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For the city that hosts the congress of nations, Deqla looks surprisingly uncrowded to the eye. The streets are all relatively wide, letting in plenty of sunlight and allowing sufficient of room for bicyclists and pedestrians to coexist with public transport and delivery trucks, while only a handful of buildings cap out over ten stories tall. It was a city that was designed by people who knew what the future would look like, and had plenty of budget to make whatever was needed to further Aramaia's status on the world stage to visiting diplomats and dignitaries happen. Further away from the congress and the local universities, the work is rather less extravagantly maintained, but even the side streets are well lit and relatively clean to help keep crime statistics down. What they don't have is a lot of people in them on early weekday afternoons, which makes the fact that her appearance is completely unobserved a bit less unusual.
The food is approximately as advertised; it tastes noticeably different from its earth equivalent, but not so much so that you couldn't imagine it just being an unusual recipe or a regional cuisine.
Unless Amaranth signals that she's in the mood for conversation, Sophie will try to oblige her with just some companionable silence, though about halfway through that decision will clearly start to break down and she'll start making some small talk about her classes at university.
"It's fine, no need to be quiet for my sake. I don't have a lot to say but I can listen fine."
Probably her own field of education is a little too fraught to bring up, but she can talk about the myths her old college had about the library sinking from not accounting for the weight of the books and its local sculptures and so on.
Judging by her responses, Sophie's never heard that particular chestnut, and she's pretty good at being an attentive listener. With Amaranth's permission acquired she can share some stories from her own school as well, like how their mathematics department spent decades at odds with their peers from the capital over who first solved the cubic equations only for archeologists to find proof that the ancients had discovered it most of a millenia before either of them and used it in their engineering.
That's cool! She can listen along and make appreciative noises.
She should probably check out a local university catalog, seeing what fields and courses there are might be helpful to her. Not that she says that.
What she does say is that she should plan to continue her education eventually - how can she get a hold of a copy of the local university's calendar, do they have a registrar's office she could go to?
"I don't have a copy of the academic calendar on me; they hand them out every year, but I always end up losing mine. Uh, the fall semester starts in about a month but I'm not sure how far in advance you need to register for it, I assume it's probably still possible because I have three more weeks to change my classes if I have to before I need to pay a fee? And sure, we can stop by admissions tomorrow. I'm not sure what hours they keep on weekends but probably if we drop by around noon they'll be open pretty much no matter what it is."
Oh no, Sophie's being helpful when she only has half the context. Lindsey kind of wants to disappear.
"I doubt I'd be able to register, but it'd be helpful for getting to know the country at least."
"I'd say that reminds me of Gemma, but really what she'd do if she wanted to get to know another country she suddenly found herself in would be bury herself in a library deep enough we'd need excavation equipment to get her back. Education would definitely be the second priority, though.
"On an only tangentially related note, do you usually eat dessert after dinners where you're from? I don't exactly have an amazing selection at the moment, but there's at least cookies or ice cream."
She ducks her head. "Usually that's a special thing with my family, but I could definitely use something sweet after the day I've had."
Then Sophie can get Amaranth her choice of snickerdoodles, vanilla ice cream, and chocolate chip cookies; she takes one of the first herself.
"Normally I also have chocolate ice cream but someone finished it off last time they dropped by and didn't tell me, so that's going to have to wait until I go shopping."
"That's the one, yes. Sometimes it's Jaron but it's always one of those two and she stops by more often. I take it you've seen her eat?"
"We went out to a - I forget the name of the cuisine, spicy seafood - place before I came over here. I never saw her take a single bite and yet somehow her food disappeared mighty fast."
"Well, now you know she's always been like that. We always used to joke that anyone could do the impossible, it just required too many calories, but these days I'm pretty sure they're unrelated."
"Well, improbable might be more accurate. All the individual things have perfectly rational explanations, it's just taken together that she ends up looking like a miracle worker sometimes. When we were younger the most obvious one was always her multitasking; she and Gemina would spend a whole study session helping the rest of us with essay outlining, and then it'd turn out that despite being busy the whole hour she'd have already plotted out her own essay in detail. Between that and her people skills I can't say any of us were surprised that she chose to go into politics, though Gemina was holding out hope on her getting a degree in math for a while."
"She's the smart one of us misfits; er, that's the name of our friend group. There's me, Karen, Gemina, Maya, Jaron, and Jennifer, which is pretty much everyone that might drop by to visit unless one of them happens to have a sibling tagging along. I'm pretty sure you'll get along with all of them if you want, though there's no pressure if you get busy or overwhelmed or just not interested."
"It'd be interesting to meet some more people. It'd help to get a handle on the local culture, and also I just like them. People in general, I mean."
"I'll let them know they don't need to hold off, then. Do you have any close friends back home, or is that the kind of topic I should be avoiding reminding you about for now?"
"Well, I sort of did. I used to play roleplaying games in high school, but when we went to college that group broke up and I haven't seen any of them for like a year... In college I had a brief but pretty intense romance with that girl I told you about, the one I helped escape her family. Her name was Opal, last name Essence - it was a bit of a joke but it stuck, she didn't want to keep her family's last name for obvious reasons." She shakes her head.
"We supported each other really sharply through a hard time for both of us - I'd just moved out and was having a real time of it getting my feet, and of course she had her family to contend with. I made a lot of memories with her, but it got kind of messy and complex and ultimately ended with us breaking up half a year in. There was another girl she liked more than me, and I could see that... holding on to me was hurting her... So I stepped aside." She rubs the back of her neck. "Still. She taught me a lot."