"You can use your pickaxe to dig through dirt, and your axe to chop down trees," the stranger says helpfully, continuing to hold out the sack and giving no sign he has even noticed that Cam said anything.

"Those being more or less the definitions of those kinds of tools, yes. Why do you want a demon to LARP with?"

"That's a slime? Why the hell would somebody make those? Also how hard is it to understand I don't want to LARP with you dude."

"Whoa! Hey! Sorry, angel, I did not mean to trespass, I got summoned here, I'm not trying to make trouble!" Cam exclaims. "Please stop shooting at me!"

Cam tries the five words of a common angelic language he knows. "I mean no harm! Sorry!"

Nope. Now there are two identical angels(?) pelting him with sharp stiff feathers. Their flight pattern is oddly repetitive: swoop close while firing, veer away and circle back, repeat.

The added weight encumbers them enough that they start losing altitude. They make no noise, but continue firing feathers at Cam as they sink.

He grounds this one without attempting diplomacy. He flies higher in case there's other land he can aim at within squinting distance. He makes himself a set of good binoculars to increase squinting distance.

Another weirdass angel?

"It's - it's my original model! I swear!" says Cam. "What the fuck is up with this place?"

"I've had them for a hundred and fifty years. How in the name of inconjurable antimatter do yours work? Are you hiding a fairy in your pocket?"

"...So those are in fact not angels, then, angels not having exploding in their repertoire? What are they, and how did you come by your cinematic aiming skills?"

"They're called 'harpies', and they're a kind of local monster. They appear and try to kill you if you fly above a certain altitude."

"So weighing them to the ground is not necessary nonlethality for reasons of tactics or mercy?"

"What?"

"I'm a demon. If, as I begin to suspect, this was not obvious. Demons make things. I took the harpies for angels, which would be indestructible and also people, so when they came after me I made large blocks of solid gold around their feet to pull them to the ground, rather than exploding them. Should I just explode them?"

"They're not indestructible and they're not people. You can just explode them. ...How long have you been here?"

"A few minutes, maybe ten, why?"

"Oh. No wonder you don't know anything," she says, nodding to herself.

"Yes, quite, is there a pamphlet I can read?"

"Sorry, no. But I can try to explain what I know. Can we land first, though? Harpies are annoying. Where's your guide? You have a guide, right?"

"Would that be the fellow who knows two sentences and tried to give me a bag?"

"Sure." Cam swoops down towards his guide.

The wood-winged girl follows. She explodes one more harpy on the way, and amid the shower of gore, several silver and copper coins rain onto Cam. "Sorry!" she calls. "The blood and stuff vanishes after a few minutes."

The girl does nothing obvious to the trees in the guide's immediate vicinity. They collapse in showers of numerous small wooden cubes and rarer, similarly sized acorns. She goes around sweeping up the cubes and acorns out of the grass.

"What the hell!" exclaims Cam.

"You didn't cut them!" Cam accuses. "What's the deal with the cubes? What did you have against those trees in the first place?"

The girl offers him her small wooden cube. "You can try it if you want. What do you mean, box him yourself?"

"I said demons make stuff," Cam said. "If I wanted to put a creepy dude of limited vocabulary in a box I would just - make a box." He holds out his hand; he makes a small box.

"...That's useful," she says, staring at the box and lowering her hand. "What can you make? What can't you make?"

"Can't make antimatter, can't make things containing vacuum if I'm not starting from an environment thereof, can't make things that begin in motion although I can do 'under tension', 'in midair', and 'on fire', need some idea of what I'm trying to make - for instance, for books, title and author is best - final product can't break the laws of physics. Usually. The laws of physics are obviously a very loose concept here; I don't know if I can make one of those cubes." He chucks his box into the grass and tries to make one of those cubes.

Cam places the cube on the ground. Can he then retrieve it?

Cam makes two more cubes.

"You're welcome. Can I get you anything else? Also, how deep do these cubes stack?" He makes a third and adds it in.

"Nine hundred and ninety-nine, for wood. I don't know, I've nearly forgotten what real food is like," she says.

