Battles are LOUD. Reenactors are running through swampy mud from one trench to another, trying to make their way through the soft ground that dramatically slows them down as they sink a few inches. It doesn't take long before they lose hope, and start turning back, hoping to regroup and try again. Ibrahim finds himself in the middle of the chaos, as barren, sterile trees stretch across the blackened landscape into the horizon.

ETERNAL SCREAMING PATIENCE

—he's not dead yet. This probably isn't real, but he still needs to get the hell out of here. Is there any obviously less hazardous direction to run in.

Well, there are a bunch of people just sitting and relaxing in some trenches a maybe a hundred meters or so in one direction? It's probably WAY better than heading towards whoever was firing at the people advancing through the mud.

Very reasonable, he runs for it. (He supposes he will plausibly be stuck with a side in this war now if it's real.) In the back of the mind he takes note of some salient things: how well-fed the people look, the state of their clothing, what equipment they seem to have around, what sorts of injuries they have.

They seem to eat quite fantastic; although they're slim, it's still clear that they have a fair bit of muscle on their frames. Other than those dressed in miserable outfits, presumably after being covered in dirt while taking cover, their clothes are immaculate in terms of tailoring, with their uniforms being absolutely perfect. They have a strangely wide variety of rifles and artillery pieces? More than it'd make sense for soldiers to have, and why such a variety? And somehow, he doesn't find a single person with any kind of injury. There are no cries of pain or any bloodstains anywhere to be seen.

Uncanny. Which is normal, for a psychic mal, but he's out of mana and there isn't great guidance on what to do in a hostile mindscape anyway.

He doesn't really have a good sense of what's normal for soldiers to have. What's notable aside from the tailoring and fullness and muscle is that they're adults. He hasn't seen an adult for more than two years.

He continues approaching at speed, hands in the air.

He's a half-starved teenage boy with a multitude of scars and poorly-cut hair, but no open wounds. He's wearing a backpack that looks like it could have been the peak of lightweight backpack tech a handful of decades ago, with machine stitching for its construction but patched much more hastily with non-matching thread. His shirt is a washed-out color that's greenish at a few seams, patched with non-matching material, and with some cracked buttons. His pants are similarly worn and too short for his frame. He's got a spiderweb-themed brass pauldron strapped to one shoulder and no other armor. He's wearing undyed silk slippers. There's a brass knife in a sheath at his hip.

The reenactors look at Ibrahim in total confusion. They're trying to think about as many different explains for the bizarre outfit as they can, and are murmuring to themselves and speculating on what happened until Ibrahim eventually approaches them. "Why are you wearing those clothes? Where did you even get them?" asks the one dressed as the highest-ranking officer.

He's heard enough of the incomprehensible language that he's going to have to learn it or be blocked on new spells and die. …no, he's not in the Scholomance and functional. He's going to have to learn the language or have trouble dealing with his new allies and die.

He'll give asking in the common languages a shot, though. "Do you speak English? Nǐ huì shuō Zhōngwén ma?"

They look on each other in confusion. It's a thing that they're read enough in fiction to have an O.K idea of how to explain. Nouns, concept, verbs and adjectives fall in afterwards. The "officer" begins trying to make himself understandable and give Ibrahim the perfect corpus. He points to himself.

"Hatice." Then a fellow "soldier". "Wren." Then a pair of clearly different firearms. "Den." Then both himself and Winston, together with other pairs of things, all of them referred to as "Den". And so it goes, pointing at things, naming things, and hoping to slowly build understanding of the language's nouns for Ibrahim.

The teenager is switching between rapidly taking notes in some kind of shorthand with occasional extremely rough sketches alongside, and scanning for threats. When names are given he'll introduce himself as Ibrahim.

No threats appear, as everything has gotten very quiet, very fast. The soldiers are looking at each other, struggling to think of what to explain to Ibrahim. So they just keep slowly introducing the grammar of thomassian, hoping that they'll eventually manage to make it possible for Ibrahim to explain what happened, and how.

Grammar lessons while scanning for lethal threats are very, very normal for Ibrahim. The lessons being given by people as opposed to sourceless worksheets and disembodied voices is not, but he can adapt.

He can keep this up for many hours, even while standing. If this goes on that long, he seems to find it unpleasant, but doesn't seem to be taking any action to mitigate this. He does pause at points to drink rapidly from a large water bottle which looks like it'd be very light if it were empty.

