Sunlight streams through the window of his tiny cozy cottage, which is just about exactly Bruce-sized, with a roof at just the right height for him to stand up under and a bed of just the right length for him to lie down in. There are two drawers underneath the bed, one slightly open with a glimpse of something bright red visible within. Next to the bed, there is a shelf, tucked into the corner of the cottage; just past the shelf, there is a narrow door in the wall opposite the bed, and next to the foot of the bed there is a wider door in the wall opposite the shelf.

It's not entirely clear whether he's been here before. It's not entirely clear whether he's been anywhere before. His surroundings look familiar, but he has no memory of them, or of anything else; on the other hand, there's no particular sense that he should remember anything from before he opened his eyes, no sense of anything missing. Everything is new, but nothing is alien. He's right at home.

Everything is new and just as it should be. He climbs out of the cozy bed and opens the narrow door.

Behind the narrow door is a smaller room containing some amenities whose function and purpose he recognizes, and that's all the narration has to say about that.

Well then, outside must be the other door!

It is indeed!

There is a small space around the house that is clear of grass, but outside of that, the green carpet runs all the way to the curve of the horizon in every direction, making pleasant swishing sounds as the wind ruffles its soft blades. There are only two interruptions visible from his doorstep: straight ahead, a small pond cradled in the shelter of several large boulders, and off to the left, a much smaller boulder flanked by two large pine trees. Here and there, the grass dips or swirls in a way that might indicate another obstruction, too small to show above it.

Bruce bends down to run his hand through the grass, because it looks nice to touch, then goes off towards the pond, but quickly detours to investigate the nearest irregularity that might be an interesting thing on the ground.

He was right, the grass is nice to touch. Pleasantly smooth, with a hint of roughness at the edges.

The thing on the ground turns out to be... a small grey rock, just the size for him to pick up in one hand.

Oh neat, he has a rock now. What's the pond look like? Maybe he can swim in it.

It's small, but not too small to swim in. The side facing his house is bordered only by the grass, but the rest of the pond is tucked into the arc of a rocky ridge that bends around it like a hug. The stones are tallest at the back of the pond, shortest near the front.

Nice! He takes off his shoes and socks and dips a foot in the water.

Pleasantly cool without being uncomfortably cold.

Then he can just jump on in! Swimming: pretty neat.

It is indeed pretty neat!

There are a few small fish in the pond, which dart around and shimmer prettily. Most of them flee his approach, but one sneaks up and attempts to nibble his toes with its tiny fish face. It desists after two unsuccessful attempts.

Ooh, pretty! He wants to try to touch the fish but he expect he'd just scare them off. How deep does this pond go, can he walk all the way across it with his feet on the bottom or is there room to go underwater a ways?

It's not so very deep but it is deep enough that in order to walk across it with his head above water he would have to be standing on the shoulders of a second, wetter Bruce. He can go underwater a bit. There are pretty sparkly rocks down there, stuck in some mud that makes the water around it murkier if he pokes it.

Gosh, sparkly rocks! He wants to decorate the shelf around the edge of the pool with them, if he can scoop up a bunch without losing them in the murk.

If he's careful about it, he can extract about ten of them before this activity stirs up enough silt to obscure the rest from view.

Then he shall have a line of ten sparkly rocks on the edge of the pond! Actually, how about two rows of five, with the five biggest in one row and the five smallest in the other. There, that's excellent.

Now to get out of the pond and dry and reclothed for more exploring! There are still plenty of things on the grass to go check out.

Should he explore further in the grass, he will find:

two more rocks, one of them pleasantly lumpy, the other one jagged and uncomfortable to hold;

a very small bush sprouting from the ground;

two more bushes behind the pond, their branches heavy with clusters of purple berries;

and a little baby version of those two large pine trees, standing no taller than his knee, barely visible amid the grass until he's right up close.

Rocks! He puts the jagged one next to the pond where he won't step on it by accident.

Tiny trees and bushes! Those are adorable and he's so glad they exist.

Berries! Do they taste good?

