupid" and "unaware of how statistics works" are not coextensive.

<💭>They don't have trains? Or - maybe he's used to steam-train rails and just doesn't recognize the squashed-looking maglev tracks.</💭>

"Very fair assumption, but they're train tracks. They only don't look like the normal kind because they power the train that sits on them - float it forward and along with a ridiculously strong electromagnet." He'd been hoping that part would come as a surprise, but he highly doubts he would have noticed that part himself right away.

Toy-Mun carefully looked at him. Then looked again.

- I guess you'll explain it to me later when I will be able to understand more...

The sudden noise of a train was, perhaps, quite familiar to Kwaiets, but not to Toy-Mun - and in the next moment Kwaiets found himself pressed to the wall, with Toy-Mun firmly holding him, thus showing both reflexes and strength of a professional swordsperson, and protecting him with their own body, as if the ceiling was going to fall on them or a huge beast would attack them. They only calmed down and let him go when the source of the noise became obvious and stopped nearby.

- S-sorry, - they whispered, blushing, letting Kwaiets go.

"I -

I've been trying to err on the side of assuming you know stuff but that frankly might not be safe of me.

Anything with semi-flexible wires andor one of those wall contraptions - " on their way to the ticket machine, he gestures at a cluster of differently-shaped electrical connectors sticking out of a wall, some mated to cords going somewhere  - "is probably carrying electricity and just to be safe you should not touch it until you learn what you are doing, because if something fails a lot of force could be delivered through your body at once and injure or kill you."

- Certainly isn't, - Toy-Mun readily admits, following Kwaiets. - Our worlds probably have different histories but, since you were hinting my world has similarities to your past, if you assume I have no familiarity with things that were created later than anything I wear on my person, it will be safer. For both of us. Even if it's not always true - I'm certainly not wearing carts on my person, but we do have carts.

<💭> <3 it is impossible to carry carts on one's person. that is a very funny image <3 </💭>, says a very stupid part of his brain that was not effectively shut down after poor Toy-Mun reflexively tried to ???take a bomb??? for him.

Nod. He hurries depositing coins into the ticket machine, drops one, has to scramble after it. "It's not really safety-relevant that I can think of, except for some far-fetched situations - but anyway - this machine works by throwing light that is too purple, too high-energy, to see, into the coin, and measuring the energy level of the light that comes out, with high precision, such that different elements - gold, silver, carbon, or iron, for example, would give different light signatures." He hands Toy-Mun a ticket, scans it, walks through the tall turnstile to the train side of the barrier, and motions for Toy-Mun to do the same.

Toy-Mun follows the instructions with precision of a craft apprentice and effortlessly gets their ticket scanned.
- "Too purple to see" is a funny concept. Can you be "too yellow to see"? Or "too green to see"? - they respond when they meet up on the other side of the barrier. - We are waiting for another… loud railcart, right?

"Oh, yeah, another loud railcart, it should be here in a minute or so." The crowd is fairly thick in front of and behind them. "So - have you ever seen a rainbow?"

Toy-Mun is somewhat surprised by the question but nods.
- Sure. After a rain, usually. I've seen a couple. Why?

"The concentric circles would keep going all the way to the middle, and all the way out, if you had better eyes - and if the Sun emitted all kinds of light. But the first bottleneck is your eyes. Light that's 'too purple to see' is light that's on the inside of the rainbow."

Toy-Mun is silent for a couple of seconds, seemingly trying to absorb the information.

- So… there's some order between colours, same as in rainbow, and they go one after the other. Does it just start with red, or is there "not red enough"? And what about colors not on the rainbow, like gray or brown?

"Not red enough" is in the sections outward of red, it's called 'infrared', like the "too purple" inward of purple - 'ultraviolet'. Gray and brown, and any other colors you don't see in the rainbow, aren't actually pure shades of light, surprise! A 'pure shade of light' is actually a single wavelength -" and he's drowned out by the arrival of their train. He looks apologetic. "Explanation-forthcoming, I swear."

