A little boy her own age is standing in this apartment on a cellphone. "母は。。。ドンジョン。。。です," he says, haltingly like he's not accustomed to whatever language that is either. "場所は。。。" At this point he notices Kennedy. "ええと。。。すみません。" He fumbles for a small notebook in his pocket, but he drops it in the process.

The apartment is full of boxes, and they are labeled in a mix of what looks like Latin and indecipherable foreign writing.

...Okay.  She needs to - breathe normally, and stay looking composed, and take in information.  Is there somewhere for her to sit down?  She would like to sit down.

She could sit on a box! There are also kitchen chairs but they're still wrapped in plastic and stacked on top of each other.

The boy picks up his notebook and flips through it and finds the page he wants and reads something off it slowly with furrowed brow. Then he says, "はい。　あ、そのドンジョンは。。。um. 怪獣。怪物。それは何ですか？　なるほど。。。　ここは女の子が。。。 um.... はい。なるほど。 いいえ、ママじゃないよ！”

A box will do.  She does not want to be the sort of person who sits on the floor in a situation like this but she might have, if there wasn't anything else.  Eventually.

He keeps looking at her. He tries a few more things on the phone, but his command of the language is clearly limiting him. Finally he says, "はい。さよなら。" And he hangs up. And he looks at Kennedy.

"Do you speak English?" he asks hopefully.

Oh, relief.  "No."

Sigh. "日本語ができますか？”

"I definitely don't speak that one."

"Look, if you do speak English I don't think this is a good time to be sarcastic about it."

"I know Latin and Barbliic."

"This is English. Latin is a dead language. I never even heard of Barbliic. Why are you in my apartment?"

"This is Latin.  There was a monster, and when it touched me I started being here."

"This is not Latin. This is English and you're wrong. Were you in a dungeon or did the monster come out of its dungeon?"

"Ummmm.  I guess it came out."

"Where were you when the monster got you? What did it look like?"

"I was in the Striving Plaza in Verona, and it was a really big snake with a mirror on its face that was big enough to eat adults with."

He writes this down. "Verona in Italy?"

"In Vespuricca."

"What country is that in?"

"Verona is the country, Vespuricca is a continent."

"How do you spell Vespuricca?" he asks suspiciously.

"V-e-s-p-u-r-i-c-c-a."

He types that into his phone.

"That is not a continent. I think the monster messed with your head," he concludes. "About that and maybe also about Latin."

What is that object.  "Okay, ummmmm.  I think if that happens I have to go lie down.  Alone.  Um, do you have a bed in a room that locks?  And can you get a New Year's here?  Any New Year's."

"We just moved here so the beds don't have sheets on them, and it's the middle of summer, nowhere near New Year's. I think I should call... uh... I don't know how to explain this in Japanese so I shouldn't call 119 again but maybe I can call Dungeon Data Science International or something. What do you remember being your name?"

"Kennedy Laurel Norton.  I just mean anyone born on New Year's Day?  An autumn equinox."

"I think the monster must have also messed with your head about that because New Year's is in winter except in China where it's in spring. Or, well, they call it spring festival, I think, but it's still also in winter. I also don't know why you would want that at all but I don't know if that's the monster or just you being weird." He is typing into his phone again.

"I'm one of them and they will know how to handle this without hurting me."

"Is this an astrology thing?" he asks. "Do I need to understand it before I call DDSI?"

"Yes.  What are you?  For your birthday?"

"It is not important when my birthday is unless you want to get me a present. You are allowed to believe in astrology but smart people don't," he tells her. "But some people do even without being teleported by psychic monsters so I guess I don't know if that's new or not. I don't have a good way to find someone who was born on New Year's, and if I did they would have been born in the winter, and also if I did it here, they would speak Japanese, or maybe have learned a little English in school."

"I think I need to retire."

"I mean, you can go lie down on my bed if you want, it just doesn't have sheets on it and I don't know which box they're in because I forget the kanji for sheets," he sighs, pointing at a door.

"Thank you."

In she goes.  Does this room have a closet, actually?

Nope, this Tokyo shoebox apartment bedroom has a bed and a desk and a door and that's it.

....Okay, can she fit under the bed?

Yes, and in fact it will be a little easier than fitting on the bed since the bed has a couple boxes on it.

That's good, at least.

This whole situation is the most confusing thing that has ever happened to her and she needs to figure out how much danger she's in.  There are people, she knows, who would kidnap an autumn equinox, and drug and hurt them out of revenge.  Even though she's not grown up and hasn't done anything that was really bad instead of mischief.  In that case she's supposed to abandon all propriety and let herself cry and do her best to seem like a normal kid.  But...

The monster (which was a real monster, even though monsters aren't real, but the child here thinks they're real...) clearly got several people who she knows weren't her geminis.  So this probably wasn't a very targeted operation.  Unless someone drugged her to make her see that, even though it wasn't real, and it knocked her out, and they moved her, and then they had a way to wake her up very fast while she was standing up.

It's strange, if this was a kidnapping, that they put her with another child.  Maybe it's a test?  It doesn't really make sense as anything other than a test.  Maybe they want to see... she's not sure.  Whether she'll start acting bossy and superior to someone her own age?  Especially since he keeps saying she's wrong about basic facts...

But if the monster was real, then what does that mean.  (She really doesn't feel illucid - except for all of the things happening around her that don't make sense -)

...She got taken away to a place where monsters are real?  Which means that a lot of things could be different...  Like people not understanding astrology, and calling Latin something else.

She needs more information.  She gets out from under the bed, fixes her hair and clothes as best she can without a mirror (which is something she has a lot of practice at), and comes back out of the bedroom.

