This is: some weedy ground, with a roughly-made wooden hovel that way and some meat hanging from clothesline-like apparatus to dry in the sun outside of it, and a silty brook that way, and four suns in the sky, and a weirdly sharp curve to the horizon.

That snake did not look nearly pretty enough to be able to teleport people to . . . outer space? But apparently the magic disagrees with her. At least the air is breathable. She'll head towards the hovel, paying attention to anything her danger sense has to say about it or anything else.

The hovel says it's pretty heckin' dangerous over here.

Oh no she's in space maybe they have alien pathogens. She is now wearing a lovely white gem-encrusted fully functional filter mask, and also going the other way.

It's less dangerous the other way, till she spots another shelter, this one with clay tiles and a cooking fire out front.

Is this shelter also relatively non-dangerous? She's worried her danger sense wouldn't warn her if she was going to infect someone else with Earth pathogens, but if there are humanlike dwellings in space she's probably in the future and the future probably has ways of dealing with that. Maybe. She hopes.

The shelter is less dangerous!

She makes sure her gloves go up to her sleeves and her leggings go into her boots and her filter mask is securely parked over her nose and mouth, and knocks on the wall of the shelter.

No answer.

"Hello!" she calls out. "Is anyone there?"

Nope!

She takes to the air to investigate more of the area at once. It's not at all guaranteed that there's anyone alive on this planet, but if there is she'd like to know about them.

The gravity drops off really fast once she's more than a couple dozen feet up. This must be a tiny planet.

There's somebody over there, building a fire! Next to her is a corpse!

Oh no! What if that snake cryptid has been putting lots of people here and some of them have been dying. She knows from disaster stories that magical girls can generally survive alright in relatively nonhostile wilderness, but random people dropped on an alien world would have an awful time.

She lands a ways away from the person and approaches on foot with her hands open. "Hello!"

The person screams in alarm, scoops as much of her kindling as she can, and runs away with a clumsy armful of firewood.

Wow, it's like they've never seen a high point count before. It's not like she commutes to work with fangs and claws or anything!

She sits down on whatever nearby patch of ground looks least likely to stain her dress and tries to look harmless. 

Now she is hanging out with the remaining firewood and that naked plump dead guy over there.

She'll sit here for a while and hope the screaming person comes back.

She doesn't.

Running away from a scaly high-point-count magical girl after getting flung into outer space by a snake cryptid, if that's how the screamer got here, is not the most unreasonable thing ever.

Margaret hadn't had breakfast yet when the snake got her, and she's getting hungry and thirsty. It's time to undo enough of her mods to feed herself, and she might as well pick ones that make her a bit less frightening to unnerved baselines while she's at it. She starts by changing her eyes from silver, slit-pupiled, and reflective to normal brown ones. She'll miss her night vision, unless the four suns means she won't, and she can always go back and forth.

Next step is removing her horns, and their associated jewelry. It makes her head feel weirdly light and slightly off-balance, but she never had any nerves in them. Then she takes the scales off one hand and forearm, to drop some more points and make room for a plant there--and spends several minutes scratching it raw. She hasn't had skin for years and it feels so wrong and itchy, how did she go the whole first half of her life with skin everywhere and not go insane?

Eventually she manages to stop scratching, heal the damage, and take stock. Has she dropped enough points to safely add a plant? Maybe. Enough to be sure it's safe? No. And she's not going to risk turning into a cryptid heaven knows how many light-years from home. She grits her teeth and takes off her wings.

It feels a lot like you'd expect losing limbs to feel, apart from the lack of pain. Whole swathes of sensory input she was so used to she never noticed them anymore are gone. Her center of gravity is in the wrong place; if she hadn't been sitting on a rock she'd have had a good chance of falling over. It's weird and it's wrong and she almost wishes it would hurt so she'd be justified in feeling as awful about it as she does. Getting the wings in the first place wasn't nearly this unpleasant.

But the sooner she manages to eat, the sooner she can put them back, so she pulls herself together and sprouts a strawberry vine out of her arm, crowded with large red strawberries, and starts eating and replacing them. She keeps an eye and an ear on her surroundings as she does this, partly because she's not at all sure she's even pretty enough for danger sense with this asymmetrical mess, partly to distract her from the bizzareness that is a plant growing out of her skin.

There's a sound that way; might be a bird.

She stands up and looks over that way, braces herself to drop the plant and add the wings and book it in the air, but doesn't stop eating. The more calories and water she can eat the longer she can go before she has to do this again.

It's a bird. It flies from one scrubby little shrub to another and yells again.

Huh. She was a bio major in college, but that was a while ago and she focused on pathology and epidemiology; she tries to tell if it's an Earth bird or some kind of bird-like alien life form.

It is a bird, but it's not any specific bird she can recognize. It's brown and white and bluejay-sized with a long single feather bobbing on top of its head.

Huh. She'd expect an alien to look more alien than that; it probably flew into the mirrorsnake trying to fight its own reflection or something.

When she feels relatively hydrated from the strawberries, she gets rid of the strawberry vine and replaces it with a peanut plant, with a cluster of peanuts dangling off her wrist, and starts putting them into her pockets rather than shelling them one at a time.

Somebody's hiking in her general direction over the horizon.

Then she stops at one pocketful of peanuts and re-scales her arm and holds out a peanut in the newcomer's general direction, looking friendly.

Newcomer stops a ways off, squinting at her.

Smile and wave? She's still silver, but her silhouette is clearly human at least, she really shouldn't get mistaken for a cryptid. "Hi!"

