The local star was beginning to cast its light upon the land, creatures were making noise outside, and Dakla had just woken up when I heard someone approaching Dakla’s home. Short and hurried footsteps. I’d parked the drone on the house during the night, set it to standby, and had it blend in with the dried grasses of the roof. Now, I looked through its sensors in the direction of the sound.

Rapidly approaching the house was a child. I sat up from my horizontal position, which made Dakla jump just a tiny bit, and looked towards the door. Dakla, who had been busy doing something at one of her tables, seemed about to ask me what I’d noticed when she heard the footsteps too. She tensed up, said something that I marked down in my rapidly growing language database as [likely profanity], and moved to the door.

There, she unbolted the door and opened it. The boy, who was doubtlessly from the village, all but collapsed when he reached Dakla and the open door. They really have terrible stamina. Huffing and puffing, he couldn’t clearly articulate anything, even though it seemed very important to him. Regardless of the boy’s inability to communicate though, Dakla apparently already had a good idea of what the boy wanted. She moved over to one of the narrow tables and scooped up a bag and some choice glass jars of dried biological material.

“Come [quick/fast], [proper name?] is [not good]!” the boy finally was able to say.

It was obvious: it seemed that the local “expert” on medicine was required. Why then does she live so far outside of the village?

Dakla didn’t waste a second though, and judging by her packing speed, she’d done this before. Everything gathered, she rushed to the door, before turning to me and telling me to, “You [stay] here please” and then slamming the door behind her.

Then, just as quickly as the whole disturbance had started, it was quiet again. Their footsteps rapidly retreated, and while I was curious to learn what was going on, Dakla’s advice to “stay here” was probably sound. I had the suspicion that an unknown and somewhat alien-looking person showing up in town now could cause problems. Still, just because I wouldn’t leave Dakla’s home, didn’t mean I couldn’t follow what was going on remotely.

I commanded my drone into action and had it fly down the smoke exhaust of the fireplace and to me. Opening the charging port on my wrist—which is still unnerving as hell—I refilled the drone’s pitiful power cell and sent it back on its way, into the early-morning sky.

Finding the duo wasn’t hard—the area surrounding the village was clear and mostly agrarian fields. The boy and Dakla weren’t running but still in a hurry. Cautiously, I kept the drone high and flew ahead a bit. The duo’s projected path led them to the village, and a quick scan of the village already showed a disturbance.

Multiple people were gathered around one of the buildings and not working on any productive tasks. Rather, they were quiet and—although hard to judge from this distance—seemed nervous. Whatever was going on, it seemed to be important enough to distract the people from their survival-pertinent duties for now.

Drone unnoticed above, the crowd parted when Dakla and her guide reached them. The boy was intercepted by an adult, probably their parent, and Dakla exchanged a few curt words of greeting with a worried-looking man who was standing in frame of the hovel’s door. Whispered words that were too quiet for my drone to hear among the murmuring of the gathered people were exchanged and after a tense moment, the man stepped aside and bade Dakla to enter. She did so and disappeared from my visuals. I didn’t want to bring the drone any closer—not with this many potential observers—and so elected to simply wait and watch.

The local star rose higher in the sky and time passed. Villagers started to peel off from the gathered crowd in small groups and return to their survival-pertinent duties: field work, caring for livestock, and other chores. Eventually, everyone had dispersed and around four kiloseconds after Dakla entered the hovel, she opened the door and walked out.

It was hard to tell from my distance and angle, but she looked upset or unhappy as she made her way out, through the palisade, and back towards her house—this time, unaccompanied.

When she came back through the door and I could get a look at her with my own eyes, it was clear that something was troubling her.

“What you [do] in village?” I asked, with my haltingly horrendous spoken tounge.

Dakla began unpacking her supplies and talking as she did so. While I didn’t get most of what she was saying, my limited vocabulary gave me enough to pick up the general gist of what had happened:

The boy had been sent to fetch her because one of the villagers had suddenly required her “medical” attention. I wasn’t quite sure if this problem was an injury or a sickness, but it seemed that Dakla was the local last resort when it came to tending to those who needed it. She hadn’t been able to save the life of this random villager, and they’d died during the time that she’d been giving them care.

Although the nuance of what she explained escaped me, I could still read the emotional undertones she attached to her sentences. She was upset at not being able to help the now deceased victim, but also at the villagers for acting too slowly and not calling on her in time. Repeatedly, Dakla said that she would’ve been able to do something had she only been there earlier.

