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?"

"I want to know I have the right words. The pointy hat is so you can see that this is one person and this is another person. Sometimes people in the United States of America say that magical people like to wear pointy hats."

"Right, right. Well, you'd presumably want to get something to eat, or meet some people? This simulated war isn't very interesting when you're not fighting in it."

"I want to get something to eat." Outside food! Sometimes it shows up in his dreams.

"Sure, sure. I'll call someone to get you to the city and find something edible for you."

He taps a few places on his phone, and after a short wait, a minivan arrives. It's incredibly spacious and luxurious inside, with three rows of all-black seats.

He is sorely tempted to search the car for mals but he's with a group of multiple mundies who are paying close attention to him and not annoying them is important. He'll … compromise and walk around the outside and glance over all the surfaces and then go in if someone else goes in first.

Is this how New York kids get around when they're at home? Who's driving the car? Is there any license plate, perhaps with Arabic numerals?

Nobody really thinks about Ibrahim inspecting the exterior of the van. Nobody else goes in; they weren't planning on going home themselves, after all. There's someone sitting behind the wheel; the license plate uses something like a super-simple QR code, rather than anything remotely similar to Arabic numerals.

How much attention is the driver paying to Ibrahim and the interior of the car? …never mind. Even if it's a lot, they might drop him off somewhere and start a causal chain leading to him being in an environment no mundie is paying attention to. He needs to actually bring this up.

He checks his language notes.

"I want to be with people who look at things or I think a bad thing might happen. If I go to the city, will I be with people who look at things, and not in a place with no people?"

The driver is just looking around, somewhat aimlessly. "Everyone looks at things all the time, don't worry? The city is far from a place with no people! You're really not making sense, here."

"It is hard to talk. I am not from here."

He'll look to the non-soldiers. "Can you say more?"

"Well, people look at things all the time, and there are people in the city. So if you're in the city, you won't be in a place without people looking at things, and bad things won't happen. ...I'm incredibly confused, here."

"I think in a city there are places that no person is looking at. One kind of place is … some people sleep alone and have a place for sleeping and are not in the place. I think if a person in the city said 'this is a place for one person to sleep, Ibrahim go sleep there', then a bad thing would happen." He sighs. "Talking is hard."

"Well, lots of people sleep without a bad thing happening! I just don't see why we should be worried."

"I don't have words. Does 'animals who teleport like to eat people who teleport' show why we should be worried?"

"Wait, what? I mean, that's no more impossible than anything else! We'll... fix that the normal way, I guess. How common are those animals? Is there any kind of signal that scares them away?"

“I am not good at talking yet. They are different in different places and I do not know Thomassia.”

"We don't have signals because we don't have animals like that! I'm rather sure you won't need to worry about anything."

"You think I am safe alone. I think you are wrong. I am not good at talking yet!"

Ibrahim notices he's yelling, looks pretty nervous about it, and starts taking deep breaths.

"Well, why would we be wrong about that? Will things start working differently, now that you've arrived? How were you safe previously, if you weren't safe alone?"

“I was in a … place to keep the magical animals out. I can’t make one. I can’t say how to make one. I think Thomassia has them. They look not magical to not magical people.”

"Well, it's possible we have one of those, just that we didn't know it yet! We can drive you around a bit, see if you're able to find out where they are. But if you don't know how to make one, then we you'd best believe we don't, either! So you might very well be out of luck."

“If I find one it will have people. I think the people will not be about equality and bringing people joy. And they will not let you in. Or me, if I do not give them things. …also it would be hard to find.”

“If I very well be out of luck, I think I die. Is there not … a place you put people who do things you don’t want where those people are watched? Or a place that has many people sleep in one room?”

"Sounds like finding one of those places isn't a very good solution, then, if they won't let any of us in, or you either. It sounds like you're talking about a prison? It could also be a mental institution, although we don't really watch people in those much at all. We basically don't believe in protecting people from themselves, so why would we need to?"

"Slumber parties have many people sleeping in one room! And we have nurseries, with lots of babies in the same room. Not everywhere has gone over to private rooms for each baby. But I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't want to sleep in a room surrounded by lots of babies!"

“If someone watches the babies then tonight I want to sleep in a room surrounded by lots of babies.” It seems somewhat rude to possibly summon a mal there but he doesn’t have the supplies or mana to ward a new room from scratch.

"Well, sure? Weird request. But we'll set you up with a sleeping bag and some blankets and everything else. I can get you to the hospital early and get you more time to be set up, how about that?"