He calls out something in a foreign language. He's not wearing anything; he's sunburned.

It would be of a piece with the luck she's been having today for the snake to have grabbed a foreign tourist. Or maybe there's some kind of hostile cryptid fashion trend and this guy was in China yesterday. "Hello! Do you speak English?"

He yells something else in a foreign language but steps closer, frowning at her.

She holds out the peanut and takes a slow step towards him.

He stops, looking at her suspiciously.

She points at herself and says "Margaret". Breaks the peanut-shell in half, eats one of the two nuts inside, holds out the other.

He steps a little closer.

It's like meeting a new neighbor's cat, except utterly weird. She keeps holding still. How far away from her is he, at this point?

Maybe fifty yards.

Cautious walking toward him, both hands visible, wondering why he seems so afraid. Is it because he doesn't have any clothes? She'd probably be reluctant to meet new people if she was stuck being naked.

He says something else.

"Do you speak English? Parlez-vous Français?" that's all she's got.

He looks irritated.

Sorry, dude, she didn't decide to have one or more absurdly powerful cryptids running around stranding people. She points at herself and says "Margaret" again.

He points at himself and says, "Daz."

Happy smile! "Hello Daz." She points at the peanut in her other hand, says "Food," and mimes eating.

He eyes the peanut.

Smile, nod, "Food for Daz." What got this guy so scared? Is he afraid of magical girls or did something awful happen to him or what?

His eyes go wide and he takes a step back, visibly restraining himself from bolting.

She takes a tiny step back herself and tries to look small and harmless.

He frowns again and takes a deep breath and approaches closer in a few big strides, still leaving some space.

Friendly non-teeth-showing smile! Not that there's anything odd about her teeth apart from being perfectly white, but who knows what this guy's run into.

It's getting kind of hard not to stare at Daz's nakedness, in a "don't think of an elephant" kind of way. She tries to come up with ideas for clothes she can make out of organic material and gets several, all deeply mediocre and all requiring that she be able to do mods without freaking Daz out.

Eventually they are a reasonable conversational distance from each other, which would help more if Daz could speak English.

Time to play the No Common Language game! Point: "Margaret."  Point: "Daz." "I am Margaret, you are Daz."

He says what might be an equivalent in his own language.

Awesome. She does her level best to memorize it, takes another tiny step toward him (her arm is getting slightly tired from holding out this peanut) and tries to solicit more vocabulary. Hmmm, what's sufficiently unambiguous . . . how about "one", "two", "three", counting on her fingers?

He follows her gestures with his eyes but doesn't reciprocate.

Maybe he'd rather learn hers than teach his? Maybe he wants the food first? She keeps moving forward, no faster than he's moving toward her, hoping to get close enough that he can take the peanut out of her hand. 

Eventually she successfully transfers the peanut.

He looks at it, and at her.

She reaches into her pocket, slowly and calmly and not at all in a pulling-a-gun way, and takes out another peanut. She shells it, shows him the pieces to make it super clear that they are more of the same thing, and eats one.

He shells his peanut and sniffs it.

If he got grabbed from a random spot on Earth then he might not have seen peanuts before, she supposes. Is he any recognizable ethnicity? Not that she knows which ethnicities live in places that don't have peanuts.

He's pale enough to sunburn, but might be Asian or something mixy under that.

She's pretty sure most if not literally all Asians know what a peanut is. Maybe this guy has heat stroke or landed on his head. Or he's just doubting everything because getting flung into space by a cryptid is the sort of thing that makes you doubt things; that would also be pretty reasonable. Still, is he going to eat the peanut or just stare at it forever?

Eventually he puts it in his mouth and chews. He doesn't seem to be sure if he likes it.

Raw peanuts aren't really gourmet restaurant food, are they. But they're protein and she's pretty sure if she grows a different plant Daz will run away in terror again. Come to think of it, is it rude to feed someone food that they don't know grew out of your arm? Probably not, at least under Marooned In Space rules of etiquette. She pulls out two more, offers Daz one and eats the other.

He takes and eats this one too, thoughtful.

She does this a few more times, then tries doing the language thing again. "One peanut", "two peanuts", "my peanut", "your peanut".

He shakes his head and gestures at her in annoyance, though he keeps taking peanuts.

Okay fine, food now languages later. Maybe they can get by with mime until somebody rescues them, not that she's got all that much hope of rescue. She'll just keep going until she's out of peanuts or Daz evinces interest in doing something else.

After his twentieth peanut, Daz pauses, closes his eyes, furrows his brow -

- and a person coalesces out of thin fucking air. They're a naked girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen, perfectly healthy, dark-skinned and solemn.

"What was it you were hoping to say?" she asks Margaret.

"How did you do that without being a magical girl??" she asks. It's sort of addressed to both of them.

"I'm afraid I don't know what that is," says the girl. Daz doesn't seem to be paying close attention. He's busy eating peanuts.

"How did you . . . Where did you . . . Ugh, too many questions at once. Can you just explain from your own perspective who you are and where you were a minute ago and how you came to be standing here now?" Margaret asks the woman Daz seems to have teleported in.

"...I wasn't anywhere a minute ago, I'm new," she says. "I'm Sovi."

"Hi Sovi, I'm Margaret. So you just . . . popped into existence a minute ago, already fluent in English without having learned it anywhere? What else do you know?"

"I know Daz's language and the other things it occurred to him to have me know."

"So Daz created you . . . Do you know how he did it? Does he have any other magic? Do you?"

"The thing we want to know is what are you and where did you get the food?"

