Touchstone 1 - Stray

understand those garbled train announcements, where you get the gist and guess the rest. It’s not like having an English-Alien dictionary.
    I can even read the squiggles I’m hallucinating around the room, in that I’m sure they read ‘No Access’ when I glance at them, but if I look at them closely they’re not letters I recognise, let alone words. Trippy. Still, having a language poured into my skull will save a lot of time, and I’d be 11/10 pleased if my head didn’t hurt so much.
    Infodump
    I was given a few hours to recover from dictionary-injection, and another meal, which helped a lot. Then off to a meeting-type room to talk – actually talk! – to the first greysuit and a new one. Since my internal translation service doesn’t automatically make me able to pronounce their words or understand their grammar, I mainly listened and tried to understand what the hell they were going on about. Non-literal phrases especially throw me, just as anything like ‘jump the shark’ would surely confuse them. They spoke very slowly, and had a plastic sheet on the table which acted like a computer screen and handily showed pictures to help me along. First screen I’ve seen – all the rooms I’ve been in are incredibly bare.
    The echo in my head had already let me know that the ‘Ista’ part of ‘Ista Tremmar’ is a title, a bit like ‘Doctor’. The other greysuit was ‘Sa Lents’, and I think ‘Sa’ is a general honorific. He’s going to be my sponsor.
    Centuries ago people called the ‘Lantar’ lived on the planet I was on. It’s called Muina. These people were very learned and in touch with the ‘Ena’ (which, confusingly, seems to mean ‘spaces’). These Lantar triggered a disaster which ‘shattered the spaces’ and caused thousands of mutant monsters called ‘Ionoth’ to show up and eat people. So all the Lantar ran away and went to a bunch of different planets. This one is called Tare. They didn’t find it a very easy planet to live on, and sometimes the Ionoth things would show up here.
    Recently the Tare people started to move between planets again to try and find a solution to the Ionoth problem. They found other worlds where people from Muina survived, but they consider Muina still too dangerous to live on. All the people in uniform I’ve met are part of Tare’s research and defence against the Ionoth organisation (called KOTIS, which must be some kind of acronym, or just doesn’t translate).
    Remember I said no-one was really surprised to find me at that town? Well, they weren’t. They estimate that at least twenty people each year get accidentally whisked off to somewhere else through something which sounds like wormholes: either to Muina or to one of the known worlds or just totally somewhere else. They find about half of them, some alive, some dead, and if they’re from one of the known worlds they send them back.
    Earth – you probably figured – isn’t one of the known worlds. They asked me a bunch of questions to try and figure if I was from a world they’d had a stray from before. They call people who accidentally wander through wormholes ‘strays’. Sa Lents is some kind of anthropologist and he says that my description of Earth doesn’t match up to the lost worlds previously described and he’s looking forward to learning and writing about it. Good for him, I suppose.
    Anyway, I guessed right when I said they weren’t at that town to rescue me. There’s a particular kind of Ionoth called Ddura (massives) which are really rare and from what little I could make out are something like the whales of the Ena. REALLY massive, if that was what was making the incredible noise before I was rescued. They’d detected one on Muina and rushed out to try and study it, but were too late and only got me instead.
    I find it hard to believe that the people from Earth are from some other planet. For one thing, you’d think we’d have legends or stories about Ionoth and this Ena place and Muina. And though they talked about this happening thousands of years ago, ‘modern’ humans have been on Earth for at least tens of thousands. So, not convinced, though since Tare people look just like Earth people there’s probably some connection.
    Strays count as a kind of refugee, and other than representing a slight curiosity for being from a ‘new’ world, I’m not particularly unusual. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like Tare has a refugee policy like Australia’s,