It is night. A round silver moon hangs low in the cloudless sky. The surrounding landscape is very flat, very dry, and very lifeless. Nothing reacts noticeably to their arrival or Dakker's death.

"Where the hell are we?" Luvei asks, after the final tones have died down and everyone's recovered.

"Not in Arshalei," Kaleith points out. "At least so it would appear. Which is good enough for me, really."

"Well, it's not good enough for me," Mirrin interjects. "If we're stranded somewhere with no civilization with no living Strider, how are we going to survive?"

"We're not going to die, we have an orc," Amalta says reasonably. "And if we can't stand it here--well. We have three elves, and plenty of fresh Strider DNA."

"Two elves total," Mirrin grumbles. "If you go by fractions."

"Why the hell would you do that," Kaleith asks.

The wasteland has no commentary on their reproductive habits.

On the subject of survival, the faint breath of a breeze carries the smell of water from over thataway.

"I smell water," says Yttren, the orc. "I'm going to check it out."

"Great. Everyone else look away, if we want to use his DNA ever we have to collect it now, so we should whether we're going to use it or not." Her right hand goes to the glove covering her left, but doesn't remove it while anyone other than her fiancee is looking.

Her sister sighs and turns away, in a direction so that no one can see her front and she can't see her sister, peels off her own blood-soaked glove, extends her collector-tendrils and starts probing at the blood on her hands.

As Yttren progresses toward the smell of water, a dip in the ground becomes visible in the distance. It will take him a while to reach the point where the elevation begins to change, but when he does, he'll see the dry cracked earth sloping down slow and steady toward a very large, very still freshwater lake completely devoid of discernible life. There are four trees dotting the shoreline. They are all dead.

...Huh.

Yttren touches one of the dead trees to see if he can tell what it died from.

Thirst and starvation, a very long time ago.

...Huh.

He scoops up a pinch of soil and rolls it between his fingers. How good is it for growing things?

Totally void of usable nutrients, that's how!

What the fuck.

The smear of parched earth between his fingers holds no answers.

Well. The group's not gonna like what they're gonna have to do to survive, probably, but they'll dislike it less than dying. Before he goes back to share the bad news, he pokes the water to see if it contains anything inimical to life.

Nope. Some minerals, but nothing toxic or toxically concentrated.

What the fuck, none of this makes sense.

He starts trudging back to the group.

The landscape remains super dead. No birds, no insects. Occasional broken and dessicated tree stumps, some so caked with dirt that they could pass for rocks at a glance.

He will check every fucking tree stump he sees in case one of them has anything else useful to tell him.

They all died of the same ultimate causes, in varying proportions: lack of water and barrenness of soil. The soil is indeed both dry and barren.

But there is a lake right there this makes no sense.

And yet!

Fffffffuuuu---

Fine.

He stomps back to the group.

Luvei intercepts him before he can walk in on the elves doing elf things.

Right. Good. Well, it's apparently going to be very necessary for elves to do elf things, because the soil contains zero nutrition and if they want to not starve in the time it takes to gestate at least one egg with enough Strider blood to teleport and raise the kid to the point where he or she can get them all out of here they're going to need to harvest the corpse for as much plant-usable nutrient as possible and be impeccably efficient with their waste.

They may turn out to be in slightly more luck than that.

About an hour after they arrived, a small humanoid figure wearing a backpack much too big for him becomes visible in the distance, approaching them from the direction of the lake.

The elves have all well and finished doing their elf things by this point, and Aduva's the first to spot him. "That's either good, because he knows how to survive here without arguable cannibalism, or bad, because we have another mouth to feed."

The distant figure waves.

Aduva waves back. This is highly visible on account of her being a few inches over seven feet tall.

Yeah, that sure is a thing!

Walk walk. Walk walk walk.

He calls a cheery greeting in an unfamiliar language as soon as he's in earshot.

...Well, that's hardly a surprise. She taps her chest. "Aduva."

He taps his own chest and says, "Tiro!"

"I, Aduva. I am Aduva. You, Tiro. You are Tiro."

"I am Tiro. You are Aduva." He looks around at everyone else and adds, "You are...?"

"Amalta."

"Kaleith."

"Leuska," a woman with great brown wings extending from her back introduces herself.

"Luvei." A man almost nine feet tall with pale blue skin.