"I'm a magical girl. I'm from Earth, which it's starting to look like you aren't. I got the food by, um, magical girls can change their bodies a bunch of different ways. I can make plants grow out of my arms and get fruits and nuts and so forth that way."

"What's Earth?"

"It's the planet I was on before I got sent here in a magical accident. It's mostly populated by people who look more like you and Daz than like me."

Sovi starts explaining to Daz in his language.

She has a bunch more questions, but she can wait. Once she seems to be done, she asks, "Do you know what Daz was afraid of, earlier? Is it just that he'd never seen someone who looked like me before?"

"That and until it was obvious you had plant food you might have been planning to eat him."

"I--what--no--no. Ew. How long has he been stranded here that that's where his mind went first?"

She could really do without all these mental images from past prion disease research right now.

"He's been here since he was made," says Sovi.

"Yikes. So, what do we do now? I don't suppose either of you know which way to the nearest civilization?"

"No, and you'd have to build a boat, there's not really civilization on this round," says Sovi.

"What's a round, and do you know where we'd want to go in a boat if we had one?" She might be able to build a raft, if this is an island and the mainland is close by, but she doesn't know anything about construction.

"A round is what we're sitting on. Or - those." Sovi points at a couple moons in the sky. "I don't know if those are any better than this one."

"And we can get between them by boat?" She remembers how fast the gravity faded out, but surely Sovi can't be contemplating making a boat that can hold up in vacuum. 

"If you know how to sail."

"I'm afraid I've never sailed a regular boat, let alone a spaceship. And how would we keep the air in?" She could probably make an airtight full-body garment on herself, maybe even one for each of them if they were connected by ropes or something enough to count as one piece, but she probably can't scrub air except by making plants, and she has no idea how many plants it would take to scrub air for three people other than "a lot".

"Keep the air in?"

"So, uh, you definitely seem to know a lot of stuff for someone who just came into existence, and I appear to be somewhere a lot of my background assumptions are wrong, but I'm pretty sure there's no air between rocks in space. I guess I can try flying as high as I can and see if I feel the air getting thinner?"

"I don't think Daz had a reason to sabotage me but he might not know enough either."

"Well, now I want to find out. Can you tell Daz I'm about to grow wings and fly away, but that he shouldn't be scared and I'll be back soon?" This totally isn't just an excuse to put her wings back for a bit. It is an excuse, but it's not just an excuse.

"I can warn him."

"Thank you." She waits until he she's done talking to him, and then if he doesn't have any questions, she makes sure the peanut plant is totally gone and puts her wings back on.

Daz is startled, but watches warily instead of running away.

Alright. How high can she fly before 1) the air gets thin enough she has trouble breathing or flying, or 2) her danger sense kicks in? And how low does the gravity get, at that point?

The air doesn't thin, and nothing up here seems dangerous. Gravity cuts out altogether when she's about thirty feet up.

Wow, flying up here is pretty amazing. The view is great, she can do crazy maneuvers in the low-to-absent gravity, it's a pretty good time all around. Are there any other planetoids close enough that she could theoretically fly to one unaided? 

Sure. It might take two or three hours to reach the nearest.

That's kind of a long time to be gone; once it's clear that she could get there and that there's going to be breathable air all the way, she turns back around. She's back where the left Daz and Sovi an hour or two after she left.

Then she's going to swoop in on Sovi with her face planted on Daz's crotch; his eyes are closed and neither sees her coming.

Nope nope nope back to the interplanetary void with Margaret. She can try again in another hour. 

While she's up there: Is that incest? Depends how genes work when people are creating each other out of nowhere, also, time to think about something else. Like ways of using her powers to make clothes. She should at least be able to make grass skirts. Really the bottleneck is her own lack of clothes-making skills and understanding of machinery; she could grow plenty of cotton if she knew how to spin and weave it. Making felt is probably easier, but she doesn't know what the steps are there. She really misses the Internet, and also her parents and her coworkers and wow she is literally alone in the void light-years from home, this sucks.

Eventually it's been long enough that the other two are probably done with things that require privacy, and she cautiously descends again.

Daz is sleeping and Sovi's gathering bits of wood.

Much better. Though they still both need clothes. "Hello Sovi," she says, quietly enough not to wake Daz.

"Hello."

"You were right, the air goes all the way up. It should be easy to fly to another round. This part of the sky is all alike; sailing will not bring you to civilization."

Her last sentence echoes with obvious magic. She looks surprised, then crestfallen.

"Oh. I guess that's a non-starter. Um, my magic tells me things like that, sometimes."

"Your magic is very strange," Sovi says.

"I suppose it would be, if you're not used to it. The magic here is pretty strange too. Can you make people too, or is that just Daz? Don't actually try it."

"- I can make people if I want to," says Sovi, sounding slightly affronted. "Everyone can. No one put you in charge."

"Sorry, I wasn't trying to order you around. I just meant that I wasn't asking you to make anybody. I don't think I can make people, unless coming here made it possible somehow. And even if it did I wouldn't know how to try."

"It's not hard."

"Well, I can try to figure it out if we need a fourth  person for something. In the meantime, I think I can make you some clothes. Nothing fancy, unfortunately, since anything that isn't organic disappears if it moves away from me, but I could at least get you a grass skirt or something."

"That doesn't seem important compared to more food."

"I can do more food first if either of you are still hungry, but there's no reason I can't do both eventually."

"How quickly can you do food? Daz didn't see you make it."

