Kyeo's head hurts very badly. He doesn't remember how he got that way but he can guess that he's taken a blow to the head. That doesn't explain why he's not on a spaceship any more but he should probably not expect to figure that out right now. He looks confusedly at the non-spaceship around him for a minute before closing his eyes.
When lunch is done, the person collects him and takes him back to the room.
The next few weeks continue like so. Wake up, breakfast delivery, cartoon owl teaching him Weird Kularan, lunch, more cartoon owl teaching him Weird Kularan, dinner, back to his room. The cartoon owl moves on to sentence structure and verb tenses and more complex vocabulary, which it begins to define through words rather than pictures. It has some weird choices of vocabulary: "time travel" and "xenoanthropology" and "far future"; the entire periodic table and the parts of the atom and math concepts through calculus; "parliament" and "monarchy" and "dictatorship" and "vote"; "famine" and "infertility" and "pandemic" and "torture" and "human rights violation."
Wow, Weird Kularan's grammar is brutal. He's beginning to suspect it's one of the languages that got creoled in its separately developed form and hasn't had a nice collision with half a dozen other languages to smooth it out. He will learn the vocabulary, though some of it is kind of weird.
And then one day instead of being taken to the cartoon owl room he's taken to a nice meeting room.
"Hi! I'm Lev Aarons. I work with the government of Cascadia. --You're in Cascadia, by the way."
"I figured out it was probably Earth. Other than that I'm very confused. Is there some problem at the embassy? Or is my head still in worse shape than I feel like it is?"
"So what we know is that your language does not exist in any of our records but, linguistically, has patterns associated with an organically developed language as opposed to a constructed language or a language created through a delusion. One of the languages you speak seems to be a mashup of primarily English, Spanish, and Hindi, with sound changes consistent with centuries of linguistic drift. --The linguists love you, by the way, you are going to be the subject of as many dissertations as you consent to be interviewed for."
"Okay. So, uh, my job is to help you get oriented to Cascadia and see if we can send you back-- which apparently we can't because you don't know how you got here either-- and talk to you about giving us any knowledge of the future you happen to have."
"We're not sure, we've never made first contact before. --I was picked for this job because I taught a semester-long class on xenoanthropology which was supposed to just be an introduction to social science for freshmen with a fun premise but apparently that makes me the closest thing to an expert with a security clearance they have."
"Well, we don't have anyone who's made first contact with an uncontacted tribe either. --Are there aliens?"