She's been able to hear her host's half of the conversation with Dungeon Data Science International. He has relayed the facts of the situation (she appeared in his apartment, reported having been attacked by a monster like so, has made the following weird factual errors and the following further questionable but not necessarily erroneous claims, also in case it matters his mother was kidnapped by a dungeon pretty recently herself, he is in Japan and called 119 about it, yes he would really like a report reward, it's not that he's normally in need of money but the recent mother disappearance has left him unsure how he's going to put together dinner tonight because she had her purse on her). They're just about wrapping up how he would like his report reward and how they can get ahold of him again if they find Kennedy's family or anything when she comes out. He waves.

She curtsies.

"I'm gonna take a picture of you," he tells her, "in case that helps them find where you came from and stuff." His camera flashes. He pokes his phone some more. "Do you know if you like Japanese food or do you think Japan is a city on the moon where they eat algae or what."

"People can't live on the moon," she asserts.  "But I haven't heard of it."

"Well at least you're right that people can't live on the moon. It's going to be like, rice and fish and stuff... I can bring you shopping with me. Are you hungry?"

"I was about to have lunch, when...  I was about to have lunch, before."

"...I should tell DDSI that in case it helps them with the time zone or something." Phone pokes.

When he seems done: "What is that?"

"What's what?"

"That object.  The technological one."

"It's my phone."

"........It doesn't look like the phones I know."

"...it's got a case on it?"

"But it has - it doesn't have buttons."

"...yeah, it's not that old, we had to get new ones for Japan."

"I think no one on the whole world has a phone that new.  That I know."

"...I guess I'll tell the DDSI person that too." Tap tap tap.

Can she see what's going on on his phone while he does this?

If she tries he turns it away from her. "That's rude."

"I apologize.  I didn't know."

"If you want to see what I'm saying about you to the DDSI person or how the picture came out or anything you have to ask first and wait for permission."

"I didn't know," she repeats.  If she's taking a test, this is definitely a part of it.  "I'm sorry."

[Picture of Kennedy curtsying]
She says she was about to have lunch, in case that helps with time zones.
She doesn't recognize my phone which is this year's iPhone. She expected all phones to have buttons.

She doesn't like the picture but she holds her tongue about it also being rude to take one without more warning.  ...She feels exactly as hungry as she did before, which is kind of but not very.  So maybe there's not a kidnapping, or at least one without magic.  Unless there's a way to feed people while they're asleep?

"What do you mean by time zones?"

"Well it's almost dinner time here but where my dad lives it's like one in the morning."

"How?"

"Because the world's round? So when the sun's on this side it's not on that side."

Okay, what would a normal kid do.  She doesn't know.  She - sits down on the floor, and says, "I find it really upsetting to keep being told wrong things are true while I'm disorientated."

He considers this statement. "I want to try to be nice to you but that is because I think you got your head messed with by a monster," he says eventually. "And I don't think it'd be being nice to you, to go along with things the monster did to you. And if you did not get your head messed with by a monster, and instead you only got teleported and you're just deciding to say all the stuff you say on purpose because you think lying is fun, then I don't think I really want you in my apartment at all, because that is a bad thing to do to someone who's trying to figure out how to get you back home and get you dinner and stuff and it will make it a lot harder for me to do that."

She wraps her arms around her knees.  "I'm not allowed to lie."

"And if you were lying it would be really weird to pick these lies! So I think probably your head got messed with. But you gotta remember, that's what I think. I don't know what things you expect me to say instead of the things I say, so I can't even just go along with what the monster made you think even if it'd make you feel better. I can just not correct you some of the time if it doesn't seem important like how I didn't say that disorientated isn't a word, but I definitely can't do that if you ask what time zones are!"

"Every adult I know has always said the Earth is flat.  If that's not true, then, everything about my whole life isn't true and I don't know anything about who I am or - that, that math is real, or science, or - anything.  - How do you say we stay on; is it monsters?"

"...I guess maybe you are from a cult," he says consideringly. "If the monster didn't do all of it... We stay on because of gravity that pulls us to the middle of the earth." He pokes his phone some more to introduce the hypothesis that she might be from a cult.

"I am not from a cult.  ...But I am from a country that's run by all the same person, and I'm an experiment, so - I don't think they would experiment on me by telling me wrong things about the world.  And you don't even think that astrology is real to have a bunch of the same people with..."

"I don't think that's how people who believe astrology think it works either but I guess I might not have heard of it? Anyway, monsters do lots of very bad things. But once somebody knows what dungeon had that kind of monster, and stuff, probably a psychic esper can fix you? If it's a monster problem and not a cult problem."

"What's an esper."

"I'm gonna say 'somebody who has superpowers' and you're gonna say 'nobody has superpowers', aren't you."

"Ummmmmm.  I don't think so."

"Well, an esper is somebody who has superpowers. They get them when they're almost or just barely a grownup and they go fight monsters and rescue people from dungeons. There's probably espers rescuing Ren right now. - that's my mom."

Probably now is not the time to say that she doesn't have a mom.  "Will she be okay?"

"Probably." He does sound a little nervous. "Most people who get kidnapped by dungeons are fine."

"That's good."

"Yeah. There's worse ones but the 119 guy might have... told me to come to the station and wait there or something, if it was going to be a long time or if she would have to go to the hospital after getting rescued. Probably. ...do you want to come grocery shopping or do you want to wait here and just have whatever I get."

"I think I am in sound enough mind to come grocery shopping with you but if I became wrong fast I would be upset to be in public."

It's 'of sound mind' but he was going to try not to correct her when it's not important. "Okay. Are you allergic to anything?"

"Ummmmm.  I think not for a while but maybe time is not what I think it is, right now."

"...you think you had an allergy you outgrew?" he says, not really hopeful that she meant this instead of some more insane thing.