"Yttren." A man with green skin, a very prominent lower jaw, and highly pronounced canines.

"Delsmiar." A woman in gauzy black robes that were probably very fine before they were so tattered, with black markings on her face.

"Mirrin."

"Panga."

"Fondai."

"Proust." A quartet of women shorter than he, all with thick curly brown hair and bare, hairy feet.

He smiles a welcoming smile, says something else in his language, and beckons to the group while taking a few steps away in the direction he came from.

They all look warily at each other and at their friend's body.

...yeah, there is that.

He sighs. He takes off his comically oversized backpack. He sits down on the ground and unlatches the lid of the boxy pack and takes out a round metal plate, a book, and a paintbrush.

Okay...

He makes gentle shooing motions to clear people out of the square meter or so directly in front of him.

Inside a compartment of his pack, sixteen glass spheres are strapped tightly into individual leather holders, each a different colour. He dips the brush into the brown one, somehow; the dense spongy brush-tip passes through the shell of the sphere like it isn't there, while the shaft of the brush ticks against the outside and stops the tip from going any farther. Using a diagram from the book as a reference, he paints an abstract diagram onto the flat surface of the plate in brown ink with glints of green and grey.

A cubic meter of rich soil appears in midair directly in front of him and falls into a heap on the ground. The curves and lines of his diagram vanish from the plate at the same moment.

Yttren steps forward, reaches towards the soil, and makes a "can I?" gesture.

The small conjuror nods encouragingly.

The soil is awesome.

"This is good soil. Really, really good soil," he says in amazement after pinching a bit.

"No quasi-cannibalism for us, then. Thank the Mother."

Tiro watches this interaction.

He points in the direction he came from. "Really good soil," he advertises.

"Fucking sold."

"We should still bury him," Luvei says, "even if we're not going to try growing food from his body."

Tiro looks between Luvei and the body and the pile of dirt.

He attempts to inquire by gestures whether he should make more dirt.

"We're going to need more soil than that to grow food with," he says, "since it will be a few years at least before we can find somewhere more habitable. Here or where you came from doesn't matter."

He shrugs. He puts his magic painting kit away and stands up and puts his ridiculously overlarge backpack on again.

"We shouldn't all go with him, not to start with. Amalta, you and Luvei and Leuska and Mirrin and Fondai can stay and bury Dakker. I and Delsmiar and Yttren and Panga and Proust can see where he's taking us."

Tiro glances at all the named people, then takes a few steps away and beckons again.

The group designated to follow him does so.

Trek trek trek, back toward the lake and then around it. A hill by the shore comes into view. It looks to be about an hour's walk in total from the site of their arrival; if that's his base, he must have started walking almost as soon as he heard the death toll. And it seems likely to be his base. For one thing, it's covered in more of that good soil and has plants growing all the fuck over it.

Well, investigating a death toll and then immediately making soil speaks well of his motives. Gosh, those sure are plants. Are they edible plants, Yttren?

A selection of the nearby plants:

One low tangled bush whose coiling branches bear rolled-up strips of raw bacon instead of berries. The woody stems aren't very nutritious, but the bacon, uh, is bacon.

A cluster of sunflower-like plants with shining iridescent blue liquid collecting in their rolled-up cuplike leaves. Tiro interposes himself between Yttren and these ones, gesturing to the liquid and shaking his head: do not touch.

Assorted unrecognizable fruit trees and berry bushes and vegetables and tubers, all edible and nutritious.

A stand of peculiar shrubs without much nutritional value, busily producing pods of soft delicate pinkish-white fluff.

Yttren reports dazedly on the edibility of various things. Wow.

Tiro has more welcoming smiles for everyone.

He goes to a stone door set into the hillside and hauls it open with visible effort, then gestures: anyone want to see inside?

Sure, it's probably safe.

Then Tiro can give them an incomprehensibly narrated tour of his cozy little hill!

There's one big round room just inside the entrance, with ten backpacks just like the one he's wearing hanging neatly from pegs on the curve of the wall. Also in this room: a big round wooden table, not enough chairs for everyone, dust in the corners, and another door leading to a somewhat cramped spiral stair which in turn leads to another big room. It seems like it used to be some sort of dormitory, but half the beds are smashed and some of the remaining ones have fallen apart with age. Tiro shrugs apologetically.

She nods. "We were all expecting to sleep on the ground for the forseeable future anyway."

