It's night, and they've gone for a walk, listening to some music a friend recommended. It's clever, it exploits synesthesia to look like strobelights, or at least associate. And it does that with a physical instrument, somehow, the friend likes those — might be sped up, but the composer's recorded their feeling of playing it, as a supplement, so it's not that likely, speeding up those is notable differently… (Clematis doesn't have that supplement on, though, right now; those hurt their own proprioception some, too much to navigate anything.) And it harmonises nicely with-

A flash of external blue in front of them. Or — something, they're not paying enough attention to… They walk right through.

They stop in their tracks. A dream, probably. It's — most unusual things in their life have been that, really. Still, they catch that feeling, linger on it, something new, something finally new, really, that's more important if it'll quietly fall away the next morning… They look out, trying to pay attention to what the place is like, remember it. (They've reached, internally, to turn the music off, almost without thinking.)

It's warm and dry. It's night. The moon seems very large, as the shimmering blue disperses in writhing trails of shimmering sparks.

She's on a high rock, way high up in the air as if on the eighth or tenth floor of a building and overlooking a big, gently sloping plain.

The moon is full and bright, bathing the landscape in a cool light. Fields of grasses. with the occasional tree sticking out. Off in the distance, a series of hills rising to mountain near the horizon. In another direction, a slope down towards what might be an ocean. In a third direction, a bird's eye view of a town with walls and streets of stone, houses of wood and clay tiles, cultivated fields all around. She can see light spilling from windows and a few carried lanterns. She can see humans, and also some figures that do not appear quite human. Humanoid, at least. A few are looking towards her perch.

The thing with dreams, though, is that you have to keep your thoughtstream in a careful holding pattern, if you want to keep remembering them. Take their context on faith, don't stare at it in comparison with your waking life, noticing that it doesn't make any sense at all, really. Take their logic on faith.

If it were a dream, they'd climb down and then walk out towards the ocean. They've never seen those before in non-virtual — 'ocean' in the sense of 'enormous body of water', not the newer meaning of 'hole of similar shape in a planet's surface', like the one they live in. And so, holding this flow-state gently, they do start to look for a path down. (There's a nagging sense that something's not quite right with this reasoning, but that's precisely the kind of thing you'd ignore, for this.)

(The humanoid-not-human people their eyes absently glide over; those happen, they almost-think on a nonverbal level, even if they're not just transhumanists, it's a bit of a cosmological mystery but — those happen, Clematis knows.)

There's a bright red-and-white braided rope looped around a very sturdy looking if kind of crude and dented metal piton drilled into the rock over there. That seems to be the only descent method available. Looking down, there are handholds and more hard points carved into the rock on the way down. It's a pretty long way down, though.

One of the humanoids takes off with their wings from the center of town and starts ascending, flying towards the rock.

Huh. They could probably not pull it off, then, the climb down — not at night, not unskilled. They'd try it a bit anyway, if it weren't this high up.

— oh, someone's flying towards them. I wonder why… Oh no, did I do something wrong by being here? No, wait, that doesn't check out, they're here by accident, they'd just explain things if-

No, wait, it really doesn't make sense. Breathe. Now that they do stare at the accident, it doesn't fade away into dream-logic, it's just-

Nothing in particular. At first they were home, and then suddenly somewhere else. A spacetime rift? But those happen so rarely, they'd usually say 'only in stories'. Maybe something else, though…

If the winged person approaches, they'll find Clematis in slightly confused wonderment.

"Hello!" They call out in Notal as they fly past, doing a jaunty wave with one wing-arm, which turns into a roll.

Then they glide down a bit, do a long circle, and come in for a careful landing on top of the part of the peak that does not contain a possible Otherworlder. Flap flap flap flap, and talon-feet cling to the rock. They're breathing hard and wearing low-tech leather and cotton clothes and a braided cord necklace with a metal crescent moon pendant. They have a bird-like head except for big expressive eyes, and bright blue feathers. They wave again.

"Hello!" they wave back. They think that's a greeting, probably. It's interesting (interesting, look at that again), this language is not in any of their databases, so what they can reach for is the contextual learning algorithm, except it hasn't had much material yet…

And, try to figure out if their interlocutor's body language is readable, if any of the social scripts Clematis knows fit; or, closer to, how they'd know if not.

The social script this bird person seems to be playing is 'a public servant of some kind trying to help'. The bird person watches her posture for obvious injuries or problems, and concludes that she's not in urgent need of help, or desperately terrified, and relaxes.

"I suppose you do not understand me... Unless I'm wrong? No? Okay. We had better get you down from here. But I'm not sure how to explain..."

He starts pulling out braided rope from a slim backpack. It looks a little crude; Thick, and slightly hairy.