"No..."

"........when you're allergic to things," he sighs, "what things are they?"

"I don't really know because I have always just had the right crystals to fend it off."

He taps into his phone a bit more. "I will try to get something that doesn't have too many ingredients in it," he says longsufferingly. "You're not a vegetarian or anything?

"Um, no."

"Okay. This probably won't take me all THAT long. Don't open our boxes or anything."

"Okay."

He puts his phone in his pocket. He takes a deep preparatory breath. He makes sure his notebook and pen are in his other pocket. He lets himself out of the apartment.

She goes back into the bedroom, puts her shoes neatly on the floor next to the bed, and carefully arranges the boxes so that she has a spot in the middle she can curl up in, surrounded and protected.  She thinks, a lot, about what could be happening, and can't think of anything useful that she didn't already, and occasionally sings quietly.

Her host is back fifteen minutes later. "I have fried chicken and rice balls and Kit Kats," he calls.

"I'm coming!"  It's a minute because she has to put her shoes back on and fix her hair and things.  She examines the food??

The food is: fried chicken, rice balls, and some mini candy bars with a picture of what looks like hydrox ice cream on the bag. "I don't know where the plates are. I do remember the kanji for plates but I don't see it anywhere," he says. "I'm not even completely sure she packed plates. So this is all stuff we can eat with our hands." He picks up a piece of chicken to demonstrate.

"Are the rice balls just rice, or do they have other things in them?"

"There's salmon in there and you're supposed to have it with the seaweed too but you can skip that if you might be allergic to seaweed."

"I don't think so."  She will nomf, daintily, a rice ball.

He has one too after his piece of chicken and then he returns to the chicken. "I think probably we should find sheets, and get them on the beds, and then you can have my bed I guess, in case Ren comes home in the middle of the night, she'd be alarmed to find you in her bed but not so much to find me in it."

Kennedy mentally stores this information about how parents work.  "Okay.  Thank you for getting the food; I like how it tastes."

"Oh good." When he's had enough chicken and onigiri he breaks open the Kit Kats.

She's eating pretty ponderously; it takes her a while to even try any chicken.  "What's your name?"

"Ha- uh - S- uh. If you are doing surname first like is normal in Japan, I'm Swan Masaharu."

"...So I should call you Master Swan?"

"That would be a really weird thing to do. People call me Haru mostly. I don't know yet how hard it will be to get Japanese people to do that because Haru isn't a Japanese name, it's just short for one, and I don't know quite how strange it will sound to them, but you're not Japanese."

"I will call you Haru if you want."

"Thanks." He considers the Kit Kats and unwraps a fourth one.

...Kennedy will try a bite of one also?  - WOW that's sweet.  She - sets the rest of it back down.  With some willpower.

"Do you not like Kit Kats or is it just this kind?"

"Umm.  I think I am not supposed to have things that have that much dessert in one bite.  So I don't get sick."

"Is that one of the things you're allergic to?"

"...No, I think this is true for everyone.  But maybe my adults care more about me getting sick than other children's adults."

"I might get a little sick if I ate the whole bag at once."

"Okay, well, you can do that if you want."

She tries a bite of chicken and finds it pretty greasy, but she'll at least finish the piece.  Maybe even have another later.

"After the sheets I should do some studying, I need to be better at Japanese than I am right now before school starts. If you're going to be bored we can unpack some books."

"I would like that.  ...I don't know if I will be able to sleep very soon, since it was lunchtime for me."

"I'm adjusting to the time zone too. Ren says the thing to do is just to try to get as close as you can to a normal local bedtime and lie there awake and bored till you fall asleep if you have to. I will probably go to bed in about..." He looks at the time on his phone. "Four or five hours, and then try to go to bed a bit earlier tomorrow."

"I suppose that will only feel.... seven or eight hours early..."

"You can sit up with a book if you want, it'll just slow you down on the adjustment." Shrug. He starts examining boxes and looking up kanji on his phone as he does so.

She picks through another rice ball and conspicuously doesn't look at his phone.

That's literally not conspicuous at all.

Eventually he finds the sheets. He gives her one (blue plaid) and says it's for his bed, and then goes to put a different one (pink and purple tie dye) on his mother's bed.

...She'll try!  Can she get the boxes off without dropping them, is the first question.

Maybe! There's one full of books and another one with clothes.

Okay.  She's going to go see if Haru wants help instead.

He is managing with some clambering about to get the sheet on his mom's bed, though judging by the thumping noises that preceded her entry he might have simply shoved the boxes that were on said bed to the floor.

She can help, as much as someone who has never actually put on a bedsheet before can.  (Which is a fair bit, as long as Haru's already identified the long side.)

He has identified the long side (or more specifically he has identified one of the short sides because Ren tie dyed it in such a way that one of those is much pinker than any other part of the sheet). They can get all the corners on and then he spreads out the matching ("matching") tie-dyed top sheet and gets the pillowcase onto a pillow. "There," he says.

"Would you please help me get the boxes on yours out of the way?"

"...sure," he says, and he goes back into his room and shoves the boxes in question onto the floor unceremoniously.

Strange.  Hopefully he then either helps her get the sheet on or leaves so he won't see her struggle with it?

Yeah he can help as long as he's there. There are again a matching topsheet and pillowcase. "Since it's the middle of summer you probably won't want much more of a blanket."

But then how will she feel safe with only that much on top of her.  "Okay."

He pries open the box of books. "These are my books, the ones I have in hard copy anyway. You can read them."

"Thank you very much."  What's here?

Dr. Dolittle, some Oz books, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Alice in Wonderland, A Little Princess, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, A Christmas Carol, Ender's Game, The Complete Robot, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and the first Harry Potter book but that's in Japanese.