Wry smile. Nod. Incomprehensible commentary.

"I have no idea how much you get out of it when I talk. We should probably try to teach each other more words."

"I get more words when you talk."

"...So are you just really really good at languages or is that your species' magic?"

"My magic. Not species."

"...Um?"

"Um? Words," he prompts.

"What do you mean not species?"

"My species is not magic. My magic is not species."

"...You're a hybrid?" she guesses.

"No...?"

"I don't understand."

"I don't words to you understand. I get more words when you talk," he reminds her.

"Every species has a magic. Every magic comes from a species. Except death tolls and geneses, I guess."

"My species has no magic. My magic comes from - a species not my species? Words! Teach me words!"

"Another species?"

"Another species!" he agrees. "Another species has magic. My species has no magic. All my species magic comes from another species magic."

"What makes you think your species doesn't have magic? Some people think elves don't have magic, but we do."

He sighs.

"What makes you think my species does have magic?"

"Because every species has magic."

"I don't have words," he says, frustrated.

"I don't know what words you need. Words about magic, words about species, words about something else?"

"Yes! All those!"

She giggles. "Magic! Besides death tolls and geneses, there's species magic. Every species has their own unique magic, although they can be similar. People sometimes try grouping them in artificial categories but they don't come with inherent divisions like that. Elves have elf magic, to make healthy babies, orcs have orc magic, to make food grow, frost giants have ice magic, etcetera. Hybrids can end up with varying levels of the magic of their component species. I'm half-elf half-frost giant, but I have all the elf magic and and less than all of the frost giant magic so I say I'm an elf who is also half frost giant." As if reminded by her mentioning he elfness, she looks down at the blood-soaked glove on her left hand. "...With elves, it's indecent to go around with your left hand bare, because elves have weird biology. Do you happen to have a pair of gloves lying around that might fit?"

"...Ah... that might fit, yes," he says, and goes back up to the main room and hoists one of the boxy backpacks off the wall and pulls out a pair of heavy leather gloves, brown with a silvery sheen.

"Thank you so much. Uh, I'm just gonna step out of the room to change, alright? ...Is there anywhere I could wash the blood off my hands?"

"Yes—" and back down the stairs to a room next to the dormitory with, among other things, a magical self-filling washbasin.

"Thank you so much," she repeats, and waits for him to leave the room before taking her glove off.

Yep, off he goes.

Oh it's good to feel clean.

She comes back in a few minutes later wearing the left half of the glove pair and with the right half dangling from her belt.

He waves hello when she emerges back into the main room of the underground complex. "So: magic! I don't know what death tolls or geneses are."

"...I guess if you've only got two species wherever you are you probably haven't had a genesis in long enough that you'd necessarily still have cultural consciousness of it. A genesis is when a new species starts. Death tolls are...that thing that happens when someone dies? Like when Dakker--my friend--died."

"That doesn't happen when someone dies wherever-I-am!"

"...Uh."

"Crap."

"My species does not have magic."

"Okay, I believe you. But I think that's less important right now than the possibility that my friend just died on virgin soil. Death tolls, on land that's never seen one before, cause geneses."

"..."

"Some period of time--I think a few days, maybe a week--after the death toll rings, the nearest population center--I don't know if we count, we wouldn't if there was a city nearby but I really doubt there is--starts seeing babies of the new species just suddenly appear. Not out of proportion to the number of adults available to take care of them--if we do count we'd probably not get an average of more than one a year, I think, at least to start with--but it doesn't stop until there's enough of them to form a stable gene pool."

"Uh," says Tiro. "...uh."

"I mean, this is assuming this is virgin soil--or was--which we don't know yet, but..."

"There's no city nearby," he says. "There's no... anything nearby."

"We can't just leave. If someone else comes by someday the genesis will resume and if they have no idea what's going on..."

Tiro nods.

"I'm sorry."

"I couldn't leave anyway," he says. "I don't know how."

"...How did you get here?"

"Magic," he says wryly.

"Fair enough. We were brought here by our dead friend, but if we really wanted to leave we could create at least one child with enough of his genes to inherit his species magic."

"...Uh," says Tiro.

"Elf magic, not necrophilia."

...He giggles.

"My sister--Amalta--is engaged to Kaleith. I think they'd be competent to rear a child even if they didn't have no choice because of the genesis. And Dakker gave his consent a long time ago that if it was for the good of the group his genes could be used posthumously."