"I'll show you." She takes her wings off again, wincing, then de-scales a patch of forearm and puts the peanut plant back, crowded with peanuts.

"Can this feed us all?"

"I can make them as fast as I can pick them, which should be faster than three people can eat. And if we bury some, and they turn out to grow in this dirt, we can get more that way, too. The problem is going to be variety--I can grow lots of different plants, but unless we build a way to prepare stuff all we can get is things that are edible straight from the plant." While she's saying this, she's pulling peanuts off herself and sticking them in her pockets.

Sovi holds out her hands for peanuts.

Margaret can't actually see Sovi's hands and grow more peanuts at the same time, because of the limitations of starscape, but she can flip back and forth really fast and it only slows her down a bit. Soon Sovi will have all the peanuts she can carry.

Sovi starts eating peanuts steadily.

Margaret observes the difficulties of shelling and eating a double handful of peanuts in the absence of a table, utensils, and pockets. "Would you like me to make you a bag, or at least something you can set those down on?"

"That might be good."

The peanut plant is temporarily replaced by a modified pitcher plant, with three enormous pitchers missing their various slippery and acidic chemical coatings and instead waxy all over. Margaret picks all three, hands one to Sovi, and switches back to peanuts.

Sovi prods the pitcher curiously, then fills it with peanuts and goes back to eating. "What are these?"

"The peanuts? They're a kind of seed, they have a lot of protein in them so they're filling and give you energy. And they keep well and we might be able to grow some from the seeds. I'll make some fruit when we get tired of these and have some reserves built up." She's alternating putting peanuts into the other two pitchers, one for her and one for Daz.

"Why can you grow plants out of your arm?"

"I'm a magical girl. Back home, some women get the ability to change their bodies, and if they make enough changes"--she gestures at her scales--"they can change their clothes and get other, unique powers. I can sense danger, and see how things are going to move before they do it, and sometimes I make prophecies like the one that said sailing wouldn't help."

"Will this happen to me?"

"That is . . . a good question. On Earth it happens to girls between about eight and sixteen years old. I don't know if it can happen here, and I don't know if you're enough like an Earth human that it can happen to you, and I don't know if you count for magical purposes as being older than sixteen. It only happens to one girl in fifty anyway, so probably not even if it is possible. Sorry."

"I don't know exactly how old Daz made me to look. I don't think he has ever known anyone who used to be a child."

"Huh . . . I guess that makes sense, if you can make adults and it's a hard life here. Do you know how many people are on this planet?"

"No. Not many."

"I wonder if there's anyone who knows more about farming. And spinning and weaving and stuff, I can make cotton but I don't know how to get from there to clothes and bags and stuff."

"Probably not. You might have to make people with any skills you need."

"Making people is another skill I don't have. At least I assume it's a skill. And are you saying you can make people who are better at stuff than you are?"

"Of course. Daz made me speak your language and he doesn't."

"So it isn't just copying other people's skills. Huh. What else do you know that Daz doesn't?"

"Not very much. He wasn't sure what else there was to know."

"Hmmm. How much do you need to know about a skill to be able to give it to somebody? The language thing suggests not much. Is knowing what things can be accomplished with it enough?"

"I don't know."

"Okay. If Daz doesn't know either, I guess our immediate options are to try to start farming and stuff with what we can figure out, or to set out looking for more people and see if we can trade food for knowledge and other goods. Unless you have a better idea."

"I don't think anyone else on this round is going to know much."

"Well, if we're going to try to go it alone just the three of us, we should find a good spot to do it in. Somewhere near a river, ideally with plants already growing so we know the soil is good, maybe near a forest for wood . . . can you think of anything else it should have? I can scout from the air."

"Those are all the things I'd think to check for."

"Then I think I'll go scout. I'll see you in a few hours, probably."

She switches back to wings mode, adds eagle eyes for good measure since she still doesn't have horns, and takes off, starting a search spiraling out from their current position. She keeps alert for danger, other people, and good places to set up a base.

There are other people, though not many. Most are dangerous. Nobody has a farm or a garden. The surface area of the round is about that of a major metropolitan area. There are a few little creeks, though no full sized rivers.

She examines the soil near the handful of creeks, and picks the one where it's the least sandy and rocky. Then flies back to where she left Sovi and Daz, keeping track of how far they're going to have to walk to get there.

It's several miles, longer if they detour around local cannibals.

Between her various precog powers, her wings, and her ability to unexpectedly sprout six-inch razor-sharp claws, Margaret can probably defend herself pretty well, but she'd much rather take the detour and suspects Daz and Sovi will agree. "Sovi, would Daz like some kind of sunshade or something while we travel, so he doesn't get any more sunburned?" She's given up on either of them acquiring a nudity taboo any time soon.

Daz wakes up and says something. Sovi translates. She gets a reply and says, "Yes."

Wings back off (argh argh argh it gets easier every time but it still feels weird), what's the biggest leaf she can make?

She can make a real big leaf! If she thickens up its ribs she can get it umbrella sized without it collapsing.

Nice! She picks it and hands it to Daz while putting her arm back to her definition of normal, and then unless she's mistaken they can set out.

Daz uses the leaf as a parasol. They hike.

Margaret puts her wings, horns, and horn-jewelry back on to get as much range out of her danger sense as possible, and guides them around the last known location of the cannibals.

"Why are you doing that?" asks Sovi.

"I saw some dangerous people over there when I was scouting," she says as she turns one way and points the other. "My magic can tell if someone is likely to try to hurt me."

"...I mean growing horns, I can't tell when you're doing the other thing."