Cam makes her ice cream. Chocolate with cookie dough and a dipped waffle cone.

...This may not have been the best move if he wanted her available to answer questions about Terraria. She sits down in the grass, the better to concentrate her attention on the ice cream instead of on standing.

Cam amuses himself by stacking wood cubes in his hand. He can get it to go pretty quick, they come together so obligingly, but he doesn't seem able to make them come into existence more than one at a time.

Om nom nom.

"So, yes, among other uses I am a walking cafeteria."

"Absent gods," she mumbles, the clarity of her speech somewhat impeded by ice cream.

"What's your name? I'm Cam."

"Oh - Sable," she says. "Sable Arrowsmith. Um. It's nice to meet you, and all. Sorry, I'm not really... used to talking to real people, anymore."

"How long have you been here? How did you get here?"

"It's hard to tell for sure without seasons, but... eight years? Nine? I was twelve when, um, a giant snake with a mirror for a head appeared out of nowhere and ate me. And suddenly I was in one of these forests, on a different island, with my guide talking at me."

"Huh - I somewhat regularly experience being pulled to another world from my home, and this seemed like that until it clearly was not."

"I've seen plenty of islands that... used to be inhabited," she says. "This is the first I've seen that still was. I think this place has lots of ways to acquire new people."

"I don't know if it can put me back."

"I've been trying to find a way back to my home world for eight years. Nothing's worked yet, but I'm not about to stop trying."

"Usually I can only be summoned by a human from the mortal world - which I strongly suspect is not the one you're from - thereto, and then returned via concentration by or death of the summoner."

"I don't know if the mindless person-things count - but there was no visible circle, which usually means light projection diagram -" He hands her a paper bowl of garlic potato chips. "- or something else entirely is going on."

"I think you're my new favourite person," Sable remarks. "Not that there's much competition these days." She starts eating the chips. "Mmf - honestly, I have no idea how it got you. I don't know anything about your world's magic. And I've never seen one of those mirror snakes in Terraria, so I'm not even sure this is where they come from, but even if it is that's not what happened to you."

"I got nothing on the mirror snakes. I'm kind of impressed you can still, like, talk, if you've been here for years and showed up when you were twelve."

"I talk to the mindless person-things. And myself. I talk to myself a lot."

"How many mindless person-things are there?"

"A bunch. It depends on the island. You start with just a guide, but more show up later - there's a merchant when you gather enough coins, a nurse after you eat enough heart candies, a dryad after you kill the right monsters. Some of the islands I've been to had ones I've never seen on mine. The ones on my island call me Sable, but the ones on other islands call me whatever their person's name was, before their person died. It's very creepy. And if one of your mindless person-things is killed, a new one for that role shows up soon afterward, looking exactly the same."

"That's distinctly creepy. What happens if you move a mindless person-thing to a different island?"

"I've never tried. I'd have to carry one," she says, shuddering slightly.

"Probably not a high priority experiment anyway. What is this box protecting my person from?"

"Walking corpses and giant flying eyeballs come out at night and try to kill everything. If you leave your mindless person-things alone, they'll wander right into the monsters and die."

"Well, that's unpleasant. Is he going to starve in there if I don't feed him?"

"No."

"How convenient for him."

"As much as things can be convenient for someone who doesn't have a mind, yeah."

"Yeah. So what leads you to explore neighboring islands, and is that haze unpleasant or difficult to get through?"

"I started exploring because I wanted to see what was past the haze, and if there were any people there. I kept exploring because sometimes I find useful things on the islands, and I keep hoping I'll run into another person while they're still alive. I guess that one finally panned out. The haze - it's not uncomfortable, just a little disorienting."

"Couldn't see through it even with binoculars, it's weird stuff."

"You can't see through it while you're in it, either, but it only lasts a few seconds. Weirdly, it lasts a few seconds no matter how fast you were going when you flew in."

"This place is like a very intense art piece called 'Physics: Let It Be Fucked, Well And Thorougly'."