When I asked her why the villagers hadn’t simply called her sooner, she’d simply said, “I’m the [doctor/healer/herbalist], and the villagers do not always [trust/agree with] me.”

Not that treating illness and injury with plant poultice isn’t barbaric, but these people presumably don’t know that. I asked, “Why?”

“The villagers do not [trust/agree with] that which they cannot [understand/explain]” she said.

“I don’t understand, you [can’t] [explain/teach] the villagers [about] your medicine?”

She sighed and looked at me like I was missing something obvious. “No Elise, they fear my magic.”

I didn’t get it. “Why do villagers fear your magic?”

At this, she threw her hands up, now exasperated, “Girl! Do you not know [anything/something]?! What location are you from?”

Feeling like an idiot wasn’t enjoyable. I’m missing some sort of cultural or societal norm here. “Sorry I do not know [anything/something], I am [from a] location far away”.

“Far away?”

“Yes”

She groaned, “Do you need more [language/words] to explain?”

Well, it couldn’t hurt, but it would be quite a while before I’m able to give answers comprehensible to her on that topic specifically.

“Yes, please.”

She muttered something that I had marked as [likely profanity] and then said, “[acknowledgement/decision], I [will] teach you and you [will] help me.”

I didn’t take long to contemplate her offer; it was a good deal. She was a competent teacher, I needed to know the local language, and one of the nouns I’d already learned was “book” because she had a few on a shelf. That meant she likely wasn’t at the end of her teaching capability.

Decision made, I nodded. “I agree.”

She gathered up the cutting tool and a basket before heading to the door and saying, “Good, come [with] me.” I stood up and followed her outside.

It was colder than the previous day, just below 20° Celsius. Basket in hand and me in tow, Dakla set course for the woods and the approximate location of where we met. Judging by her equipment, we were going to gather plants, and I sent my drone up ahead to make some quick high-resolution maps of the area. With nobody around, the drone could get close enough in to image every plant properly and then I’d be able to index in my rapidly growing local botany database. This was easy for me; almost subconsciously I sorted and classified the plants the drone located. When I reflected about why this task was so simple, a cold shiver ran down my spine. Categorizing plants and making maps is one of the tasks that I was built for.

As we walked, Dakla began to point out things around us. The local star was called “sun”, this was a “path”, and that was a “waystone”. My vocabulary steadily built as we walked, and occasionally I asked questions for clarification on specific words or their usages.

Eventually, Dakla and I reached a seemingly random spot in the lightly forested area and then she put her basket down and started rooting around in one of the pockets on her dress. Then, she pulled out a small, folded bundle which when unfolded, contained several dried leaves.

“This morning, I used [multiple] of [these] leaves. I want [to see if] you [can] locate more” she explained.

I took a closer look at the leaf. It was palmate in shape with a smooth margin and about three centimeters across its longest dimension. Dried as it was, I couldn’t tell what color it used to be, so I asked. “Green” was the simple response and I nodded.

Focusing my attention on my botany database, I took the next couple deciseconds to clear the work queue of plant scans that had built up and then looked for leaves which matched the hand-shaped ones I was assigned to find. No, no, no, there! That looks like an almost perfect match. It was currently unimaginatively labeled as “unnamed plant species #812”.

I said, “Yes.”

This clearly hadn’t been the response that Dakla was expecting, and she said, “What do you [mean/intend], ‘Yes’?”

“This plant is 127 [distance] in that direction.” I indicated with an outstretched arm.

Dakla was clearly interested. “How [many/much] is 127 [distance]? Do you mean [???]”

Of course, we’d covered numbers but not their local unit system. I indicated one meter of length with my hands and said, “This is one ‘meter’.”

This seemed to clear up the confusion.

“[Comprehension/Triumph], we use [steps/strides]. Your ‘meter’ is [similar/like]” she said, the unfamiliar word ‘meter’ rolling strangely off her tongue.

More or less, I’m not going to educate her on the advantages of a proper measurement system that isn’t based on silly things like ‘stride lengths’ right now. I simply said, “Yes.”

“Well, [let] us see if you [are] correct” she said with a somewhat dubious expression, but she humored me, and we headed off in the direction I had indicated.

To Dakla’s surprise, exactly 127 meters—or about 160 strides—later, we found the plant she was looking for.

“How [did] you know [that] this plant [was] here?” she asked.

I shrugged. It might not be a good idea to show her my drone, I’ll just keep it simple.

“I know locations” I said.

“You ‘know locations’?”