"Oh, that! My magic is stronger when I look prettier; the prettiest I know how to look involves having these horns with this jewelry on them. I took them off earlier so I could make plants, but now I want them back to get more range out of the danger sense."

"You look like a monster," says Sovi.

This is true. She also looks awesome. Sovi can have her opinion and Margaret can have hers. "Magical girls can't look human," is what she says. "The magic judges what counts as pretty, and it likes this, and I like this, so it's what I do."

"Why do you like that?"

"I like having scales because they're easy to clean and never get itchy and make a nice clicking noise when I tap them." (She demonstrates this.) "I like having wings because I can fly and I like being covered in gemstones because they're sparkly and I like having horns because I can hang more jewelry off them. Also I'm used to looking like this; taking pieces off makes me feel unbalanced and wrong."

Sovi makes a face. "Uh-huh."

"It's not for everybody; some people back home get the opportunity and don't take it."

Sovi walks on. "Do you eat this all the time at home?" she asks, holding up a peanut.

"No way. At home there's plenty of food, because there are farmers who know a lot about growing it, so I can get as much food as I want in exchange for doing the things I'm good at. Including kinds I can't make myself."

"What can't you make?"

"Well, some of it is knowledge limitations--if I wanted, say, bread, I could theoretically grow wheat, grind it into flour, and make my own bread, but I don't know all the details of how. And some of it is things like, I can't make enough maple tree to get a decent quantity of maple syrup. And then some foods have eggs in them,  and I don't think I can make eggs at all."

"Why can't you?"

"I'm not sure what it would mean to shapeshift into a form including an egg. If something doesn't count as part of my body, then it disappears when I take it off." She pulls off one of her bracelets and tosses it on the ground ahead of them; by the time they walk to where it landed it's disappeared and she's replaced it. "Best case, I'd have to turn a chunk of my arm into an egg, and even that might not do it."

Sovi nods along, slowly, like she's not sure she gets it.

"Is there some part of that you don't get, or is it just weird when you aren't used to it? I'm not really an expert on this, and I've never had to explain it to someone who didn't have at least a general understanding before . . . "

"I don't know what an egg is."

"Oh, okay. I guess speaking English doesn't mean automatically knowing all the same words as me. An egg is something that animals called birds make, and usually they turn into baby birds but if you interrupt it they're just balls full of stuff you can cook and eat."

"The peanuts aren't balls of stuff you can eat?"

"The peanuts grow on plants, whereas an egg is sort of an entire animal all on its own. And doesn't have a clear way to attach to the rest of me."

"Why can plants attach to you?"

"Fundamentally, nobody really knows. It probably has something to do with the fact that some girls have plants on them all the time in ways that the magic thinks are pretty. I guess there could be a way to make having eggs on me be pretty but I don't really see it."

They walk. Sovi translates a summary of what's been said for Daz.

Margaret appreciates the translation; if Daz has any questions she'll do her best to answer them. Eventually they reach the area she noted as being a good place to settle down.

When she tells them they're stopping here Sovi and Daz sit down to rest.

Margaret sits down too, and starts in on another meal (she's almost getting used to having her wings missing). "Any requests?"

"We don't know what there is," Sovi points out.

"You might have heard of something I haven't; I'm still not super clear on what concepts you do and don't have." But they can try strawberries and raspberries and blackberries and dates and bananas and oh hey it turns out she can make a coconut with built-in weak points, here have some coconut, you can drink the liquid and also eat this part.

Sovi really likes coconut; Daz's favorite is dates.

When they're all done eating, Margaret yawns. "When do people tend to sleep around here?" She asks. "And is there any reason the answer shouldn't be 'now'?"

"When they're tired," says Sovi. "Someone should keep watch."

Margaret has lived a pretty safe life; she doesn't actually know if her danger sense can wake her up. She nods. "Can you or Daz keep watch for a while?"

Sovi nods.

Then Margaret's outfit will turn into an inner layer of pajamas and an outer layer of enormous soft fluffy blanket-cloak suitable for making a nest in. With this advantage, she falls asleep almost as easily as she would have in a bed.

They don't interrupt her. When she wakes up, Daz is up, eating one of the remaining coconuts.

She makes a pile of fruit and nuts for breakfast with a new giant umbrella-leaf as a serving tray, and a second such tray with an entire peanut plant and an entire strawberry plant, complete with small quantities of roots. Then she puts her wings and her optimized outfit back on and starts looking for a good place to try to start a kitchen garden.

"Which parts of this do we eat?!" Sovi calls over to her, inspecting the plants.

"These ones I'm going to try to plant, see if I can get a little farm going."

"So we don't eat those?"

"No, please don't. You can help yourself to anything on the other leaf, though." She points at the relevant pile. It does include another coconut and some dates, and some figs because those are similar to dates, and a lot of pecans and bananas because Margaret is in a pecans-and-bananas kind of mood this morning.

They try all the things. They eat a lot.

Hiking is hungry work. She eats her fill of mostly bananas and pecans, concludes that dates are much better than figs as far as she's concerned, and plants her plants while wishing she knew more about gardening than just pesticide use regulations and manure runoff risk guidelines. 

It doesn't really occur to them to help. Sovi does eventually go get firewood, but when she has enough for a decent-sized campfire she sits back down. Then Daz grabs her and they resume fornicating in the open.

She was going to see if there were fish in the creek but how about instead she'll go see if there are fish in the creek a good long way upstream of here bye.

There are some fish in the creek, mostly little ones.