"Anyway, I'm probably more use to you back among your own creepy people than here, and I'm all for moving, I'm introverted but not that introverted. Anything we should do besides box my person before getting out of here?"

"Usually I'd stay long enough to wipe out the local Crimson. But no, we can just leave right now if you prefer."

"Crimson?"

"Did you see those red patches on the island? That's called the Crimson. Nasty stuff."

"What's the matter with it and how do you kill it?"

"What does it... do?"

"I can show you. Just have to find the nearest Crimson patch."

"Flying the best way to get there? I spotted something very red."

"Flying works fine. Just don't go above harpy altitude."

"Which is how high?"

"Pretty high. I don't know, I don't have a measurement. I'll tell you if it looks like we're getting there."

"Sure." And Cam takes off again.

"Wow, that's gross. How'd you do that?"

Cam hovers as best he can. "I should work out a standard monster-exploding protocol of my own, since I gather they're a common problem. Maybe scatter sodium in their abdominal cavities. Or is it not strictly necessary to make them explode?"

"Terraria creatures explode when they die. Most things die if you sever their spines, but not everything has a spine. If you can explode monsters as fast as I can, that would be very useful, because my way kind of hurts."

"I'll experiment next time we see something nasty."

Cam tries the sodium thing with one of them. He makes a guess as to their spinal location; one of them gets a plain disk of porcelain appeared in the middle of same. One gets encased in dry ice, one gets set on fire, one gets its neck attached to its tail by a band under extremely high tension that snaps the two together rapidly, one gets a thoroughly distributed cocktail of miscellaneous high doses of poison.

Cam adds dry ice to the remaining Crimera.

"Frozen carbon dioxide."

"...What?"

"...Okay, know how if you're in an enclosed space, the air gets less airy? When you inhale you take a thing called oxygen out of the air, and when you exhale you're exhaling carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide freezes colder than water ice does, and also it turns directly into a harmless gas that's already in the air instead of making a puddle."

"Oh," says Sable. "How'd you find that out?"

"High school chemistry? You may be from a world with less advanced science than mine. In fact I strongly suspect it."

"Yeah... I don't have any idea how you'd freeze air."

"You'd make it very cold, of course. Don't touch the dry ice. It's safe to get near as long as you're in the open but it'll freeze your skin."

"I can tell how cold it is with my hard-to-explain magic powers," she says. "But I couldn't make it that cold. I guess you don't have that problem. Anyway, I'm going to climb into this hole and spray it with green stuff. Please come along and kill monsters for me."

"Does it grow back?" Cam wonders. "After you've got it all on an island?"

"Not unless you summon the Wall of Flesh. Don't summon the Wall of Flesh," she advises. "You have to go all the way down to the underworld and kill a specific monster holding a doll and then drop the doll in lava, and your guide dies and a huge monster appears and tries to kill you, and then you get extra Crimson. So you're unlikely to do it by accident. But seriously, don't summon the Wall of Flesh."

"I... can't think of any earthly reason I might want to summon something called the Wall of Flesh by that mechanism for that result."

"Good! Because you shouldn't. I nearly died when I accidentally did it on my island. And now the place is infested with all kinds of even worse monsters than it used to have, and I live on one of the ones next to it that hasn't been changed that way. On the other hand, islands that haven't had the Wall of Flesh come by don't have the right materials to make wings."

"I can make wings. I mean, they won't look like you're an art installation, but I can make wings, behold." Waggle.

"I think mine are better," she says. "Are yours conveniently detachable?"

"I could take 'em off, but I don't know that I'd describe it as convenient."

"Mine come off and go back on neat as you please. I have a few other sets to swap them out with, but these are my favourite."

"Very nice. I've gotten used to having mine all the time. And the tail. They help me balance."

"I don't think I'm able to make a tail. But I've never particularly felt the lack."

"Then I will not give you one for your birthday."

"I don't even know when my birthday is anymore."

"Yeah. Are there even years here?"

"I don't think so. There's days, and weather in the form of occasional mildly hazardous rain, but no seasons."

"Do you even know how old you are?"

