:I didn't think it would do more than give you a nasty headache, but if you think something worse could happen we definitely shouldn't try it.:

:I'm not sure how the food bank is going to work, I checked it out and it's pretty far away - I can hear it but I don't think you want to walk that far with a bunch of food. But we can do vocabulary, yeah. I want a shower first though.:

:That's what I was thinking too, but it is different systems colliding. So I think I'd rather not, at least, not right now. When circumstances are better, I might revisit it.

How far away is it? I'm stronger than I look – it's one of the passive effects of being awakened to Flowers. I am much, much stronger than the average forty-two year old woman. Though I wouldn't have a bag or a pack to put the food in. Maybe I could use the tote bag? I'll try to see if they'll give me bags there.

Yes, I'll shower after you.:

Marina is happy that she offered to go second, because she doesn't understand the bathroom layout. She knows how bathtubs work, and she also knows about having a bucket and a scoop to pour water on yourself. She does not know how the detachable shower head works.

:It's pretty close to the edge of my range. I don't know if you should take the tote bag - it's a good idea but then if someone finds me here it'll be hard to take the papers. I can check if they have bags before you go.:

She doesn't object to Marina following her into the bathroom to watch her use the shower; she has to spend a little while figuring out how the controls work herself, and then spends a while rinsing the worst of the sweat and ick out of her clothes before ceding it. :We should try to find more clothes soon, too,: she sends, trying to decide whether she wants to put her soaked clothes back on.

Marina comes from a culture that does not have a nudity taboo, so she doesn't feel embarrassed about the whole thing. In any case, she has bathed many children before and is kind of inured to it. 

She follows what Denice did with the controls and washes herself, but she holds off on her clothes.

:Hm, that's true. I think you should check if they have bags, and if they don't, we can consider me taking this one. Or maybe they have a box that I can carry with the food inside.

Indeed. Maybe the food bank will have clothes too? Or know where we might be able to find clothes for free – clothes that no one else wants to wear. Or cloth and rags that I could sew into tunics. I'm not good at it, but I know some.

I don't recommend wearing the wet clothes; they might give you a chill. I would put them up to dry. I suppose that could be a concern if someone arrives, but you have good range, so you might know whether someone is coming well in advance.:

:I can't tell the difference between someone stopping a car here and someone driving by until they start to do it, my range doesn't help much with that.: But she lays the clothes out by the back door where she can grab them if she has to run, and then sits to listen to the food bank. :They do have bags, just little plastic ones but you'll probably be okay,: she reports when Marina comes out.

She has to pause for a moment to process the concept of 'plastic' but understands what Denice means, especially since she encountered plastics in the library before.

:I think I should go to the food bank first, then shower. Actually...we should plan before I go.

The first contingency is that I get identified at the food bank, try to question me about you or arrest me, and I have to run away. The second is if someone tries to enter this house and you have to run away. You'll be able to detect if someone happens to me at the food bank, since your range does extend to it. But I don't have a mechanism to identify whether or not you're here or had to run away.

I'll go ahead and cast Be My Eyes on one of the acorns and place them so that they're looking at the back door. You should keep the tote bag with papers in sight of it – think of it like an eye. If someone comes here, grab it and run away. That way, I'll know that you've gone. I'm going with the tote bag signal because I can't look through the focus the whole time. It requires concentration, especially since they're not optimal.

We should look at the map and find a meeting place where we could wait for each other in case one of us has to run away. Where do you think is good?:

Hmm. :Hold on, let me listen to some things.: And a few minutes later, she'll point out on the map where there are a few more empty houses between the library and the food bank. :This one is best,: she says of one a ways off the main route. :It's farther from other buildings than the others and there's woods there.:

:I'll remember that. Let's wait two days for the other person, and if they don't arrive, we ought to assume that they were captured. Does that sound good to you?

Also, I have another idea. Since I can see through the acorn, and you can hear me traveling, we'll be able to communicate with each other. I can talk to you, and you can talk back to me by writing. That way you can warn me about things you think I ought to avoid, and take a different path. I'll position the acorn closer to the door so that I'll see. You should write big.

