When Sandalwood signed up to be part of the rotation for the Emergency First-Contact Response Team, she did not particularly expect to be called upon. But she kept up with the trainings, and pulled the occasional shift even though nothing ever came of them.

So she is surprised, when she hears a warning tone and gets teleported to a sun-lit open space. Doubly so because most anticipated first-contact scenarios would be happening in space, not (her HUD tells her) in southern Antichthon. But she has prepared for this.

She assesses the scene. There is one object of unknown origin, but it's changing shape in a physics-defying way, so there's no telling what it is. The whole scene is being streamed to other observers who can work out the physics. Her job is to handle making friendly contact. Better to err on the side of caution.

"Hello!" she calls. "Welcome to Sol."

She copies her words as pulses across the electromagnetic spectrum, bursts of neutrinos, and gentle gravitational waves, because they don't know the object's sensory modalities (if any). If there is no response, procedure calls for her to proceed to a more basic first-contact package that works up from math. If there is a response, she is to use her judgement about figuring out the most effective means of communication.

Her words arrive just as the doll finishes hitting the ground, and, as a final touch, a mote of alien radiance sparks in the center of her forehead and a black unicorn horn weaves itself into existence around it. Unlike the rest of her body, which is made of normal materials undergoing unexplained transformations, the unicorn horn is Really Definitely Magic or at least Really Definitely Not From Around Here; its unknown energies are scaffolded on a physical substrate that's not totally unlike nacre, but without the constant interference of that energy, the physical structure of the horn would be disintegrating on the spot.

The doll, whether in response to Sandalwood's words or because she just landed from a fall of six times her own height, stirs groggily and emits a soft groan. There's no tiny vocal equipment in there; her mouth just moves inexplicably, and the sound issues forth inexplicably from it. Her eyes blink open and then quickly close again with a slight, suppressed flinch as though pained by the light, even though the eyes are just inert spheres of coloured glass without nerves to transmit information, and there's no sign of a brain they might be transmitting information to.

... huh. Those sure do look like human mannerisms! Maybe this first contact will be much easier than they had expected.

Sandalwood dims the sunlight in the park. She's not sure whether she should shrink to match scale with their visitor, or whether appearing so much smaller is deliberate. Ultimately, she settles on shrinking down to 1/4th scale, so that she's a little under 3 times taller. She sits crosslegged on the grass about half a meter away, such that she couldn't quite touch the visitor if she stretched.

"Take your time," she says in a gentle tone of voice. Even if the alien hasn't picked up language, they have clearly picked up on body language, so maybe tone of voice will convey information too. Or she's reading too much into what looked like a wince and she'll have to fall back to math. "If you're hurt and there's something I can do to help you feel better, let me know."

The doll startles slightly when the light goes darker, and squints her eyes open again (the wood morphing subtly to provide the squint) to peer up at the misbehaving sky.

"Where..." Her voice comes out as a hoarse croak; she stops, makes throat-clearing noises and motions despite the lack of a functional throat to clear, and tries again. "Where am I?"

"I'm not sure what scale of answer is most useful to you, because we don't know where your previous location is relative to here," she apologizes. "You're in a play park in the residential community of Asvrirniji, near the south-easternmost tip of the largest continent on Antichthon, in orbit around the star Sol."

She thinks for a moment and then holds out a hand and shows the cosmic microwave background above it. "This is what the cosmic microwave background looks like from here, if that helps."

"Sol... I think I've heard of Sol," she ventures cautiously. "I can't remember..." She rubs her tiny wooden head with one tiny wooden hand. "I can't remember much of anything."

Sandalwood keeps being surprised by their visitor. Which is probably not a good sign for how well she's staying on top of the situation. But they did pretty much expect that first contact would go off the rails more or less immediately.

"That's alright," Sandalwood replies. "I can't see your brain, so I can't speculate on whether there's anything we could do to help directly. A human who had acute amnesia would often benefit from food, rest, sleep, and time. Does it seem likely that those things would help you?"

...blink blink. "Can you... normally... see brains?" she says dubiously.

She makes her forb stop hovering vaguely behind her head and come hover over her hand in place of the previous image.

"Baseline humans can't normally see brains unassisted. I can use a tool called a forb to perceive things in my surroundings better. Normally, I don't look inside people's brains because they want privacy. But we've never seen someone like you before, so I took a quick peek at what you are made of when I was trying to figure out how to communicate with you," she explains. "And I didn't see anything that appeared to contain enough data or ability to perform computation to be your brain."

The doll gives the forb a look of perplexed uncertainty.

"...well, I'm a doll," she says. "I don't have a brain. Or a... computer." She says the word 'computer' with some hesitation, like it's slightly foreign to her, though her English has been otherwise fluent so far.