Neat, multiple blankets. "I like that plan."

"Oh, I'm hoping to not have to explain it to you any further, but bacteria and viruses can be a problem, and we take extreme care to keep babies as clean and pathogen-free as possible. So you'll have to wait for the special protective gear to show up before being allowed to walk into the room with all the babies in it. But you're free to sit down in the hospital lobby instead."

"A lobby is?"

"A place near the entrance that's perfect for people waiting for things happen."

Eventually, the city shows up. Even in the outskirts, there are skyscrapers dozens of stories high, rising out from the immaculate grass and beautiful ponds stretching out at the city limits. It takes maybe 15 minutes of fast driving before appearing outside of a huge building, the size of several city blocks put together. There are walls of beautiful greenery and plants, stretching all along the sides of the skyscrapers around it, and the roof of the building stretches into the sky. The car stops a few blocks away, in near-empty streets narrow enough for 2 cars to barely fit side by side. The white and grey exteriors of the buildings, combined with the featureless walls, creates a sensation of being in a maze.

"The lobby entrance is the green door on the huge building that you'll see if you walk straight ahead. I'll call the necessary people so you can get to sleep inside the nursery room near the top of the building; the woman working behind the counter will tell you when everything's ready and you can start making your way up."

"Okay. Is there food? I can also sleep in the lobby." But protective gear might help against a gaseous mal.

"... yes, there is food. Also, there might not be enough people at the lobby, and we don't want people sleeping where there are people walking around, like in the lobby. We'd honestly prefer you sleeping in the room with all the babies."

"Okay."

"Well, I'll be making a few calls to get sleeping bags and blankets and protective equipment. You won't have to wait long, trust me."

The driver opens the sliding door.

"You'll probably not want to wait in the car; it wasn't designed to be a pleasant place to wait."

"It's a very nice car." But he'll get out and head for the building, it's probably a social cue.

Eventually, there's a green-painted door, that slides away as Ibrahim approaches, revealing a welcoming and pleasant room. There are children playing and having fun, and there are many round patches on the floor, rugs of artificial grass or something that feels like hot sand, designed to feel nice for your feet. There are mothers and fathers waiting with kids on their laps, and one man with a broken arm breathing slowly and deliberately through what looks like a very compact flute, connected to a very thin hose. The benches and chairs that people sit on consist of a thin layer of mesh fabric over a metal frame, and people sit fairly spaced out from each other.

This does not seem like how a hospital lobby is supposed to work, but he's a kid in what's probably a hostile dreamscape, what does he know. He doesn't want to interact with the thing that seems like hot sand.

He'll take a seat and wait.

Eventually, after a few other people have started walking over to their appointment from the lobby, a nurse walks over and talks to Ibrahim, perhaps 30 minutes later. "I was told that you asked to sleep in the hospital nursery for your safety, and that you'd need to wear protective equipment before showing up to the babies' room? I'll help you with that; please follow me to get properly dressed, and then you can start to set up a place to sleep for the night, with a proper sleeping bag and some blankets."

He'll … he won't nod, he's in a very foreign place where nobody knows what America is. "Yes." And he'll get up and follow her.

Eventually, Ibrahim gets led to a door with a drawing of a shower head on it. The nurse quietly opens the door, revealing a nice and spacious bathroom, with a shower and a counter filled with many different brands of soap, in thin, individually packaged slices. There's some sort of grey, plasticky bodysuit on the counter, that even has a hood to cover the back of Ibrahim's head, next to a pair of plastic gloves,  together with a mask connected with a hose to a small plastic box. It fits fine, but the gloves are a bit too small. The mask somehow blows a gentle stream of air in front of Ibrahim's face.

Aaaaaand he doesn't have a shower buddy. Great. At least amphisbaena shouldn't have had reason to infest the pipes.

"Should I?" And he'll gesture at the shower.

"We think the bodysuit is sufficient, although you're free to have a shower if you wish."

Smelling bad is bad for diplomacy and he probably smells bad compared to a bunch of mundies who can shower every day with storebought soap if they feel like it. …but he doesn't have soap and mundies like having privacy when they shower so it'll probably be a whole thing. He will put on the bodysuit. And probably ask for instructions during. Is it supposed to go over his clothes or replace them?

"Ahh, right. We probably need to explain things better; we thomassians often face problems with forgetting that other people haven't thought of what we have! You're supposed to wear it with just your not-to-be-seen underwear. You unzip it, and then you step in with the legs first, and then you pull it up. Then you have to put on the blowing mask, and if you can feel the breeze, that means it's working properly."

