Maybe this would all make perfect sense if Kyeo didn't have a head injury.

He is going to lie there and experience pain.

After a few minutes a woman - with fur and a long squirrel tail? - calls out to him in some unfamiliar language from the top of one of the nearby trees.

Definitely another thing that would make sense without a head injury. Or that he wouldn't be seeing at all without the head injury. He produces a confused grunting noise.

She nimbly drops to the railing, then to the path, and says something else then reaches down to poke an available extremity with her hand, slowly enough to let him object if he wants.

Object? Why? What possible objection could he have to a hallucinatory squirrel-woman touching his hand?

...Feeling it out a bit with a touch of green... Yeah, that's a concussion or something.

She raises a glass pendant to her mouth and talks for a while, then sits on the railing and waits.

At length, a grumpy-looking man with shiny white hair and a - large man with some kind of pig's face - come out. They gently place a stone disk on his chest and suddenly he can understand what they're saying.

"-Seems calm and stable, but I didn't want to risk making anything worse."

"Probably a good call," the grumpy man grouses. "Stranger, I'm a doctor. Can you understand me now?"

"Yes doctor," mumbles Kyeo.

"Good, good. You have a head injury. It doesn't seem life-threatening, but let's be careful and not agitate it. Nice and calm, yes? What's your name? Do you know how you got hurt or where you are?"

"Kyeo Sebe Luk. Ship to ship combat. No idea."

"-Okay, that's bad news. I haven't heard about any ship combat recently, but luckily you're almost certainly going to be fine. It'll just be a while healing up, brains are delicate."

The three carefully load him onto a cloth stretcher and then carry him while the doctor keeps up a gentle patter of questions and reassuring mumbles. What kind of ship? Any comrades or wreckage they should look for? Anywhere they should send the news of his survival?

They load him into a wood-frame wagon. The doctor stays with him and gives him a green-colored chalky pill and something faintly sweet to drink, the other two stay behind. The wagon's rolling is remarkably smooth and his pain should be receding slowly.

"The ship is the Five Virtues, it's a patrol cruiser. I didn't think we were even near a planet... tell Ibyabek if you can tell Ibyabek..."

...Well, they're on the planet for sure. He must be confused. 

They take him from the wagon into a wooden building and settle him into a hospital bed. Though... Without much recognizable equipment. There's things that might be hospital equipment around, but they're all very weird.

They'll send the news if they can. He should just rest for now, and he'll feel much better in the morning.

This will all make so much more sense when he has less brain damage probably. He sleeps.

In the morning his head no longer hurts, but the room is still very weird. He still has the stone disk from yesterday.

He's gonna... keep lying there... and look at the stone disk, see what the heck that's about.

There's a bright blue material embedded in it in complicated patterns. Might be some sort of circuit? It definitely looks more like metal than plastic.

Oh, and the squiggles at the top definitely mean 'disk of understanding - Kelosian'.

Squiggles, you say.

They're characters in a language, but they're not Ibyabekian characters. And yet he can understand them.

Are they Kularan? He can read Kularan.

They're not Kularan either. This part looks kind of like something from Kularan, but not really, and it's definitely part of the compound character for 'understand'.

That is incredibly fucking mysterious but he is still pretty injured so he is going to just lie there about it.

The moon is visible through his window. It's brown.

In the morning there is a knock on the door and a pause of a few seconds before a woman wearing green-colored scrubs enters. She is completely bald, and has dark skin and bright green eyes.

"Good morning, I'm a nurse here - Sessa. You're Kyeo Sebe Luk, right? Is there a short name you'd prefer? And how are you feeling this morning?"

"Kyeo. The pain is much better. Where am I?"

"Oh, good! This town is called Gale Rocks, and the nation is known as White Forest. We split off from Kelos a few years back. I saw a note saying you're from 'Ibyabek'- It looks like we don't have records of such a place unfortunately, and we haven't found any wreckage or other sign of your ship either. It doesn't help that 'five virtues' is just about the most generic name possible, unfortunately."

