Understandable. That fuckery would build up some trauma. 

Their worst fear comes true. As if making up for lost time, a veritable army makes their to their village, ransacking every home and taking away many people to who-knows-where. The following day, famine returns to their village, worse than ever. The markets are barren, and their "debt" means that everyone in the village can barely keep anything of what they grow. As the season ends, our protagonist's mother and brother are both dead, buried in a shoddily-built grave on the edge of their land. They hear horror stories about cannibalism and desperation, as an overwhelming atmosphere of fear conquers the village. It feels like living in a nightmare, where they are surrounded by glass walls that let them see their freedom as they're trapped, their attempts at escaping the misery only resulting in them standing still, more exhausted than ever.

Oh no! Calm before the storm, that was! Poor family, losing the mom and the brother like that.

The following year, another group of soldiers arrive. They're followed everywhere by a military medic, and the soldiers are far friendlier than the soldiers she's seen before. Before anything else, the medic asks if anyone needs treatment, quietly offering some medicines and herbs, while soldiers talk about what's happened recently.

"The last regime divided the countries into parts to control them, making it impossible for one part to get goods from another part. This meant cities without food and farms without plows. This has resulted in a huge number of people dying, and plenty of farmland for everyone. We're looking for people willing to leave the farms and move into cities, where we desperately more people to keep the factories running. We're happy to accept volunteers, the more, the better."

Well that's interesting. They're promising better things, and they're walking the walk at least a bit. Maybe they suck less? They're still soldiers, but... she knows a thing or two about soldiers.

A few reluctant people follow them and join them, and those who remain split the fields between each other in larger lots. They're getting paid much, much more for the rice they're selling, and they can use the money to buy things like books. The workload has shrunk quite significantly; everyone is working on huge plots of land, planting the rice less densely. It all means that there's less work each day, and the money they're earning lets them buy fruits and vegetables in town (the food is coming in again!), with meat as an occasional treat.

Well that's an improvement! Hopefully it keeps up? Hopefully things continue to get even better? Sucks how far they had to fall before things started improving again, though.

Eventually, they get oxen to work the fields, and they're able to plow quite huge areas. Their income from selling the rice lets them buy lots of things: food and spices, books, decorations for their homes, and even getting a fireplace for their home, so there isn't quite so much indoor smoke. As more and more draft animals and modern agricultural tools get put to use, and the pay of those working in factories rise, more and more people leave for the cities, leaving those still farming with ever more land for them to cultivate, with animals doing most of the heavy lifting.

Decades pass, with life constantly getting better decade after decade. The protagonist is now a grandmother, but still working on the farm that now stretches over vast acres. She's not in the best of health, so the oppressive heat could be dangerous; she's never outside one of her air-conditioned harvesting machines for more than a few minutes, always in her special ultra-breathable cooling dress. Today she's chosen to drive down to the city, a metropolis of sprawling skyscrapers and beautiful parks, to meet her granddaughter who's just given birth, and is resting with her baby inside a private room larger than her childhood home. There are nurses everywhere as she visits the towering maternity care center, there to help the new mothers and their babies.

The movie ends with her driving her daughter back to her childhood home, now a multi-story mansion surrounded by a beautiful garden of bright green grass. The camera gets a look at the graves of her brother and father, now covered with offerings of food they never got the chance to enjoy, before showing us a view of her mother resting peacefully inside of a cryonics center, a pleased expression on her face at the prospect of seeing her daughter again.

"Awwwwww! It got so much better for her! That's really sweet. Things did work out, in the end, and that's really nice. There are some similarities, too, between her story and mine. Really good pick, y'all."

She smiles and sniffles a bit. That was a good movie.

"That's actually quite close to how things happened, before we ended up with the basic income system we have today. Essentially every famine comes from cutting of one part of a country from the food coming elsewhere, or mandating the food to be sold for enormously less than it's worth." They return to squeezing Sable some more. "Are you starting to feel better, and less stressed, and safer, now?"

She smiles softly, snuggles in, and nods. "I am feeling somewhat better, yeah."

She... is not sure whether telling her story is a good idea. It might be cathartic, and it might provide her "nurses" useful information, and having people who actually know what the fuck she lived through could be nice. But. That could also be awkward as fuck and she has no idea if they'll believe her. It might be too soon.