This time, Toy-Mun doesn't do anything as rush when the train arrives. It's easy to see they were still startled a bit, though. Nodding to the promise, they enter the train with Kwaiets and look around.

- Train, - they say slowly. - It's a train of railcarts. Multiple carts joined in a tow. Hence - train.

"I'd actually never thought about that, they've been around since before my great-grandparents were born, but yeah."

Large windows line the wall - right now they show the station. The seats are separate, individual, arranged in two pairs of rows in the middle of the aisle. They have seatbelts, but most people aren't using them. He sort of boxes the crowd out of a pair of them so they can sit together. A screen on the wall counts down the few remaining seconds until departure.

Toy-Mun takes off their belt with sword, collects it in the hand of the arm that doesn't carry their beg, and sits near Kwaiets, deciding that if he sat, they should sit too. They don't quite ignore seatbelts, looking at them with interest, but don't use them, either.

The clock reaches zero. The doors close, the clock starts and finishes a shorter countdown, and, with the train now mostly full of settled-in people, a tone sounds and they begin moving - backward from the direction Kwaiets and Toy-Mun's half of the car is facing, it so happens. Kwaiets makes a face at his failure to remember the orientation they should have favored. He puts on his seatbelt, showing Toy-Mun how to do the same, before there's a brief feeling of weightlessness.

"That was the wheels retracting," he says. "We're actually moving by magnet now."

The tunnel outside - lit dimly to an Earthling's eyes but well enough for a Gaha'ei* to see clearly - is pure blur, and still accelerating.

*[Gahai: the place

Gaha'e: adjective meaning 'of Gahai'

Gaha'eka: plural demonym

Gaha'ei: demonym, singular]

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."

Toy-Mun thinks for a second and then shakes their head.

- I'm… not hungry, - they claim, not quite looking at Kwaiets, and sit on the edge of the bed to take of their shoes.

It does not even cross Kwaiets's scope of awareness that Toy-Mun might be lying. Maybe if Kwaiets hadn't just offered to make the whole thing financially legible, or if Toy-Mun had literally any other way of obtaining food in the foreseeable future, but neither of those is true, so Toy-Mun must actually just have eaten recently. And you Do Not Press people on food stuff. You just don't.

. . . Except in this case, Kwaiets, regrettably, has to.

"- I'm going to be up for a few hours; if you're eating in the mornings, I may still be asleep. Can I show you where the food is now? I can list off vague ingredients if some of it looks unfamiliar, so you can be sure it won't poison you. Also, I have changes of clothes that will probably fit you - do you want something cooler? Or softer?"

Toy-Mun coughs a little.

- Well… sure, show me. I'll do my best to not take too much. As for clothes… are you going to change clothes yourself? Is it, like… customary to do so when you come home or something?

"- not, like, in front of you!" Any fears Toy-Mun has that Gaha'eka are exhibitionists must be squelched immediately. "Some people don't, some people only change clothes once a day, but most change twice. Um. Right. This is the future, everybody has craptons of clothes."

He sheepishly opens several drawers overflowing with leggings and sweatshirts. And there's some underwear in there, cool. Hopefully not recognizable as such. Well, anyway, they'll have to -

- so better get used to it - 

- Is somebody going to have to go underwear shopping in the impending transition? Future-hygiene is mostly a fake concept . . . 

Toy-Mun comes to the drawers and, after a short consideration, chooses a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt, putting it against her body to estimate - they basically fit.

- Good thing I went with you. I think most others' clothing would be too big, - she chuckles weakly before carefully taking out a pair of underwear. - Is this… what I think it is? A loincloth? Fancy… Although, I guess, if everyone has them, not so fancy. This is probably too personal to take, though?

"- that's underwear? Like, for under your other wear, at all times, so stuff doesn't like, chafe, and whatever. I'm not going to - recommend against taking it - everything in those drawers is washed, but, like, zero pressure -"

Toy-Mun blushes a bit again and smiles, shaking her head.

