The second morning hurt less.
Not comfortably less. Not good. But less catastrophic than the first day, when the entire cohort had stumbled through the village like newborn animals wearing stolen bodies. The nausea had faded. The dizziness came in waves now instead of constantly. Even the overwhelming flood of scent, heat, texture, and sound had dulled enough for coherent thought to occasionally survive for several uninterrupted minutes at a time.
Which, for most of them, immediately created entirely new problems.
Kelan sat barefoot on the roof of one of the low wooden storage buildings with his knees pulled to his chest, watching steam rise from the wet gardens below while trying very hard not to think about the fact that he could feel the morning air moving through the hair on his arms.
That detail alone kept ambushing him.
Not the wind itself. The individual strands responding to it.
His body possessed layers. Tiny ones. Millions of them. Skin wasn't a surface. It was a field of microscopic signals continuously screaming information into his nervous system. Temperature. Pressure. Humidity. Insects landing. Fabric dragging across sweat. The simulation had approximated sensation well enough that he hadn't understood until now what had been missing.
Reality had weight.
Below him, the village was already awake.
Water moved through narrow irrigation channels that cut between dense gardens glowing faintly with pale blue fungal light beneath broad green leaves. Wooden walkways crossed the wet ground in elegant curves instead of straight lines. Warm yellow light spilled from open windows. Somewhere nearby, somebody was laughing while metal cookware clattered against stone.
Cooking.
The smell hit him a second later and his stomach cramped violently.
Kelan groaned softly and lowered his forehead onto his knees.
"This is ridiculous," he muttered.
A voice answered from behind him.
"You said that yesterday about gravity."
Kelan twisted around.
Lysa climbed awkwardly onto the roof beside him carrying a clay mug in both hands. Her dark hair had been hastily braided at some point and was already partially falling apart again. She moved carefully, still not entirely trusting her own balance.
None of them did yet.
She sat beside him with a grunt and held the mug out. "Drink this before you pass out again."
"I passed out once."
"You passed out twice."
"The second one barely counts."
"You walked directly into a support beam."
Kelan accepted the mug anyway.
The liquid inside was warm, bitter, and faintly sweet. He took one cautious sip and nearly gagged before his body abruptly decided it loved whatever this was and demanded more immediately.
"That's horrifying," he said, drinking again.
Lysa nodded solemnly. "Apparently we enjoy poison now."
Below them, several younger members of the cohort crossed the central square carrying baskets overflowing with broad orange fruit harvested from the terraced gardens near the eastern water channels. One nearly slipped in the mud and burst into startled laughter while the others shouted at him.
The sound drifted upward through the warm morning air.
Kelan watched them quietly.
Yesterday had been chaos: panic attacks, crying, arguments, three separate vomiting incidents. One brief but memorable fistfight caused almost entirely by hormone spikes and complete emotional exhaustion.
And underneath all of it:
wonder.
The simulation had prepared them intellectually for environmental transition. They understood atmospheric chemistry, fungal ecology, hydrology, genetics, structural engineering.
None of that had prepared them for sunlight.
Not real sunlight. The warmth of it. The scale of it. The way shadows moved continuously. The way water reflected against ceilings. The way exhaustion settled into muscles slowly.
Lysa leaned back on her hands and stared out across the village. "I still can't believe this place exists."
Kelan nodded slowly.
The village sat within the center of the stabilized basin like something impossibly delicate that had somehow survived the end of the world through stubbornness alone.
It wasn't large. Maybe a few dozen structures total, arranged around curved stone paths and layered gardens. Nothing about it felt rigidly planned. The buildings followed the terrain naturally, spreading around massive trees and winding water channels instead of flattening them. Soft blue fungal lanterns hung beneath roof overhangs even during the day, dim and nearly invisible beneath the sunlight.
There were benches everywhere.
Entire sections of pathways widened for no obvious reason except to create places where people could stop and gather comfortably. Covered porches wrapped around buildings large enough to shelter entire groups during storms. A narrow stream cut directly through the center of the settlement despite the obvious inconvenience it created for construction.
Nothing about the layout made sense if efficiency had been the primary objective.
And yet somehow the entire place felt instinctively correct.
As though whoever designed it had cared more about how people felt moving through it than how quickly they could travel from one structure to another.
Lysa squinted toward the western gardens where several elders worked among dense rows of broad-leafed plants.
"They're doing it again."
"What?"
"They keep pretending not to watch us."
Kelan followed her gaze.
The elders moved calmly through the gardens, speaking softly with one another while harvesting long strands of pale green vegetables from climbing trellises. Their movements were smooth and unhurried. Comfortable. Completely at ease in their bodies in ways the cohort absolutely was not.
One of the elders glanced briefly toward the rooftops before returning to work. Like a parent checking whether children were about to fall out of a tree.
Kelan looked away first.
That feeling kept happening too.
The simulation collapse had revealed enough that the cohort understood, at least intellectually, that something about the adults was not what they had believed. The revelation itself had arrived tangled inside the emotional violence of decanting, sensory overload, and transition shock. Nobody had even fully agreed on exactly what they had seen.
But none of that changed the strange, immediate instinctive response the elders triggered anyway.
Safety.
It made no sense.
Kelan was taller than several of them. Stronger than at least two. Intellectually, he understood more advanced genetics than the woman currently trimming fungal growth beneath the western irrigation wheel.
And yet every time one of the elders entered a room, the emotional atmosphere stabilized automatically. Nobody had asked them to trust these people. Their nervous systems had simply decided first.
Lysa exhaled slowly. "They already knew what all this would feel like."
"Probably."
"I hate that."
"You hate everything right now."
"That's because everything is touching me."
Kelan barked a laugh before he could stop himself.
Lysa looked mildly offended. "Don't laugh. I can feel my own heartbeat constantly. Who designed this?"
"The same person who apparently decided we needed stairs instead of ramps."
"That man was a menace."
Kelan smiled faintly despite himself.
The strange thing was that the village agreed with her.
Everywhere he looked, he found tiny pieces of personality embedded into the construction.
The stairs curved slightly wider near the bottom as though somebody had repeatedly imagined groups sitting there together. Roof overhangs extended just far enough to let people stand outside safely during heavy rain. Several garden walls had been built around existing trees instead of removing them despite the obvious extra labor involved.
Even the fungal lighting wasn't necessary.
Beautiful.
Useful.
Comforting.
But unnecessary.
The realization settled quietly into Kelan's chest as he looked out across the warm, living village. None of this had been built for survival alone. Somebody had wanted this place to feel like home.