"What planet?"

"The world? Uh, Scope, I hear that a sometimes for the whole world."

"I don't know a planet called Scope."

"Well, as far as I knew we only have the one. No pain this morning, you said? Any other discomfort?"

"Well, I may be hallucinating."

"That's troubling. I'll have Doctor Sky come examine you again, if you wish. Though illnesses of the mind can be challenging. Do you say that because you believe you're from a different planet than Scope?"

"No, getting to a different planet could easily have happened, I'm saying that because, uh, yesterday I saw a woman who looked a lot like a furry animal of some kind."

"Oh, no, no! That's an Ejer form. Specialized medical treatments to change your body. Lots of people want to be a woman, or a fox, or just be stronger and more nimble, rather than what they were born with. I'm not surprised if you've never seen it. It's not popular anywhere else, I think, at least not to the extremes we take it."

"Oh. Okay. Then I'm perhaps not hallucinating and am just on the wrong planet for some reason."

"Well, that's good news."

She's not quite so sure, since this talk of planets sounds like the kind of thing Faronites tell people isn't supposed to be taken literally. Not that she's going to mention that.

"I don't know what your prospects of getting home are like, since we've never heard of it, but maybe someone at one of the bigger towns with proper libraries will know more. And, hmm, I don't want to be cruel but if you end up sticking around for a while, you'll have to earn your keep somehow. No rush, not today or tomorrow, but something to start thinking about."

"I did not expect more."

"Good to be in agreement. Okay, I'll have the doctor come see you in a bit, then. Do you need anything in the meantime? What would you like for breakfast? We've got fish stew or spicy pastries today, plus the usual options of oatmeal or plain bread or whatever fruit is in from Maxim's place today."

"I'm not a choosy eater but don't think I should eat anything too hot while injured."

"That makes sense. Okay, plain bread and fruit, then? I'd like to do some exercises later to see how you're recovering. Even if the body is fine, the mind driving it is the important part."

"Yes, doctor."

She runs him through some physical therapy. His body isn't particularly weak, though depending on just how hard his head was hit, he might have some coordination trouble despite some gentle careful magical healing last night.

He is able to perform all the requested exercises. Looks like no permanent damage.

She will leave and fetch breakfast then. A big ol' hunk of rye bread and a plate full of pale yellow strawberry-ish fruits. They're very juicy and sweet and have a hint of an unfamiliar flavor in them. Sort of like weirdly shaped grapes. "Doc Sky will be by in probably less than an hour. He's the best here for head trauma and brain damage, so we'll see if there's any lingering issues. Touch this panel here if you need anything or notice any new symptoms."

"Thank you."

Kyeo eats his bread and extraplanetary fruit.

The nurse writes some things in a notebook and then leaves him alone for a while. And then Doctor Sky comes by with the nurse again. He's another not-quite-human person, unlike the old-looking man who treated him last night. He has cat whiskers protruding from his face and a faint dusting of blackish fuzz, and strange eyes.

"Good morning, Kyeo. I'm a little bit concerned about your mental state, since we... Have never heard of another planet that people can be from. So one of us is confused, or else something very very strange is going on. I don't think there's ongoing damage at this point. From our tests last night you are in good physical health. You're tracking things in your environment, expressing preferences, speaking clearly and working fine with the Baron's language disk, and seem coordinated and alert. But it's possible you lost time - that you don't remember some things that happened to you, or that you lost some memories. Something's very confusing still. Where is Ibyabek, what is it like? Are you quite sure it's a planet?"

"Ibyabek is one of the planets orbiting the star Ibyatok, which if it were visible from Earth would be among its summer constellations. I am sure it is a planet. I have seen it from space. It was colonized for resource extraction by capitalists from Old Sohaibek, the first planet in the system to be settled."

"We don't have records of ever being from a different planet. Though until recently, we were unable to travel the oceans, and we found more humans living on this continent when we crossed, so things likely have been forgotten in the arc of history. Do you know how many years ago Ibyabek was colonized?"