"...why?"

"Because we were a group of civilians banding together for mutual protection and survival in a very nasty war zone."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

He doesn't seem to know what to say to that.

"We wouldn't have actually gone back even without the possible genesis, not once you showed up, but if you hadn't been able to produce fertile soil we would have been on a very tight deadline to get out of here as fast as possible."

"Yeah."

"If none of us can go back where we came from and we're going to have as many people as a genesis will ultimately produce we're going to end up founding a civilization whether we want to or not. Maybe we should think about how we want that to go."

"Maybe you should teach me your language first," Tiro suggests.

"True. I mean, if there's a better way to do it than talking about things I'm not sure what it is, I've never taught a language before, but things like that should probably wait."

"Talking about things will do it! Talk about more things!"

"My name is Aduva. I am the daughter of Saerltes, an elf, and Arka daughter of Aduva and Jaken, a frost giant. I am the sister of Amalta and the sister-in-law to be of Kaleith. I was born in the nine hundred and twelfth year of the settlement of the nation of Arshalei, and in the thousandth year the queen was murdered and her brother and son began to war over her throne. Each claims the other killed her."

"My name is Tiro se Fara. I am the son of Kelten, a human, and Alyne se Fara, daughter of Fara, another human." He has to borrow in 'human' from his own language. "There are no hybrids with us. Athrai don't die or have children."

"That is very strange. They can't be killed at all?"

"I don't know how to kill them."

"And you've never heard of one dying?"

"Never."

"I don't know what to make of that."

"They are very magic."

"Doesn't seem fair, if they have lots of magic and you don't have any."

Tiro snorts. "Yeah."

"But you have your--language thing?"

"It's from an athra."

"I guess that's better than them not sharing, if things are like that but they can share."

He snorts again and shakes his head. "Yeah," he says, somewhat ambivalently.

"Need more words?" she guesses.

"Yes!"

"I can't really think what we should be discussing right now that you have words for. Maybe I should just tell stories for a bit."

"Do that!" he encourages.

"Okay, here's a creation story from a popular Elf religion. Long ago, before the worlds were born, two ladies danced among the stars. Each was more beautiful than the loveliest of mortals, and the steps of their dance spanned galaxies. One day, one of them happened to notice a planet, in the course of their frolicking, and she saw that it had life on it. She narrowed her attention, until she could see the leaves and the flowers and the animals. And she said to her counterpart, 'look, is this not lovely? Is it not totally unlike the grand slow sweeping of the skies that we have traversed? Let us garb ourselves in flesh and bone such as these creatures possess, and walk among them.' And so they did. Decades passed, as they walked in forests and grasslands and mountains. But these two did not know the frailties of mortal flesh, and in time the first, the one who had noticed the world, fell from a cliff and snapped her neck.  Her death toll was like nothing heard before or since; it ripped apart the fabric of reality and created the portals, and its tones sank into the earth, causing the first Genesis. Now the dead Lady's counterpart was inconsolable, but when she saw the child that the world placed before her, since there was no one else to watch it, she took it into her arms and taught it everything that she and her beloved had learned about the world while walking in it. And in time more children were brought forth, and married, and multiplied, and the Mother at last left the world that the Martyr had died upon, content that her children did not need her so much that she could not seek her partner amongst the stars, hoping that the death of her body was not the death of her self."

"...Portals?"

"Between planets! Do you not have those either?"

"No! We only have one planet!"

"That must be so confining. What do you do about overpopulation?"

"We... don't have it?"

"Do people just mostly not have kids?"

"Uh? How often do people have kids where you're from?"

"Depends a lot on personality and social class and economic status. I don't think I ever bothered to look up the average. But--if there keep being new people, the population's going to keep growing--oh. Unless you're a species that ages past maturity, I guess."

"...There are species that don't?"

"All the species with a significant population in Arshalei don't."

"Humans do. Well, most humans. Some have magic."

"Do you?"

"I... need more words."

He can have another story! This one is a folktale with animals in it.

And then he has enough vocabulary to try to explain.

"I don't know if I'm going to age past maturity, but I also don't know if I can die, at all."

"Magic thing?"