They taste delicious. Sweet and slightly tart. They also have a tendency to get berry juice all over his hands.

Well, good thing there's a pond right there he can rinse his hands off in once he's done eating. Om nom nom.

Om nom nom! Tasty fruits!

Once he finishes eating and rinses his hands, there is still this whole planet left for him to explore, should he so choose. There are plenty of little mysteries nestled in the grass, and one of the trees is doing a thing.

Exploration: seriously the best. He's going to find every single piece of stuff in the gr--ooh, a tree doing a thing! What thing is it doing?

It is making seeds! They look nifty. Big and round and pointed at one end and made of many many many little flaps all nestled together.

Gosh, that's a complicated seed. He runs his fingers over it, enjoying the texture and wondering what would happen if he pulled one of the flaps off. Can he get enough of a grip on one to try it?

He can! It takes some effort, and makes a slightly crunchy snapping sound as it detaches.

What fun! He pulls a few more off, then realizes the seed might need them to grow, apologizes to the tree, and buries the remainder of it. Now, back to finding things in the grass!

Trees do not seem to emote very much, but as far as he can tell, this one is chill about the seed vandalism. It's all good.

Things in the grass include:

several more rocks, of varying sizes and sharpnesses;

two more little baby bushes;

three more little baby trees;

and a curious little dip in the ground, with glassy-smooth blobs of dark grey stone scattered around it like droplets from a splash of water, and bluish-green shards of something-or-other glittering at the bottom amid scorched lumps of dirt and charred shreds of grass. The grass next to the smooth stones is burned, too.

Rocks get collected up and put in the designated Rocks Place next to the pond. Little plants get petted because they are Small. 

Oooh, what is this thing? He pokes at it very carefully in case it is hot.

The droplets of stone are warmish to the touch but not uncomfortable; the glittering shards, when he unearths them, are also warmish but less so. They're very pretty. A little sharp, but not too bad as long as he doesn't outright stab himself with them. They seem to glow, very very faintly, with a pretty bluish-green light.

He does poke himself with one of them, just to see what that's like, but he stops before drawing blood. Glittery glowy rocks are way too cool for the rock pile; they'd totally distort all the scales he's sorting them on, and anyway he wants to put them somewhere safer. He gathers up all the pretty shards and brings them to his house for safekeeping.

There's plenty of places in his house where he could put them! On the shelf next to his bed, for example, or in the drawers underneath the bed which currently contain several changes of clothes.

He will reorganize the clothes into the bottom n-1 drawers and put the rocks in the top drawer and go back outside to see more of the world!

The world contains all the same things it did when he went inside; but also the blue of the sky is darkening from cerulean to sapphire, and it might be time for small new people to go to sleep.

Sleep probably doesn't have as many new things as being awake, but it's still pretty novel. Yawwwwwn and probably also a good idea apart from that. Bruce snuggles up in his bed.

If anything interesting happens to his planet while he's asleep, it doesn't happen loudly enough to wake him.

What would he like to do with his second day in the world?

He wants to eat berries for breakfast, then pick a direction and walk really far in that direction and see where he ends up! (Really far means for an hour or so; it's still farther than he's ever gone before.)

After about an hour of walking briskly directly away from the berry bushes by the pond, he finds...

...that a suspiciously familiar roof is visible up ahead, cresting the curve of the horizon. If he walks a little farther, he'll be right by his house, nearly all the way back where he started.

Gosh! And here he was worried he'd get lost. Does the same thing happen if he picks a different direction? Say, halfway between the way he was going and the way he found himself coming from.

Yes it does! It seems his world is a little more than an hour's walk around no matter which direction or starting point he chooses.

That's really neat! He sits down next to the pond to think about this for a bit. He picks up one of his rocks and traces a finger around it, sees how he always gets back to the same spot no matter what direction he goes in. So the world is like this rock, except bigger. He wonders whether, if he had something to dig with, he could dig a hole that goes all the way through. Something to think about. In the meantime, all that walking made him hungry. Berries are still delicious, but also does anything else around here look like food?