"Well, yes," she agrees. "So I don't know how to directly help you with amnesia, the way that I would if you were a human. But I still want to help you be well. Is there anything that you would like to have to recover from whatever it is that brought you here?"

"...I don't know," she says, lost. "Why... why help me be well? Do I belong to you?"

She is now confused in a different direction, but this feels like progress. She double checks the local laws.

"Under the laws of Asvrirniji, no sentient being may belong to anyone. You seem sentient, so this applies to you. This means that nobody owns you. If you had a previous owner, Asvrirniji does not recognize their ownership of you," she explains.

"I am helping you for two reasons. Firstly, because it is my job. I am paid to try and make a good first impression and open friendly relations with any aliens who show up. Secondly, I would want to help you even if I weren't being paid, because I value other people's well-being. I like knowing that everyone else is okay."

"...you can't just... not recognize that I belong to someone," she says, little wooden eyebrows drawing together in a puzzled frown. "Isn't that stealing?"

Oh! Property rights and the rule of law! She is so prepared for this to be one of the cultural disagreements with aliens.

"So whether a person owns something isn't a concrete fact about the thing, like whether it's made of wood. The fact of whether someone owns something is a fact in the minds of the people involved, which only 'exists' insofar as it will prompt people to take different actions. So different communities can have different rules for what can be owned, and how it can be owned," she begins.

"Wherever you came from, the consensus might have been that someone owned you. And so the people there would have acted as though that person had some right to control you, profit from you, etc. When I say that in Asvrirniji nobody can own you, what I mean is that nobody here will act as though anyone has the right to tell you what to do, control where you go, or other rights that owners have over their property."

"Does that make sense? I can talk about how stealing works in this framework, or walk you through examples of what would happen under different circumstances, if that would help."

"...no, me belonging to someone is a fact in me. I can tell who I belong to because I have to do what she says." She frowns, looking lost again, her authoritative air subsiding. "But I don't remember who it is. So I won't know for sure until she finds me and tells me to do something."

Sandalwood nods. "That makes sense. But I think it's important to be clear that nobody else here is going to think of 'someone can order this person to do something and they will do it' as meaning 'this person belongs to this other person'. They might adopt language like that colloquially to refer to your relationship, but they wouldn't bring you to the person who can give you orders against your will, or anything like that."

Sandalwood leans back and rests her weight on her hands.

"Would you like it if I did a thing so that you can't hear anything someone says that might be an order?"

"—no?!" she says, somewhere between offended and alarmed. "Don't do that! Then I'll never find her!"

"I promise I won't do anything like that to you without permission!" she quickly exclaims. "I wasn't sure whether you wanted to find her or not. If you want to find her, there are probably ways I could help with that, though. Do you remember anything else about her to narrow it down?"

She considers asking whether their visitor thinks her administrator is in whatever place the visitor was beforehand, but her HUD says that the physicists think the visitor might have been flash-fabricated or reconfigured for human interaction somehow, based on how the visitor's body was changing as it landed, so she decides not to poke too hard at where the visitor came from.

...slowly, sadly, she shakes her head. "I don't remember anything."

"That's okay. Do you know if the giving orders works through recordings? Because if so, I could put up a request for every person who uses she/her pronouns to send you one," she offers. "I don't know how many of them would, but it might still help eliminate a lot of candidates."

"...every... person who uses... what?" she says, puzzled. "I don't understand what you mean. And I don't know if - recordings - would work right."

"Earlier, you said 'So I won't know for sure until she finds me and tells me to do something'. In the language we're speaking right now, that only grammatically refers to a little under half of people. Since you have otherwise been speaking fluently, I assumed that was information about the person who can give you orders," she replies.

"Do you understand the difference in meaning between the sentences 'I gave her my raincoat', 'I gave him my raincoat', and 'I gave them my raincoat'?" she asks. "Or do those sound like the same thing, or refer to a concept you don't have, or anything like that?"

A tiny thoughtful frown as she puzzles over this input.

"'I gave her my raincoat' sounds like you gave someone your raincoat and 'I gave him my raincoat' sounds like you gave someone—weird and foreign and unusual—your raincoat, and 'I gave them my raincoat' sounds like you gave your raincoat to a stranger, or more than one person."

"Huh!"

She thinks about that for a moment. Luckily, her job is to talk to the alien, not to figure out why an alien would share so many concepts but think of men as foreign and unusual.

"People here tend to sort themselves into categories called genders," she explains. "There are two popular categories, and a bunch of less popular ones. When you refer to someone in the third person, it's considered polite to use the set of third person pronouns associated with their category."

She waves a hand.

"But a full explanation of what's going on with genders can wait, unless you're particularly interested. Do you have any other questions I can answer for you, or immediate needs?"