“Oh! Yeah.” He puts down his ender chest and takes a heart out: a little glowing star, the same thing Alita had when she withdrew one. He hands it to Alita. 

"Thank you!"

Alita jumps up and down a few times.

"Do you guys have more business to take care of while I'm here, or do you mind if I head home?"

Planet glances at Bacon before nodding to Alita. "I think you can head home."

"See you later!"

She bounds off home, then looks over her journal and plans her next moves. Regardless of how much or little she plans to follow the laws, she needs to be able to appear to be a normal citizen, and it seems that normal citizens around here, who don't have the ability to morph off all injuries, use totems.

She tries to figure out if any of the new senses she's developed since arriving in this world can help her. Her intuition about how to craft things with materials she's obtained isn't showing her a recipe for them. 

She has a sense of certain milestones she's completed since arriving in the world, and—aha! It also suggests to her more milestones she can reach.

She can infer some interesting things from this—it seems like the nether can be used to travel long distances, like Zero-space—but she still doesn't know how to get a totem.

<sunbather> hey how do you get totems?

<SpokeIsHere> Play My Maze Tomorrow...

So he's running... some kind of game giving them out as prizes? She should go, it's a chance to meet this Spoke guy she's heard so much about and maybe get his side of the story.

<sunbather> sure! where's the maze at?
<sunbather> but i'm also wondering, like, how do people normally get them? how did you get the totems you're giving out as prizes for the maze?

<SpokeIsHere> The Maze Is At Spawn... If You Dare...
<baconnwaffles0> do raids
<baconnwaffles0> or cheat them in if you're Spoke
<SpokeIsHere> HEY!
<SpokeIsHere> all of my prizes are entirely legitamate
<SpokeIsHere> no cheating allowed
<SpokeIsHere> i grinded for these
<PlanetLord> sure you did

<sunbather> raids on what?

<SpokeIsHere> your mom
<Vitalasy> stop being rude
<Vitalasy> >:(
<SpokeIsHere> no

Oh, this is what we're doing now, is it.

<sunbather> my mom's dead
<sunbather> you monster
<sunbather> :Þ

(Vitalasy feels quietly vindicated in his stance.)

<SpokeIsHere> I Have Made A Severe And Continuous Lapse In My Judgement And Don’t Expect To Be Forgiven

<sunbather> You won't be. My retribution will be severe and instant.
<sunbather> =^-^=
<sunbather> ...ok seriously though anyone who can explain to me the normal way to get totems, such that i can actually get one, gets my first totem

The chat's quiet for a bit. No one seems super inclined to take her up on it.

(Vitalasy's busy moving wardens; Zam normally uses the three heart trio base for totems, and before that he used Subz's area, but he doesn't want to give either of those coords to Alita without permission; Planet and Bacon have an efficient raid platform that can generate several totems in the time it would take to show Alita how to get one; Spoke has more than enough totems in his ender chest.)

<ItzSubz_> you are all terrible people
ItzSubz_ whispers to sunbather: meet at -2k -2.5k on the nether roof

Alita enters the nether using the portal at spawn, and starts looking around for some means to ascend.

There's a ladder! It leads to... a ceiling of unbreakable bedrock. And unfortunately for Alita, she doesn't know that you can use the ladder and an ender pearl to glitch through to the roof.

(There are other miscellaneous nether portals at spawn that aren't the main central one with a building around it, if she wants to try any of those.)

Dang.

(She does try the other portals, starting with the closest one to the main one and working her way outwards.)

And eventually one of them takes her to a somewhat different location: a perfectly flat plane, stretching on in every direction, of that same impossibly hard rock. There are a lot of portals and random blocks scattered around--a short rail line, a few blocks of dirt and grass, a scattering of cobblestone, some netherrack around a portal, a single crafting table, a couple planks made of a strange purplish wood, a single piece of pink wool--but they all look placed, unnatural, not like they're just part of the landscape.

(If she goes further out, these signs of habitation decrease: the portals become few and far between, and the random blocks disappear entirely.)

Given that there's nothing above her, she assumes this is the roof. She starts walking in the direction of the given destination.

sunbather whispers to ItzSubz_: on my way

Dang, this place is kinda freaky. Once she gets far enough out that there are no more blocks or portals, she starts placing the occasional lamp for comfort, flicking them on with levers.

There's a portal at the given coordinates, or close enough. 

sunbather has reached the achievement [Subspace Bubble]

There's also a man hanging out at the other side of the portal. He's the closest thing to human she's seen here thus far, although he does very much have horns and a glowing purple eye and some sort of black markings on his skin on his right side. He looks young; late teens or early twenties. He's got a horse with him that's tied to a nearby post. 

"Hey," he says. "You're Sunbather?"

"Yeah. Or you can call me Alita."

"Alita," he says, testing it out. "Pillager outpost is over this way, and I've got beacons set up and an area cleared out for the actual raids." He starts walking; sure enough, after a bit, a wood-and-stone tower appears in the distance, and next to it, five lines of light up to the sky. They have to cross a river and then they're at the tower; gray-skinned angry-looking humanoids point crossbows and axes at them. They're close enough to the beacon now to get effects. (Speed II, Strength II, Resistance II, Regeneration, Haste.) Subz has his sword out; he kills most of the gray-skinned humanoids with one shot each, his bored expression unchanging. One of them is carrying a banner; Subz leaves that one alive.

"Wow."

Being at 17 hearts had felt good. Being beacon'd feels great.

"I'm guessing the last guy is for me?"

She pulls out a diamond sword. It's not even enchanted.

"Yep."

Beacon effects help out a lot with the not-even-enchanted thing, although it will probably take more than one hit, especially since she presumably doesn't know how to crit.

She does not, although she makes a habit of jumping while running and she runs at the pillager, so she might get lucky.

Well, she gets there eventually.

sunbather has reached the achievement [Voluntary Exile]

"I'll show you where you actually do the raids now, it's pretty close by." 

They have to cross another river after she gets Bad Omen and then, where the beacons are, there is a huge unnatural-looking mined-out rectangle of ground with a bed and a long wall of double chests. The raid will start spawning once Alita crosses about halfway over it; she has time to set her bed or look in the chests first if she wants.