- I mean, I've seen such stuff - on a very rich woman, I'm talking basically head of the city she was in. If you don't mind, I will take one then? I… I'm not sure whether I'll ever be able to repay for such a luxury thing, but… Ahem. You've said "not in front of you", so, er… should I go somewhere else to put this on? - she blushes more, looking downward.

"Pffft, those cost twelve times what they were trying to sell you notebooks for - not even. Uh, yeah, the bathroom's right through here." Bathroom is shown, including how to lock door. Look of realization. Gesture at bathroom. "Plumbing, indoor plumbing, we have that everywhere."

Toy-Mun makes an honest attempt at recalling what price was offered for notebooks. Unsuccessfully: she does still want to sleep, and the parts of her brain that don't want to sleep are occupied with different thoughts entirely. She takes her bag and comes inside the bathroom.

- Plumbing. Like, running water. Like in bathhouses, but in your own house. And you say it's everywhere… yeah, I can say you all just live better than most of people back in my world. I… Mm… Since these are clean clothes and all… I guess it's appropriate for me to wash myself first? - more blushing. - I will probably need help with this.

" . . . with, what?" he squeaks, effortfully. It sounded like 'help washing himself' but that's insane and also perverted, what the damn Kwaiets, but what did he actually mean

Toy-Mun stifles a laugh. "Do I make her… him… embarrassed? How cute".

- With how this thing works. How it's regulated and stuff. Of course, I take it you don't normally show your bodies to others, but… I don't know, I'm afraid I'll just break this thing. Besides… - some sixth sense tells her saying "aren't you interested to see how we differ" isn't going to win her any favours. - It isn't like I am so ugly that seeing me naked, should this be required, would kill you, would it?

"Seeing - pretty people naked - is worse - because then you owe them - debt?" he chokes out, half-delirious.

<💭>Does their culture have the concept of debt? Literally how could it not?</💭>

"but anyway, never mind. If this is a prank," he looks around in an effort to cover his bases with respect to making eye contact with any hidden cameras "fuck whoever's putting it on, of course I'll help you."

Toy-Mun knew the concept of debt very well - and yet couldn't resist a joke:
- I mean, you look pretty enough to be able to instantly repay any such debt.

A pause to see Kwaiets's reaction.

Then, more seriously:
- More importantly, I'm already indebted to you beyond recognition. So feel free to look, I won't… won't require anything in return.
With those words, she puts her bag on the floor and takes off her black shirt (which is buttonless, much like a long-sleeve T-shirt) in one swift motion, throwing it on the bag with a faint tinkle (potentially interesting: clothes, especially buttonless, don't normally tinkle, do they?). She doesn't sport any underwear on her breasts - and even though they are really small by Earth measures, they are probably still noticeable for a human race which has none. Her shoulders and upper arms are wide-ish and muscular-ish for a usual woman - but for a swordswoman, this is probably to be expected. She doesn't stop to demonstrate herself much, however, before bending down with the obvious intent of likewise getting rid of pants.

He (respectfully, he hopes) ignores Toy-Mun's permission (and bizarre, alarming declaration of debt, that can wait for later) and does not look any more frequently or broadly than is necessary for communication.

He starts demonstrating the shower. The knob has little notches marked with water temperature.

Toy-Mun follows his instructions and is soon pretty confident in her ability to manipulate the shower (and a bit wet from accidentally discharged water). If Kwaiets's gaze does sometimes land on her, he can notice she has quite a lot of hair below neck for a woman, whose blackness is noticeable on her pale skin, and seems to have never bothered to remove it; otherwise, except for narrow but muscular hips and lack of noticeable narrowing at waist, her anatomy is more-or-less Earth-standard.

- Thank you… I guess I can do the rest myself now, - she smiles soon. - Would you mind opening the bed while I wash myself?

He would not!!

Since opening the bed is very quick, once that's done he starts his list of foods along with their locations and prices-for-future-payback.

