There's a plastic spoon and fork included with the food. There's a kind of tray included in the steel box, that works as a plate for the food. Everything tastes excellent; the rice is sweet, the eggs are savoury, and the onions almost taste like they're candied. There's a very delightful sweet soy-sauce aftertaste, that works fantastic with the whole mix of ingredients. It'd probably feed Ibrahim all day if he finished everything.

This is the best thing ever! It is incredibly tasty and compelling and good!

He is going to, slowly, with pauses to drink water and take notes on the day and such, make a solid attempt at finishing everything. (He is underweight by normal metrics and may or may not have the stomach capacity.)

It's a mystery of thomassian food, but you somehow always barely manage to finish your meal, even if you end up painfully stuffed. So Ibrahim manages to eventually, just about, finish all the food.

Hopefully he will not end up being sick. Allegedly that's sometimes a problem people have? But he hasn't been starving, just not eating well. And if he gets sick he is in a hospital, a good place for a sick person to be.

What time is it? Has it gotten dark out? (Why are there not convenient bells to tell him when it is time to sleep, or convenient parents for such? …he's not going to see his parents again, is he.)

It's been a few hours since Ibrahim's arrival, so it's still bright outside, although noticeably darker than when he arrived.

He'll go over his language notes and try to improve them as possible and, if not interrupted, make flash cards and start going through them. If anyone talks to him he'll respond.

Nobody notices or talks to Ibrahim in the lobby; he can enjoy flashcard practice completely uninterrupted.

Kind of strange, but not a problem.

As it starts to get dark, he'll go to a bathroom, use the toilet, refill his water bottle, and brush his teeth, then mask up and head to the nursery area.

Conveniently enough, the hospital bathroom that Ibrahim got dressed in is available and unoccupied. It's not even a particularly long walk before Ibrahim finds himself in the nursery area, with the lights dimmed to be similar to the outside.

He'll get set up for sleep. Backpack under head, knife in a good position to grab it, et cetera.

It's been a long day, but if his senses are to be believed, he's outside and in the world of the mysteriously generous and non-arabic-numeral-recognizing mundies. He doesn't have homework aside from learning one new language (which he doesn't have to worry about being forced to learn spells in) and in general not antagonizing people.

It's kind of noisy, but not a threatening kind of noisy. He sleeps.

It's induction day, but just as he's departing he sees a grogler heading for his kid sister –

He's seven and he's visiting his parents' friend who does carpentry charms and he leaves a door open and everyone is screaming at him, which feels like the worst thing in the world even though he knows it's not –

He's drowning in some kind of horrible slime and there's currents and he can't swim and it's freezing –

He's awake, and there are no mals, and nobody is yelling, and he can breathe. He's in a nursery, because for some reason people are willing to let an alien who hasn't even made any vows be in the room with that which is most dear to them. Depending on his suit and blanket, he may or may not be extremely sweaty.

One of the people patrolling the nursery takes a look at Ibrahim. "Well, nothing happened or went wrong. I don't think this makes for a particularly good place to rest long-term, so you'd presumably want to move in to a proper apartment rather soon. One of my colleagues has a shift that's ending in an hour or so; maybe wait for her in the lobby, I'm sure she'd be happy to help you if she'd get to hear interesting things about the world you're from."

Yeah, he's not surprised nothing happened, he was being monitored by mundies.

He'll head to the lobby.

Eventually, a woman wearing an unexpectedly short dress that's white with a black skirt shows up. She looks at Ibrahim. "You're the guy who insisted on being allowed to sleep in the nursery! Talk about being a baby. Now, you're going to want somewhere that's actually designed for non-inants to live. I'll take you back to my place for now, you must be so confused and scared." She starts walking out of the hospital, taking Ibrahim on the walk to her home a few blocks away from the hospital.

…great, social consequences.

"It really wasn't my first idea, someone else brought it up."

And he'll follow.

Eventually, after a ride on the breathable and soft subway seats made out of mesh, she opens the door to her home, where the elevator opens directly into her apartment, after she enters a key into the keyhole on the elevator placed above all of the buttons. Her daughter is waiting just inside the elevator, dressed in a blue skirt and white shirt that looks like it's a school uniform.

"Wow, you're really an alien! It's so cool to see you! Can you feel radio waves?"

This sounds like a science thing, maybe? Possibly Abigail from Boston bragged about something about that?

"It's nice to see you too! And I don't think so, sorry."

"What's your name? I'm Candace! I'm hoping to care for people in the hospital like my mom does one day!"

"I'm Ibrahim! Caring for people in the hospital can be hard, so I hope you're studying lots! I don't think some of my best skills will be useful here, but I do carpentry and blacksmithing and learn languages fast and translate things."

"What's carpentry? I know blacksmithing, I heard about it in history class once, but maybe you can help with some languages we don't have written down anywhere? And also, you can actually care for people in the hospital perfectly well, even if you're kind of dumb. Being a hospital carer doesn't make you dumb!"

"I don't think you're dumb! There's just many things and that's why kids need to study. I need to study a lot too! Carpentry is making things out of wood."

"Hospital carers really don't need to study much, really, and I've already done my 3 years of mandatory school, so I'm just studying so the patients can have fun when I talk to them and I can give them the right kind of massage. I thought that sawmills and cutting machines made things out of wood? But maybe carpentry means making different things out of wood?"

"I think there are things that are nicer if a person does them, and sometimes you don't have nice tools but you still want to make things?"

"Well, I think we'd try inventing a way to get walls and planks and things without using a sawmill, instead of making things without having nice tools. And I don't know about anything that's nicer if a person does it, other than maybe giving advice, making food, and giving massages."