—an honest friendly and cheerful air, right?

As far as can be determined, yes!

A library?

A library! It is near the tall golden palace, and is both less tall and less golden but still pretty respectable on both fronts. Its interior has a great many books, and a stork perched at a desk who is delighted to help Jonathan find anything he might be looking for.

Jonathan would like to take Stormcloud's suggestion.

Then the stork will find him a small pile of books about previous outworlders.

He will read the beginnings of each to get an idea of general (dis)similarities. For example, are all outworlders human?

All the ones in this small pile of books, anyway, although nobody doing the writing seems to have picked up on the pattern as a thing, and two of them didn't disclose the name of their species and were described as 'some sort of outworld fey' with a list of very humanlike characteristics.

And what do outworlders do in the world? How do their stories end?

They meet with the King, and -

Of the five books in the pile:

Two asked the King how to get home and took his advice and left.

One decided to help the King win the war against the Moon Queen, who rules the Kingdom of Night; and failed in his quest, and never returned.

One decided to stay in the Kingdom of Day without helping with the war, and lived a long quiet happy life and died peacefully of old age a century later.

And one decided to move to the Kingdom of Night, and was only occasionally heard from again on this side of the border, but seemed to be doing fine as far as anybody could tell, to the implicit bewilderment of the book's author.

That — sounds fairly positive, overall. Except for the part where there's a presumably-eternal war between day and night.

Next research topic: What is said about the Kingdom of Night, and what's bewildering about moving there, other than the “other side of the war” part?

There is a big map of the world available. It's circular, with a roundish continent surrounded by a rounder ocean. The Kingdom of Night occupies the north half, above a band across the middle of the continent labeled 'Borderlands'. Moonrise, moonset, sunrise, and sunset are marked locations along the outer edge: the moon rises in the northwest and sets in the northeast, whereas the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest. In a few places the land goes right up to the edge of the circle and then, apparently, just stops.

Non-geographically, the Kingdom of Night is known as a place where things are done very differently. It comes across as sort of anarchic. There is only one city: the capital, Silver Falls, where the Moon Queen lives. Rumour has it that they have an intra-kingdom violence problem, and no citizen's stipend, and no Royal Guard to help people in need, and the people of the Kingdom of Day - at least the subset of them who wrote the books in this library - are sort of bewildered that anyone wants to live there.

Okay but if one of your complaints is violence why are you having a war.

No one seems to have thought of this argument in order to address it directly. In fact, no one seems to discuss why there is a war. The war is just a fact about the world, a basic underlying assumption.

Maybe he'll ask somebody that question, if he meets somebody in a position to have an answer.

Well, the King.

So! What shall he do now? He can go home, say the books. He can live here, say the books. He can fail at changing the world, say the books.

He meanders around looking at titles to get a sense of what life is like here: What do people think is worth writing about? What do they write about how to do? What do they write about happening?

There are books about gardening and natural philosophy and architecture and cooking and literary criticism and art and theatre and mathematics. There are books about sporting events and game tournaments and poetry contests and seasonal festivals.

There does not seem to be a whole lot of history. The outworlders were interesting enough to have books written about them, and there was a plague a few centuries ago (if he skims that one he may notice an underlying assumption that normally no one is ever seriously inconvenienced by illness, let alone killed), and here's a book about famous natural disasters (one time a whole town was swept away by floods and they evacuated everyone safely but it took them years to rebuild! a storm sank a fleet of fishing boats and ten people died! an unexpected wildfire killed two dryads and gravely injured a dozen more!), but there's nothing that lays out a coherent large-scale timeline of past events.

Okay so it seems likely that things are nice and don't get worse but they don't get better either.

What time is it? (Do they have clocks? Do they automatically make sense to him? Either way, he'll also look out a window.)

There's a clock on the wall. It's round and has a single arm with a sun on the end of it, which is presently just shy of the top of the circle. The sun in the sky appears to be in an approximately analogous position.

How admirably simple to read!

But how does it run, anyway? Is it making clockwork noises or electronic noises? Does it faintly glow and tingle with magic and raise the hairs on one's arms?

Clockwork noises!

And more elaborate clockwork than it appears at a glance.

There's only one arm going around, but the background of the circle is divided into thin pie-slice sections - ninety-six of them, to be exact, four for every hour of the day - of which approximately the top half are a pale sky blue, and approximately the bottom half are dark and speckled with stars. The little sun on the end of the arm seems like it can be flipped to show a little moon, which it will presumably do when it crosses the day/night border; and the sections surrounding the border are flippable too, able to display either a night side or a day side. So the clock shows not only the objective time in relation to noon and midnight, but also the current relationship between that time and the interval between sunrise and sunset.

Fancy. And thematic.

If he wanders out of the library —