"Magic thing. Sometimes the athrai give out nice magic, and sometimes they give out nasty magic, but they almost never kill people. An enemy of my family won a favour from an athra and thought they'd try to trick the athra into killing me, but the athra added in more magic so the thing that was supposed to kill me didn't, and as a side effect, nothing else does either."

"Oh. What's the thing, or should I not ask?"

"It's hard to explain and I don't really want to demonstrate because it hurts a lot."

"I can imagine. More words?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

She tells him an adorable childhood anecdote.

It's very adorable!

"Should we be going and getting your other friends?" he wonders at the end of it.

"Probably. They're probably done with the grave by now."

"Okay, let's go."

"Not looking forward to explaining the genesis."

"...yeah."

"I can give you more words on the way back."

"Good plan."

More miscellaneous stories! Aduva can tell a lot of stories in an hour.

It's very helpful to Tiro's vocabulary.

It's only fair. He's very helpful to her survival, and that of her friends.

Trek trek trek trek oh look it's her friends.

Her friends appear to already be freaking out before they get there.

...Did a baby generate already???

They'll find out when they reach the friends, Tiro supposes.

A baby did not already generate, as it turns out, but Delsmiar has announced that they're on previously-virgin soil and a genesis is imminent.

Tiro hangs back awkwardly. He really doesn't know how to handle the prospect of spontaneous babies.

The spontaneous babies will happen where there are adults, not where there is corpse, so if he's willing to handle nearby spontaneous babies there's no obstacle to following him back to his base.

...Yes, okay, good. Back to the hill.

"I'm going to have to research construction," he says on the way back. "It was next on my list anyway, now that I've got the bathroom working. Does anyone want to help me clear all the broken furniture out of the bedroom? And does anyone want to learn this world's weird magic? You have to be careful with it, if you spill the wrong magic ink on yourself you might die or something, but it's really useful."

"Tell us more about how it works?"

"You saw what I did to make the dirt when you got here. That's how you make things with it," he says. "Painting magic ink on a flat plate. I'm learning how to make the magic ink, but I haven't got it all figured out yet, but there's enough of it that I'm not worried about running out soon."

"But spilling it could be lethal."

"I'm not going to spill it on any of you! I should get those collector flowers moved, though, I don't want to risk somebody running into one..."

"I didn't think you would! I just want to be sure it's really clear to everyone here. Anyway, I absolutely want to learn."

"Okay."

"--Can it do healing? I don't--I don't want to be in the position of trying and failing to save someone again."

"I honestly have no idea. I'm working out of books in a language I don't speak - my language magic works on speech but not writing, and the speaker has to understand what they're saying - and I've only been here for a month. I know it can do lots of things besides make stuff out of thin air, but making stuff out of thin air is the only thing it can do that you don't need to be literate to learn out of a book."

"That's really annoying. Delsmiar?"

"The third word on the legend of the diagram on the fifty-first page of one of them means 'structure,' and I could identify which one if you showed me the diagram," she shrugs. "I'll let you know if I get any other words."

"...There aren't that many books with diagrams, I can show you page fifty-one of all of them when we get back to the hill," says Tiro.

"That'll work," she agrees.

"Thanks."

"Did Aduva explain Oracles to you?"

"Not really!"

"My species--Oracles--we're pretty rare, but we have incredibly valuable magic. We just--know things, out of nowhere, and they're always objectively true. You can't steer it, though--I could tell you the exact number of eyelashes you have, for example."

"I don't need to know my number of eyelashes, but thank you," he says. "How are you rare?"

"People frequently try to abduct Oracles to force us to use our magic for them, so most of us find powerful people who aren't coercive to work for instead of forming communities composed primarily of ourselves like most species."

"I'm not sure which part of what I just said is causing that reaction."

"If I had to put the reaction into words, it would be something like 'things work so differently from what I'm used to where you're from, but people are apparently still people everywhere'."

"Ha. That much is certainly true."

"People are always people. Except when they're athrai. But I think athrai are people too, in their own way, they're just so strange it's impossible to tell what they're thinking."

"They don't sound like a normal sort of species at all. I mean. You don't either, for our values of normal, but you're closer."

"I can tell human from athra pretty reliably, and you all seem human to me, that way. You're different but you're not different the way athrai are different."

"Amalta and I are half frost giant elves, I think I mentioned, Kaleith's a full elf, we've established that Delsmiar's an oracle, Leuska's a siren, Luvei's a full frost giant, Yttren is an orc, and Mirrin, Panga, Fondai and Proust are halflings."

