For a change, it was early morning when I emerged into the Gate place. I jotted it down in my notebook, and I'd also taken Earth and Gate screen shots on my phone's GPS and clock; I figured if I kept the correlations, maybe I could work out the offset.

I didn't stop at the Clearing, just set off at a steady pace down the path.

It was mid-morning when I once again found myself in front of the wooden sign. I was reminded that even the spiteful bird couldn't help me with things like mutated writing. My searches hadn't turned up much, either. Who knew what else was different in the language...?

I took a deep breath and turned toward Fleuve Clair.

When I crested the hill above the town, it was right around lunchtime. I could smell food being cooked down below, and my stomach growled. I figured I should eat some of my trail rations before heading down, to avoid any complications having to do with food, at least until dinnertime.

I knew that I'd stick out like a riotous sore thumb, but I didn't have a lot of choice. In the worst case, I supposed I could just high-tail it back to the Gate.

I started down the switchbacks that led to the town.

Fleuve Clair started out as many such towns would: stables, farms, outer roads made of little more than gravel. As I went onward, I started seeing more of what looked like they might be gas or even electric lamps on black lamp posts, and brick roads with worn tops.

These outer city streets, the first ones that made me feel like I was in a city, were a mix of barn-like warehouses with tall wooden slat styles in bright primary colours (red, green, blue, yellow), and smaller two and three storey buildings that looked like they held small businesses or homes, in much the same colour palette. Many of the buildings had white trim. It had a Nordic feel to it, like a picture I'd once seen of Iceland, pushing the grey back during the winter with colour. Those first buildings would've been the ones I'd seen from the overlook on the hill earlier.

Small brick roads led off to the side, leading to courtyards of building entrances. The courtyards occasionally held complicated decorative patterns in their bricks, angles and lines in various colours that interlocked like Celtic knot-work.

Every time a townsperson caught sight of me, they did a double-take and then settled on staring when they thought I wasn't watching.

That didn't take long.

I was used to this sort of treatment sometimes, being trans, so my knee-jerk reflex was to assume it had to do with that. But no, I didn't think it was that, this time.

I knew that my clothes would be different, from my earlier visit on the hill. But now that I saw the townspeople up close, I saw that I'd drastically underestimated it. I had a blue button-up blouse, one of my more femme options; some basic tan cargo pants; and my hiking boots with short socks. With that generic set, I might have gotten away with less attention, but I was also wearing my medium-sized sky-blue backpack made of all ripstop nylon and other modern materials.

The townspeople I'd seen were all wearing clothes that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Renaissance faire, really. The men had waistcoats or business suits, or plain puffy linen shirts with pants, generally in white or brown, but other colours were definitely represented. The women tended toward similar tops, or tunic tops; but skirts or dresses were more common on the bottom, in many of the same colours. Some of the women wore pants as well. Both genders seemed to like cloth belts that wrapped around the waist and hung down on one side.

I felt extremely conspicuous.

The road curved around gently, occasionally intersecting, splitting, or joining with other roads. Those lamps continued, but they also started to carry pots of greenery from cross-pieces, and banners I didn't understand. The buildings had little flower boxes outside, filled with riotously blooming flowers in orange, red, purple, green... Green? Hmm. The edges of the roads dipped down as gutters to guide water away.

As I walked along toward what I assumed was the centre of town, the buildings became more mixed; the colourful wooden ones were still frequent, but I also started to see boxy shops and building lobbies in glass and metal, dark stone, and floor to ceiling windows. A-shaped sign boards tried to entice customers inside, and occasionally a wrought iron and wooden bench tried to entice them to sit down.

I started seeing shops for various purposes: clothes I couldn't afford; food I couldn't afford; tools I couldn't afford; souvenirs I couldn't afford. You get the idea. I had no currency. I didn't even know what the currency looked like.

Occasionally, I'd see something peeking over the tallest buildings, but I couldn't make much of it until I happened to cross a street that headed toward it. Without realizing what I was doing, I stopped walking and stared, gaping at it. A very large plaza, or maybe a park or... I didn't know. But there was a collection of buildings that looked, near as I could describe them, like a giant alien had sat down and sculpted with stone and glass, and then walked away with a craftsman's nod. Some sort of art had been painted across some of the stone, but I couldn't see it from there.

I nearly went that way to see what it was, but I decided to keep on where I'd been heading.

The road led me to a large square with a circular water fountain in the centre. The bricks formed into large, angular knot-work patterns. Many people sat on benches nearby and ate lunch, chatting in that strange language peppered with oddly pronounced French and something else, presumably oddly pronounced Irish.

As before, the proverbial record scratched and the music stopped while everyone nearby stared. However, one man's eyes lit up and he hurried over to me.

"Bonjour," I said to him as he walked up.

He was fairly pale; short, tawny hair; a robust beard. He might have been in his early fifties. He wore a brown suit, with a teal cravat instead of a tie, well-tailored but not fancy. If this person had looked excited and run over to me, back at UBC, I might have assumed he was one of my professors or something.

He raised a hand in greeting and fired off several sentences in that strange language. The only words I understood definitively were basically, "Where from?" That and "Fleuve Clair", though he pronounced it strangely, especially "Clair". It was more like the English name "Claire" than the French pronunciation I would've expected back on Earth.

Since he seemed so friendly and excited, I decided to take a chance.

"I'm from La Lune," I said quietly in French.

His eyes widened, and he looked briefly troubled, then his smile returned.

"Would you like something to eat?" I guessed he said next, as he mimed putting food in his mouth. I was filling in a lot based on context, but it wasn't nothing. A lot more, actually. I didn't expect to find someone and get this far with comms this quickly.

I wasn't sure if I should accept charity, but it seemed like it might be rude to say no, so I nodded and followed him to a street vendor.

He ordered something, handing over a couple of coins, and while we waited, I figured I'd start asking more about the area. I started with the part I found strangest. I pointed to the sky, and asked, "Is that the aurora? It's bright for daytime." I'd been wondering about it since I first came through to the Gate place.

The man spluttered the mouthful of water he'd taken from a flask and coughed for several moments. "You can see that?" I guessed he asked me.

I felt on my guard suddenly. He was practically wringing his hands in agitation. "Ua, ua!" he muttered.

He turned from the food vendor and handed me a small loaf of bread, and some cheese, seeming almost reverent. I had no idea what was going on.

"Alyx," I said, pointing to my chest. "My name is Alyx. And you?" I pointed at him.

"Bastien," he replied, pointing at himself. "Alyx," he said, pointing at me. He followed this up with several words I didn't understand. Fee... rail... I couldn't follow it.

The bread turned out to be incredibly good, with a taste I didn't quite recognize from my Earth experience. Fluffy, soft, but with a tougher outer crust. The cheese was likewise strange but delicious.

"Bien!" I said, smiling. Good!

Bastien kept studying me, especially my face, and eventually he said a long string of words I didn't understand. The only one I caught was in French: "change". He smiled again and nodded excitedly. I shrugged, confused, and that just made him smile even wider, nodding his head more vigorously.

Change? Hmm. What an odd half-conversation we were having...