Are we really doing this … yes, we are, we need to be safety-conscious, these are the Thomassian's kids. "I do not know if my underwear is the kind of underwear the suit wants."

"... Oh. It's just a stupid fashion and formal-etiquette-nobody-really-pays-attention-to thing, you can actually wear any kind of underwear you want with the suit and it'll still work fine!"

"Okay."

And he'll change clothes. If there's some modesty divider or curtain he'll step behind it but if not he'll just start getting undressed.

The nurse, realizing that Ibrahim wants privacy, walks out of the bathroom without saying anything.

Want is a strong word. He mostly wants to behave in a socially appropriate manner and assumes the nurse doesn't want to see him. He'll put the suit on and put his clothes in the backpack. …he probably shouldn't wear the pauldron over this, ward anchor or no. He'll keep his knife at hand but he's probably going to have to let go of it soon. And he'll reflexively refill his water bottle while there's a sink, and exit wearing the outfit and his backpack and holding a sheathed knife, if he can't get it into a pocket or clip the sheath to a loop or such.

The outfit doesn't have any pockets or loops whatsoever.

"Is the knife, ah, holy for you? You can keep it, we just think it looks like it's kind of cumbersome and uncomfortable. I'd be quite uncomfortable holding a knife and walking around with it, even if it's sheathed. If nothing else."

"What is 'holy'? I want to hold the knife."

"It's really hard to explain what makes something holy to someone who hasn't heard of the idea before! Ahh, innately valuable for supernatural reasons? And yep, you can keep it if that's what you want. I'm not going to insult your intelligence by telling you to be careful with it around all the babies. Anyway, follow me."

She walks through a corridor, waiting as an oversized elevator opens up. She walks in, and it rapidly starts heading up many, many floors, before leading into a truly massive room. It has a wide window, with one person waiting behind the window while looking at a screen, and a few people dressed like Ibrahim patrolling the dozens and dozens of huge, widely-spaced cribs, changing, feeding and comforting babies. They're followed by small cargo robots driving around on wheels, carrying any baby supplies they need.

The knife is innately valuable for supernatural reasons (it's enchanted for stabbing mals), but that explanation wasn't parseable. He'll follow.

…wow, robots, cool.

"So, you'll be able to sleep in one of the corners of this room without disrupting anything, and we've already set up a few sleeping bags and blanket options for you in the corner to the right. Just try them out, and pick out the one you like best?"

The room spans much of the width of the building. It takes a few minutes to reach a pile of plush sleeping bags and various brands of blankets. The sleeping bags seem like they'd be impractically heavy to hike with anywhere, but they're also much more roomy and spacious than a normal sleeping bag.

These are unreasonably fancy sleeping bags and it is not clear why one would need a blanket with them. Which one looks fastest to exit nondestructively? He'll take that one.

The largest and most spacious bag is white and grey, and it'd probably be the easiest to get out of. You can actually unzip the top part, so it's basically just a mat on the ground. Although you'd probably feel a bit naked without a blanket as well. It'll be a relatively tight fit in the corner of the room, but Ibrahim could easily sleep there.

Great! He'll get that set up. With a blanket. …he doesn't really know how to pick a blanket for a climate, usually everything is the same temperature unless someone's casting spells which heat or cool it. He'll go with something not too fuzzy that doesn't seem heavy. And which is one closed solid piece. Duvets are right out.

None of them are even slightly fuzzy; they're all incredibly slick and silky. There is one very thin blanket that weighs nearly nothing, but just about everything else clearly has weights in it. The others are also all fairly thick and warm, as well.

Who are these people who do not know what a normal fabric is. …well, hallucinations. Weirdly long hallucination. He'll take the blanket without weights in it. (Why would anyone want to use a blanket with weights in it?) He sets up a sleeping space. He doesn't use anything to approximate a pillow, that's what he plans to use his backpack for.

Then everything is just about ready! One of the people walking around gives Ibrahim a glance before rocking a baby to sleep. Then she gives the baby boy a massage and sings a lullaby, before laying him down in his crib and placing a tarp hidden in a pocket at the end of the crib on top of the baby, blocking out any light from the lights in the ceiling.

"I am set up. Thank you. Is there a place I can go to eat food?"

"... well, you can order something and eat it in the lobby? What are you thinking of having?"