Brilliant! They don't have to be big to be protein. She dangles an extension of her sleeve into the water in the form of a large bag of very loose lace; once some fish are inside its boundaries it becomes a bag of very dense lace.

Now she has some little minnows.

She's not sure these are worth the effort of butchering, especially given that for all Daz and Sovi are doing fine on Earth food the reverse might not be true. But she can try them as fertilizer for plants, anyway. She sits by the creek for another half-hour with another net out in case anything bigger comes along.

She can catch lots of minnows and one medium sized catfish.

Awesome! Even split three ways that's still a nice side dish. She carries it back to camp, contemplating butchery and cooking techniques.

Daz is sleeping when she comes back.

Oh good, she doesn't have to choose between giving the couple privacy and cooking the fish while it's fresh, she thinks as she sets the fish down on one of the leaf-plates and starts fileting it with a claw.

"What are you going to do with that?" asks Sovi.

"Fry it and eat it! Do you want some? We can have a third each and save the rest for Daz."

Fish butchery: proceeds. Margaret misses her good kitchen knives; being able to reshape her claws however she wants does not fully make up for them being attached to her fingertips. What's the current status of the campfire and/or woodpile?

The campfire hasn't been lit, but when Margaret says she's going to fry it Sovi gets to work on that. There's no flint so she's using the rub sticks together method.

Margaret eventually gets the fish meat in one location and the skeleton and organs in a different location. She doesn't have a frying pan, but she can turn a bracelet into something similar and it will work fine as long as it's on her hand.

Sovi supervises the process with interest, and tends the fire.

Margaret tries to pick up some fire-tending skills by watching; she was never one for camping.

At one point the bracelet heats up enough that she needs to turn the part on her hand into ceramic, but eventually she has some fully cooked fish. She takes it off the fire and lets it cool down for a couple minutes before serving it.

Sovi wakes up Daz to eat his portion. After she's eaten she goes to sleep.

Margaret buries the minnows in half of the garden and leaves the other half as a control group, then sits around keeping watch until someone else wakes up.

Daz looks confused about the fish burial but obviously can't ask.

Margaret doesn't know how to mime the concept of fertilizer, but she points at the plants and mimes them getting bigger. 

Shrug.

Likewise shrug.

The next days and weeks see the development of something of a routine. Margaret catches and cooks more fish; the crops of peanuts and various berries take to the local soil acceptably and start supplementing her arms as a food source; the three of them deliberately keep their sleep schedules out of sync.

After Sovi and Daz have observed her farming-related behavior for a couple of weeks, Margaret will discover a fourth person, hard at work in the garden, when she wakes up.

Margaret's been bugging Sovi for a few words of the local language now and then, but she's sufficiently surprised and still-waking-up that she ends up saying "Hello?" in English.

"Hello," says the new person, who appears to be a woman. (Sovi and Daz are asleep cuddled up under a tree.) "I'm Kiray."

"Oh, you do speak English! I'm Margaret. Are you, um, new? Or another stranded Earthling?"

"I'm new. Sovi made me."

"Ah. Well, pleased to meet you. Thanks for helping with the garden. Um, tell me about yourself?"

"I'm here to help with the garden."

"So are you inherently really good at gardening, then? I'm still not totally clear on how this works."

"I'm as good at gardening as Sovi could make me."

"Can you teach me stuff?"

"I can try, but I'm not sure how much you know."

"I'm mostly guessing. I know that plants need water and sunlight and nutrients in the soil, and that rotting stuff can provide the nutrients, and that it's a good idea to rotate which crops you grow in a given field from year to year."

"I know those things and a few more. You can work with me if you like."

"Great. I between us we can figure out a lot of stuff." 

She resumes de-rocking the ground around some of the plants. "Why didn't you make a gardener yourself?"

"I've never made anybody and I'm worried I'd do it wrong. That I'd make a person and they'd be unhappy, or sick somehow, or wish I had made them differently."

"Oh. Sovi's never made a person either before me."

"Sure, but she was made herself and probably understands it better than I do. I guess if she did a really good job maybe it's easier than it looks?"

"I seem all right so far."

"You do! You seem like a really cool person. Which might mean it's easy or might mean it's a good thing Sovi made you instead of me." Shrug.

"If we need more soon I'll make them if you don't want to."

"If you think it's something that can be taught I'd like to learn, but that might be a good idea," she says, pulling up a weed. "With two of us, I think I can add some more plants than just berries and peanuts--potatoes, I think, and maybe some spinach and a pumpkin vine." She elaborates with descriptions of what those are, since presumably Kiray has never heard of them.

"- I know what a potato is," Kiray interrupts. "I think they're a good idea."

"Ah, sorry, I don't remember everything I've talked about with Sovi. I'll get started on potatoes; do you have any thoughts on where to out them?" She takes her wings off (sigh) and starts on a potato with lots of eyes.

"I don't know if you ever talked about potatoes with Sovi," Kiray says. "I'll churn up some earth over there for them."

"Thanks. So you might know about plants Sovi's never heard of . . . I wonder if you know about any Earth plants I've never heard of, or if you can't know that because the information is on Earth, so to speak."

"I don't know if I can know things you don't, since I don't know what you know, but I think Sovi tried to make it so I'd know what you knew at least."

"Well, if you feel like listing some obscure plant facts, or listening to me do it, we can try to find out." Potato, potato, potato.

"The potatoes will sprout from their eyes, and the part we eat will grow under the ground," says Kiray helpfully.

"I knew that one. Hmm . . . It's a good idea to alternate alfalfa with other crops, because alfalfa replenishes the nitrogen in the soil?"