Berries are still delicious, and if there are other sources of food around, they're not immediately obvious. Unless he wants to try eating the fish, but he'd have to grab one first and they are wigglesome little creatures.

If the fish don't want to be eaten, and it sure seems like they don't, then it would be pretty mean of him to eat them anyway. He'll stick with berries, and then go look at more of the little surprises in the grass.

There's a bunch more of the little pits with splashy rock-stuff around them and sparkly shards hidden in their depths. Also some more regular rocks, and a few new baby bushes and baby trees, and the grownup trees have made more seeds, and it is generally a peaceful and ordinary time here on Bruce's planet.

And then there is a strange new sound, and a strange new light in the sky, pink-orange-blue and blazing along like a thrown rock. A very large thrown rock. A very large thrown rock making an eerie whistling noise.

"Woah!" Does it look like it's going to land? Things he drops or throws always land, but this thing is going very fast so maybe it will just zoom off through the sky and never be seen again.

It does land!

It is not a rock.

It's a shiny smooth oddly shaped thing, bigger than Bruce's house although not by much, and it zooms in an arc across the sky and then slows down and turns and settles onto the grass near the pond in a way that is not very much like a thrown rock at all.

And part of the side flops open in a way reminiscent of a door except turned sideways so the hinges are on the bottom, and a person steps out onto the flopped part and walks down it. She is much taller than Bruce - less than two Bruces tall, but more than one and a half - and she seems very curious about the pond and the trees and the house, and even more curious about Bruce when she spots him.

"Didn't know this planet was big enough for people!" she says, blinking at him in friendly surprise.

"Hi! I didn't know there were other people! Or other planets!"

"Guess we both learned something today, then! What's your name, kid? I'm Apra."

"I'm Bruce! What's that thing you came here in?"

"That's my spaceship!" She pats its shiny shell affectionately.

"Can I look inside it?"

She hesitates, then says, "Yeah, okay. But don't go inside, there's stuff in there it would be a bad idea for you to touch."

"Okay, I'll just look." He peers around her into the ship.

The inside of the ship is shiny and complicated! And pretty small, if you're an Apra-sized person. There's a chair, set in the middle of the cramped space and facing a curved panel of buttons and switches and blinking lights. Above/behind the panel, there's a dark glossy surface that covers most of the wall. Behind the chair, there's a ladder leading up into a dark mysterious place.

It doesn't look anything like his house or like outside! "Coooool. I want to go to other planets someday. I want to see everything there is to see."

"A respectable ambition," says Apra. "Maybe I'll come by again sometime and take you for a ride around the galaxy. I couldn't do it now, I don't have room for a passenger even if they're as little as you. D'you need anything in the meantime? Is there enough food here and stuff?"

"Taking a ride around the galaxy would be awesome! And, um, I've got berries. Are there more kinds of food?"

"There's plenty. Hmm, let me see if I can find anything..."

She steps into the ship, hauls herself up the ladder, and disappears out of sight. Rummaging noises ensue. Half a minute later she's sliding back down the ladder again with a box cradled in one arm.

"Here," she says, opening the box. It's made of a thin rough bendable material like very stiff leaves, and inside there are lots of roundish flattish objects slightly bigger than Bruce could hold in two cupped palms. She takes one out and bites it, revealing that it is a pale outer skin wrapped around a gooey inner filling, and offers the box to Bruce. "Apple handpies!"

"Oh wow they smell amazing!" He takes another and bites it. "They taste amazing too!"

"I'm glad you like 'em! I don't know how to make them myself but I know who does, I could see if she wants to come visit. And you can keep these in the meantime."

"Awesome, thanks! I should get something for you too--one second!" And he darts into his house and comes back with one of his sparkly rock-shards, which he holds out to Apra.

"Aww, thanks!" She happily trades the box for the shard. "It's real pretty."

"You're welcome! So is this what you do all the time, just fly around and meet new people? What are other planets like? You said most of the ones with people were bigger than this."