Toy-Mun doesn't take too long. Soon after, she emerges in the borrowed leggings and sweatshirt (and underwear, although that's, of course, not obvious), having put her original clothing in her bag. Her shoulder-length raven-black hair is now fully wet, and she has put some kind of cloth around it to protect the new clothing.

- That was great, thank you, - she proclaims happily and yawns, covering her mouth with one hand. - I... I think I'm going to fall asleep as soon as my head touches the pillow, so if you have anything else to say, do so now.

<💭>pretty,</💭>

"- You sure you don't want to eat first? I've got the food list almost ready and everything. If not, valid, but. I'll leave it here anyway."

Toy-Mun smiles tiredly, putting their bag and their (rather heavy) boots near their sword:
- I was actually eating when the whole… jump to your world happened. So… just leave it here, yeah.

With those words, they lie down, moving the cloth so that it now covers the pillow rather than their shoulders. Their prediction was essentially correct: they close their eyes and fall asleep almost immediately. They don't snore, at least not initially.

<💭>Wow it is adorable and kind of terrifying how easily he fell asleep in the middle of a foreign universe!! What!!</💭>

He finishes and leaves the list, as promised, before reading for a few hours and then eating and going to sleep on the air mattress himself. If Toy-Mun wakes before Kwaiets does, they'll find the list containing locations and prices of:

- Apples!

- Salad mixes!

- Microwavable frozen vegetables! (with a note that Kwaiets has also left, on the microwave, instructions as to how to use the microwave, and a half-assed explanation of how the microwave works, (because not leaving one when the question is so obvious would be rude!))

- Hard-boiled eggs!

- Dense rice cakes!

- Non-dense rice cakes!

- Dense oat bars!

- Non-dense oat bars!

. . . and, basically, grain cakes of various densities, flavorings, and protein levels. There are also some jerkies?

Also, spices (cinnamon, salt, pepper, chili powder, several vinegar-y, salty, or sweet sauces, and some weirder stuff), and here's where the dishes and silverware are. 

We have no standardized silverware! Who would do that! 

A common theme, though, is that you put spring-loaded, subtly flanged chopsticks on the end of a rigid spine and include some kind of lever for separating and releasing/clenching them.

Toy-Mun does wake up somewhat early. Having looked at Kwaiets asleep at the air mattress and smiled, they come to the list - and discover they can't read it. They then manage to find a dense grain cake and an apple. Silverware causes some headache, and it is quite possible that Kwaiets is woken up by their bitching about "how one even uses this thing".

He mrrrrrphs in his sleep, but just rolls back over.

His making a sound does startle Toy-Mun enough that they choose to behave more quietly from now on. They manage to defeat the cake with chopsticks (even though this was probably a hilarious thing to see, if there were anybody to see this), eat the apple, and then take a book and open it on a random page. They don't know the writing system, of course, but they attempt to copy letters on the notebook, marking how many there are on the page.

We've mostly converged on alphabets since they generalize best, so there aren't too many letters.

He wakes a couple hours after Toy-Mun, scrambles for the nearest clock-calendar - which, it so happens, is on a lanyard around his neck.

"Hhhhhhhhh.

Wh'th'fuck'm'I'on'thfloor - ALIEN.

Sorry Toy-Mun. Good morning!"

He sees the dishes.

"You found the food. Nice!

. . . I guess I get ready for work now. Um. I leave this hour. Then after that I'll be back in - about nine hours." He feels awful, like he's abandoning a fresh-caught feral cat to new confinement. A sentient fresh-caught feral cat. With a sword.

". . . Can I map you a few of the places you might go, if you want to get out of this box today?"

Toy-Mun chuckles at "alien" and smiles.

- Good morning, Kwaiets. And yeah, I did - even though I found out I can't actually read what you have written. There were only so many places to look. So… you leave for work, you say? If you could quickly tell me what each letter reads here, - they show him the notebook with their notes on letters, - I might start learning what your language actually sounds like while you're away. That's certainly going to be more useful - and, with any luck, when I repeat it out loud, translation magic might work to tell me what I just said. Or not, who knows how the spell is set up? Anyway… I'd rather to not leave this place alone, so mapping letters is more useful than mapping places for now.

