There appears beside him on the boat a woman in her thirties, if he's in the habit of being able to identify how old people look, and she is not expecting to be on a boat and wobbles when the waves bob it.

Wono does not like surprises — loud noises and sudden jolts tend to rankle him a lot more than the average person — but focusing on the past has left him unable to react properly in the present. His face, like always, is stiff, but he tries to twist it into something that a stranger might interpret as a welcoming smile, though he doesn't feel as if he's succeeding.

"Uh". As he tries to muster a greeting, it hits him that he was almost sure that he hadn't turned on permissions for anyone to enter his Continent. Hadn't they been off? Shouldn't this lady have had to message him before popping up like this?

She says something in a foreign language, and then corrects herself: "...hello?"

Wono blinks, shakes his head — he'd missed the first part of what she'd said — and tries to more seriously get his bearings. He set aside the rest of the flat elephants he'd been holding to the side.

"Uh... hello. I... apologize, I don't know if you're a recruiter, but I'm happy where I am, thank you." (This isn't really true, but he's not going to waste his time explaining his life story to a recruiter.)

"You can, uh. You can go. Sorry." You weren't allowed to kick someone out of a Continent you moderated once they were already in, though you could change the permissions after the fact to prevent them from coming back again after they left of their own volition. (You could also just leave and create a perfect duplicate of your Continent and all its contents whenever you like and simply abandon the old one, though that took at least a minute of fiddling around with the bowl, and he didn't feel like bothering with it.)

"...I don't know how you brought me here but I don't think I can go without help, sir!"

"Uh, excuse me? You... came here."

"Not under my own power, I'm first circle!" she exclaims.

Wono realizes that she's one of those traveling improv people. Fine, fine. He's in absolutely no mood for one of these things, but he'll play along. Something to push away some of the ennui.

"Just so you know, out-of-character, I am autistic. I'd like to clarify that before we continue, because I have had unfortunate miscommunications in the past that I believe only occurred because other people were not aware of this." His heart twinges, and a flash of Niko enters his mind. "Are you fine with that? If you aren't fine with that, I don't want to do this."

"...I don't know what that means and I'm not in character at the moment."

Wono speaks as if he's said all this somewhere before. He has.

"So I understand that you are roleplaying, and I'm happy to play along, but I am going to intentionally break character in this specific moment because I do think that it's extremely, extremely important to explain my condition. I want to start off by making something absolutely clear: my autism is not an illness. When I use the word condition, I am not attaching the usual connotation that comes with it; I am in no way implying that my way of thinking makes me any lesser than you or any neurotypical person. It does not. That's the framing my parents liked to adopt, that my autism was something to be cured or fixed; this is discriminatory and cruel. Please, even within the scenario you have created, do not imply otherwise or I will end the game and cease to be your partner in this context. My autism is a condition only in that it is a literal descriptor of my mental state. Nothing more."

Wono stops, takes one deep breath and then another.  "I also would like to clarify that I hold no resentment or anger towards my parents, they were the product of a life spent living under the yoke of Scarcity, I am well aware of that. They have since apologized and we do spend every fiftieth Chanukkah together. We have established healthy but appropriately-distanced boundaries that work for us."

"Okay. With all that established, I am going to assume that from here on out, regardless of your willingness or unwillingness to break out of character in order to confirm that you have listened carefully to all this, that you do understand it, and that you will respect my wishes and frame-of-reference as much as you would any neurotypical person's. If at any point, even in the context of fiction, you disrespect me on the basis of my autism, or you disrespect other autistic people on the basis of their autism or the autism community as a whole, we are finished. Thank you for understanding."

"I will now begin the scenario."

He blinked twice. "Okay. Uh... what does it mean to be first circle?"

"Sir I recognize that it is extremely important to you somehow but I am not in character and I do not know what an autism is or how to respect it! I - do you have standard character breaking rituals, my theater does one where we clap hands with each other -" She holds hers out, not very hopefully.

For a moment, Wono is silent, and still.

His upper left left curls. It's not a smile, not really, but it's as close as he ever gets. This is getting interesting. There was more to this than he initially appreciated. Layers upon layers. This was more his style, wasn't it?

Obviously, the scenario has already just truly begun: it commenced the moment Wono announced it. In spite of this, only now that they were in character did she actually ask to get out of his: that meant, if he clapped her hands, they'd both begin to play the roles of the people playing the roles they'd already begun playing; a heavy task, given that he'd hardly defined his own initial character.

Wono briefly considered his character — he knew that his character would certainly be autistic like him, because that was that kind of character he would have liked to play (in order to serve as good representation for the autistic community). He decided to call this character: Boy 3. Boy 3 was a lot like Wono himself, honestly. There were little differences, he decided — Boy 3 would have a crippling fear of birds — but it was more or less just a Wono expy, if he was being honest.

Then he needed to come up with a character that would have created a character like that. Hmmm...

Only one man came to mind. It felt wrong, somehow... but not so much that he wouldn't do it.

He clapped her outstretched hands and put on a fake Greek accent, suddenly sounding a lot more casual. "Yo, sorry about that, I was really getting into the role there.  I'm Niko. But I've got to ask, little lady, how'd a thing like you end up in a place like this?"

"I don't know! I thought you brought me here and if you're still saying it wasn't you now that you're claiming to have dropped character then I really really don't know."

"Slow your roll, little lady, slow your roll. All is good on the Niko Boat. Why don't you take a deep breath and tell me what happened? Here, you can have an image of an elephant eating corn."

He tries to hand her an image of an elephant eating corn. The elephant looks particularly depressed, with a thick scar on its trunk.

How is that supposed to help in ANY way. "Is it still critically important that I know what an autism is?"