"Twenty...ish?"

"You seem very psychologically healthy for what amounts to eight years in solitary, gratz."

"It's very possible I'm crazier than I look. But thank you."

"You're welcome. I have a question. By what mechanism are the monsters around here harmful? I am indestructible with respect to all normal forms of harm but if they tend to do magic I might have trouble and I'd like to know in advance."

"They mostly just do normal things like try to eat you, but some of them are weird and do weird things. I couldn't give you a list off the top of my head."

"If you can mention it whenever a weird-things sort of monster comes to mind, or tries to do weird things to us, do tell."

"Sure, of course."

Cam continues to follow Sable around and ice monsters.

There are three more patches of Crimson on the island, and then she circles the island from the air to make sure, and then she hovers next to Cam and says satisfiedly, "Done in time to make it home by sunset. This way. The island I live on is two north and two west from here."

"Are they laid out in a grid?"

"Yes. Just like everything else."

He holds his breath and follows.

Everything is sort of blue-grey and misty for a few seconds, and then he emerges from the south wall of a new square. There's an island in the middle. Sable, hovering, waves to him and flies into the west wall.

Flap flap.

"I don't wanna get lost, fail to meet up with you again, and only have mindless basement-dwellers to talk to. ...Basement-dwellers is one of the colloquialisms for a demon-made human body, which cannot think."

"...Why basement-dwellers?"

"Because you keep them in the basement so they don't disturb your guests, if for whatever reason you want to have one or more mindless human bodies around," says Cam. "I don't have a basement or any bodies to put into it at home, myself, but that's the reasoning."

"...Why would anyone want mindless human bodies around?"

"... You have been here since you were twelve. Of course. Uh."

"Some people with questionable taste make basement-dwellers to have sex with," says Cam.

"Ewwwwwwwwwwww," says Sable. "Ew ew ew they don't have minds."

"I don't do this!" says Cam. "I'm not even friends with anybody who does it! It's just the most common reason to have them around!"

"Well that's good!" she says. "It's still not much fun to think about!"

"I didn't exactly want to explain!"

"In Hell, where I live when I have not been recently summoned to physics-defying worlds, most demons live on a gigantic plane of solid gold, which is very impractical," he offers.

"...Why?"

"Some demon decided it would be a good idea to have a gigantic plane of gold. So they made one. And it was very big, and more or less in the middle of parts of Hell that demons had previously settled, so it became a pretty obvious place for people who wanted to live in cities to build cities. And new demons tended to appear there once there were population centers, and it's snowballed over time."

"Most of the places anybody lives are covered in less intensely stupid substrates. Soil and lakes and such."

"Well, that's better. ...Can you make local gold, I wonder? It's not quite the same as the gold I knew about before I came here."

"What's different?"

"It can be made into tools that are harder than iron, for one."

"That's... bizarre. I'll go with bizarre. I don't know if I can make it but I can check."

"Try it. It comes in little cubes like the wood, after you mine it," she says.

Cam tries making a cube of local gold.

He makes one of those too.

"Ooh. That'll be useful. Can you make them in bar form, I wonder?"

"Are those a local phenomenon like cubes or do you just mean the shape?"

"Ores can be crafted into bars and bars can be crafted into all sorts of useful things," she says. "They're about as local a phenomenon as the cubes are, I guess."

Cam makes a bar of chlorophyte.

"You're very handy," approves Sable. "Can you just keep making those the rest of the way? Do your demon powers get tired or run out?"

"No, they're pretty unlimited. It would probably be a better idea to make them on the ground in a larger batch when we're wherever you like to store things; I don't have arbitrary carrying capacity."

"Do you not have pockets? The bars stack like the cubes do, although I guess they only go up to ninety-nine each."

"I don't seem to be able to appear them stacked, but if we were on a flat surface I could make a few thousand of them or whatever all at once literally on top of each other and they seem like they'd be fairly obliging about stacking themselves that way," Cam explains.

"Oh. If you can make more than one thing at a time, then that does make sense. Okay then. But I want to make a lot of chlorophyte things when we land. Let's see, what else... oh! Hallowed bars?"