"- that's brilliant, holy shit I'm so sorry, I forgot the simulation masters are cruel and you can't read -"

He takes a moment to deliberately comport himself and calmly makes recordings of each letter sound (indexed to a description of what the letter looks like) on a little cheap recording device that was one of eleven collecting dust in some drawer somewhere in the dwelling.

When he's done (it didn't take long) he squints and frowns at Toy-Mun. "I'm not sure we've given you an accurate impression, even now - Gahai is safe! No one will try to kill you unless you try to kill them, no one will even threaten to kill you unless you teleport into their presence or do something equally unfamiliar and dangerous-seeming." He knows this probably doesn't mean much next to the danger distribution of Toy-Mun's actually experienced history, but maybe it will be enough to tip the scales. He wants to stress it early, in any case.

- No place is safe until you know its laws and customs, - Toy-Mun answers in a very serious tone. - I can easily do something that's normal for me but - how did you put it? - "unfamiliar and dangerous-seeming" for locals. Hell, I carry a sword, and no one else does, how's that for unfamiliar and dangerous? Speaking of… - Toy-Mun suddenly smiles. - Could you show me that weapon of yours? The one you were going to "shoot" me with?

He almost tries to explain that carrying a weapon, even if they did recognize the sword as a weapon, would not be considered threatening, but then stops himself. He needn't press the point any further now. Toy-Mun will get used to it in due time.

He smiles back. "Sure."

He quickly unloads the gun - showing off the little conelike brass bullets - and, the contraption having been rendered safe, demonstrates the firing mechanism. The whole thing is un-Earthly, designed to be gripped and fired with very precise hand control the whole way through.

"You can't see it, but there's basically a blunt needle here -" he points to the space behind the chamber where bullets are loaded - "that pokes a bullet, which deforms it just enough that its internal chambering breaks down and two powders inside it mix and explode, forcing this heavy part -" he indicates the nose of one of the bullets "- out of this, which is just a skin -" he indicates the rear of a bullet  - "the skin sticks in the gun but the heavy part is forced by the expanding gas from the explosion down the tube at high speed and - well, at speed high enough to go through most things you might want it to go through.

We can go practice shooting tonight or sometime if you want." He shrugs, doing his best not to care if Toy-Mun wants.

<💭>Sages, when did this become about my feelings. I was supposed to be overthrowing science. It's just that every day I have to go to work. Whatever. Kwaiets mindset growth. I can, I must, I will! Fuck all y'all.</💭>

Toy-Mun looks at the weapon with eager interest. Clearly means to harm others are important to them.

- So, a small controlled explosion pushes this part out of the gun at the thing you aim at, and it goes through the target? Yeah, this looks… decidedly unsafe but very cool. I most certainly want to practice using it. And what's with this skin? Where does it go afterwards?

<💭>🎉</💭>

"The gun does what it wants with that - it doesn't really matter for the firing, obviously, so long as it gets it out of the way of the next bullet. This one ejects it out of here -" he thumbs open a port on the side of the gun. "With some gun types you can get the casings reloaded - I think this is one of those - I personally would just sell them as scrap metal if I bothered to collect them at all, though. I'm not a gun expert and I'd rather be sure my casings were new.

And cool, we can go to a range tonight, if you want - indoor is closer but outdoor might be more fun - although a little chillier - and it's only maybe twenty minutes' train ride and walk away."

Toy-Mun nods sagely.

- This makes sense. You wouldn't want your equipment to be faulty. Neither would I, that's why I carry a grindstone for my sword in the bag. Anyway, I guess you are to go to work, and I... I have a writing system to master. And possibly a language. See you in the evening!

They go back to the letters, marking each of them with the letter of their own writing system. It's not an ideal fit, but close enough, only a couple of letters require some additional notes. Afterwards, with a break for taking care of the sword and for physical training, they dedicate themself to transcribing one of the books. The trick with pronouncing things out loud doesn't seem to work.

