Ivans are playing cards.
Mileses, including Solvei, are debating the wisdom of borrowing another strategy game from Bar; Mark, a voice of caution, does not know what will happen if all of them (Solvei, Mial, Miles, Milo, Stalas) all start screaming at each other in twenty directions.
And -
"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."
"On what might astonishingly be a happier topic, do you have your own variant on the fairy curse or substitute therefor?"
"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."
"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."
"It is! I actually have some with me, is there anyone here who could really use some unnatural health?"
"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."
She digs around in a few belt pouches and comes up with a handful of heart-shaped red objects, and then another handful of heart-shaped yellow objects.
"Okay, that's... ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine... three hundred and twenty-one heart candies and two hundred and thirty-three Life Fruits," she says. "Which is enough for, um... twenty-one people to get all the unnatural health that heart candies will give you, and eleven of them to get all the unnatural health Life Fruits will give you on top of that."
"What is the mechanism here? One just eats them, like they're candy? I wonder if there's any way to manufacture them... how do you get them in Terraria?"
"You get heart candies by smashing crystal hearts that just sort of exist underground in caves, and Life Fruits by picking them from plants that spontaneously grow in certain areas after certain conditions are met," says Sable. "Because Terraria. And yes, you just eat them like they're candy."
"...Milan," says Ivan, "are you worried the anti-science world will stomp you for eating extremely inexplicable non-scientific heart candy, or do you just not want the results maybe probably eeenh?"
"I'm worried because I don't know what the results would be, and fucking around with fairy curses is generally pretty stupid, but if the results came out in a way I liked it would be really nice so I am really tempted," says Milan, conflictedly. One might begin to worry that his face will get stuck that way.
"Fairy curses in particular above and beyond general 'the universe wants to punish you' reasons are a particularly dangerous thing?"
"Yes? Sort of? Fairy curses are the sort of thing it is a bad idea to try to circumvent without either making an honourable attempt to fulfill the ending condition where applicable, or getting another fairy on your side. And if this one has an ending condition, I don't know it and have no good way to find it out."
Alas, no.
"Rats. Worth a try."
Sable sits at a table and starts separating her handfuls of magical treats into piles. Eleven little pairs of a red candy and a yellow fruit sitting next to each other, and then ten more red candies sitting alone. (There are a few extras, which she returns to her pocket.)
"I know it doesn't look like it, but each of these red things is fifteen heart candies, and the yellow ones are twenty Life Fruits. You can't get any good out of a Life Fruit until you've had the maximum number of heart candies already. And I'm reserving two of the full sets for my parents in case I can get back home from here but can't go back to Terraria to stock up first." She pockets two red-yellow pairs. "So that's nine full sets of heart candies and Life Fruits, plus ten sets of just heart candies, left over to give to people I meet in strange bars. Who wants some?"