The door opens, and someone rolls in. The door shuts behind her.

That someone is... odd.

Her wheelchair is extravagant and bizarre - it looks like a drugged cartoonist, having never seen an actual wheelchair, decided to draw one. The wheels look like rolled up caterpillars, thousands of teeny caterpillar legs connected to soft, circular, electric blue circles, and the chair itself is more of a sphere - azure-and-white marble, with a square pedestal on top. The caterpillar-wheels and the sphere are connected by a thousand thin white threads, attaching to each side and rotating around and around like a carnival ride. The pedestal is backed by an interwoven lattice of pale white fungus, and draped in a carpet of violently blue moss.

The woman in that wheelchair has pale blue skin, dark hair, and a dress that looks like it was made by sewing together bags of flour and scraps of purple fabric. A large mushroom grows out of her head, perhaps six inches tall and four inches wide. It’s impaled by three spears of tasteful silver jewelry, and there are several rings around its stalk. Smaller mushrooms, all also decorated and pierced, sprout from other locations - her shoulders, her right knee, her left hip, from right behind her left ear.

She seems unphased by being suddenly in a bar.

”Hello!”

Ari about jumps out of her skin at the first noise indicating she's not alone, almost knocking over a chair.  She whips around, sees the person, observes that, while she's definitely strange, she isn't exactly the sort of monster you'd intuitively expect when dealing with whatever twilight zone bullshit's going on, and even appears to be friendly.  Ari pushes the chair back in to (unsuccessfully) hide that she's taking a deep breath and putting on a smile.

"Hello!  Hi.  I like your - " it would be dumb to assume that's a costume and also dumb to assume that it isn't one - "aesthetic?"

Being in a bar is exciting, but this is a person she hasn’t met before and they can be friends and that’s about ten times as important. 

“Thank you so much! - do you know where we are?”

"No clue whatsoever.  Did you also walk through a door that you know for a fact didn't lead here before, or might we be wherever you came from?  Also where did you come from."

“This was Timmy’s house before it was a bar! I don’t know why it’s a bar. I’m from the blue mushroom swamp. Are you from another deck?”

"Another...deck?"

“They’re the round things in the sky that people live on!”

"Oh, we call those 'planets' - I think I must be; we don't have anybody that looks at all like you where I'm from and I've never heard of the blue mushroom swamp.  ...How are you speaking English if you're not from earth?"

 “I can speak anything if I keep up with my kazoo practice. But I’m speaking truffle, and you sound like you’re speaking truffle, and my kazoo doesn’t work like that at all.”

"Your.  Kazoo practice.  - I mean, that's hardly the weirdest thing going on here, but - how does your kazoo work?"

“I made it from my relationship with my mom. If I play it often enough I can say things in any language I want! - I’m the Jack of Leaves,” she adds, as if that clarifies anything.

"...I know less than you think I do.  Um.  Is it, like, magic?  Let's start there; we don't have magic where I'm from."

Della is very, very good at telling when people are lying to her. Her wheelchair rolls a step backwards in alarm.

”Wow! It’s... definitely magic?”

"Okay, so you have a magic kazoo that turns you into an extreme polyglot, but that's not what's going on here.  Cool.  Do you think it's more likely that there's some other type of magic making us understand each other, or like, I dunno, we're both actually speaking languages that are extremely similar except for what they call themselves and the spheres that people live on - or I guess mostly don't live on, actually, but, you know - or something else?"

“Does ‘crocodile’ rhyme with ‘lemon’?”

"It does not."

Della bounces a little in her seat.

“Then there’s something translating us, and we aren’t speaking similar languages!”

"So it would seem!  Um, you mentioned you were the Jack of something; what does that mean."

“It means I can have eleven regular artifacts, and more than that if I really, really love someone! And I can change what my artifacts do without having to break relationships, even though it’s really hard! People who aren’t cards can only have one artifact and they can’t change it. Artifacts are things like my wheelchair or my kazoo, they do magic, people make them out of relationships, cards are people who can make more than one of them.”

Ari pulls out the pen and pad of paper she has for taking orders out of her half apron and writes down a few sparse notes on this; it seems like the thing to do.

"Okay so, you've clearly got a theme going with the whole playing cards thing - I just realized that the fact that 'decks' and 'planets' are being translated differently probably means that they're more different than I was assuming.  Um, planets are big spheres of rock with molten metal in the middle - maybe some of them are just rock?  I'm not sure - and they go around a sun.  And some of them aren't rock at all but are made of gasses, and those ones are like, hundreds of times bigger I think.  Until now we only knew about life on one planet.  - Well, we went to our moon; that was cool, but no one, like, lives there.  Anything obviously different so far?"

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘playing cards themed’! What’s a sun?”

"Okay.  So.  Inexplicably, I think something similar to your magic system exists where I'm from as a - medium for many popular games?  I don't know how to describe it better than that without going into way more detail.  Or it could be a weird thing with the translation, I guess.  - Do you also have queens and kings and aces?  And what did you say you were the jack of; it wasn't one of the suits we use, but if you've got what I mentioned as types of cards I'd put some trivial amount of money down that it's one of four - I don't know, types of magic user you can be, or something like that.  A sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma - uh, that rhymes on my end - that's actually the same as a star but we have a different word for it because it's way closer to us so instead of appearing as a tiny dot of light at night it looks like a much bigger ball of light that's bright enough to make it daytime."