He can give the number in Ibyabekan years and Earth Standard.

"Kelos has records going back much further than either of those numbers... A couple thousand I think. In our years, right, I remember hearing that other planets have different ones... Though I've never heard of anyone who's actually been to one of these other planets. And lived to tell the tale, anyway."

There's no obvious reply to make to that.

How about some more neuro-type tests? Eye tracking and reflex tests and flash cards and the like.

At one point the stone disk falls off his lap, and he stops being able to understand the doctor until he puts it back.

Yes, yes, he has brain damage, he knows. Back on goes the disk. His eyes and reflexes and memory are all pretty good considering.

They have more devices made of stone or wood with blue bits, like the disk, that they wave near him or in one case would like to put on his head.

Can he still do magic, like this? (the doctor holds his hands together and makes a bright dot of light appear above them.) What did he do for a living? Can he remember his friends, workmates, or family? Complicated details about the days he's been having? If some of it's secret, that's perfectly fine, they want to know if he can remember. What did he have for breakfast this morning? Does he remember what the animal-like woman he mentioned looked like? Because they are not seeing anything that normally indicates damage and memory loss and are very confused because people don't go from planet to planet, and Ibyabek doesn't seem to be a real place. 

"I have never been able to do magic like that or in any other way. I was a star cadet in the Ibyabekan military. I can remember the names of people I knew and what the days before the incident were like. She had a large, fluffy tail, and was up in a tree at one point."

He can't do magic??? This confuses and alarms them considerably more than talk about planets.

Does he feel anything like - dots or points in his head? Possibly overlaid on his vision or making a humming noise or something, some people have synesthesia about it? That might have suddenly appeared one day? They're not asking for a number or kinds, just, any at all?

No, this phenomenon is completely unfamiliar to him and he is assuming that there must be brain damage because he would have expected to say last week that this wasn't a thing at all.

There is a lot of ??? at that. Two other doctors show up, one of them being the man from last night.

...They'll leave him in observation for now, then? And send off confused letters to other experts, which might start coming back in a week or two. They want to examine him with their hands some more, and wave the devices around again, and then repeat the mental acuity tests without him touching the disk, and then it's time for lunch.

The spicy pastries are replaced by pickle-sandwiches but his other options remain the same. They think he's fine to eat hot food but it's his choice, of course.

He'll eat whatever they suggest, he's not choosy.

They'll go with 'nutritionally complete' and suggest the fish and fruit, then.

He likes both of those things and eats what he is served as quickly as is decorous.

Would he like to try learning Kelosian? He probably can't keep the language disk forever.

Yes, of course, that makes sense and he should have thought of it himself. He'll apply himself to this study.

Okay! They send him to a room in a nearby building - the complex seems to be surrounded by forest - which seems to be a sort of schoolhouse. A white-robed man and woman are walking around teaching people, including half a dozen ordinary seeming children of various ages and a pair of teenagers, one of which has cat ears sticking out the top of his head, and no ordinary human ears to go with them.

The teachers are patient and cheerful and are big fans of full immersion learning! They can start with you-I-him-her type pantomiming and go from there. The smaller children think this is a fun game.

Well, it's sort of embarrassing but clearly they do not care to look after his dignity and that's not unsurprising. You-I-him-her indeed.

After a little while one of them, Kessel, will indicate that he should use the language disk.

"Thank you for coming to build your white with us today, Kyeo. I noticed you seem a bit uncomfortable, though, and that's not good for learning. Is it the immersion? I find immersion helps learning the most, but it's not comfortable for everyone. It's my duty to make a good learning environment for everyone here."

"I am not accustomed to it," he allows.

"What sort of classes are you accustomed to?"

"More written material - though of course it would be unsurprising if you don't have any in Ibyabekan - or Kularan either, I suppose."

"We don't. You could make some yourself with the language disk, writing in Ibyabekan along side Kelosian... We might pay you for that actually, preserving and spreading knowledge is all for the good. But we can't speak Ibyabekan or Kularan, the disk is encoded with Kelosian, which is a pretty arduous process as I understand it, I think you need to be a native speaker and white expert to do it."