Since when do people choose what food they eat at mealtimes. …okay, the answer is "sometimes before he went to school", that is the answer, it's just a totally foreign question.

"A food that is … not hard to make? With the, uh, things a person needs to eat to do well and be strong? I don't know what food there is or how hard it is to make."

"That's too vague, honestly? We have so much different food that I don't even know what to ask for. Is there anything you like more than other foods?" Her tone is mildly annoyed.

Oh dear, being annoying. He needs a food preference. …hamburgers are straightforward, right, he'll draw a diagram of a hamburger. It has a crinkly bit that comes from a head of lettuce, and a smooth bit which comes from a cross-section of a tomato, and some kind of patty that comes from a cow with black-and-white spots. "Something like this?"

"I'm not sure what that is? Or, at least, I haven't ever seen anything like it. Can you tell me what ingredients are in it? Maybe it's just that food looks different where you come from, but the ingredients are the same."

Do they not recognize cows. This is going to look very silly. "This is a <cow>. The <cow> goes moo. It's big. It has <fur>." He'll pat his hair, which is … covered by the bodysuit, oh well. "It eats grass." He'll … mime picking up grass from the floor? This is incredibly awkward.

He'll explain that the tomato is red and the lettuce is green. He doesn't know how to explain bread. It comes from wheat, probably, he can draw a piece of wheat? Wheat is … amber, right, it's amber in the national anthem, or at least some kind of grain is. And amber is yellow. But that might be about corn, people joke about Americans and corn. He'll say it's probably yellow.

He could also eat … a rice bowl … with egg … and he should probably pick a vegetable, onions are common, also with onion? One of the students was nostalgic about those? Rice comes from a plant that wants to be in water some of the time. Eggs come from birds and they have white or brown shells and a white inside part with a yellow sphere inside there. Onions tend to be white or yellow or red and they're bulbs. Does that work?

"Right, so you're saying that part of your food is made of cow. But how? Can you eat the... cow fur, somehow? Is there some method of turning milk into... no, you can't be eating an entire block of cheese like that? I thought I recognized the tomato and lettuce, it's just the cow-part confusing me. And it's also really interesting that you use bread like that!"

"Ahh, you'd be happy with some ordinary rice-eggs-veggies? Excellent choice, it never goes wrong, and the taste of the chef's interpretation is always so fun and exciting! I'll call my favorite chef now; you're going to love his rendition! He has this really interesting sweet onion."

Do they not eat meat. Are people going to be mad at him when they figure out that he eats meat. …ate meat, he's been on illusioned nutrient paste for years and if they don't eat meat here he's not going to go hunting for it. He's never going to show anyone this drawing again, isn't he. Anyway. "Okay."

"Were you wanting to eat now, or were you asking just in general? I think the rice falls off in quality lightning-quick if you don't eat it fresh, so I wouldn't want to order it without you eating it fresh."

"I was wanting to eat now."

Outside food impends! …probably. There might be more problems first. But outside food impends!

"Yup, I'll make the call. You'll probably want to start heading down to the lobby now; it's not much longer until the food arrives."

He'll head over! He is trying to not appear a weird amount of enthusiastic but he kind of still does.

After taking the elevator down and finding the way back down to the lobby, it's just a few minutes before a cute robot, with stickers that make it look like it's vaguely dressed like a waiter at an American diner, drives in through same door Ibrahim entered through. There's a dot-matrix display that tries its best to replicate the facial expression of a peppy young waitress.

He'll approach the robot, if other people aren't acting like it's their robot, and have a look.

Everyone else is completely ignoring it. The robot has very obvious lid on top; taking it off reveals a squared off steel box, smelling faintly of rice and eggs. Removing the lid of the steel box reveals a truly huge portion of rice, eggs and various vegetables, including thin strips of onions in the food. There are several tables with chairs near the corners of the waiting room.

Outside food!

He will take it to a table with a chair and … inspect the utensil situation … and prod it to check for mals … and take off his mask so he can eat the Outside Food. Which he is going to be careful about and not eat more of than he can physically process without getting sick.

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."

"Oh! I can make shoes, and shelves. People sing, and … do a fabric thing with a hook instead of pointy things … and pick fruits without breaking them? Do machines do those better here?"

"Wow, I didn't even think about singing as something that people do, I'm just too used to listening to recordings I guess? And we have trees that drop ripe fruit onto the ground now, and machines can do a perfectly fine job of shoveling fruits off the ground. They're not really better, it's just kind of a waste of time not to use the machines."