"Athrai can take whatever shape they please. Sometimes they pretend to be human. They're usually not very good at it."

"Not good at it like how?"

"The really easy mistakes to pick up on are when they give themselves glowing eyes or bright green hair or make themselves eight feet tall. Sometimes they're a little subtler and it's just... you can tell their bodies don't quite work? And the really good ones don't make either of those mistakes, but they still sound like athrai when they talk."

"I mean, one of my mothers is taller than eight feet, and she's of the shorter local frost giant ethnicity. Someone eight feet tall with green hair would just be pegged for a locally obscure species, most likely. How do Athrai talk?"

"...Weirdly. It's hard to explain. If you ever meet one I can say 'see, like that, that's what I was talking about' and you'll probably say 'oh, I see exactly what you mean now'. Different athrai get different things wrong, but... they're drawing from a different set of errors than humans?"

"Fascinating. Can you quote an example or something?"

"It might get lost in translation."

"Right. You're learning this language really well, I'm impressed by your magic."

"Yeah, the language thing is pretty useful."

"I can't claim to be as fast a learner but if you teach me your language too at some point you can tell me what it's like when an Athra talks!"

"I've never taught a language before, but I can try!"

"Neither have I! Granted that I don't have a magic thing, but I'm sure we can still work something out."

"Sure."

"Pronouns? I we you y'all (he/she)/it they(animate)/they(inanimate)?"

...He grins. "Actually, which language do you want to learn? I speak two."

"Probably ultimately both but it'd be less confusing to start with just one--what're the major practical and aesthetic differences?"

"Haelahar is the language of my country. Sanash is my father's native language. Um, let's see, how about a line of poetry in each... Soth an hazire senn' ith verai, that's Haelahar, and min ada peret min firris telaynit, that's Sanash."

"Those are both nice. Have you heard an Athra talk in both of them?"

"More frequently in Haelahar, growing up in Haela and all."

"Haelahar to start with," she decides.

"Okay! So, pronouns? 'I' and 'we' are fe and feya... after that it gets complicated."

"Complicated like how?"

"Well, you've got 'you' and 'you(plural)', but in Haelahar it's ka and kai for friends, de and deya for strangers or other people you want to be especially polite to."

"Oh, a formal/informal divide, I've heard about languages having those."

"And then there's a gender divide in the next set."

"That I have also heard of, a lot. My language--Kaelque--doesn't have one because it started out as an elven language and elves aren't sexually dimorphic."

"Oh, huh. Yeah, I guess languages would develop differently depending on the species that spoke them..."

"It's sort of interesting that we're all psychologically female instead of being all psychologically agender."

"...Are you? I mean - what would the difference be?"

"There is a difference between someone who's a girl and someone who's a boy, and sometimes you get someone who's biologically one and psychologically the other, and that's usually not fun, and sometimes you get someone who's psychologically both or neither, and I guess I don't know about all but when oracles have had anything to say on the subject it's that elves are by default women in the brain."

"I guess they'd know..."

"If it was just one they could be lying and if they disagreed it would be ambiguous which side was lying but it would be really weird if they all independently decided to lie."

"Yeah."

"Is this really weird to you? Did you just not know gender identity was a thing?"

"It just seems like if your species isn't sexually dimorphic, it would be hard to tell the difference between gender identity and species identity...? But oracles exist, and that explains how you know."

"Gender identity is apparently really consistent across species! Elves have some weird cultural stuff about it, though, you occasionally get bisexuality even in elves who aren't half something else and being attracted to men is seen as this really weird fetish."

"I guess it makes sense, with how your species seem to be so... similar? Integrated? That gender would be a consistent thing."

"I think similar works better than integrated."

"You are way more integrated than humans and athrai, though, and that's obviously having societal effects. If you had an entire planet with nothing on it but elves for dozens of generations and no contact with the outside world, they might lose the concept of gender completely!"

"Elves don't die of old age," she reminds him. "Unless someone kept murdering generations that recalled gender being a concept we probably wouldn't."

"It might take longer, but it's not like they'd be getting any day-to-day use out of it..."

"I still think they wouldn't forget it was a thing, but you could get to a point where the younger generations never learned about it," she concedes.