"Which is your favorite?"

"I don't have a single favorite. But these ones are series so if you read them start at the beginning."

"Thank you.  ...Do you think if I stay up most of the night reading, your mother might see my light on and be as alarmed to see me in your room as if I were in her bed?"

He considers this. "I think I should put a note for her on the door... which means," he sighs, "I will have to find tape."

"What if you put it on the ground, instead?"

"She won't see it."

"Okay."

He resumes the process of looking at various box labels. Eventually he opens one and finds tape in it and writes a note on a page of his notebook, tears it out, and tapes it to the outside of his door. He writes the note in English, in spite of Ren's apparent preference for everything being in Japanese even when this is inconvenient, but then he seems all set to buckle down and study his Japanese flashcards and his copy of Japanese Harry Potter.

Kennedy settles in with A Little Princess and only bothers him for the next few hours to ask after the location of the bathroom.

Fortunately it has toilet paper in it.

That is indeed fortunate.

After another few hours she goes back for another try of the chicken.  It's worse cold but she's pretty hungry and she doesn't really want to have more interactions here beyond the necessary.

Haru has by then put himself to bed but the karaage is in the fridge waiting for her!

She remembers there being more of them, so even though she's not sure Haru didn't eat the rest, she does eventually check the fridge and tucks in on another two.

Her outfit is going to be so rumpled tomorrow if she sleeps in it, and she doesn't have any clothes to change into...

After really a lot of reading, she attempts to bed down for a while.  She doesn't really feel tired but she does feel tired of this.

Ren still isn't back by the time Haru gets up, leaves a note for Kennedy on the table that he's going out for breakfast, and ventures forth and back again with a couple of pastries and bento and a bottle of orange juice. If she's still asleep by then he will do his best not to wake her as he does another session of flashcards and picks his way through a bit more Harry Potter and the ingredients labels on all the food. If she's still asleep by eleven o'clock, though, he will start quietly doing some unpacking.

This wakes her up around noon.  ....Her clothes are indeed hopelessly wrinkled.  She exits the room anyway.

He's got a new shirt on, though the jeans could conceivably be the same ones. "Hello. Did you sleep okay?"

"It was okay, given the circumstance."

"Ren isn't back yet." He taps his foot. "I called Charlie. My dad. In case this takes long enough that I need to fly back to Canada. I don't know what would happen to you then. I haven't heard anything new from DDSI."

"Oh.  They speak - this language, in Canada?"

"And French too, but mostly English."

"What does French sound like?"

"...I don't know very much of it to begin with and I've been studying Japanese really hard. I know French words but I'm not sure about a whole sentence. ...hm." He pulls a nearly empty bag of peanuts from the backpack he brought on the airplane (navy blue) and reads the French copy to her.

"That's not another name for Barbliic, then."  She sighs.  "Should I start trying to learn Japanese?"

"If you like learning languages sure, but you might easily be matched up to a missing person and on a plane by the end of today," he shrugs. "And wherever you're missing from probably is not part of Japan."

"What are monsters like, here?"

"They're all different, in different dungeons. I have books about dungeons but not hard copy ones. There's ones with dragons, or dinosaurs, or giant bugs, or sea monsters, or evil teddy bears, or practically anything."

"Hmmmm.

"Can they make you remember a whole life with pretty much no monsters?"

"Your monster was definitely weird but mostly because it teleported you all the way here and it isn't with you still doing stuff, not because it messed with your head. I actually tried to ask the 119 guy if possibly Ren's dungeon was sending out monsters that look like little girls, in case you were one, but I think probably you are a human. Psychic monsters and psychic dungeons are really bad though. They can make people think or feel basically anything."

Pulling at her hair is a bad habit that she's not supposed to do, but this is really scary and she can probably make an exception.  ...But the fact that she should make an exception does mean that she should probably hide away where no one can see her.  But - "I guess if my whole life is fake all of the advice I remember for how to deal with something messing with my head is too."

"I think probably not absolutely everything you know is wrong because you can still talk and stuff. But if you are going to do anything drastic you could ask me first."

"I'm supposed to hide away where no one can see me, if I think I'm not clearheaded and I can.  But I don't really want to."

"Why are you supposed to do that if you don't want to?"

"Because later I will hate that anyone saw me."

"..........why, that's dumb."

"...Why do you think it's dumb?"

"Because being around in a place you decided to be anyway isn't somebody doing anything wrong worth hating them for. I'm just sitting here and you can go in my room if you want but if you don't want to that's not my fault."

"Hate that anyone saw me, not 'hate anyone who saw me'."

"Oh, I heard wrong, sorry. Well if you're going to hate it why don't you want to go hide, then."

"Ummmmm.  Umm.  If you're right about everything, then the adults who told me I would hate it aren't real, because the reason they would know that is because of astrology.  But if you're wrong then nothing is wrong with my head.  Or someone is hurting me on purpose and it wouldn't matter."

"Well, some people do believe in astrology," he sighs. "Do you know how you would have teleported here? If you weren't wrong about anything at all."

"Ummm.  I remember everyone always telling me that monsters weren't real - unless scientists make them, but those would really just be weird animals and not want to hurt me any more than regular animals would - but maybe one escaped from this world and started bringing people back here."

"Is there being other worlds a thing you knew about?"

"No..."

"It's not something I knew about either. So either there are new things neither of us knew about going on, or basically the thing I think is happening is the thing happening."

"Is there a way to get a superhero to try and fix me?"

"I'm not sure exactly how to do that. I would be able to figure it out at h- in Canada but I'm not sure how here. It's not really DDSI's job. But I bet it can happen, it'll just take a bit because I'm new here and still working on Japanese."

"I hope your mother comes home soon."