That sounds like the wrong way to farm fruit but he's not an expert, so he'll try changing the subject. "Do you have a recording you like?"

"Yes, I have many!" She rapidly reaches into the waistband of her skirt, getting a phone and quickly tapping it until an incredibly patriotic song with lots of trumpets begins playing through well-hidden speakers. There's a singer singing in a mysterious language that sounds vaguely Russian and extremely patriotic.

It's a language he doesn't know, he's doomed–

It's fine. Nobody expects him to be spell-competent in it. He'll … try to tap his fingers quietly on his leg to the beat, that's a non-disruptive way of demonstrating that he's listening.

It isn't a bad song.

"Cool, isn't it? Anyway, I bet that there are people that want to talk to you about your world, and that they'll ask much more fun questions. My mom will probably explain how all that stuff works to you, though. Once it's time to begin on that."

"Okay. Do you want to talk to me more, or no?"

"Well, I was going to ask what you do to play and have fun!"

"I have been very very busy. So not much. I like to draw."

"Huh. Do you like climbing in trees and on playgrounds? There's one not too far from here! You'd be a fun friend to play with!"

"I don't know, but I'd like to find out!"

Her mom then walks in. "Well, I'm pretty sure I won't be able have any of the people who want to pay to talk to you here until, at the very least, 3 hours from now. Candace, go have fun in the park with the alien man. It's important to stay in shape and have fun."

"Yay!" Candace is full of excitement, taking the elevator down and running off to a playground, tucked away between some buildings another few blocks away from the skyscraper apartment.

It's a playground! He hasn't had time to play on one of those since way before he went to the Scholomance. He'll go for the swingset.

Candace runs towards a kind of plastic tree, designed to be fun and easy to climb. It's not long before she reaches the top, maybe 15 feet off the ground, and sits down looking at Ibrahim, letting her legs dangle off the side of the artificial branch. "Bet you won't be able to climb as fast as me!"

"I've never climbed it before! No bet."

But sure, he'll give it a shot.

The various handholds and nooks and crannies don't make it too difficult to reach up to Candace. She then sneaks her way past Ibrahim, landing on the ground and rolling away from the tree, as she takes her turn on the swings. She chooses to jump off the swing, again rolling carefully to minimize any strain on her joints. She's full of energy after landing.

Good for her.

He wishes he could have been doing this five years ago. He would have enjoyed it properly then.

He'll climb down more carefully and go back to the swings again.

Candace has fun making her way up and down one of the playground's slides, before deciding to climb upside down on a net that hangs a fair bit off the ground between two different parts of the playground.

That'd maybe be neat if he wasn't wearing his backpack. He'll go explore the fake tree in a less hurried way.

The plastic of the fake tree feels very nice when Ibrahim grabs the strategic handholds; the tree itself is colored a very dark shade of blue. There are many paths for Ibrahim to take all around the tree, none of them particularly tough. The fake tree doesn't reach too far into the ground; there's no need to worry about falling off, especially onto the soft padding at the base of the tree.

And how's the view from the top?

It give a nice view of the swings, the slides, the seesaw, the playhouse, and the many toys on the playground. It's not tall enough to quite let Ibrahim look properly down, but it almost works as a kind of map for seeing all the different parts of the playground. A few other kids have also shown up; Candace is also playing with them, climbing around the playhouse and almost crashing into each other on the slide, or pushing each other on the swings.

Is there anyone his age or is it all little kids?

They're all 5-12, with a few of the older kids explaining science and history to the younger kids.

He'll try to go listen in on the lectures.

"So, the simplest way to explain a nuclear reactor is that it has fuel, something to make the reaction go faster, and something that it boils to move around. Just putting a big enough pile of super-expensive uranium together makes a reaction begin, but once you put it into some heavy water, it means that a much smaller amount of uranium makes a much stronger reaction. It's the thing that makes the reaction go faster, that I mentioned. The easiest thing to boil would be water; but water isn't quite perfect for this, in large part because it boils too easily. Reactors today, compared to those of old, are almost boring in how simple they are. They use a special metal alloy, that's a perfect mixture of various parts, that means that you can just stuff super-simple uranium into it, and it works both to make the reaction go faster and as replacing the water as the thing boiled. And the boiling off of the alloy works to slow down the reaction, meaning that it's impossible for a reactor to just get going faster and faster and faster."