Hallowed bars?

Cam tries. "Nope. What is a Soul of Flight?"

"They're little glowing blue orbs you get from killing wyverns and they're an ingredient in every kind of wings. There are a bunch more Souls - Night, Fright, Might, Sight, Light - that come from different places and make different kinds of things and glow in different colours."

"How... cute. I don't seem to be able to manufacture them; they may be too inherently magical or inherently magical in the wrong way."

He follows. "I'm glad you speak a language I know. It would be automatic if you'd been my summoner, but since you weren't it's sheer luck you know English."

"English?"

"Unless there is, in addition to physics fuckery, linguistics fuckery, you are speaking an unfamiliar dialect of my first language, which I am accustomed to calling English. I'd be pretty surprised if all those Souls managed to both rhyme and translate correctly in another language. What do you call what we're speaking?"

"I... don't. I suppose it might have a name but I've never had cause to find out."

"Well, this is English. I speak a bunch of other languages, too, some demonic that I learned the long way and some imprinted by summoners who spoke this or that."

"I guess it is lucky. And weird, now that I think of it. I don't think I know of anyone speaking any other languages, back in my world, but there's no reason why the languages in two different worlds should be the same..."

"The basement-dwellers here speak English, too, don't they? That might be involved."

"Can you call them a less disgusting term?"

"...NPCs?"

"...What?"

"...it's a term for characters in a game who do not have players behind them and instead behave according to more or less simple rules. When we land show me a good place to put a house for myself and I'll introduce you to video games. Gotta do something with all the free time you will enjoy in this era of no material scarcity except of souls."

"Sure," says Sable. "Do your wings not go any faster than you're going, by the way?"

"I could speed up a little. Not a whole lot. If I want to go really fast I take a vehicle."

"You should try on one of my spare pairs," she suggests. "See if you like them. They go faster."

"Sure, why not," says Cam, "I can cut these off and see if it's worth the tradeoff."

"Right. If I want them back after that I would just make new ones. Slightly macabre, but I don't mind if you want to try it."

"I think I will. I probably have enough Souls of Flight."

"And my wings are very snazzy."

"They're pretty snazzy," she agrees. "I still like mine better."

"Sure. Yours are faster, for one thing. Are we in some kind of hurry? This isn't my maximum theoretical airspeed, just my unaided one."

"No, we're most of the way there and the sun's not down yet. We're fine."

"Night being when the nastier nasties come out?"

"Yeah. This island hasn't had its Wall of Flesh yet, so it's relatively tame, but it's still annoying to be assaulted by flying eyeballs so I try to get indoors before dark unless I'm collecting stars or something."

"Collecting stars."

"Little sparkling stars fall from the sky at night and they're very useful," she says. "You can try making one if you want."

He tries. "Nope."

"Oh well. They're not that hard to collect. I have enough at home to make a full course of mana candies, I think."

"Mana candies being?"

"You eat them and they give you magic. Local magic. Useful for things like operating a Shadowbeam Staff."

"I wonder if they'll work on me."

"Should they not?"

"Part of being indestructible is also being pretty hard to alter. Usually I can make exceptions to things - that's why I can cut off my wings - but it might or might not have a gap for the mana candies, and if it does that's actually a little concerning because it means I am in principle potentially vulnerable to local magic."

"Well, I'm not going to try shooting you with a Shadowbeam Staff to find out if it works..."

"Thank you. I appreciate that."

"But I'm not sure mana candies and the magic they can do are the same kind of thing that way. I mean, you can eat food but if someone tried to harm you with food it wouldn't work, right?"

"I can eat food, if someone tries to poison me it usually won't work, and if I try to let someone poison me, it will only work to a point."

"So if you let the mana candies give you magic...?"

"Then it might not work, in which case I don't get any magic, or it might work, in which case if I'm careless or my indestructibility has gaps for unfamiliar magic in general something bad might also be able to work - and I've had a hundred fifty years to get used to being carelessly immortal."

