Holly runs as fast as she can but the demon's faster. She has no idea where Lightning's gotten to; maybe he found a tree to climb. She on the other hand has been diverted into a treeless hill and she's careening down a slope, trying very hard not to trip.
And the demon's gaining on her.
She's never seen anything like it and neither has Crystal; maybe Book knows what it is but Book's asleep. It's mostly mouth - it looks like a cross between a floorlength mirror of a mouth and a snake to propel the mouth along.
And Holly's not fast enough.
The mouth catches her.
But it doesn't hurt.
Where are we?
...The girl seems absolutely bewildered by the globe. She spins it. She finds America, and murmurs "...A-me-ri-ka." Eventually she locates Hawaii and Alaska too. Apparently there is no Kuigao here, and no kloofmuur either.
"What? You..." He points at her map, and then to the globe. "No Kweengow?" She must... have trouble finding...
"Amerika." She points. "Raotfkiol." She pats the ball of the globe with both hands, describes a sphere in a separate gesture. "Kunue Kuigao." She points at her own map. "Kuigao. Kloofmuur. Slasmuug -" She smooths her hand over the map, then over the floor for good measure.
Wait. No. She doesn't understand what he's saying. Right.
"Rowt- rowtufk- rowt-f-kyole... sphere." He mimics the sphere gesture. "Flat... coonway?" He copies the smoothing on the floor thing, and repeats "coonway?"
The part of him that's demanding he ask questions is quieting down some, seeing the progress, but he's annoyed by how slow the process of learning languages seems to be.
"Ert," she says, "raotfkiol..." She looks dubiously at the floor under her feet. Then she mimes writing.
Oh, that part is easy. They're in a school. He steps into the globe classroom- that'd be, what, Lansa's social studies?- and starts looking for looseleaf in the cabinets.
When she is presented with paper and a writing implement she starts making careful notes in an unfamiliar alphabet, in two columns. She narrates helpfully - her transliteration of "flat" and "slasmuug" share a line, for instance - but other vocabulary isn't so directly translated (America has what looks like a short sentence in the column beside it).
He sees her notes- she's learning some English words, okay, but... he needs to give her a vocabulary she can use to explain how she got here. What words take priority, which can be most easily communicated... how to get an intelligible explanation from her in under an hour?
Movement words, place words, prepositions...
Or take a more primitive approach. Cave paintings. Drawing. He grabs a piece of paper, draws... a circle, with a crudely-rendered America, next to a parallelogram, a plane. On the plane, he places a stick figure with curly hair, and atop the globe he places an unadorned stick figure. He then draws a curved arrow from the girl to America, with a question mark.
Actually, she probably won't understand the question mark. Maybe not the stick figures, either? He leaves the question mark, and draws tiny smiley faces on the stick figures.
Whether it's the quality of the drawing or some unexamined assumption, she doesn't have an answer for him.
He draws another stick Pyay at the end of the arrow, then points to the first Pyay with his pencil. "Pyay Kweengow..." he traces the arrow to the other Pyay, "then Pyay Earth?"
Or, wait, maybe that was an explanation. Just, a brief and vague one, asking for more information from him? He could...
"...I draw Earth." He flips the paper over and draws a crude globe. "I draw Pyay." He adds a- not a stick figure this time, a more detailed rendering. His sense of proportion is all wrong, but it's recognizable.
He hands the paper and pencil to Pyay. "Pyay draw 'tlaa'?"
She makes a dubious face, but makes a drawing of - a monster. A snake with a big eyeless face. Chasing a stick figure Pyay.
This connects even less to the whole materializing/no English/mice/flat world situation.
Ohhhhhh. She's crazy. She's- no, wait, the appearing, that's not a thing that her being some escaped mental patient would explain. That's not a thing anything explains. There's got to be connections, between something, and something else, anything else... the tlaa is a snake, snakes eat mice, what is with the mice...
He points at the mouse cage. "...Mice?"
He is interrupted by a humming noise. It's 6:45- the hallway lights click on in unison, and the air conditioning turns on. Various quiet whirrs and hums sound from all directions.
The front doors downstairs ought to be open, now. It'll be a while yet until things start, but they could be interrupted at any time. He's going to have to find a way to accelerate this, or else cut class to deal with this mystery girl.
"Do you have any frie-" No, not words, drawings.
He takes her drawing of the "tlaa" and adds a few more stick figures running away alongside her. Were there others with her?
She crosses out his stick figures but draws one of her own, a taller, blonder stick figure, farther away from the snake with the door-sized face. "Praip ruum Fwaysyee."
"And... is he here?" And then he remembers words, again- how does he keep forgetting this, moment to moment?- and lays this stick figure's drawing on top of the piece of paper with Earth on it, and draws an arrow between "Praip room fwaysee" and Earth, to match the arrow he used to ask how she got here. He traces the movement of the arrow with his finger a few times, to emphasize the movement.