"Yeah. I hope so too. ...if you wanna learn Japanese I can get you started with the alphabets."

"Yes please."

He has by now opened a box with notebooks in it and finds a blank one for her. "Japanese has three alphabets, kind of, but none of them are alphabets with one letter per sound like how English has. Instead there's kana - hiragana and katakana, it's not really like capital and lowercase letters but it's more like that than it's like anything else - and each one of those is a syllable. Or N. Which you pronounce kind of longways like it's a syllable, nn. Kanji you can save for later." While he is explaining this he is writing out a hiragana chart, with English consonants for each column and vowels for each row. "There are only five vowels and they are always pronounced the same. A, e, i, o, u. But sometimes it matters how long you hold them out for. Like ie is 'house' and iie is 'no'. This chart is all the basic symbols. But if you want to write something with a G sound you start with the K column one, and then you add a little quote mark sort of thing, like this," he writes ひらがな above the chart and points at the が. "Same with making D out of T, and Z out of S. And also for some reason B out of H. If you do a degree symbol instead, like a tiny circle, that makes P out of H." The chart is almost full. "And there's no 'ti', instead it's 'chi', and there's no 'si', it's shi', and both of those are J if you do the quote mark, and there's no 'tu', it's 'tsu' and that should turn into dzu but I think it's basically just zu the same as if you do it to su. And there's no hu, it's fu. ...am I going too fast?"

"Ummmmm.  Not if you don't say more things now."  She starts copying the chart, with neat and very slow writing, flipping back and forth between the reference and her page.

"Iiit also matters which order and direction you write the lines in for some reason, and I... don't know if that changes if you're left handed."

"Oh."  She tears out her page, collects all the paper fuzzies from inside the spiral, and folds it into quarters before starting over.  "I can learn the right-handed order with my left hand?"

"I'll draw in the arrows and the little numbers for you." He does this, though sometimes he has to stop and think about it and write a character entire on the back of her torn-out scrap.

"Thank you."  Copy copy coppppyyyyy cooooooooooopy.

"Let me know when you are ready for more stuff." He goes back to his copy of Japanese Harry Potter.

She's there a while, and sometimes she messes up and has to very delicately erase a bit, and it's hard because the wire binding is on the left side of the paper, right where her hand wants to go, instead of the top.  And then even after all that, she doesn't feel like she really knows it, so she starts a third one.  At least for this one she can tear out her previous attempt for easier reference, although it doesn't have the arrows and numbers.  ...She supposes she could also copy the arrows and numbers onto it; she does that.

And once the new chart is neat and done, she goes to stand next to Haru with her hand raised.

"...what?"

"I'm ready for more information about Japanese."

"Oh, okay. So sometimes you have to make combination letters, like how in English T-H is 'th' and not 'tuh-huh'. And you do that like so -" He writes and says as he writes "cha, ちゃ", and then others in the same vein. "With the tiny ya making the chi into a cha. And you can get combinations like 'nyo' or whatever that way too -" He writes "にょ” accordingly. "A thing I did when I was at this stage was I would try to write down a sentence, like an English sentence I mean, with all the sounds turned into Japanese as much as possible. You can't do it perfect. Like everybody's going to pronounce my last name 'Su-wan', but they might say the 'u' part really really fast. But you can do it pretty okay and that's actually how a lot of Japanese loanwords are. Like 'orenji' for orange the color."

"....But a W is already just saying an 'oo' very quickly?"

"I don't really think so but I guess you could say it that way. But also words like - uh, 'words', for instance. You have to pick vowels to go in between stuff. So you wind up with wa-ru-zo, I'd spell that with a tsu with the dakuten, that's what the quote mark thing is called, just in case somebody would get what I meant there and put the d and the z properly where they go, but they might leave out the d sound, so if you really didn't want them to do that you could do wa-ru-do-zu."

"Is there a right way to choose vowels for this?  Or is it up to whimsy?"

"I don't really know how they pick it when it's ambiguous. I guess maybe it seems more obvious if you're Japanese. I mean like if you grew up here. I'm technically Japanese in that like my ancestors were from here. I can teach you more words but loan words are usually in katakana, that's the other alphabet, do you want that now or do you want to practice hiragana more first?"

"I will practice this."

He-but-with-a-degree i su.... chi? ri.  Pe i su ta ri.  Pastry.  Bo ku.  Book.  .....She doesn't think she can do 'philosophy' but she has thought of it and she will try anyway.  Fu do so fu... i.  Phooey.

She carries on like that for a while.

Ren comes in while they're breaking for bento lunches. "- 誰ですか?"

"Mama!" Haru gets up and - doesn't run over to her, but holds out his arms for a hug and gets her rushing to him to provide it. "This is Kennedy. Some kind of monster teleported her into the apartment while I was on the phone with 119. She doesn't know any Japanese yet so that will make going full immersion much harder."

"Hello, Ma'am."

"Oh, how about you just call me Swan-san, I'll have a classful of kiddos doing that soon and may as well get practice with it - have you been all right, Haru -"

"Well I didn't have any money since you had your purse, but Dungeon Data Science International gave me some for the report on Kennedy so I was able to get food from the konbini. Uh her monster messed with her head, so she is confused about a lot of things. Are you okay?"

"Apart from being worried sick about you I have been perfectly fine. The dungeon was an orchard and I was buried up to my neck in a peach, like a worm, but I'm not a bit hurt and they got me hosed down before I came home. I'd have called but I'm going to need a new phone. Peach juice."

Kimberly is listening somewhat raptly and wide-eyed to this.

"I have been sleeping in your bed since if you came in at night I thought that wouldn't scare you and putting Kennedy there would, and she has been in my bed, but I don't know what to do now. I don't know how to talk to social services in Japanese, I'm not good enough at it for that," Haru tells Ren. "She remembers stuff about where she came from but it doesn't make any sense. Like it's a continent that doesn't exist."

