"The name does kind of suggest it. What about the cities looks mage-king-y?"

"I haven't ever seen one and I last heard about them when I was twelve, so I really couldn't tell you."

"...Hard to explain, some of them," she says. "They steal the ground out of things, either slowly just by being near them or fast by tearing it out on purpose. Ground-ripped alive stuff dies. Ground-ripped dead stuff loses colour and structure and crumbles into grey dust. Somewhere that a malice has been, if they stayed long enough, we call it 'blighted' - things have had so much ground pulled out of them that nothing's alive anymore, and just standing in the middle of a bad blight patch can make you sick. There's a place called the Western Levels that's blighted so bad, if you throw a rock in and wait, it'll fall apart."

Stalas looks even more troubled now!

"Remind you of home?" asks Ivan.

"Yeah," says Stalas. "I mean, there are obvious differences, but, yeah."

"Anyway, that's only what they do just existing and staying alive," says Sable. "What they try to accomplish - or seem like they're trying to accomplish - isn't great either; they... sort of try to be mage-kings. By mind-slaving anyone in reach and making war on everyone else."

"They can - with animals, and people who don't have groundsense, or don't have it strong enough - take over your mind and make you do whatever they want. It's one of the worst things a malice can do, because mind-slaved people remember afterward, if they're rescued - and sometimes you can't rescue them, you have to kill them before they kill you. My parents invented ground-shields that you can put on a person and then no kind of groundwork can touch them, not mind-slaving or ground-ripping but not healing either, and now that there's those, farmers can help in malice battles without getting mind-slaved."

"That's a useful thing to invent. Are there enough to go around?"

"Sort of. They don't - the way they work is, a Lakewalker who knows how has to make the shield, right on the person - usually with something like a walnut on a string, that's the kind my father made first - and if they take it off it breaks and won't work again without another Lakewalker fixing it. So it's not a matter of everybody in the world getting a walnut and then you're done. And there aren't near enough Lakewalkers to go around fixing everybody's walnuts all the time if everybody had one. But for farmers near a malice breakout, if there's a spare maker to whip up a shield for them, it means they have options besides run away or get maliced."

"I see."

"On what might astonishingly be a happier topic, do you have your own variant on the fairy curse or substitute therefor?"

"Fairy curse?"

"For some reason, all Mileses have some sort of painful and inconvenient health problem. Fragile bones, a tendency to bruise, whatever. In worlds where fairy curses are a possible phenomenon, it can manifest as a fairy curse."

"Oh. Yeah. I have a - ground injury. It hurts to do most things with my groundsense. But then Terraria happened and now it's much better."

"How did Terraria improve your ground injury?"

"Terraria has a lot of really weird magic," she says. "A lot of it is horrible monsters that try to kill you, but some of it is useful things like heart candies, which are candies that you eat them and they make you unnaturally healthy."

"Sounds convenient."

"It is! I actually have some with me, is there anyone here who could really use some unnatural health?"

...Milan looks deeply conflicted.

"I mean, if you have infinity of it to go around I won't turn you down but I'm planning to move out of my organic body and into a shiny rock and I'm not sure how much good it will do me after that..."

"I'm sort of curious what good it could possibly do me, but if you don't have it to spare for experiments I will do without."