"Never having been carelessly immortal before, I guess I wouldn't know."

"...Usually, in the five-part multiverse I am familiar with, people who summon daeva - demons like me, or angels or fairies - then turn into daeva when they die. But I don't know what part of the usual system has changed here. I don't know if you could get one, I don't know if you could send them back, and even if that part worked fine you may be attached to some completely different afterlife-related arrangement."

"...We should probably sit down and explain our universes to each other," she says. "At some point. When I'm done making things out of chlorophyte."

"What do you need chlorophyte for, what is it?"

"It's one of the rarest and most useful kinds of ore and it's a huge pain to mine, although not quite as huge a pain as hallowed bars because it doesn't strictly involve killing terrifying monsters," she says.

"Useful for what, though?"

"Making armour, tools, and weapons?"

"I can just make those directly, incidentally. Unless that will make them not count according to Terraria unphysics. It's also possible I know of materials that are better than anything you can dig up here - unless, again, unphysics. Would the NPCs be able to tell?"

"If you make some of whatever material you want to check and show it to a guide, he'll tell you what you can make with it, but I can sometimes invent things the guide hasn't told me about. We can experiment."

"I mean, at least in a local sort of sense things seem to work on normal phyiscs when that's how they start out. When I encased the harpies in gold they fell; my wings still work; conjuring up your lunch was normal. Will the guide say whether, say, titanium, is better than chlorophyte, or just tell us that you can make armor out of it if you want?"

"He'll just list off all the recipes he knows about that include whatever you just handed him. He doesn't say how good they are. But tools sort of 'know' how good they are, so if we actually made one, we could find out that way."

"Weird."

"How is this house floating?"

"In Terraria," says Sable, with ironic cheer, "when you build a structure out of blocks and mine out the parts connecting it to the ground, it doesn't fall down."

"Oh. Great. That makes perfect sense."

"It has a logic all its own - you can't place an unsupported block, but once a block is placed, what holds it up isn't its neighbours, it's... something about the invisible grid."

"Which is also very video-gamey. I will show you some super dated video games and we can see if you think it's creepy."

Cam makes an enormous pile of chlorophyte, arranged vertically so it will fall into itself.

Cam takes some tools. "That was fast. I'll take the tools, I suppose. What is the advantage besides cool factor of having a floating house?"

"Walking corpses can't bang on the walls at night. The eyeballs can, but they're quieter."

"What happens if you cover the house in spikes?"

"Squelchy monster explosion noises, I guess? I haven't tried."

"I should probably make myself a house. I guess I should put the entire thing on a support structure of floating blocks. Can a block hold arbitrary amounts of weight?"

"...I have no good way to test how much ordinary weight a block can hold," she says. "Not at house-sized amounts. Do you not want to make your house out of blocks?"

"No, not really. It's faster and more customizable if I just," gesture, "make the house. Unless there is some advantage to blocks besides floatability?"

"Guarantee that your house will not fall down unless someone goes at it with a pickaxe? And do you know that you can't make blocks? You can make them in tiny cube form, after all."

"Maybe I can make blocks, but like - I'm accustomed to houses with electrical systems and plumbing in the walls and glass in the windows and while there is some lovely ocean around here I bet it's full of monsters and I got used to having a swimming pool? I am also not so much here for the blocks aesthetic. Maybe there's nothing else for it for reasons of defensive architecture, but."

"Well, this house is not really built to show off the grace and style of block architecture," she says. "And there is such a thing as a glass block, it's possible to have glass windows in a block house, I just don't like being able to see things hitting them at night."

"Curtains!" says Cam.

"I had higher crafting priorities, and then I got used to not having windows?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm not criticizing your interior decoration, here, but I'm a demon," he says, "and do not have to be particularly careful about priorities when I want material objects. Do glass blocks focus sunlight in a way that makes things warm? I could encase my entire house in glass for defense reasons. If you can make a glass door which also works in a defensively appropriate manner."

"Yeah, glass doors are possible. So's a lot of really improbable glass furniture, actually. What do you mean, do they focus sunlight?"