"Mostly I fly around and meet new planets, actually! That's my job, I'm a starscout. I look for planets that are interesting somehow, like if they're pretty or if people could live on them, and I write down where they are and then I go put them on the big list of all the planets in the galaxy so other people can find them later. But usually if I find a planet that's not on the list already, there won't be anybody living there. And usually if a planet is this small, it's not good enough at growing things for somebody to live on it."

"Cool! What makes a planet good at growing things? Are you going to put mine on the list?"

"So plants grow in dirt," she says, "and different dirt is better or worse for growing plants in, and different plants like different kinds of dirt more or less. Like, there's no grass growing on that rock," she gestures at the pond, "because rock is really bad for growing just about anything. And really little planets are usually just made of rock, sometimes with some sand on it, and there's not much that likes growing in sand either. And plants need water, too, and really little planets sometimes don't have any. Do you want your planet on the list? If it's on the list then lots of people can find out where it is and they might come visit you."

"I'm not sure. Meeting you has been nice but I don't know if I want to be meeting lots of people all the time. . . . But some of them would have cool explanations of things like you, and if there are too many people I can just go in my house and not talk to them, so yeah, I do want to be on the list."

She thinks for a second, and then suggests, "I could just tell a few people about you to start with, and you could see how you like that, and if you want more visits than just a handful of my friends, I could put you on the list then?"

"That sounds really good, thanks!"

"Okay, I'll do that!"

"Do you want a tour of the planet before you leave?"

"Sure!"

"Okay, follow me! Over there is my house, and this way is the pond I like to swim in . . ." 

He gives her a tour of the pond and the berry bushes and the trees that make cool scaly seeds and the place he found the prettiest of all of his rocks and various other landmarks and in not too long they have gone clear around the planet and seen all the important tourist locations.

It's a lovely little planet.

"I like your house," she says. "Did you build it yourself?"

"No, I just woke up in it. But learning how to build things sounds fun! Did you build your spaceship?"

"Most of it! Some parts I got from someone else who put them together first."

"Woooow. Where did you learn how to do it?"

"Some of it I asked people, some of it I read about, some of it I figured out myself."

"I want to learn everything, but there aren't a lot of people to ask or any things to read so I guess I'll have to figure stuff out mostly. What are some good things to learn first?"

"Maybe how to build a house, in case something happens to the one you've got or you just want a bigger one, and how to grow more food, so you can have different stuff to eat," she suggests. "And how to read if you don't have that one down already. I could see about bringing you some books."

"Those all sound like good things! I would love to have some books, thank you."

"I'll bring some next time I visit."

"Awesome! I hope you have fun wherever you go next."

She laughs. "Yeah, I hope so too. Enjoy your apple pies!"

And she waves and climbs back into her ship and closes it up and zooms away.

Bruce waves goodbye until the ship is out of sight, them takes a look at his house. What sort of things is it made of? If he might want to make another one, probably the first step is finding out what things he would need.

His house is mostly made of rectangular objects, pale brown with a darker brown wavy pattern running through them. There are also some little shiny round things embedded in the rectangles. If he goes over the whole thing very carefully, it looks like there are more or less three materials involved in the bulk of the construction:

- Shiny hard stuff that functions as fasteners and door hinges. It's similar to some of the parts of Apra's spaceship, but it's not clear what exactly it is or where it comes from or how to get more.
- Brown patterned stuff, usually but not always found in rectangular planks, that makes up most of the structure of the house. It doesn't look quite like any other object he's encountered, but the sound when he taps on it is a little reminiscent of what it sounds like to tap on the side of a tree.
- Different brown rectangles, which cover the roof in a pattern a little like the scales on a fish, and sound more like rocks than trees when tapped on but not really very much like rocks either.

The stuff that sounds like a tree when tapped on kind of smells a bit like a tree too. Are there any trees on this planet big enough that more of the brown pieces could feasibly grow on them like fruit?

There are not! That would have to be such a big tree. Some of those brown pieces are bigger than some entire trees.