An alternate signal for me to know that your location has been compromised is by destroying the acorn. You can step on it to smash it, and it will destroy the ward and I'll notice.:

"Mmhmm." :Another thing is that if you yell my name -: "Denice," :- I'll hear that from pretty far away and I can try to get to you. Don't do it if someone has you, obviously, especially if they don't know you know me. They know they're looking for me with that name.:

:What happens if I move the acorn? Like if I was going to a different house and took it with me.:

:I'll keep that in mind! Or, hm, we could try coming up with a different rare word for me to yell? Would your power help you detect it if we set it in advance? What if I yelled 'Scion' or something?

Sadly the ward will break. The standard version of Be My Eyes, which is the one I know, can't resist being moved. It can withstand being jostled – though that isn't good for image quality – but being moved more than say, a meter, will break it. I've seen permanent portable versions, but in the form of artifice. Artifacts are permanent enchanted objects. I haven't taken artificing classes, and I could probably rederive it, but this is not the time for a research project.:

:If I was more familiar with your voice I'd notice you yelling other things but I think right now it'd have to be my name, unless I was already paying attention. There's a lot of people talking or yelling in my hearing range.:

:That's understandable.

Alright, I think it's time to execute our plan. I'll cast Be My Eyes now. It should take around...fifteen minutes. I won't be able to talk to you during this time. Please disturb me only if someone is about to come in.: Back at home she can do it in eight, but this is an unfamiliar environment that hasn't been specially prepared to be resonant with Flowers casting. It will take longer to fashion the energy of the ward into the correct shapes.

And she will start dancing, this time, with lyrics. It's more of an interpretive dance, or the type of dance you see in musicals, compared to the vigorous hopping and leaping dance she did when she was healing Denice. She makes a lot of broad gestures with her arms, and leaning forward as though she was an explorer looking out into the horizon. The lyrics are a poem about someone leaving home, but not wanting to be estranged from their friends and family, and so pleads for the essence of Flowers to intercede. She repeats the lyrics several times, moving in the same ways each time.

She moves slowly around the most-round acorn she selected, and then kneels before it, cups it in her hand, and carefully sets it in place, with the stem end looking at the back door.

:It's done! I can see through it now, after a moment of concentration. Do you want to test it yourself? I can go outside, and you can hold up fingers, and I'll say aloud how many fingers you're holding up.:

Denice watches the dancing quietly.

:It's fine, I believe you.:

:Alright! In that case, I should get going. I'll follow the route you sent me: she re-checks the map Denice printed out one more time :and give you updates along the way.:

She'll leave out the back door and do so.

She's still kind of adapting to the technology. She has no idea how these black roads were constructed, or how plastics or computers work. She's very confused by the lack of coherent aesthetics or ornamentation, though. Surely, if you were richer, you would have more of that, not less? Though admittedly she'd only seen this one place. Perhaps New York will be different.

The route takes her out of the housing complex and along a busy road with a building full of storefronts on the other side of it. It doesn't take very long for her to come to an intersection where the road she's following is crossed by a similarly busy one, where the cars traveling the same direction she is stop. There are yellow objects hanging from poles overhead; the ones facing her are shining red, while the ones facing the cross street are shining green.

Um. She has no idea how to navigate this. Carriages drawn by horses or Fire practitioners are banned inside the city walls, and there are no four-way intersections in the road network connecting the city to other places. The colored lights are presumably some sort of signaling mechanism – there would be no need for lighting outside in the middle of the day...

The paths perpendicular to her route are clear, but the paths parallel to her aren't. Presumably at some point it will reverse? Surely the cars won't be left sitting there forever. She'll...wait until the movement of the cars changes such that the path in front of her isn't occupied by cars anymore. If it takes longer than five minutes she'll try looking for an alternate path or seeing if there's a lull in the number of cars and try to dash across. Not really the safest option, but what can she do?

After a few seconds the lights change, green through yellow to red, and then one lane of the cross street is shown a green arrow and the cars there turn onto the street beside her; after a few more seconds they change again, and when the lights facing her are green, the cars next to her begin to move.