"I... do not know if I can show you, because unphysics. But normally if you've got a piece of glass and it's shaped right, you can concentrate lots of light into a very small space, and even start fires. Sociopathic small children burn ants in this way with magnifying glasses. Also, literal glass buildings have traditionally been used to make hot, sunny enclosures suitable for growing plants in the dead of winter if you're so inclined."

"Oh, that. I have no idea, I've never tried building a greenhouse in Terraria. Or out of it. I have lived a greenhouse-free life."

"Maybe I will experiment with architecture on an island you are not trying to inhabit rather than risk cluttering yours with the ruins of insufficiently defended or excessively glass-enclosed buildings."

"Sure. There's plenty. In the meantime, I have space in my house."

"That's very nice of you. Although I also don't have to sleep if I drink enough coffee, so I could just sit on your roof reading and icing eyeballs all night."

"...If you like."

"It's up to you, I just don't want you to think you have to house me. Besides, the eyeballs thumping on the walls all night sounds irritating."

"I'm used to it. They're really not that loud. No bones."

"Anyway, we were going to give each other rundowns on our worlds?"

"Yeah. Who first?"

"Of course. Although if you can remember the titles of any books or anything I can make those. Probably unless something weird's going on."

"The evidence that this fallen civilization had magic is that they had cities and roads? ...Also: on the list of things for an indestructible demon to be concerned about: can you affect my 'ground'?"

"I haven't tried."

"And you can't tell if you can do it without actually trying to?"

"I can see it just fine. There you are being all solid and living and personish and stuff. You do seem a little odd. Maybe that's the indestructibility. I don't know. I've never met an indestructible person before; how would I know whether I can mess with your ground or not?"

"I've never seen the ruins, I don't know what-all's there besides them being ruins and big and weird and mostly under a lake," says Sable. "I don't know what the reasons are for people thinking they had magic. Well, except that malices have to have come from somewhere, because they sure couldn't have built cities like that with malices popping up underfoot everywhere no matter how magic they were. And people think the first malices came from something the mage-lords did, although nobody's exactly sure what."

"Sure, the malices sound definitely magic to me. The roads just don't."

"These days the people with groundsense and the people with cities aren't hardly any of the same people," she says. "People with groundsense - we call ourselves Lakewalkers, and we call the people without it 'farmers', although plenty of them do things other than farm - well, we're the only people who can kill malices. And there aren't many of us. And as best we can figure, if there's ever a malice that nobody kills, it'll just keep making horrible monsters and mind-slaving people to do its bidding and eating everything in sight until the whole world is grey dust and there's nothing left alive."

"Why are you guys the only ones who can kill malices? Do you have to do ground things to them?"

"Um. Sort of broadly yes."

"...Sort of broadly yes?"

"...it's another thing that's hard to explain right," she says. "But, um. Malices by themselves are immortal. You can kill their body but it's not them really, they'll just make another one. The way you kill a malice is with a sharing knife, and only Lakewalkers can make them. Three different ways. You need a Lakewalker bone to make the knife out of, and really good ground-shaping to make it work properly, and then you need a Lakewalker to kill themselves with the knife and put their death in it, and then you don't need anybody special to stab the knife into a malice and share the death with them so they die, except Lakewalkers are better at it because malices can't mind-slave us like they can farmers."

"...How in the world was this discovered before the first malices turned the whole world into gray dust? What a specific execution procedure!"

"I sure don't know, I wasn't there! Maybe there was another way first. From what I know of knife-making theory, I wouldn't be surprised if people used to have to kill themselves at the malice somehow and then later on someone figured out how to store the death ahead of time so there wouldn't be as many ways to mess it up in the middle of battle."

"Kill themselves at the malice. Wow."

"If I had to kill a malice and I was very desperate and the only Lakewalker in the entire world, that's what I'd try. The only other option would be to cut off my own leg, make a knife out of the bone, and kill myself with it, and then I'd still need one other person around to pick it up and stick it in the malice. But if I had other people around and I could get away from the malice for long enough, it might be more important to have Lakewalker children so somebody would be able to kill the next malice."