...but, out of the range of available tree sizes, the biggest ones are big enough that those mysterious rectangles could fit inside of them.

Maybe someone broke up a tree into rectangles, then? That sounds like a lot of work, and getting it to break in such nice straight lines sounds even harder. 

After enough days of swimming in the pond every day, Bruce notices a patch of bare dirt where he usually gets in and out. When he's just been splashing and dripping on it, it turns into mud, and squashes under his feet, but when he comes back the next day, it's dry again and stays in one shape--and that shape includes a dent shaped like his foot! That's cool.

It is!

Other things that are cool: a new and totally different spaceship landing on his lawn. This one is flatter and more disklike, and when the panel in the side opens, it unfolds in a more complicated way and creates a little awning just about big enough to comfortably shelter the approximately Apra-sized person who emerges from the spaceship a moment later.

"Hello!" she calls, leaning out of her awning. "I hear someone wants to learn how to make apple pie!"

Bruce is already running toward the spaceship as it lands. "Me, I do! Hello! I'm Bruce!"

"Hello Bruce! I'm Brrante. Can I look at your berry bushes?"

"Sure! They're over here." He leads her to the nearest patch that has a bunch of berries on them right now.

"Oh, pretty!" she says. "Want to learn how to make a pie out of them?"

"Definitely! How many do we need per pie? There are more patches than just this one."

"I'll go get a bowl and we can fill the bowl and start there. We might need another bush or two after this patch but I think we'll be all right."

"Okay!" He holds out the hem of his shirt to make a sling and has a bunch of berries already collected by the time she gets back with the bowl.

Berry time! They pile up in the bowl until no more berries can be piled without rolling off onto the ground, and then Brrante takes the bowl back to her ship and demonstrates to Bruce how one rolls out pie dough into a round shape that will fit in a pie plate and hold lots of berries. "I can teach you how to make the dough, too, but it needs things I don't think you have growing here."

"Could I get them to start growing here? Where do new kinds of plant come from?"

"I could get you some seeds and you could grow grain here, yes. Plants make more of themselves by making seeds that go in the ground and grow up into plants like the one the seed came from. But they're usually not exactly the same, so if a plant makes a seed and that seed makes a plant and that plant makes another seed and so on and so forth hundreds and hundreds of times in a row, you can get something that looks pretty different from the plant you started with, and that's where most new kinds of plant come from. Completely new kinds of plant happen sometimes on new planets, but we don't know how that works exactly because no one's ever caught a new planet appearing."

"That's really neat. What makes them change? And how does a seed know what kind of plant to grow up into at all?"

"There's an explanation for that but I'm not sure I know it well enough to give it to you. I think I know who does, though, and Apra said she'd be telling them about you, so you might get to ask them soon."

"Okay. I have a lot of questions but I can wait if I have to. What's the next step for the pie?"

The next step involves Bruce being invited into Brrante's ship to see her kitchen! It spans the whole arc of the interior except the part where the door is, and like April's, this ship has a ladder in the middle that leads up to another room.

"This is an oven," she says, introducing him to a boxy apparatus tucked against the wall opposite the door. "It gets very hot inside, which is useful for cooking things. You have to be careful with them so you don't burn yourself, though. We close up the pies and put them in the oven for a little while, and then when they come out they're cooked. Here, you can try a little nibble of pie dough - see how different it is from the cooked version?" She offers him a scrap of excess dough. "Much less tasty, in my opinion, and not as good at holding things inside it."

Raw pie dough is amazing, actually. Though it is admittedly less useful as a structural material, so cooked pie dough probably wins just off having fruit along with it.

Pies go in oven!

"If you want a kitchen of your own, I bet I can figure out how to help you build one. I'd have to make another trip to bring you some things, like an oven, since I don't have a spare one with me."

"A kitchen would be great, and so would learning how to build things!"

"I'll bring you an oven next time I visit, then! Do you have anything to trade me for it? An oven's much harder to make than a pie, so I'm going to have to trade for it myself."