"- See you, then!"

<💭>Toy-Mun is trustworthy, Toy-Mun is not literally a cat with hands and a sword, I am not abandoning Gahai to . . . to whatever Toy-Mun is, this is the Code-following thing to do . . . I am such a mess at this what am I going to do in five years when artificial wombs are cheaper and I have an actual child . . . eh, that's forever in the future

. . . should I - we - actually have turned Toy-Mun in to some - adults -

- no, nothing really bad will happen, it would have already, and we can't just let him go - we're pursuing our advantage, this is the Code-following thing to do.</💭>

Kwaiets's job, like so many held by Gaha'e thirteen-to-twenty-year-olds, is to maintain and operate a particular segment of a production line. His name (and shift, along with the names and shifts of two others, and three B-backups and three C-backups) is emblazoned on a little plaque bolted to the wall of the clearly-bordered area.

His employer makes an intermediate industrial chemical. He's been here for a year - not at the same job, but it's a long time, and he's itching to leave, just to see how things are done somewhere new.

It's a pretty uneventful day. Which is to say, some annoying thing fails at least once an hour, and he has to continually plug the holes and decide whether to try to permanently-fix them himself and risk fucking things up further, or bother one of his bosses about them and risk looking a little less competent than he could have. The production line is never on the verge of breaking down or slowing because of his problems, they're only shadow-problems, future breakages, but the juggling act is still stressful enough to convince his hindbrain he's working a Real Job, or he wouldn't stay at all.

He did not pick this stress level for simultaneously wondering whether he might have set a time-bomb to explode the universe from his apartment. At one point he genuinely contemplates going home early. He doesn't, though.

When he gets home, nine hours and fifteen minutes after leaving, he scans the room with a thousand-yard stare.

Aside from consumption of three more grain cakes leaving its traces, the room doesn't seem to have been bothered much. Toy-Mun raises their eyes from the book they've been transcribing - meticulously, if without much understanding.

- Hello, Kwaiets, - they say, smiling at him. - I hope you are not too tired from your work and our plans to go shooting are still in place? I've been writing this book in my alphabet - wanna hear my feeble attempts at pronouncing it?

<💭>Sweet, no carnage!</💭>

". . . Yes, and - yeah, we can start heading to the range whenever you're ready - presumably you want a change of clothes, long pants and stuff -" he gets going on supplying these.

". . . You just stayed here all day?" He could lie, but he probably won't.

Toy-Mun simply nods to the last question before beginning to read, with a strong accent, the transcription of the book written before, clearly having no idea what words are pronounced. When pants are provided, Toy-Mun changes them without even stopping reading - underwear remains on.

(We don't have any protections about lying being okay if you do it in sign language, so it doesn't even occur to Kwaiets to prod for a verbal 'yes'.)

"Whoa, that's really good. You don't know what you're saying, right?" Incensed: "How the hell can that work??"

He opens a safe and fishes out some of his spare ammo. It's an effort to conceal his enthusiasm about the impending trip, but he does. <💭>Don't oversell it.</💭>

"Hmmm . . . do you want, like -

I could get you a stupid-looking kids' dictionary" (he sounds apologetic) "large font and all that, right away. It'll take more time to sift and find first-principles, starting-language-less beginners' guides to approximately-this-dialect, if any even exist, that are any good, but if I find any I'll send them your way, too."

- A stupid-looking kids' dictionary is exactly what I need, it seems, - Toy-Mun nods and adds with a coy smile, putting away their notes: - What was I saying, by the way? It wasn't anything… unfitting, was it?

". . . Unfitting? I mean, it was a cringey old kids' 'how the universe works' book that I should really throw out, not at all your speed. The part you were reading  started with how 'Big Sun drags the heavens with it as it skirts the earth'," he's blushing out of embarrassment now, it really is cringey rhyme - "because heft is all to Master Gravity you're worth."

