After 15-20 minutes of letting out the grief and loss, I started calming down again. My emotions were still in turmoil, but I had calmed down enough to listen to what people were saying.

“Hey,” Alex asked while patting me on the shoulder. “You feeling better now?”

“Do I look better?” I snapped at him as rage and disgust suddenly overtook my despair.

“Woah, ok.” He exclaimed while backing away with his arms up. “No need to get aggressive here.”

“Says the guy going around mind-controlling random people he meets.” I shot back, full of anger.

“We both know you would have been in no state to leave if you weren’t calm first.” He responded with a light smile on his face. “Besides, you're not all that mad at me right now. You are just feeling the aftereffects of Calm.”

"And what would those aftereffects be?" I asked with a good helping of suspicion and a hint of burning rage.

"The suppressed emotions are all released at once instead of gradually over time." Alex calmly recited as if this had happened many times to him.

I took a moment to take stock of what I was feeling to see if anything was out of the ordinary. I could feel the juxtaposition of the burning anger that felt out of place and the calmness of rational thought. Something wasn’t right, and for once, I was inclined to believe what Alex had said as it made the most sense with what I knew, which was admittedly, basically nothing.

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“Maybe it is, but it still doesn’t make it ok to use mind-controlling spells without consent.” I protested with more rationality than the first time.

“Would you have given consent to a spell that suppresses emotions?” He questioned flatly.

“Well, no, but that is beside the point.” I retorted while trying to keep the foreign anger under control.

“Think about it this way,” He suggested. “If we didn’t calm you to bring you here, then we wouldn’t be able to communicate with you nor you with us.”

I had no idea what to say in response to that. So I elected to give up and sit down for a while as my legs were sore from standing for so long. After I sat down, I realised how tired I was from all the emotions and explanations. It had been what had felt like half the day here.

“How long is a day here?” I inquired after realising it could and probably is different from Earth.

“Huh? Oh, right. Lost.” He took a second to think about how to phrase it. “There is 50 cerin in a day, 100 ketan in a cerin, 10 days in a week and the number of days in a year changes depending on what year of the Cycle it is.”

“What’s the Cycle?” I asked, knowing that it was a stupid question. He stared at me long enough for it to be awkward until he broke it by asking a question.

“Have you not looked up yet?” He questioned seeming concerned for some reason.

“No. Why?” I asked, feeling like I was missing something important. “Did I miss something?”

“You only missed what is one of the defining features of this planetary system.” He replied, exasperated.

“Two things. One, how do you know what a planetary system is?” I asked as it felt like something that didn’t fit the level of technology I had seen thus far. “And two, what did I miss?”

He took a deep breath in before starting. “I should feel insulted by your assumption of our knowledge, but you are Lost, so that is expected. To answer your question, we know about planetary systems from both observations and other planeshifted. As to what you have missed,” He smirks. “We are in a very delicate dance within our star system. There are two stars. Though we only orbit them part of the time. The rest of the time, we are orbiting the main planetary body of the system.” He paused for dramatic effect. “A black hole. The Great Devourer to be exact.”