“Yes”

She simply shook her head and proceeded to harvest individually selected leaves from the plant. Harvested leaves were then placed flat into an empty bundle, presumably to be dried out later.

“What leaves for?” I asked.

“These leaves [help/cure] [???].”

“What is [???]?” I’m starting to sound like a malfunctioning AI with how many ‘what is…’ questions I’m asking.

Fortunately, Dakla seemed willing to explain and launched into a lengthy explanation as we walked further through the forest, occasionally harvesting plants. From what I put together; these specific leaves were used to counteract something bad. The way that Dakla described this “something bad” made it seem as if it were something with malevolent intent like a toxin. Does that make these leaves some sort of primitive antidote?

That theory made some sense: even if they couldn’t affect me, I wasn’t ignorant of the wide range of toxins and anti-toxins that occurred naturally. In fact, I had innumerable entries in my various alien-life databases solely dedicated to describing diverse venomous or poisonous life-forms. Thinking back, almost every planet I’d been sent to had turned out to have some poisonous mushroom-analogues, venomous insect-analogues, or something equally uncomfortable to creatures without proper protection. It wasn’t only possible, but likely, that this planet had entire branches of its evolutionary tree dedicated to life forms that had mastered the use of some sort of toxin, and others—maybe the plants that we’d been harvesting—that had evolved to counter the toxin in the never-ending biological arms race of evolution.

“Did [some] creature bite [the person] or [did] the villager eat [something] bad?” I asked.

Dakla grimaced. I’d struck a nerve somehow. “Creature—no. Plant, yes, but not something that a person would [normally] eat, I think.”

“Did [some] person give villager bad plant?”

“Maybe.”

Great. My opinion on these primitives was starting to shift again. Originally, my mental picture of them had been… adorable isn’t the right word, but maybe nostalgic? I’d been projecting my history lessons onto these people, and I’d just now realized that those same lessons had been somewhat biased or skewed in their perspective.

We’d been shown a more whimsical side of Homo Sapiens in school. We’d seen pictures of extravagant and colorful festivals honoring their made-up religions or we’d been shown old news reports where they all thought that their little problems were so important. Looking back, we’d all laughed at them, like it was some sort of elaborate comedy routine they put on just for us. After all, how could we take their petty squabbles or problems of the past seriously when our own society was dealing with so many much more important things?

Now though, I was just at the edge of this “primitive” society and already there were complex and real events unfolding at my peripheral awareness. A villager had likely been poisoned and subsequently died, with Dakla unable to help them. Her emotions about the event were real—just as real as mine—and even though her approach to medicine was primitive and barbaric, Dakla wasn’t an idiot.

The fact that Dakla considered “foul play” a likely option had implications for me too. It would be wise for me to be more careful. Clearly, I’d been immediately recognizable as “different” to Dakla and these people had a complex socio-cultural structure that I didn’t understand. What if someone decides they want to kill me too? Yes, unless I was thrown into a pool of highly corrosive toxin without my skinsuit, there wasn’t any amount of poison that could kill me, but there was the magic. I had no idea what it was; no idea what it could and couldn’t do… definitely a gap to address in my education.

Dakla and I spent the rest of the day out in the woods, but our task wasn’t only to collect plants and the occasional fungus. By mid-afternoon, I was beginning to get the feeling that the herbalist wanted to avoid going home—or at least near the village—for now. The basket was full, and the walks between plants got longer and longer as I located rarer and rarer herbs with my map.

My payment for navigation was apparently an endless patience to my questioning. My language comprehension increased by leaps and bounds because our discourse had built up the necessary vocabulary to explain concepts or words that couldn’t be easily pantomimed or pointed out in nature.

More interesting to me though, was our discussion on magic. Dakla wouldn’t show me any, and her explanation painted magic as something of a taboo or something that isn’t usually liked/accepted by the general population. There were exceptions, she said, but for whom it was acceptable to use magic and for whom it wasn’t was too complex for me to fully comprehend without the necessary background at the time. In short, magic seemed to be almost an alternative branch to technology. Many of the example effects that Dakla described were similarly achievable with simple engineering—like creating a light or moving an object—but not all of them. If I understood her properly, some “spells” could mimic more advanced technology like accelerated healing or talking to people over long distances.

Eventually, basket and pockets full of plants, we returned to Dakla’s home just after sunset. Dakla spent the whole way home thoroughly impressing on me that magic was not a topic to bring up with just anyone and that I should be careful using “my magic”. I said I would, and we settled in for a comfortable evening of language lessons.