"I am merely RULING MY ENTIRE EMPIRE, not engaging in any activity worthy of the attention of any entity smarter than a soft-shelled crab, so I suppose yes, yes I am."

"- Pleased to hear it. I was mostly just wondering if now that the excitement is over, it would be worth getting some kind of explanation of, you know, all the stuff I don't understand very well about how your empire and your metal monsters and, uh, me now - work?"

"Well, I suppose I could spend a little time explaining the overwhelming brilliance and power of the technology that has bound your life to eternity, invented by far greater minds than you or I could -"

And they are elsewhere!

(For the record, 'they' is a seven-foot-tall robot-looking person who looks completely made of metal on the outside, vaguely resembling a kind of cross between a bat with arms and an bipedal tiger whose wings are also his cape with an outsized left hand, and a short woman of vaguely north Indian or Persian appearance wearing badly machine-made clothes and carrying a cane, half of whose flesh has been replaced by living metal and who is, aside from the obvious, stunningly healthy-looking. The cane's in her non-metal hand.)

They have appeared in the middle of an FAO Schwarz, where fourteen first graders are having a birthday shopping spree; one of the girls runs headlong into Rinara's metal leg and falls backward onto her butt. "Hey!" she says. "I didn't see you and I'm mad at you about it!"

"Wow!" says a different girl, putting down the stuffed rabbit she was examining, "what's that? I never saw anything like it before, how much does it cost?"

"I'm sorry," says Rinara immediately. "I didn't mean for you to hurt yourself. If we go outside I can probably heal you." She looks around in every direction, confused. "You know, Traveler, if you didn't want to answer, you could have just said that!"

"Not me," he says, ignoring the tiny meat children aside from clenching his metal hand aggressively. "Where in all the ten thousand fictional hells are we?" Did by chance his ability to pick up radio signals suddenly kick in after a long time of near-obsolescence?

"- Uh, I don't know," she says to the other kid, "he did it for me for free to save my life, a few - I think it was weeks but I'm not sure? - ago."

"No, I mean what's that!" clarifies the girl, pointing at Nau. "I don't know that kind of animal!"

"I," he says grimly, "am Nau, Hegemon of Profectus, the Traveler, and judging by base rates I expect we are on YET ANOTHER WORLD, RINARA, WHY." 

"- Hey, it's the first time I've been off-planet! I just thought I was inside a building somewhere on another continent or something! Aside from the cleaner, damper air, this could just be Profectus."

"WOW they're from aNOTHER PLAaANET!" shrieks the first girl, and she runs off to tell her mother.

"What planet are you from?" asks the second.

Other little girls are approaching cautiously.

"- I don't think we named it anything, as, like, 'a planet?' We just called it 'the world' -" (the actual syllables she tries to use are 'Jihan') "- Traveler, did you name my world anything -?"

"I called it The Eternally Horrible Place I Am Stranded Where The Laws Of Goddamn Physics Don't Apply For Some Reason, or Thepias for short. I assumed the official naming committee would find something better when I contacted them. Possibly use your word for 'world' as a loan-word, in whatever the most popular language was."

"I think I prefer Jihan to Thepias, myself, if you don't mind?"

"Jihan," repeats the girl who asked what planet. "That's not in this solar system!"

"There are no other inhabited worlds in the solar system Jihan is in," he confirms. "Unless their inhabitants work on bizarre and alien laws of physics which is apparently possible now!"

"The planets here are EARTH, that's this one, and MERCURY and VENUS and MARS and JUPITER and SATURN and NEPTUNE. And... that's seven. So I'm forgetting one."

"I don't think I've ever heard of them, but they could be named something else in my language?"

Nau has. "Are there any adults around here?" Maybe ACTUAL adults, Even if this place looks comfortably low tech, If this is actually Earth he's sure there are a lot of people smarter than him around.

"Sophie's mom is somewhere around and there are the people who work at the toy store."

"I intend to speak with them," he says. "Which way?"

"Sophie's mom is that way but I want you to talk to ME because you're COOL ALIENS."

He opens his mouth to say 'yes, but I want to talk to an adult, because adults can give me useful information,' but adults also tend to lie, and children are usually pretty bad at it. "Fine. What country is this, and what sort of government does it have?"

She has no idea why he abruptly changed policy? Presumably he has a reason?

She's going to look around. She's never been anywhere like this before.