"Haru said that a superhero may be able to fix me and I would really like that to happen as soon as it can."

"Ye-e-es, hm. I think... I'll call my boss for help, he speaks excellent English if I trip over some words and must know anything about social services for children, because he runs a school. Oh, are you learning some Japanese now, though, dear?"

"I am trying, Ms. Swanson."

"- Ms. is an English way to be polite, and putting -san at the end of a name is the Japanese way. You don't do both. Just Swan-san."

"...Okay, Swan-san."

"There you go, well done. Anything to cover before I get on the phone, Haru?"

"I sent Kennedy's picture and stuff to DDSI but it's not really their department and I have not heard back."

"All right. I'll have to borrow your phone." She accepts it when he hands it over and dials.

"Thank you very much, M - mmmm.  Umm.  Swan-san."

Ren gives her a smile and a thumbs up and then she's talking to some guy in Japanese.

Kennedy is so capable of being so quiet.  She sits with her hands folded on her lap.

Haru goes back to eating his bento and trying to read Harry Potter.

....Okay, it's probably sufficiently polite for her to also eat.  She will do this.

It's got inarizushi and pickled vegetables and a hardboiled egg (peeled and cut in half) and grilled fish and edamame in there.

These are all quite acceptable to her.  (She eats the pickled vegetables second-to-last and much slower than everything else.  The egg she saves for last.)

Eventually Ren gets off the phone. "They're going to find you a social worker who speaks English and is used to strange dungeon-related situations," she says. "But it doesn't seem very likely, if you remember being from a continent we don't have on Earth, that we'll be able to get you home to wherever you belong. Do you have an idea of what you would like to do with yourself, Kennedy?"

"Umm.  I would like to remember who I am?"

"Yes, I'm sure a psychic esper will do their best, but if it doesn't work?"

"Um!  I guess if it doesn't I will keep thinking I am right about where I'm from, and, umm...."  She's kind of wibbly.

"- you don't have to come up with an answer right now, dear, but the social worker might ask. Espers are very busy and it may take a while to find one who can give it a go."

"Yes, - Swan-san.  Do you think if I'm from somewhere else, I may ever be able to go back?"

"Well... more espers awaken all the time, and people figure out new things about how to use the magical things they harvest from dungeons all the time too. Right now, we don't know how to go to any other worlds, though."

"Then I don't really know what I could want to do, Swan-san."

"Well, do you want to learn Japanese and live in Japan, or do you want to try to live somewhere where English is spoken, for instance."

"I have acceptable marks in my foreign language study.  ...I remember."

"Does that mean you would be all right learning Japanese?"

"Ummmm.  Yes."

"That's good to know. I see you've made a great start there, I wasn't gone very long and you've got lots of practice already."

"Thank you."

"- you know, I bet that if Haru were suddenly teleported somewhere he wouldn't want any hugs from strangers, and I bet he didn't offer you any for just that reason, but just in case you're not much like him that way, would you like a hug?"

"- Yes, please."

Ren hugs her. She is good at hugs in a kindergarten teacher way.

There is now a fairly clingy eight year old on her!  For perhaps the foreseeable future!

That is so understandable and she timed this to allow for that!

She sniffles, and startles a bit before carefully releasing Ren from the hug.  "Excuse me."

And she makes for the bathroom.

Also so reasonable.

She emerges twenty minutes later, looking uncryingly pristine but shuffling more than walking.  Probably the two of them have started doing something else and she needs to evaluate it.

Ren is unpacking. Haru is studying Japanese but drops it as soon as she comes out to stumble into the bathroom himself (he crashes a bit into the doorframe but calls "大丈夫" to his mother before continuing into the bathroom).

Kennedy supposes she should continue studying Japanese as well.  After a pause, she stops shuffling and walks over there normally.

"Do you want to try on some of Haru's clothes, dear, you must've been in those things since last night but I don't know how you feel about the way he dresses."

"Ummmmmm.  I don't know.  I shouldn't wear things like that but I also shouldn't keep wearing dirty clothes...  So I don't know."

"...you shouldn't wear things like that? Why not?"

"They aren't ladylike, Swan-san."

"Well, I guess not, but they're certainly closer to your size than anything of mine, and we've got a bit of a tight budget with the move so I'm not sure I can buy you something new."

She looks disproportionately horrified.

"If these are the clothes which are here, I will have to wear them at some point.  So I shouldn't wear dirty clothes if the other choice is wearing them forever."

"- the social worker might have something, I just don't know for sure. We could try turning one of my scarves into a wrap skirt, would you like that better than wearing jeans?"

"Ummm.  If it was good enough I would like that better but I would have to see more to know if it could be good enough."

"You can come have a look at my scarves, then, I need to unpack them anyway."

Ren is susceptible to street vendors distributing anything that can pass for silk or linen to amateur inspection and has colors on it; she's got a variety.

These ones look acceptably sized and heavy enough for modesty, and of them.... she thinks this one is the least - loud.  The one that has a lot of shades of green in blotches but at least is only greens.

Ren will go ahead and render it into a wrap skirt for her.

And she will take one of Haru's white T-shirts (and tuck it in, and then pull it back out the flattering amount).  (...As flattering as she can manage under these circumstances.)

Hopefully she will also accept tiny boxer briefs (they are, mercifully, in solid colors; Haru doesn't go in for putting trains or Pokémon on his undewear).

She doesn't complain and in fact thanks the Swans for them.  But it does look like she might be about to cry again.

Will another hug help with that?

No, it makes her meet the threshold of starting to actually cry.  But she doesn't let go right away, this time.