"I'm not accustomed to being paid but if making myself study materials would constitute earning my keep I am happy to do it."

"-Not accustomed to being paid? Are you from a tiny hamlet where everything is handled with barter and favors?"

"No. On my planet we have moved beyond the need for money."

"...Well, we use money here, and we'll see if we can shake some pay out of the temples for recording down a new language and probably also information on what your, um, planet was like."

He nods glumly.

"I know it must be a huge adjustment, I just don't know how to help with that. Besides trying to teach you. How about we prepare a study sheet for you, you can write the Ibyabekan words for things on the left side and I write the Kelosian words on the right, and we can go from there. One hour at a time."

Kyeo nods and diligently writes down vocabulary.

Kelosian seems to be a logographic language. The teacher, Mr. Ansel, writes very fast and then does a circuit helping the other students before coming back to Kyeo and practicing pronunciation and sample sentences. They can pass quite a while this way. 

At dinnertime the teachers encourage him to come out by the campfires to join everyone else. He doesn't have to, but most people eat outside together for dinner most days, and it's the most special meal of the day. There's roasting meat and stir-fried veggies and fresh warm bread and half a dozen different dipping sauces and jelly and jam and biscuits and fish stew and more weird fruits and spicy baked beans and creamy sweet marshmallow paste for dessert, all in big piles on the tables outside around a bonfire, buffet style. Close to a hundred people dot the clearing laughing and joking and a few people singing, it's pretty crowded. Kyeo could grab food and find an out-of-the-way table if that's more comfortable, Ansel suggests.

He is not used to the self-serve thing; he follows Ansel through the line and takes the same amounts of everything. Doesn't go and sit alone, though.

Ansel sits at a table on the fringe. People say hi to Ansel, he introduces them by name to Kyeo. Doctors, custodians, cooks, medical students. Someone brings over a game board of some kind and asks to play a round, Ansel politely declines, so she asks Kyeo instead. One of the doctors (the cat-like man) who administered the mental tests earlier sits next to them and starts chatting with Ansel about his students and tells Kyeo that word came back from the relay to Old Birch, where the largest library in the nation is- They have no records of Ibyabek or interplanetary travel, either. He's sorry that Kyeo is so lost.

"I'm afraid I don't know the game," he says rather than address the loss of his planet.

"Oh, that's okay! I'll teach you, it's not that hard!"

"All right. How is it played?"

The game-loving woman (who Ansel introduces as Caffa, or more properly Catreffa) expounds on this at length!! It's a tile-placing game where you put down tiles with different kinds of lines on them and try to make long chains of your color and block your opponent from doing the same.

They can play the basic version. Without all the special-case rules. Even though the full version is better.

Sure. He is mediocre at this game.

Caffa seems to be having a lot of fun trouncing him and offering helpful tips to be better at it. The dinner conversation flows around. Ansel goes back for seconds and asks if Kyeo wants anything.

Oh, well, if Ansel's having seconds. "The meat was very fine."

"Yeah, it's not just rabbit today, good treat!"

Ansel fetches some bread, more meat for himself, and a refill on the 3 sauces he likes: Gravy-ish, spicy, and savory-sour.

"How's the game treating you?"

"I am performing poorly."

"Is it any fun, though?"

"Yes, it's pretty good."

"Glad to hear it. Having fun with what you're doing is helpful with learning, if you want to try taking off the disk and playing... Though I don't know that this game involves much talking, actually. Nevermind."

"I'll bear that in mind if one that does comes up."

"Your diligence will serve you well for learning either way. Oh, I talked to the housekeeper and you can just sleep in the same room you were in earlier, tonight. I think they're not going to fill an entire day with tests again tomorrow though, just some quick observations."

"Very well, thank you."

"Let someone know if you need anything- And I'll leave you to your game now." Ansel munches on his seconds.