"What are you thinking about doing, today? Do you want to sit around at home, or are you in the mood for meeting people and heading someplace outdoors?"

She's quiet for a moment, then replies, "I think staying home, tonight. Normally I'd love to go out to a board game cafe or something, but right now it feels hard to be around people who don't know at least a little of what's going on."

"I can totally get that, it probably feels way safer and nicer to be at home with people you're familiar and comfortable with. Do you feel the need to stretch anywhere? Trying to take up as much space as you can can feel really empowering and nice, I think it's worth trying."

She hums, nods, tries stretching out and and taking up more of the couch. It is oddly comfy. Doesn't quite hit the spot, though.

"That helps at least a bit, yeah."

"I think you should try going further, taking up space, saying to yourself, "this is my space, I'm putting my comfort first, I'm sitting how I want" and kind of... spreading out a bit?"

She sprawls out a bit further, then hums thoughtfully, something occurring to her. "I think sprawling out physically isn't doing as much as it could because I'm still being shy about sharing what happened to me. It's an outlandish story, but I don't think I can really feel like I'm taking up the space if I'm hiding that."

"Well, it sounds like you have something you'd like to tell us! We're all ears."

She goes and fishes in her purse for a moment, pulling out her old wallet and opening it up. Each piece of currency and ID and debit card gets spread out on the table.

"I'm not from thomassia. I'm from a world that doesn't know how to prioritize kindness, and has a lot of institutionalized cruelty that people just ignore because they don't believe that better is actually achievable."

The currency and social security card are worn and aged in a way that's very hard to convincingly simulate in a prop. The payment cards are of a design that thomassia either has never used, or hasn't used in years, and all seem to be less than three years old. And the lot of it references cities, states, and countries that don't exist on thomassia at all.

The trio look at the contents of her wallet, equally stunned and curious. "Please go on, you don't need to be shy."

She lets out a long, slow breath. "It hurts. There's so much to unlearn, so much to unclench. I spent thirty years without even realizing I was trans because I didn't have any examples to see to realize that it was possible to be this way. Even after I realized it, I spent my remaining year and a half on that world afraid to start treatment or even go outside in a skirt because the state I lived in was part of a region that treated trans women like we were predators, like we were making it up to harass cis women. And they were violent about it. Other trans women got violently assaulted for just trying to use the women's bathroom in peace. And that's not even starting on the pervasive economic conditions, the lack of UBI, the sabotage of other financial support programs, or the attitude that seeking comfort is childish in most cultures around the world."

She huffs out a harsher breath this time. "I'm hurt and angry about it. I'm exhausted. I've spent my whole life being taught that what I am is shameful, undeserving of comfort, unworthy of care or attention. And now I'm finishing my second day in a radically different world, and I'm simultaneously grateful and bewildered and not even sure how to explain all these contradictory instincts I'm unlearning."

They instinctively wrap themselves around Sable, letting their warmth and pressure work as a reassuring layer of protection around her. "Do you - do you still fear anyone hurting you? We can tell you about the system of fines, we can get a guard from the police station to start living here if you want someone nearby to protect you."

She snuggles in, but at the mention of cops she shivers a bit, shakes her head, and frowns. "No, having police here won't make me feel safer until I get a lot more used to this world. The things help the most so far are just seeing the acceptance and receiving comforting touch, even if I'm still struggling to get used to asking for it, struggling to get used to it being allowed. I think martial arts will help too, because that's not dependent on some outside authority that could turn on me or a resource that could be taken away."

"...Oh. You have police trauma... that's horrible, but we'll accommodate you. You can have total acceptance, and all the touch you'd ever want. And I entirely see how martial arts would empower you and make you feel enormously better. Do you want a weapon of some kind? We have special exemptions to our weapon laws for the disempowered or police-traumatized, if it'd make you feel better, and we have more-or-less serious combined reenactment and militia organizations, if it'd make you feel more comfortable with the police being around."

"Wait really? That... that could help a lot. I was planning to join a swordfighting club later this week, try out a few different designs of sword just in case my instincts about which I'll be most comfortable with are wrong. So an exception on the weapon carry laws would help a lot. I... wouldn't say I'm particularly unique in having police trauma, being from earth. Most ethnic minorities, most gay, lesbian, bi, or trans people, and lots of neurodivergent people have it. It's just a fact of life there."