"This is such a lot to be dealing with and then on top of everything you didn't even have a change of clothes, you poor thing."

"I need some tissues."

"Of course, dear." They have those unpacked now.

Then she will not get crying byproducts (cryproducts) on Ren.

"I - I, want to be good - the way my adults said to be - but maybe they aren't even real or maybe I can never see them again -"

"What did they want you to do, sweetheart?"

"I have to be neat and a lady, and be as good as I can at everything, so I'm not disappointed in myself when I'm adult, and make sure that autumn equinoxes can turn out right even when they're delayed incubated, and I - I'm being really bad at all of those."

"...autumn equinoxes?"

"She remembers astrology being important," Haru says.

She nods into Ren's arm.  "We are all the same person on the inside except for how things like being a man or a woman or growing up in different families changes it."

"People who are - born on? - the equinox are?"

"Yes.  ....And, and everyone else, for their birthday.  Except mostly the solquinoxes."  Sniffle.  "Everyone else is evener."

"What do you mean evener?" says Haru.

"More like everyone else than like each other than solquinoxes are."

"...I don't get it."

"What I'm hearing is that you were expected to grow up to be a certain way, and whether they expected that because of astrology or because of how they were choosing to raise you it's still a lot to put on a little girl."

That sets her off again.  "I was doing really well at it but now it's all gone -"

"Nobody could possibly expect you to do exactly what was planned for you when you've been teleported to a strange place!"

"But I don't know how to do anything else..."

"You can't be much older than Haru. You've got years and years to figure out what you want to do."

She needs to wipe her face some more.  "I'm eight."

"That's his age too. He'll be nine in just a couple of months."

"It's longer, for me."

"What time of year do you remember it being again?"

"It was springtime.  Tetrinary twoct-seven."

"Do you wanna learn Earth dates in English first or just start there in Japanese?"

"Why do you ask?  It's different?"

"Yeah. There isn't a month called Tetrinary and there isn't a day called tooked-seven."

"Oh."  Sniffle.  "What base do people use here?"

"Base ten mostly, but there are twenty four hours in a day and sixty minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute."

"Oh."

"So there are kanji, for the numbers, but everybody even in Japan knows the Arabic numerals so you can just use those. And then there's the twelve months and they all just translate to one-month, two-month, etcetera, it's really regular, and the days are less regular than that..."

...She can compose herself well enough to tear herself away from Ren and start writing things down, if that seems like the thing to do.

It's up to her!

As much as everything is awful and she doesn't know how to handle it.... she does know how to handle lessons.  And she's quite good at them, by her own standards.  So - yes, she will try to learn about this.

....Except it turns out to be a poor distraction.  She accepts the information and writes it down, as perfectly as she can, but some of it makes her tip her head down so that her hair curtains off her face, and then she keeps having to take tissue breaks so she very definitely won't get any tears on the notebook.

Neither Haru nor Ren comment on this phenomenon at all.

That's polite of them.  The time here is not neat and it doesn't make sense and she thinks these hours must be really short but she doesn't know how long an hour is supposed to be without a clock tower ringing every twoct minutes and she wants to go home.  But if she can't do that she will have to learn Japanese.  Swan-san seems probably like the best adult she's likely to find here, so she can't just go somewhere where they speak Latin whatever the word Haru keeps saying is that she can't remember.

He will helpfully repeat it occasionally as he teaches her how to tell time in Japanese by comparing what it is they do in Japanese to what they do in English (in Japan the months are just numbered but in English they have names, for example).

"In Latin they have names but the names are numberly," she mumbles.

"Like 'Tetrinary'? We have some of those but they moved... for history reasons I forget... so like October is tenth."

"Something to do with Ancient Rome, if I remember right."

"We only have eight so there's October but then it goes back to Unuary.  I guess probably because of Rome."

"January February March April May June July August September October November December. In Japanese and English the days of the week have names and some of them kind of match but some of them don't." He will teach her the days of the week. The Japanese ones all end in "-youbi".

Nothing about this is tidy or good.  "Onesday Twosday Threesday Foursday Fivesday Xesday Vensday Octsday."

Haru makes a face. "I guess that would not be too hard to learn if I were trying to live where you remember being from but I am not."

Well, she will dutifully keep copying out this arbitrary and nonsensical set until she kind of understands it.

They tried not to pack too much stuff, because shipping across the Pacific Ocean is fairly expensive, and Ren has the place mostly unpacked by dinnertime. But not by time-to-make-dinner-time, so they're going out for kaitenzushi unless Kennedy would like to register an objection.

"Ummmm - then people will see me?"

"...yes, there will be people out there."

"...I don't know if it is okay for people to see me wearing a scarf as a skirt.  More people."

"Why wouldn't that be okay?"

"It's not a real skirt..."  But she doesn't sound sure.

"No one will be able to tell you aren't doing it just like that as a fashion statement," Ren assures her. "People make all kinds of fashion statements in this part of Tokyo."

"Ummmmmm -"  But she wouldn't make this fashion statement; it says wrong things about her - and even if that weren't true she doesn't have any clean tights - but -  "If you think it will really be okay?"

"If you really don't want to, we can get something from the konbini again."

"I don't know.  I don't have anything to wear in my shoes."

"I have socks."

"...Can I see them?"

"No, they're invisible," he says, but he gets up and presents her with a pair of white crew socks.

"I spoke inexactly."  They're horrible.  "What if I don't know how not to cry, again?"

"About my socks?"

"It's okay to cry, but if you don't want to go out to dinner while you're still feeling fragile we can get something from the konbini, and that's fine."

"Not about the socks.  In the restaurant...  Do even people cry in restaurants?"

"Do even p- oh. It's not usual, no, but I wouldn't expect it to cause a scene if you were quiet about it."