“We don’t have suns. Our daytimes mostly just... happen! We have kings and queens and aces. There are seven kinds of person you can be - lava, waves, ink, leaves, frost, sands, pearls - and I’m the Jack of Leaves, and there’s only ever one of those on a deck unless cards immigrate. I’ve been reading you as - pearl or leaf or frost, or maybe just a joker, normally there are species cues and you don’t have those - but it sounds like you do something different, or you give the categories different names?”

"...We'll come back to daytime 'just happening' in a bit," she says, tearing off a new page for topics they don't discuss right away.  After a thought, she adds 'species?' to it as well.  "I don't think we have anything equivalent to those; tell me more about them?"

“They’re... the first way you divide people? People tell you their suite with their clothing, the way they talk, their hair, everything. And there are physical and personality differences. And every species is mostly made up of two suites - truffles are mostly ink and leaves, mermaids are mostly sands and waves. There are four suites native to every deck, and some suites are better than others at making some kinds of artifact.”

"Huh.  Yeah, I don't think we have that.  - Or wait, if I say 'gender' and 'suite', are those different words or the same one?"

“Genders... are the thing where languages have different ways of marking categories? Most languages have suites as genders but orcish has it for colors and it varies.”

"Hmm.  I think - we have something...similar, to suites.  But there's only two of them - well, that's not true; there's way more than two, but there's two main ones that everybody knows about and the rest are mostly people deciding they're various combinations of neither or both of those.  But we do only have the one sapient species, so I guess it still kind of fits, number-wise."

“I really want to know what your two not-suites are! And what your species is like - I thought you might be a vampire, at first, but you don’t have fangs!”

"I sure don't!" She really wants to ask the full set of species but if she doesn't take this one thing at a time they'll probably spend a lot of time circling back to previous topics, and she doesn't know how long they have before something interrupts them.  "I don't expect these to translate for you the way suites did for me, but our - we just call them genders - are um, male and female, or men and women or boys and girls, depending on age - I think the most natural thing to call them is possibly guys and girls?  But it's like, a whole thing; I dunno.  ...I'm trying to think of how to describe humans - my species - but I'm having trouble because I have no idea what ways we might be similar or different in.  - No humans are naturally blue?  Or have mushrooms growing out of them.  It's really cool that you're blue and have mushrooms growing out of you."

“I have very pretty mushrooms! What are your social systems and governments like? Are you a guy or a girl?”

"I'm a girl!"  Well, mostly, but it's probably not smart to out yourself to an alien you just met even if she's the nicest person you've had a sustained interaction with in months, and even if she doesn't have the context to know what it means.  "I'm not sure what you mean by social systems; I think most countries nowadays are democracies?  - Or, that might translate as the wrong thing - uh, I think the technical term is like, republic?  Or maybe representative democracy.  What do you guys have?"

“Oh, like dwarves and sphinxes! Truffles don’t have governments. We live in little villages where everyone can know everyone else and we don’t... do bad things.”

"That sounds really nice."  ...That came out way more wistful than she intended or felt.  "Tell me more about what it means to be a leaf?  - And the ones you thought I might be; what about them and me made you think that?  Like, what features; you read as a girl to me because you're wearing a dress and jewelry and have long hair and just like, your facial structure I guess?  What cues do I give off that match up with what you said."

“Leaves are people who are - curious, and loud, and extroverted, and more interested in people than in things? It’s really different for different species. But we mostly wear dresses, and keep our hair loose, and have breasts, and look younger than other suites. Pearls are anxious and indecisive and more likely to be depressed, frosts are - rigid, and cerebral, and more interested in things than people, and don’t have unconscious emotional affect? You look mostly frost, frosts have breasts and keep their hair up and wear pants. But your personality reads as more pearl and leaf.”

Having an entire not-gender whose most notable quality is being anxious is...something.  Probably they all have really good support systems and stuff?  They must.  "That's really interesting!  Do - let me think about how to phrase this.  Does anyone ever decide that they're the wrong suite and start presenting like a different one?  Are people ever more than one suite?"

“Jokers aren’t any suite. But I’ve never heard of someone being two, and I’ve never heard of someone doing that other thing! They might do it on other decks, decks can be really different.”

"How many decks are there?  And how common is travel between them?"

“I think there are at least a million decks, but I don’t know the number! People travel to other decks all the time.”

"Cool!  How many of them are inhabited?  Have you been to many?"

“All of the ones we know about have people on them! Sometimes a new one wanders in, and the new ones only sometimes have people on them. I’ve been on eight different ones.”

".....Huh.  What do you mean by wander in?"

“They aren’t there. And then they are! And nobody knows if they’re somewhere else before that.”

"There are people on them sometimes when they appear and they don't know if they were somewhere else first?"

“The people who are sometimes on new decks have languages and cultures and habits and relationships and houses. But they don’t have memories.”

"Huh."  She takes a second to process that.  "That...doesn't happen where I'm from.  Any of it.  Nothing just - appears, and definitely not people.  I mean there are lots of planets we probably don't know about yet, but that's just like, our limitations?  In finding them?  We don't have reason to think more are appearing.  - How many people usually live on a deck?  Um, both when they first appear and also in general."

“About two million!”

"Earth has a little over seven billion.  - Do you want to elaborate now on how your day/night cycle works?"