"Sorry!" These ones are in Flans, what they most of the time spoke at home. "Give me some minutes…" They think they'll be able to recognise how person is marked, in a few sentences. And some exclamations, maybe.

Clematis peers curiously at the rope, too. They've only seen something like that once, here, the red one to climb down (and that they'd assumed from some old paintings they'd caught a glimpse of, never in life). Still, why a second rope, what would that protocol look like? And they're quietly correcting themselves — not assume every difference on an alien world is chased back to one thing, not assume every rope is for climbing just because they aren't at home. It might be anything (anything…), because alien! This isn't how the principle of simplicity works! Like in that one story…

"Haha, yeah, I don't actually have anything for translation. Is that... Steppe Nomad tongue? Or otherworlder tongue?"

Also joining the rope are some straps, clips, a few metal carabiners and a pulley. Rough iron work and wood.

"Hmm. Well. I can't carry a whole other person by myself, but I can get you down with these!"

The bird person starts wrapping them around himself, narrating the process. The whole arrangement, it becomes clear, is a sort of harness thing, with the rope coming off the upper back.

Okay, that's how questions seem to work… at least assuming that's a verb, it feels verb-like in an opaque way. At some point they reach to participate, if they're let, maybe clip a clip in an obvious place, and mirror with something like "[Here/so/that]?" Clematis picks basically at random, one of the words that you'd punctuate bits of instruction with, the ones they've heard already.

In short order the bird person is nicely harnessed. They spin and tug at the straps and ropes to show how secure everything is.

"...Hmm."

He points down. The hands at the ends of the wings look a bit odd to most human sensibilities.

"This, rock."

Point at the town. "That. Town."

Themselves. "This, me. Kuvi."

And at her. "That, you. Hm?"

(It would never have occurred to Clematis to ask systematically for names of things through pointing at them. They don't have a script for that; even the language enthusiast characters usually have corpora, if not freeform native speech to listen to, and if you have those, why bother? This is not a principled conscious objection, though, they would throw it out if they noticed.)

"Clematis." A pause, to separate out their best guess. "Or — person? Human? Planeter? Not quite sure which…"

"Clematis, I think. We're going to be all good. No rush."

Kuvi starts undoing the harness on themselves, unsure what else to say at the moment.

Neither are they sure. Kuvi seems occupied, so they quietly retreat back a step, but not so much they're not still visibly waiting… And take the chance to listen around them, too, they hadn't noticed much before.

It's pretty quiet right now. The wind blows over the rock and the plants down below, making a faint whistling and rustling. Kuvi is making a bit of noise as they undo the harness. Bells or chimes of some kind sound out from below, somewhere. She faintly hears a dog bark a few times.

And now the harness is off, and Kuvi tries to hand it over to her.

Clematis takes it, gently, and starts to figure out how to put it on themself, and what will be next after that in the process.

In half a minute, once they hit a part they forgot in the demonstration, they reply, "How to this?" (They don't verbalise the 'this' right, borrow that part from Flans instead too.)

Kuvi has meanwhile gotten out another block of metal and threaded one end of the rope through it, then done something to attach it to the hard point/piton, too. And then the whole thing attaches to another belt/partial harness, which they are putting on now. So it takes a moment for them to look and see what she's stuck on.

"Ah- Under here, and through this loop."

He will reach out and guide the rope, not really hesitating that this means incidental contact over her hip.

"Like that. And then pull it through and it goes over there."

"Ah! Thanks." (This one's — in Flans, technically, but it's more of an interjection sound, expressing the meaning through pure prosody.)

And, in a few minutes, they're done. Their hands are maybe burning a little, unfamiliar, but that's fine.

Kuvi connects them together via ropes and then attempts to show how the belaying device works. Look, no matter how hard you tug this one that goes to her, it doesn't budge unless he lets it from this side.

"So, you can climb down safely like this. We should figure out voice signals though... So I know when to give you more rope and when to tighten up."

...Gestures are really insufficient to explain complicated concepts. Probably only a word or two made sense to the foreigner, there. Blech.

"Mhm. What are —" subtle intonation change that would have marked a quote, at home, "— voice signals?"

"Hmm."

Kuvi steps back and then does a little theater bit, using puppet-hands that flap to indicate which 'person' is speaking.

"Hello!" says left.

"Hello!" says right.

"Rappel!" says right.

"Ready!" says left.

And then right hand 'climbs down' a few inches, his hand fluttering.

"Rappel!" says right.

"Wait!" says left, and right 'freezes'.

"Okay!" says left.

"Rappel!" says right.

"Ready!" says left.

And another few inches down.

Then Kuvi awkwardly shrugs.

"I hope that makes sense..."