"Anyway, how old do people tend to get? There are people who don't die of old age in Haela but there aren't any of the same such people that there were ten thousand years ago. Even Talovir's only about six thousand. Accidents happen, and so does murder."

"I honestly couldn't tell you, Arshalei's only been around for about a thousand years and none of the settlers were very old."

"Well, I'm not going to try settling an isolated planet with elves just to see what happens if I leave them that way for a few thousand years, so I guess I'll never know."

"Maybe someday we can figure out a way to get to less war-torn parts of the worlds as I know them and see if anyone's done it!"

He grins.

"I wonder if there'll be portals, now that there's been a death toll. Don't especially think so, but it's possible."

"We can keep an eye out. What do portals look like?"

"Shimmering, freestanding irregular shapes."

"Huh, okay."

"If we don't get portals I expect overpopulation's going to be an issue eventually, at least assuming Dakker's genesis doesn't produce a species with the age problem..."

"...Honestly, by that point I'm pretty sure I will be able to build a new planet with local magic."

"How would we get there without portals, though?"

"We will figure that out in the thousands of years it takes us to overrun this one!"

"Fair enough!"

"We should figure out what planets this solar system already has, first."

"Before building a new one, or before learning to travel to them? Either, I suppose."

"Well, it'll probably be easier!"

"I expect so!"

"I wonder if it'd be easier to make a new one or terraform an existing one, if one suitable for terraforming is available."

"I don't think I know enough about planets to say."

"We can figure it out!"

"It's good to have projects!"

"Yeah--I think I'm going to want to write down every story I know well enough, if you can make paper, in my spare time, so I don't lose the entire corpus of literature in my world."

"Good idea. I haven't found a paper recipe yet but there's bound to be one, or a plant that grows it, or something."

"I know you can make paper from just wood but I'm not totally clear on how."

"We can figure that out too."

"Yeah!"

...Gosh that's a pretty smile.

Tiro is unaware of this assessment.

"Anyway, what was I going to do when we reached the hill - right, show Delsmiar all my recipe books," he says. They reach the hill. He gets out all his recipe books.

Delsmiar points out which is the correct one.

"'Structure'. That has interesting implications. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He starts flipping through the recipe books, trying to guess what the various Structure recipes might produce.

"What's the significance of 'structure', here?"

"It's one of the sixteen basic colours of magic ink," he says, flipping to the back of the book to show her the diagram.

"Recipe diagrams are almost always painted using a subset of these sixteen colours. The ones I've been working with mostly use these four," he points at the brown, pale blue, orange, and blue-green circles that connect to the big red one in the lower right corner. "Structure is this one," he points to the bluish one on the upper right edge between black and green. "I don't understand the diagram completely yet, but if I'm guessing right about some things, the five big ones are the basic basic colours and each of the smaller ones is made by combining whichever two big circles it's in the middle of - so Structure is black plus green, and the one I think might be Air is red plus black. The bright blue one in the very middle doesn't fit the pattern, though, and it seems like all the other colours can be made out of it somehow but I don't know how yet."

"Almost always? When do they not?"

"There's a whole list." He turns the page and shows her: the sixteen basic colours appear first, but there's at least a few hundred, spanning several more pages, all neatly labelled. "Some of these are only in the book twice. I'm not sure they're all in the book at all, I haven't gone through and checked every single one."

"Oooh."

"Isn't it fascinating?"

"It really is!"

"I've been doing a lot of really reckless experiments, but I can teach you everything I've learned how to do that's safe and why all the dangerous stuff is dangerous."

"Reckless like how?"

"Like, uh. Did you see that kind of scorched crater near the lakeshore, on the far side of the hill from where we were coming from?"

"Yyyesss?"

"I was still figuring out how the recipe diagrams work and I might have been in kind of a bad mood and I scribbled all over the plate and, uh, I'm now pretty sure the orange ink represents fire. And I'm very careful about drawing recipes correctly these days. The plate and brush were a total loss."

"...How are you okay?"

"It's hard to explain. The short answer is 'magic'. I told Aduva some of the background; how much do you want to know?"

"Aduva?"

"His world works completely differently from ours--they have one species with no magic, one I'm-not-even-sure-it's-a-species with lots of magic, no death tolls, and no portals. The maybe-not-a-species shares, sometimes, which would be good except they hand out curses as well as blessings. He's...got a thing that hurts a lot, but he can't die of it because the not-species doesn't like killing people, and it's plausible that nothing else can kill him either as a side effect."

