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Lucien can mostly make a living off of doing divining for certain niche medical studies, but he can't do specific enough conditionals to get his grander ideas off the ground yet. Still, when portals start showing up he's well positioned to suggest to a few people that diviners like him could be useful for quickly figuring out what conditions on the other worlds are actually like.
Still, they're taking a chance on Lucien by approving his application to join the expedition, so he definitely really shouldn't be late for his first day of work. He also probably shouldn't be running along a poorly maintained trail in Bolivia, but between that and the possibility of being late he knows which he prefers.
Well, which he prefers right up until he's tripped on a branch and sent tumbling towards the portal.
Lucien follows, continuing to succeed at putting one front in front of the other, and not crying, and that's it, that's all he's really up to doing right now.
Eventually they start passing through caves that have people in them. His escort exchanges words with them. Sometimes they laugh.
The people who talk are all purple but they pass a group that includes a bulky blue guy with tusks, hauling a big sack of mushrooms, and one that includes some tiny people who'd come up to about Lucien's waist, bent over their own glowing objects and sewing. Some of the purple people are playing a dice game; some of them are performing mushroom-related actions of some kind that they don't linger long enough for Lucien to get a great sense of.
Lucien is confused about their being different types of suspiciously-human looking aliens, though probably this shouldn't be any more surprising than seeing one suspiciously human looking alien.
The sewing looks lower tech, which isn't great.
They come to a long tunnel and pass people going the other way, some of whom his escort doesn't actually need to talk to at all!
And eventually they are going up and down the stairs and ramps in a bunch of twisty passages and come to a cave, with a tiny person cooking in the dim firelight. His escort makes a rag hanging from the wall glow and says something to the tiny person, who replies with a deferential head-bob.
And then down the hall to this terminal cave here, just a room, not very big, with a hammock and a bookshelf and some folded up furniture made of bones.
She sits on her hammock. It looks big enough to sleep on but it's also low enough that she can sit there. She cups her ear again hopefully.
"-I'm surprised that you nod, it seems like it would be cultural and this isn't even my planet, I'm pretty sure. I'm also surprised that your planet has people who look similar to my species, and mushrooms. Probably those are good signs for whether you will have food I can eat."
She points at the ceiling. "Taldor. Qadira, Cheliax, Absalom, Kelesh... debna. Human."
"I'm really surprised that you have place names that sound like the sort of place names that would exist on Earth, and also that you have humans.... I guess this could make sense if humans came here from Earth.... it can't have been the other way around because we have a fossil record of human evolution."