"It does, yeah." This seems important to get right. They've never done geotherm or been space crew, but this seems like the same reference class, collaboration in a high-stakes environment with no one else around in some direction… And it'd probably be worse, without air shields, at least caving you can only be stuck. Still, maybe Kuvi has quick teammates with wings like theirs or likewise… Anyway. "So, I 'Rappel!' and you 'Ready!' and get down more rope? And if not, you 'Wait!' and I stop, until you 'Okay!'. Is this right? Safely?"

Slow, thoughtful nodding.

"...I think that's right. We can figure out how to talk more in the morning. But this is safe. I rappel many people."

"Right. Yeah. …In the morning I'll be done with it, probably." (Depending on what 'morning' is, but probably the next day? Still more common to keep time this way than not, human sleep cycles are skewed towards nights near-everywhere they know.) And they get ready to follow Kuvi's instructions.

At any rate, they can get her down off the rock without much fuss, and then pack the climbing gear all up again.

Kuvi then shows her to a little Japanese-style shrine near the base of the rock. There are nine chest-high pedestals in a nice little garden, with offering bowls, and a few small buildings, and a few wooden sort of-windchimes, and a well, and a stone perimeter wall, and two people (both humans, a man and a woman) who seem curious but are playing the social script respectfully-quiet-in-important-place right now.

And a guest room that is pantomimed to be hers. "You can sleep here. Or if you're not tired... I don't know. I'm tired."

"I'm not, much." It hasn't been long for them today, it's been years since they had anything effortful on in the morning, and Kuvi probably has something else they do all day besides help randomly dropped arrivals, unlikely they've been waiting on call for this all day. Unless it's somehow common to specifically here… And Clematis wants- they got a little used to this place while they were climbing down. Felt some of the wind, the smell of the grasses, if it was them. So, now they're noticing people properly, their own standpoint in the world.

And they're so glad to be the kind of thing people are curious about. It's a kind of cooperation, reciprocal, that allows people to become whatever, or did at home — Uncanny 102: notice others' weirdnesses and appreciate them, reinforcing any sign of them getting out of the narrow default pathway. They realise there's much more of a gap here, a whole other world to them; you don't have to curate difference painstakingly, just linger in whatever is already there. Bring it together with what they know, even, try to build one framework to understand both. That's not really a different ideal, though, a world that has — so much more than they had the feeling of expecting to hear about —

They stare into the distance back in the vague direction of the two curious people. Reply to Kuvi. "I could stay here for some time, maybe?"

"You seem to be picking up things quickly. Sorry for the trouble... You want to talk to Kalisha and Clove?" Shrug. "Sure, if they're willing. They have work to do in the morning just like me."

If she goes over to the two strangers, they'll both give shallow bows. On closer inspection, their robes carry some of the same design aesthetics as Kuvi's, but less ornamented. Probably a rank or status marker.

"I'm Kalisha, and that is Clove," the woman says. "Hello, and welcome to the shrine. You do not know much Notal?" She is trying to speak slowly and clearly. And she mimes the next two questions. "Do you want to go in there and sit? And drink tea?"

That's interesting about the robes… It actually reminds them of amateur worldbuilding at first — when people imagine a different place's clothing as more homogenous by accident, because enough detail and difference is much harder to construct than a rule-thing. They do consider that it's on purpose, though, after a moment, maybe a uniform of some grouping.

"I'm Clematis." They nod, try to signal that they're ready to follow wherever. "Hello… Yeah, if you're willing. I don't want to wait[en] you from sleep," that's a Flans causative, they hope it'll make sense in context, "it's just… Here! I'm new here, and… What are you like, your everything? What part of this here is a 'shrine'… what is a shrine… All new for me. And it's good for tongue, to talk." (That's the word for 'language' they've heard, unaware of any subtle constraints it might have on use, if there is any.)

Clove says, "You're new here! New people being here is exciting. You know things." He taps his temple at 'know'.

Kalisha gestures everyone towards the side building. The interior of it looks like it has some kind of formal purpose in addition to containing a mini-kitchen and a table with four chairs, but what exactly is not immediately clear. There are two... What might be worktables? Or some kind of ritual space or altar? Currently bare and tidy.

Clove gets a slate and piece of chalk from a cabinet, and starts drawing... A map, maybe? It's all rather squiggly and vague, for the most part. He also draws a sketch of a solar system. "Do you recognize-? Yes, you know what this is okay. This is Ragni," he indicates the star. "And these, planets. Emisstatus," a tiny planet, "Tirra," drawn with a moon and vague continents, "Noblius, Ember," both small, "The Giant," a gas giant, "Kalimar, Wretch, and Glisten." Three small ones. "We are here, on Tirra." Tap tap.

