#((sorry this got. erm. quite long HAGHAGAH))

[spacesealing]

It must be strange to the good people of this world, to see a ball-joint puppet wander through the fields, picking up stones and chunks of dirt and placing it in its pockets with vigor. It must be even stranger to hear the puppet speak, repeating questions about a portal, a space station, and a place with enough electrical energy to let it charge. It is very strange indeed, but Herta never really cared about how most people feel. Decorum was just a noun—courtesy, a concept. Even when she is at her most helpless, she doesn't find use in pleasantries. Ask, get an answer, then move on. Though her already-thin patience is wearing down. She's been here for a few system hours, yet no one seems to want to take her seriously.

Asking for help is a nuisance. Especially when one has as little regard for social standing as Herta. She doesn't really need people, though. It's not as though she couldn't get herself out. Had she the resources of the space station to aid her, she thinks she could have found her way back in less than a system hour. Unfortunately for her, all she has is her puppet and this vast expanse of unfamiliar land. And so she asks.

But it isn't so bad. People aside, Herta enjoys the change in scenery. The Blue was… well, blue, and the Space Station was always different shades of gray, but this place was teeming with a vibrant green. Forests stretch by the mile, swallowing its surroundings in a sea of leaves. The city she finds herself in, a place called "Sumeru," she's overheard, seemed less like the sprawling concrete and chrome metropoli of her realm and more like roots of a grand tree, each house blending organically into the environment. Had this puppet have any olfactory sensors, Herta imagines she would smell fresh grass and dewdrops. And a new place means tons of research potential. Already, she has filled her pockets with samples of the land. Stones, dirt, strange grasses and flowers that she finds particularly interesting. She's starting to run out of space—she's considering using her hat to store her finds instead.

Would that she could stay like this forever, collecting odds and ends to analyze once she returned to a lab. But that's precisely the problem, isn't it? Returning.

So Herta sighs. She wipes the soil off her hands, being extra prudent with the ball joints, and resumes her hunt for answers.

She spies a potential candidate easily enough. Already she could tell that this one was different from the others, though she's not adept enough to articulate how—was it their hat? She likes their hat.

"Hey. You there" Herta calls to the hat man, "Have you seen a portal around here? Semi-large, hole-y… portal-like? Probably up in the sky. If you don't—you probably don't—could you at least take me someplace interesting? Oh, and before you ask, I'm not a toy. I'm a puppet. Big difference."

@fuujinwanderer

do puppets dream of ball-jointed sheep?

[ herta & wanderer ]