Eventually, the soldiers try asking questions again, hoping that being slow and using gestures lets them communicate. "This is thomassia. We aren't actual soldiers. We want to know why you are dressed differently."

He has a few scraps of mana by this point and tries to do a spell he can afford to lose, to see if it works or not. It doesn't. Mundies, then, probably, some weird country that doesn't recognize English or his mediocre Chinese. What to tell them.

"I don't know Thomassia. I come from the United States of America. I am dressed differently because I am not a soldier or isn't-actual soldier."

"We've never heard of any United States of America. Is that some controlling cult of some kind? And we're asking because we want to know how you found those clothes because we can tell that they were made in a way extremely different to any ways we know of."

Notes referencing.

"'Controlling cult' means … I say I want to leave the United States of America or I say I want to wear other clothing, then they say no? The United States of America is not like that. Many people want to go there. They have an, er, picture. I can write it. I can write it better if I have a tool for, uh, writing this and this." He points to red and blue objects.

"Well. We mostly use our phones? But I'll be happy to hand you mine." The highest-ranking "soldier" puts a phone in Ibrahim's hand, open to a virtual canvas. He shows that you can easily swap between red and blue colors by pressing the round buttons on the bottom, and paint just by touching the phone with your fingers.

Wow, electronics advanced quickly while he was in school.

He sketches a rectangular flag. There's a blue rectangle in the upper left-hand corner with 50 stars in it, and the rest is horizontally striped, 7 red and 6 white stripes.

He uses it like he's familiar with the concept of a touchscreen and a phone app but hasn't actually seen either in years.

All the thomassians are completely unfamiliar with it! They look at each other and make a few quiet hand signs. "Yeah, we're thinking you actually teleported here by some magical means. Welcome to thomassia, I guess. Do you have any kind of urgent medical or other needs? Do you know whether you're suffering from any form of infectious illness?"

He watches the hand signs closely, but can't parse them.

More going slowly with reference to notes. "Thank you for welcome to Thomassia. What do 'teleport' and 'magical' mean? I do not think I suffer from any form of infectious illness."

"Teleport means moving from one location towards another without an external force acting upon you. Magical means by an approach completely inexplicable by the powers of science. And it's good news that you don't have any infectious illness! Means our quarantine will be much less strict. Anyway, we sure hope you can feel safe and happy with us. We're all about equality and bringing people joy, we're hoping you'll be, too."

They're plausibly onto him. This may not be a safe path for them to explore. But lots of mundies believe in … God letting people who work for him heal people, crystals helping luck, et cetera, and they don't die, hitting the truth about magic is hard. Plus they'll run into other people who hopefully won't believe them. Also, this is probably fake, he needs to keep that in mind, he's pretty sure that no group of people with phones should all fail to recognize what English or the United States are.

Also, he is all about not being eaten by monsters or starving to death and that means there's not much room to be about other things. But probably he can pretend to go with whatever they're doing, he'll get a better read on translating what they said later. He could … watch a movie, right, that's something people do to help learn languages when they're not in the Scholomance. (Or when they're in the Scholomance, if they want help with English and can tolerate Legally Blonde and pay for a showing.)

"I want to write more pictures. I can write with my writing tool or yours."

"Yeah, it'd be more convenient for you to write, honestly. Phones can be a bit small, and there's something about not just touching a screen, but really doing it."

He'll draw a little stick figure cartoon. Two people, one wearing a pointy hat, are in a room with a window and a door. Pointy hat gets some sketched special effects around his hands that look kind of like what Ibrahim remembers from a mundie children's book with a wizard. Suddenly, pointy hat is outside the building visible through the window. No hat person walks to the door. (This takes multiple panels, there's some depiction of a walking gait.) No hat person opens the door. (This also gets a depiction of the door being opened by touching the handle.) Then no-hat person walks over to pointy-hat person. (The perspective doesn't change.)

Ibrahim shows the cartoon and points at a depiction of the pointy-hat person. "This person teleported here by some magical means?" He points at the hatless person. "This person did not teleport and did not use any magical means?"

"Yes, don't get why you added the pointy hat? This feels weirdly over-specific. Is the terminology super-important for some reason I don't get?"