And then over to the vague continent-sketch, he taps part of it. "We are here, in Chelarn and near the great Noten." He circles a fairly large area for Noten, and indicates a particular spot near the equator for Chelarn.

Meanwhile, Kalisha goes over to the stone-brick stove and opens the front grate, takes a deep breath, claps her arms together, and showers a dusting of sullenly glowing embers from her hands into it. Then she picks up an iron pot. "I will boil water for tea."

Clematis has quieted down their voice a little, by now. There's somehow an atmosphere for it, in this less public, more functional space, as it looks to them. "That's many planets, mine has less. Is there anyone on the others? And the…" they point at the star, "what is its word? And, Noten — Notal is of there? What else do people talk in?"

"Noten is... Here." A mid latitude big curving coast. "And here and here." A couple islands, a couple other patches of coast, including the one they tapped for Chelarn.

"Notal is the tongue of Noten. What about Ragni? Do you mean 'star', for things like Ragni? Nobody on the other planets... Probably? Uh."

Pockets pockets. Here is a six sided die, he rolls it. "Probably is- one two three four five, yes. Six, no. I think I forgot a question."

"Oh, that's [interesting], with the [cube]"… they gesture at it. "And star, yeah. But also-" Oh no I made a mistake- no, no, that's all right in a new place, no one is depending on me here… "Sorry, I think I forgot a yours, that it's Ragni. Mine was, what are other tongues on this planet like? On my world there's many different ones, but there's translation, so I know almost none, didn't have figure out."

"There's...? Hmm. I think I'm confused. Tongues, or actually, 'languages'... Notal, Atsosi, Khangi...? Notal and Atsosi are the... Biggest." Expansive hand gesture. "All persons speak Notal or Atsosi... Shemak and Kigo sometimes are spoken around here, and... And Ancient Tirran? You read it, you don't speak it, and only uh... People who learn about things know Ancient Tirran. Oh, there's species- Some people can say things like-" He attempts to imitate various click and purr type noises. "Like that, and they talk that way. Dialects."

"The water people speak Merrish," Kalisha adds, having returned with a bucket of water.

"Thanks." They nod, look over at what Kalisha's doing, quietly sit down now that they've done some leaning over Clove's map, enough for now. "Didn't have… Ah! Didn't have to figure out each language, translation does that for me, if it knows it. Some people point attention at how words feel anyway. Not me, though, except now, I had so many other things to do this at… Water people?" Any species they've heard of, they wonder… The cosmos is big, but there's humans here, so some nearness.

"The water people live in water. Some of them are shaped like us but also like fishes... Like how honored Kuvi is like a bird. Some are made of soft jelly or have a hard shell, like crabs. Most of the kinds of people are like humans but also like a different animal. They say the humans looked at all the animals and were fascinated and made themselves like the animals with ancient Tirran magic we no longer know."

"What about the story of Tamamo?"

Shrug. "They also say that the Light Gods made all peoples, humans and mer and fastwings and all the rest, giving them mind and soul and tools as they were shaped from the natural world and loved. They say many things."

"Ah! Thanks." 'Magic' — that's technology, maybe… something like that, maybe a subset. 'animals' — kinds of creature? Kuvi is like a bird, or maybe that's the word for a specific kind of bird, that makes sense… 'Mind' and 'soul' and 'tools', those probably have subtle distinctions between each other, like ontologies have. That they can ask, they think. "Sorry, that is a lot of words… Mind and soul and tools, what is different in those? And Tamamo, what's that, or who? And 'Light Gods'."

"The Light Gods? They are the nine we praise here."

Kalisha will draw a grid of nine symbols matching the ones that are on the little altars outside, all stylized, and name them. A two lines diverging in a curving path (Galasa), a puffy maybe-a-cloud (Illumine), wavy lines with curlicues on the ends of them (Alteri), differently wavy lines without curlicues (Otena), a fox (Tamamo), a crescent moon like Kuvi was wearing (Isara), two concentric circles (Hekosi), a bird (Erius), and a circle with lines radiating from it (Ragni).

"The Light Gods are a little bit like very big people who are in a lot of places at once. This is not really right, but it's... Abstract - not easy to see. I don't think I can say it in a way that helps you know more right now."

"Mind is the thing in your head-" Tap temple. "That does thinking and knowing and learning. You are learning Notal very fast, with your mind. Uh, learning is - not knowing, and then knowing."

"Very, very fast. I'm not sure whether to do baby-talk or just talk normally."

"Soul is the thing... Uh..." They look at each other. "I don't think you know enough words yet. Mind and soul and body are you. Body is-" they wave over themself. "This. Meat. What is different between me and Kalisha and you, and more different between me and Kuvi, that you can see and touch. Soul is the part of you that is not mind or body. You feel things and do magic with it."