"The almost-boringly-simple solution is the key thing to understand about engineering: it should be boringly simple and obvious. 'A clever solution is an idiot's solution', as the slogan says. Electrostatic headphones used to be patented, meaning that the far less elegant kind had to be used instead. But when they finally came off patent, doing things in the sensible and correct way finally became an option. It used to be like this dystopian novel where someone patented 'using steam pressure to convert thermal energy into mechanical', and so people were condemned to pre-industrial poverty for centuries, because the patent holder was an idiot who made it illegal for anyone to do better than him. And things went from bad to worse, when another patent became introduced: using the extract of one rare plant grown in distant corners of the world, that had proved itself a cure for a raging pandemic. Its inventor wasn't a very useful botanist, and condemned the world to go without it until he'd be able to finally get his greenhouse working, decades later."

Yeah he's missing a lot of these words but it sure sounds interesting.

The kids explaining things totally ignore Ibrahim. In fact, they don't seem to care much about the kids they're talking to, either.

In that case he's going to spend the rest of his time at the park taking notes with as much paper as he wants, because he is in the outside world and paper is cheap. (He startles when people get near him from angles he wasn't primarily watching, but they keep not being hostile, so he keeps going back to taking notes.)

Eventually, Candace walks up to Ibrahim. "My mom called and told me that she's ready for you to start talking about your past in interviews and things, so she wants you to get back to her apartment. I hope you'll find the interviews fun, too."

"Okay."

And he'll head back to the apartment. Hopefully he can manage to be interesting without causing all these rather nice people too many problems. Bella and Lucy had mundie dads, right, Bella said something about her dad turning mals into moose. But you can't unring a bell and he doesn't know where the safety margins are and these people seem more willing to believe in weird things than the ones he remembers from home.

The woman waits for Ibrahim outside the apartment, leading him in. There's a projector, projecting a life-size version of a man dressed in something that seems like a fusion between skinny jeans and dress pants. He waves at Ibrahim.

"Hi! I'm professor Morley. I was told that you came from an entirely different dimension, with a culture of your own! Nice to meet you! Now, before any of the proper questions, is there any question that you'd be completely unwilling to answer?"

Well, let's hope this isn't a trap. "I am unwilling to answer a question about magic if everyone will hear my answer."

"Sure, sure! We respect your privacy! Now, there's one question we like to start with: what's a ordinary day like in your culture? Would you be able to break it down hour by hour?"

"Uh. Hmm. So. A day starts in the middle of the night and has 24 hours. An ordinary twelve-year-old boy would leave bed at 6 or 7. He might share a room with his brother, if he has one. He'd change from sleep clothes to day clothes, use the toilet, maybe use a thing for not smelling bad. He might eat at home – I can draw foods – or he might eat at school. He might clean his teeth. Then he'd go to school. His parents might drive him in a car, or he might walk or take a bus. If his parents don't have much money, he'd go early for food the school pays for. School starts around 8 and ends around 15. At school, he'd go from room to room for classes of around 30 people that are a bit less than an hour. He'd take classes like … mathematics, reading and writing, moving the body – stuff like moving fast or moving in water or playing a game, history, study of life or physics or such. And maybe a class he got to choose, sort of, like writing pictures. He'd also have a break for food around 12. He might eat food from home, or he might eat food from the school. The school sells food but also will offer very cheap food to children with parents who don't have much money. He'd have a break of a few minutes between each class to move between rooms. After that, he might do an activity at the school like a moving-around game, or go to a friend's house, or go home. The school would send him home with work to do, so his parents would tell him to do it at some point, but he might try to say he had no work, or otherwise ignore them. Probably at least one parent, usually the father, would be working and not home until 18, often both the father and the mother. For playing … he might watch moving pictures, he might play a game at a machine. He might help take care of his brother or sister if both his parents work. He'd probably eat food with his family sometime between 17 and 20, and go to bed … I think sometime between 20 and 23? Oh. And for bed he'd change into sleep clothes and maybe clean his teeth."

"Well, nothing too magical there. We also have 24 hours, although we usually start at 8 and end at 12. 30 pupils is a bit smaller than one of our classes, but not by much. And the classes sound the same too; you said there's a class about moving in water, around what age do you first tend to have diving classes?

Usually, kids don't eat at school because they've had so much for breakfast. And this cheap food for children to parents who don't have much money, couldn't they just charge everyone that same, low price, not just those with little money? Also, we're not sure exactly what kind of work that they'd send home to you. That thing about often have both parents working until 18. Shouldn't you have more than just two? We think that there are some cultural differences that you're kind of taking for granted, here."