He remembers all too well the following page (in smaller print and with diagrams, it's a book for slightly older kids with some poetic mnemonics because some people like those, or probably just like writing them) explaining how years work differently from days and how to observe them. He'd stared at it for an embarrassing number of hours when he was four through six, and made an awful """table""" of starmaps to try and corroborate it like it suggested . . . not coming to much of any conclusion, and certainly not any of the ones the book authors had been angling for.

He slings on his backpack and looks Toy-Mun up and down. "You ready?"

Toy-Mun chuckles.

- I might need to return to that book when I'm more fluent then, - they claim and quickly put their belt back with sword on before nodding. - Ready as I'll ever be. I don't need my bag with me, do I?

"Not unless there's something in it you want to use," he says cheerfully, and heads out.

"So, um, have you ever been target-shooting with any kind of projectile weapon?"

Toy-Mun decides against taking their bag with them and follows Kwaiets out.

- Me? Oh, no. I mean, I maybe tried to use a bow once, but it clearly isn't my favoured weapon. I am more of a thrower if I need to attack at range - I have even managed to throw my sword somewhat effectively when needed, even though it's not, strictly speaking, balanced for that.

They pass a few solitary people in the halls on their way down and out of the complex, wrapped up in their music or thoughts. One guy has an enormous blocky eyepatch that doesn't look like it serves any medical purpose.

He half-nods, then suddenly narrows his eyes at some point in the middle distance of the little elevator.

"Can females where you're from throw more accurately than males?"

Toy-Mun follows Kwaiets, looking at the people they pass with some amount of interest but not staring.

At the question, her eyebrows jump up. With a clear surprise in her voice, she responds:
- I... don't think so? It was obviously never tested, but I think that males generally have better thinking in terms of where things are in relation to each other, this could apply here, too. But training amounts for more than such inborn qualities anyway.

He nods. "I'm not sure about relations, but males here have better thinking about space, too, as well as upper body strength . . . 

I was just thinking it would make sense if breasts were for throwing like ass cheeks are supposedly for distance running. Is all."

He looks straight ahead at the horizon as they enter a street more crowded and sunnier than last night's, but otherwise the same, and starts for the familiar subway station.

Toy-Mun looks at him and laughs shortly.

- I don't know if you were paying attention yesterday, but breasts are kinda too low for that, they're not on shoulders or anything. I'd even say larger breasts can get in the way. Buttocks are at least somewhat muscular. Breasts only have fat and, well, whatever the thing that makes milk is called.

She folds her arms under her miniscule breasts in a mostly-futile attempt to push them up, not stopping.

"Well, but there's more fat on everyone's buttocks than makes sense - 

they say. It's just a theory, though.

And clearly I was wrong."

Someone on Heelys overtakes them, followed by a trained crow.

Someone else in the street is apparently doing yo-yo tricks as they walk. Someone else is playing a silent all-plastic "string instrument" with a cord leading into their headphones and nodding to an unheard beat.

An electric blue carplane descends on a nearby roof, adding to the noise but not nearly as much as it should if you know how helicopters should sound.

- I guess it is funny that in this world I get the largest-breasts award, while in my world my size is ridiculously small, - Toy-Mun continues, looking at the passersby. The string instrument without strings attracts her attention shortly, but she doesn't stop. - Do you… do y'all still feed children from nipples though? Or do you just secrete milk and let them collect it, like platypuses?

It is marginally interesting that platypus is a known fauna to Toy-Mun. On the other hand, she did mention traveling a lot.

For all Kwaiets knows, monotremes are the rodents of Toy-Mun's home planet.

"Nipple situation unchanged," he confirms.

"It just - seems like a terrible waste of physical carrying capacity, for a strictly cosmetic sexual-selection thing, but I guess a lot of birds have it worse."

- Yeah. Like peacocks. Although, I guess, these do double as, well, general fat deposits, - Toy-Mun makes a small chuckle, although it seems somewhat forced. - Didn't think I would become an analogy to a small-tailed peacock, although in hindsight it was asking for itself. What do you find attractive in people, by the way? Like, generally in your culture or, perhaps, you specifically?