"I didn't know it had to do with nitrogen but I did know the alfalfa thing."

"Huh. Okay." She has a little pile of sprouted potatoes now, for whenever Kiray thinks the new plot is ready.

Kiray starts planting potatoes. "I don't know what the quality of the soil is right now. We might want to cook or dry out our dung so it doesn't give us any diseases and use it as fertilizer."

"I think I'd be alright with that if I had any way to get soap." She's been cleaning herself via deleting and recreating parts of her surface, and it's adequate but she could still really use a bath. "Maybe ash and olive oil would work."

"That I don't know."

"It seems worth a shot. And now that I think about it, I should be providing wood for the campfires, too; it's got to be easier and more sustainable than Sovi gathering it." She starts in on butternut squash, having decided it will be easier to cook than pumpkins; the first couple go on a leaf-plate for today's "dinner".

"Weren't you going to do pumpkins?"

"I realized the only thing I know how to make with pumpkins is pumpkin pie, and that needs lots of stuff I don't have. Squash I can just roast and it'll be pretty good."

"Okay. I don't know how to cook."

"Do you know if there was anything stopping Sovi from making you know everything she knows plus everything I know?"

"I'm not sure. I think she might have been especially concentrating on farming."

"Huh. Well, farming is definitely the most important thing right now, but if I was making someone I think I'd want to give them as much knowledge as possible. You never know what might come in handy. I hope that wasn't a rude thing to say, sorry."

"It's all right."

She starts planting the squash, a few each of a couple different kinds. "What do you know about good growing conditions, should we be finding somewhere shadier or sunnier for anything?"

"I think I don't know more than you about that. We could plant some of everything in different places and see which grows best."

"Sure; it's not like I'm going to run out of plants. How about in the shade of that tree over there?"

"I don't want to put it very close to the tree in case they compete for water, but close enough to be shaded part of the day works."

"Yeah, and if we put it too close we'll hit roots when we try to dig holes for them. Speaking of which, I bet I can make you a shovel handle for that rock you're digging with. Can you hold it out for a minute?"

"Sure." Kiray holds out the rock.

Margaret turns both arms from scales to skin just to be safe, then extrudes a single long branch that grows around the rock, leaving the sharpest edge exposed, with an approximate handle on the other end and an ultra-thin bit so she can remove it easily. It's not the most pleasant experience--the branch tugs on her skin weirdly--but when she's done Kiray has a pretty good approximation of a shovel.

"Thanks!" says Kiray, and she resumes working more efficiently.

Margaret joins in the digging whenever her plant-creation gets ahead of places to put them, with a metal shovel this time. "Anything I make that isn't biological disappears when I let go of it," she explains.

"Why?"

"Magical girl powers are weird, Earth scientists don't really know what's going on with them. Anything that counts as part of my body sticks around; anything that doesn't disappears. I can delete things too--if I put something in a pocket and then stop having the pocket, it's gone."

"Huh."

"Yeah." Dig holes, plant plants, futile attempt to come up with a polite way of asking "So are you going to start having sex with Daz and Sovi and if so can you give me five minutes warning first," give up and say nothing, more planting.

Daz wakes up. Kiray starts talking to him in their language.

Margaret is trying to pick out words she recognizes and speculating on the mechanics of making people when she suddenly interrupts with, "The vast knowledge of Earth is not mine to have, but mine to give to someone new."

Kiray blinks at her, interrupting herself midsentence.

She takes a moment out of being shocked by the implications to explain. "One of the things my magic does is . . . that. I say things I have no way of knowing, and they turn out to be true. This one means that if I make a person, I can give them knowledge that people where I came from have, even if I don't have it myself. I could make someone who knows medicine, mining, cooking, building things . . . someone who could start building this round up to a higher level of technology." Then it's back to being shocked.

"Should I not have made her?" Sovi asks, pointing at Kiray. (Kiray seems unperturbed by the question.)

"If she's glad she exists, it's probably good that you made her," she says, twisting one of her rings around and around on her finger. "And even if I make someone who knows more than all of us put together we can all still help with stuff, I'm pretty sure it takes multiple people to build lots of things."

"All right," says Sovi.

"Can you teach me everything you know about making people? I'm going to want to get this exactly right the first time."

"I'm not sure where to start."

"Well, what's it like? Do you have to hold everything about the person in your head at once, or can you build up a model over time? What does making someone good at a skill entail, do you have to think about a specific person to copy or can you just think "really good at such and such"?

"I don't actually know how much of what I guessed is right," Sovi points out. "Kiray has some things I came up with before I made her and wasn't thinking about at that moment, but not all of them. She has some skills I tried to make her good at but not all of them."

"Can you think of any differences between the skills you successfully gave her and the ones you didn't? Either differences in the skills themselves, or in how you tried to impart them?"

"She can sing, which I wasn't trying very hard to put in, but not do any of the things you were talking about people doing on your world besides farming. I was trying hardest for farming, though."

"Okay. What's 'trying harder' like, is it concentrating harder or thinking about it in more detail or something else?"

"Making sure to think about it at the moment I made her."

Margaret acquires a Wonder Woman-style arm panel and starts appearing notes on it. "I can't actually think about multiple things at the exact same moment--is that a difference between our species or did things you thought about in nearby moments work too? Can you specify physical traits as well as mental ones?"

"It takes more than an instant to make someone. More like a couple of seconds. And yes, she looks just how I meant her to."