The dinner goes on, but it does seem to be quieting down over time. A bunch of people are dancing, with some sort of holographic light show all around them, and also torches or something. One pair of people are arm-wrestling, and lighthearted accusations of cheating with magic are flying back and forth. A couple of people are starting to pack up some of the buffet, and people leaving are stacking their dishes high on one table.

Caffa completes a long chain, using some of the tiles Kyeo laid down thinking they were safe.

Ah well. He loses. "Again, or are you done for today?"

"Oh, I can keep going all night." She waves a hand flippantly. "I might want to switch to a different game? I've got lots. And I don't want to drive away a new combatant right away, if you're done say so."

"I'd like to learn another."

"Sure, one sec! Pack channels up while I fetch academy?"

She runs off. She has a cat's tail sticking out of a hole in the back of her shirt.

Caffa is back with a different game a bit later. "This one works best with three or four, but it still works with two. The idea is, we're both playing a band of students at a school, competing with each other for the merit of honor..."

This one is a fairly complicated token placement game, taking turns assigning students to the limited facilities at the school, many of which are described as magic in some way. Caffa plays aggressively, deliberately taking up things she thinks Kyeo needs even if they're useless to her.

"This implied school is very strange."

"Is it? I mean, it's an academy, not a temple-school, of course there's going to be sabotage and stuff. The teachers actively encourage it, so you build faster."

"I don't think we have anything like this on Ibyabek."

"What're Ibyabekan schools like, then?"

(She finishes considering and puts a student on the action that generates pets, and takes a pet from the stack to her tray.)

"They didn't allow pets, for example." He considers the board and puts a student on textbooks.

Caffa's pet can join her student when they go out hunting, taking up two spots. You have to pull cards from a deck when hunting; She gets a Nothing and an Injury, and scowls.

"So, temple schools. Wear your uniform and say the pledge every morning and raise your hand before speaking. Right?"

"- Ibyabek doesn't have religion but it does have the other things."

"Military, then? What is religion, anyway? Your turn," she nudges.

"I was in the military but only after school; the school was not part of the military." He places a token.

"I'm just gonna gloss it as 'weird temple school'."

"As you like."

"The flavor of the doctrine hardly matters. The point is to learn to obey. Fuck that and fuck Kelos."

"Kelos?"

"The place that colonized this one. Really dysfunctional, the nobility are high and fighting with each other all the damn time, nearly genocided the Ejer, tried to drag us 'colonists' into wars that should never have happened."

"Oh. Ibyabek was also colonized by oppressors and eventually had a revolution to overthrow them."

"Ooh. We should play Renegade tomorrow. I bet I can find two more players."

"All right."

"It's really neat, three people are loyalists and one is a Renegade trying to sabotage the other three. If the loyalists unanimously accuse the renegade they win, but if they get it wrong and the other three vote out a loyalist they lose, so you have to look at what cards people play to see if they're trying to make the mission succeed or fail - that's the other way to win or lose - instead of doing risky accusations..."

Caffa has no compunction about rambling about a different game while playing the first game.

"Oh, I had thought it was about a revolution, because of the timing..." Kyeo will continue to do his not very good best at the current game.

"It is a revolution! At least in the theme. The missions are all sabotage. You don't know if you can trust your fellow revolutionaries."

"I see."

The game of Academy soon concludes with Caffa winning. Kyeo's students won one of the secondary rewards worth some achievement points, though. 

"Getting dark. I'm gonna help with the dishes a bit- Goodnight!"

"Would you like further help with the dishes?"

"Sure, why not. There's a rotation, scheduled by... Somebody. I forget. You can be on it."

"Of course. How will I know when it's my turn?"

"Honestly I should just point you at him, it's just I can't remember his name. I'm legendarily bad about names. Tall, entirely human, old, male, wears this coat with the five virtues written on the chest."

"What are construed as the five virtues here?"

"Uh... Red, blue, green, white, black, obviously?"

She has finished picking up the game.

"He's probably around somewhere cleaning up..."

"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with, ah, color-virtues."