Alright. The path parallel to her is now clear because the cars traveling parallel will block the cars traveling perpendicular. She really wants to try and figure out the mechanism – is it controlled by anyone? Are they nearby? – but she suppresses this instinct and runs across. Just to be safe.

She'll pause for a minute beside a tree and focus on her ward: has the bag been taken? Has the ward been destroyed? If not, is Denice trying to send her a written message?

Everything looks quiet at home; Denice is reading one of last night's printouts.

Great! In that case she will continue her pattern of walking straight until she comes to some sort of corner or intersection, and then reviewing the map she memorized for which way to go.

She thinks she's gotten the hang of the signal light intersections now. Will there be any other obstacles aside from it?

Not particularly. The road continues to be pretty busy, and takes her by various shops at varying distances - they're set back from the road to allow space for people to leave their cars outside, proportionally to how big the shops are, with the biggest ones having hundreds of feet of asphalt between themselves and the road. The distant ones don't seem to have windows at all, but even the nearer ones are too far away to see much about what's inside, and they don't seem to have their wares on display in any case, just occasional signage.

Eventually, the road takes her over a bridge beneath which runs a much larger, busier road.

This is so different from how anything is laid out in Sarana Province, where she lived. Not that she's particularly well traveled, though she expects that city layouts would be the same everywhere in her world because they don't have cars. There is so much space for cars! She supposes that if this world is rich enough for everyone to have cars, then it's unnecessary to walk, and it's better to lay a city out to accommodate them. She likes walking, but she knows many that don't or can't walk, or can't walk far. It's very sad that she can't window shop, though.

It's mildly unnerving to be on a bridge on top of the enormously wide road – she has never seen a road that wide – but she passes through it without incident.

Belatedly, she notices that this city doesn't have any city walls. Huh. If this world was more peaceful than hers, and it probably is, given how wealthy they are, then there wouldn't be any need for them. So the city could expand as much as it needs to and not be constrained by walls.

The road she's following becomes less busy as she continues past the bridge, and soon her instructions have her turning onto a less busy side street that brings her by tall, glass-walled buildings of unclear purpose - the signage on these is much more understated, and they have fewer cars around them and no people coming and going. After passing a few of these, she comes to another bank of shops; her printed instructions have her following the road in front of them, but she could just as easily walk along the storefronts and rejoin the road at the other end.

So much glass! Probably they have mechanisms for putting out that much glass of that much quality. She's still not used to the aesthetic incoherency in this city. It's fascinating, but she doesn't think she likes it.

Well she is going to be Very Disobedient and walk along the storefronts and rejoin the road at the other end. She can't buy anything, both because she doesn't speak English and because she has no money, but looking is free! Even if she was never able to return to Kosofo – she would still want to try and transmit this world's knowledge to them. Maybe it's possible to talk to them via the internet – it seems similar to the Openet.

The stores are:

- a restaurant serving long white foodstuff with other ingredients inside

- an office of some sort with a handful of people working at desks, one of whom is speaking to a pair of customers

- a small, pungent shop with two lit signs in the window, too cluttered inside to make sense of without stopping to examine it

- a larger shop with a desk, a waiting area, and a curtain blocking her view through the doorway to the back room

- another restaurant, serving soft, multicolored food in bowls, sometimes with toppings, with a slight chill to the air around its door

- an empty storefront

- a small clothing store, offering form-fitting outfits in mostly blue and white, with a variety of striped and geometric patterns that generally follow the lines of the wearer's body

- another large shop, this one with people inside walking in place on machines or doing other machine-assisted exercise

- a large restaurant serving mostly sandwiches

- a store selling various mysterious rectangles; one wall hosts a huge collection of brightly colored ones, while a dozen or so black ones are individually displayed on pedestals around the shop floor

- a small shop where the workers are doing something to their customers' hands; again she'd have to stop and stare to get a better idea of what's happening there

- another desk-and-waiting-area establishment, this one with a more austere aesthetic of white and grey

- another sandwich restaurant, this one much plainer inside

- a bed store

- a hair salon

- another empty storefront

- another restaurant, this one decorated in lush red and black and gold and smelling of warm spices; the tables of this one are set too far back for her to get a good look at the food it serves