"...Well, you haven't found any here, right? Just weird spontaneously generated monsters."

"Yeah. It's been eight years and I have not found one malice. There probably aren't any. Unless one of them just shows up sometime, the way people like you and me and all the dead folks from the other islands keep just showing up."

"Okay." Cam decides not to start a conversation about the feasibility of having Lakewalker children, under the circumstances.

"Anyway. So that's my world."

"Which does include spontaneous monsters, but different ones, and none of the blatant unphysics apart from your sort of proper magic done by proper persons. Huh."

"Yeah. And we don't know if malices spontaneously appear or just sort of... bubble up. I've caught Terraria monsters actually appearing out of nowhere, every so often; they do it out of sight when they can, but they don't seem to know about groundsense."

"...Weird."

"Yep."

"...I have got to show you video games, I'm just not sure where to start."

"Well, we could start with going to a different room that's less cluttered," she suggests, getting up and gathering up the chlorophyte armour.

"Sure." He follows her.

There is a hallway, and then there is a room. The room has a bed inexplicably shoved against one wall, and the opposite wall is lined with ornate chests-of-drawers, and in between there is a table with no chairs.

"I think I'm going to start you with the best example of the 2080s sidescroller renaissance," says Cam, and he conjures up a device. It has a screen, lower-tech than his computer, and buttons, and it invites Sable to Play Runaround!. Runaround proves to be a game that gives her a little character which she may move from side to side and up and down in a 2D environment. The first level is a tutorial; Cam does his best to cover the cultural gaps as she learns to kill turtles and collect guavas and add magic hats to her collection.

"...This is kind of fun," she says. "In a really weird way."

"How Terraria-like," she snorts.

"Yep. The walking flowers are not enemies, the people who look like the same species as your character are sometimes not enemies, the mermaids are not enemies."

"What are non-enemies for?"

"Flowers are mostly decoration but in a few later levels you can observe their behavior for puzzle hints. The characters who are the same species as you are for talking to - the writing is pretty good in Runaround, but they talk and are not, really, people. The mermaids give you quests."

"Quests?"

"Yeah, some of the magic hats you have to earn by doing things for the mermaids. Unless you want to steal from the mermaids, and then that mermaid tribe won't give you any more hats no matter what you do for them."

"Hah. They have longer memories than the whatever-they-are here, then. When I steal from one of the merchants, they only stay mad at me until the next sunrise."

"Pfffft."

"And all their stuff comes right back."

"Of course it does. Some of the people of the character's species - they're called Rounders - are merchant types and will take your guavas and other junk for power-ups. You can't steal from them in the game, though, only the mermaids."

"I'm beginning to see what you mean about Terraria seeming gamey..."

"Blight it," she says the first time this happens. "Game things do that?"

"Uh, yeah, that's common in games like this, looting monsters. Do monsters here do that too?"

"Yes! They explode and things fall out! It happened a few times when we killed monsters on your island, but it's easy to miss, the things that fall out are usually small and there's also exploded monster at the same time. That one harpy dropped coins on you, though. I guess you didn't notice what with the harpy chunks."

"I had other things on my mind. Okay, I'm leaning towards 'someone is fucking with us' again here."

"Who is fucking with us?"

"No idea. It is clearly not the NPCs themselves, which was my original thought."

"Yeah. They don't have minds. It's easy to tell the difference, with groundsense. People have complicated things going on in their ground that other animals don't, and the NPCs are like... they're almost not alive at all."

"I mean you can argue about whether I'm alive, seeing as this one time I died, but sure."

"Your ground is alive," she says. "I don't know about anything else, but that part's clear."

"Sure."

"...Hmmm. If I make an animal, it will be a very stupid animal. Do you think you'd notice that?"

"Probably. Why?"

"Just getting a sense of the parameters involved; I don't especially want a pet idiot kitten."

"It could eat the idiot bunnies."

"They're probably a little smarter than demonic bunnies, I remember them hopping along like they knew how their legs worked."