"So I might have to mentally go over all the traits I want in a few seconds . . . Do you know what happens if you try to specify something impossible?"

"I assume if it's impossible it doesn't happen."

"Sure, but does the person just get created as if you hadn't tried that, or does the closest possible thing happen, or does the person not appear at all?"

"Oh. I'd think probably the second thing but I'm not sure."

"I really don't want to create a whole new person without some way to practice first . . . I can't believe I'm asking this, but is it possible to create a person who's already dead?"

"No, but you can make one who's about to die."

"I don't want to do that! It sounds like I'm just going to have to get this right the first time."

"Why would you want to make a dead person when you can grow food?"

"For practice. If I can get a whole bunch of really specific things about their physical appearance correct, then I know I'm concentrating on them the right way and can probably do the same thing with mental traits."

"So why not make one who'll die in a second? You could check that way."

"Because I'm pretty sure creating someone and who immediately dies is the same as creating someone and immediately killing them? And that's morally wrong?"

"But you'd make one who was already dead?"

"Yeah, that doesn't involve anybody experiencing being about to die."

"You might be able to make one asleep."

"Well, the question is, what's worse--existing asleep for a second and then dying, or whatever the worst mistake I'm likely to make is? Have you ever heard of someone doing such a bad job that the person they made killed themselves, or does immediately when they weren't intended to?" She still obviously hates this entire conversation.

"I haven't heard of much," Sovi points out. "Around here I think most people are made for food."

"Yeah, and that really needs to stop, that's part of why I want farms and technology and stuff, so there can be enough food without anybody eating people. But all the people on this round had to come from somewhere, so people must be making people for other reasons. Maybe I can go find someone who's made lots of people to ask."

"Daz was made for food but the person who made him made a mistake so he could escape."

"Oh my goodness. Um. I'm really sorry to hear that, that sounds awful. And . . . it sounds like even if someone isn't trying to give someone a good life, and even if they aren't very skilled, people still end up basically okay." She hasn't noticed Daz having any particularly serious problems, at any rate.

"Kiray and I are much better made."

"If it's not rude to ask, what are the differences? I know Daz can sunburn and you can't, but if there's anything else I want to make sure I don't miss it."

"He has more trouble moving around and thinking straight - he gets more tired and he's in more pain. I have a little of the thinking straight problem because he didn't know how to get rid of all of it but much less, and I think Kiray doesn't have any."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Can you tell Daz he has my sympathies? Also, how did he and you fix it? Did you just focus on making Kiray good at thinking, or was it something more specific?"

"He didn't know what thinking better was like, so he made some things up and some of them worked. I had that much, so I made up more things from there and I think Kiray's fine."

"Can you describe any of the things you or he made up? I guess they might be hard to put into words."

"It is, sorry."

"That's alright."

That's probably all Margaret can get out of asking questions for now; the next step is to figure out what exactly she'll aim for once she knows how to aim. When she's not making food or sleeping, she plans. She only wants to take on this much responsibility once, and she wants to live up to it; she's going to be thorough.

Margaret's notes-bangle is replaced by a scroll, still mounted to a bracelet so she can't drop it. She writes a massive pile of specifications; she can decide what to cut later if she decides it's safer not to try too many things at once. The new person should be female, sixteen, and in good health, physically strong, with antibodies to every disease on Earth and here; she should have excellent stamina and coordination; she should have acute hearing and the best possible eyesight. Skin that won't sunburn, a very low risk of cancer or heart disease, this height and that weight and a cooperative metabolism and healthy flexible joints and minimal need for sleep, and and and. 

Mentally, she should be as intelligent as humanly possible, with a strong moral compass, concerned for the well-being of others and disinclined to violence except in self-defense. She should be fluent in every language Margaret has ever heard of, but especially the local one and English. She should have all Margaret's background knowledge of this world and of Earth, plus Earth-expert-level knowledge of physics and biology and chemistry and engineering and medicine and fashion design and mining and farming and every other form of science and art and craft she can think of in hours of thinking and writing, not to mention being as good at people-design as possible.

(The wake cycle after she questioned Sovi, Margaret prophecies, "Not working memory, but memorization and prioritization, matters for creation." She stops thinking in terms of "how much can I fit into a person" and starts thinking in terms of priority ordering. Even with starscape letting her write as small as she can read, her scroll gets pretty long.)

Margaret still can't make clothes, so the new person should share her companions' lack of a nudity taboo. Similarly, she should be content with the limited social circle of their little group, but not averse to welcoming new people if they're required. Not too bothered by the lack of modern Earth conveniences, but ambitious and inspired to invent them. Neither too much caution or not enough, a love of building and inventing but the flexibility to do whatever work is most useful, an eye for the long-term future. She should be generally cheerful and happy to exist. And, if and only if it's possible, she should be about to starscape and willing to go for magic.

Once she runs out of things to write, she goes over it with Sovi and Kiray, asking for help with anything she forgot.

They don't have much in the way of suggestions except that they think the new person shouldn't get tired of working or traveling or whatever else needs doing the way Daz can sometimes.

Margaret adds mental stamina and industriousness to her specification, sleeps on it one more time, and wakes up in the morning still unable to see any further flaws. She's as ready as she'll ever be.

Sparks coalesce into a human form, tall and muscular and symmetrical. The woman's eyes open, and a voice built for singing says, "Hello everyone. I think I'll call myself Alana. Don't worry, Margaret, I feel fine. And I know just what to do." She stretches her limbs, experimentally but with an athlete's grace. "My, what a rich and untapped resource this round is! We're going to build so many things together."