"I guess if not every world has death tolls that explains why this is--was--virgin soil," Leuska mutters.

"The maybe-not-a-species are called athrai," says Tiro. "Singular 'athra'. And what I am is 'human'."

"I assume Aduva already told you what we all are," Luvei says.

"Yeah."

"Ouch!" yelps Proust from the other room.

Tiro is alarmed! "What happened?" he calls, hurrying toward the sound.

She is cradling a hand with one lightly sliced finger. A shard of something clear and glimmering with a little blood on one edge lies on the floor beneath it.

Tiro winces. "Sorry, I thought I'd cleaned all those up," he says. "Don't touch them, they're really sharp. Worse than broken glass by a lot."

"What is it?" she asks. "I know it was kind of dumb, it was just so pretty..."

"It's, uh. It's me."

"...What?"

"I - break, when I get injured, and it makes those."

"That the thing that hurts a lot?"

"Yeah."

"I guess that explains why you don't have visible scars."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for figuring out what's dangerous."

"Better me than someone who'd die if they exploded," he shrugs.

"I was avoiding saying that because it seemed rude but I was totally thinking it."

Tiro laughs. "It's true, though!"

"The world would be a very different place if everything that was true was polite to say!"

"Okay, you got me there."

"Also," Luvei says, "the bare words, spoken initially by someone else, might imply that just because it doesn't do lasting damage means that it doesn't matter if you're hurt."

"Well. Yeah. There's that."

"I don't think it doesn't matter that you got hurt but it seems obviously worth it."

"I don't like getting hurt, but it is temporary and death isn't."

"Exactly."

"You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm - I'll be fine. I think I'm having some trouble adjusting to not being the only person on the planet anymore. I... wasn't having much fun being the only person on the planet."

"Are you the kind of person who's comfortable with hugs from near-strangers, because that is sad and I kind of want to hug you comfortingly."

"...I will accept comforting hugs."

Hugs!

Comfort!

She eventually unhugs and stands up again. (He is not tall enough to stand up while hugging.)

"You're really tall," remarks Tiro.

She looks at Luvei, who's eight feet seven inches, and Kaleith, who's six feet eight inches. "I'm not unusually tall given what species my parents are."

"Yes, but neither of your parents has ever hugged me."

"This is true."

"Hmm?"

"Nothing, sorry."

"It's fine, I was just curious."

He nods.

"I'm making such a mess of this, I really should've tried harder to prepare for guests..."

"So far as I can tell you had no reason to expect any."

"Yeah, but if I didn't get any I was going to go insane, so..."

"Fair enough."

"It's good strategy to plan more for the situation where you have a chance even when it's less likely than the one where you don't."

"I think you're doing fine anyway."

"Thanks."

"It helps that we just came from a war zone and have really low standards," Panga opines.

Snort.

"No one's trying to kill us and we don't have to set a watch so we can escape when that inevitably changes! It's great."

"Yep," says Tiro. "Being the only people on the planet will do that."

"Less great," she admits. "Still better than dying."

"And," Luvei says, "lest we forget, we're not going to be the only people here indefinitely."

Tiro mutters something in Haelahar.

Aduva visibly considers asking but decides it's probably private.

"Okay," says Tiro, "I think I'm gonna go around and make sure there aren't any more pieces of me lying around where they might hurt somebody."

"It's weird that they're so pretty," Proust grumbles.

"Athrai are weird!"

"From our point of view I don't think there's much about your world that isn't weird. Athrai are extra weird if you also think they're weird."

"Athrai go around doing things that don't make sense to anybody who isn't an athra."

"Sounds extra weird to me."

"Well. Yeah."

"Delsmiar?"

"Got nothing on 'em."

"Anyway. I was going to clean up after myself," says Tiro. He heads into the dormitory room to start systematically checking for shards and other hazardous items.

"We should figure out sleeping arrangements," Luvei says. "The beds are a windfall--to those of you that can use them."

"If the four halflings double up, we could maybe put mattresses together on the floor or something."

Delsmiar pulls the tatters of her robe closer around her. "I'm not sure I want to sleep alone. I know we don't need to, anymore, but--"

"I know what you mean. We could take all the mattresses off the beds and put 'em all together."