"Can we bring tissues?"

"Yes." Ren collects a few out of the box and folds them up into her purse.

"...........Okay."

And she will put on the socks and then her shoes even though they don't match at all.

And now they can go get kaitenzushi?

Yes.

Ren is playing a little fast and loose with the budget and expects herself and Haru to be eating rice for breakfast and cafeteria food for lunch as soon as school starts up, but kaitenzushi in the heart of Tokyo is not very expensive, especially not per calorie which is what matters when you're feeding kids. Haru and Kennedy can kidnap as many sushis as they want.

He's partial to salmon. He gives something that's too spicy to his mom after he eats the first piece of a plate of it.

Kennedy sips more water when eating spicy things but doesn't otherwise react.  She has a fair few of them and stays pretty quiet throughout the meal.

And when they're all fed they can walk back home. Haru holds Ren's hand and sometimes pulls on her arm kind of hard when he trips but never actually hits the ground with her helping.

Is there also a hand for her to hold?

If she would like one sure! Ren has 2 hands.

She would like to very much, yes.

Ren will hold her hand all the way home ("home"), then, and she will set up for Kennedy to have Haru's bed while Haru joins her in her own.

Haru shoves one yet-unopened box marked ノート from his room into Ren's when she decides on this arrangement.

".....Swan-san, it really does not at all seem time for bed yet?"

"Oh, we can stay up a bit longer, I just want to make sure we all know where we're sleeping when we sleep. I don't have a spare toothbrush for you, so that'll be the konbini... anything else we need so we don't need to make too many trips?"

For some reason this makes her look like she might cry again.  "I don't know, Swan-san."

"Well, the konbini's open around the clock, so it's all right if we don't think of everything till the last minute. The social worker should be here tomorrow and I asked if they could bring some more ladylike clothes for you but I don't know if they'll do that."

"What is a social worker?"  She doesn't quite put the accent on the right syllable.

"Someone who helps people whose usual ways of getting what they need aren't working right."

"Oh."  She pulls on her hair, a little.  "I think maybe your day doesn't have enough hours for me.  But - I haven't learned how to feel time yet, so I - I don't know how different it is."

"...how many hours do you think a day should have?"

"Ummmmmmm.  Four.... thirty-sss - um.  Thirty-two."  Her face scrunches up.  "Thirty-two."

"Do the hours seem about right so far?"

"I haven't learned how to feel time," she despairs.

"Wouldn't you notice, if somebody said it was an hour but it was only a minute?"

"....It is not that big a difference," she admits.

"I guess it'd be more like... an hour feeling like an hour and a half."

"I don't think I would be able to tell that one."

"...well, there's no school for you to worry about being awake for. If you don't feel tired till well after Haru and I do, you can just stay up, and that's fine. The social worker may well need you to be awake but I don't know exactly when."

"Okay..."

Ren makes a run to the konbini for a toothbrush and similar sundries and makes sure Kennedy has everything she needs to put herself to bed before she and Haru themselves go to bed. She's got Japanese to study but there's not a whole lot else to do.

And because of this, and the dark, and that she didn't get enough sleep last night, and because things have been very, very stressful recently - she does get in a two-hour nap around midnight.

She tries to stay in bed for a while after that; maybe she was wrong about the hours.

But no, she's really not sleepy.  So she gets up and, yes, practices Japanese for a while, and finishes A Little Princess, and, she knows how to take a shower by herself, at least at home; she figures out the Swans' and does that, and gets dressed again in her terrible outfit.  She draws little figures on the notebook paper, and tears them out very carefully, and draws outfits for them, and plays paper dolls.  She finds some squished-up bits of packing tape that didn't make it to the trash and pretends those are dolls, too.

She's still wide awake when the Swans get up.

Yawn. "Good morning, Kennedy." Ren put some rice in the cooker last night, after the konbini trip, and has a jar of furikake to put on it. That is breakfast for everyone.

"Good morning, Swan-san."  Well, it's dinner for Kennedy but she likes it well enough.

And they can have a quiet morning of breaking down boxes and practicing Japanese - Haru will talk to his mother in Japanese, sometimes, and then explain to Kennedy what he said and how it breaks down - before the social worker arrives at around ten a.m.

The social worker is an older lady dressed in an admirably ladylike style. She speaks English, though it is quite accented. "Hello, Kennedy."

"Hello, ma'am."  Curtsy.

"My name is Takuma Kikyo and I am a social worker with a specialty in dungeon related problems. Can you tell me about yours?"

"Umm.  ........I remember a whole life that doesn't work with how people say things work here."

Takuma Kikyo nods invitingly.

"Like how I think we're speaking Latin, and a day has thirty-two hours but I call it fourct because we use octal for time and decimal for some other things, and I tried to sleep kind of somewhat earlier than yesterday but it really didn't work except I took a nap, so I think it's true to me in, umm, in my body instead of just in my mind, and all the other times are different too, and astrology is important because everyone born on the same day is geminis of each other and I was being raised in a country of mine to see if I would turn out a normal autumn equinox even though they waited a long time, until both of my parents were dead, to incubate me in a machine.  Ummm, and the phones I know have buttons and things like that."

Takuma-san has to look up "octal" (and "gemini", though that helps less). "And you appeared right here in Swan-tachi's apartment?"

"Tachi is sooooort of like a plural but it mostly just means 'and all the others you would expect from this being the example member of the group'," Haru volunteers.

"- he's right, maybe it's less common a loanword than I thought."

"I had never learned any Japanese before I came here.  ....Before I appeared here in this apartment."

"Most people I speak to have at least seen some Japanese television before. I apologize," says Takuma-san. "But you appeared here and Swan-san has been taking care of you?"