"Huh! Do you know how far south the ice reaches on your world? If the sea is lower there, the water is probably bound up in more ice and things are generally colder. We can tell when the ice was at particular places by looking at the rocks it left behind, so if you know exactly where the ice is that narrows things down."

Xenife is getting back into excited speculation, and appears to have forgotten their sandwich.

(Their excitement is cute, not that he's going to comment on that and break their flow.)

The northern ice doesn't come very far south in this part of the world, but on the western bit of this continent it touches the north edge of widest part of the northern bulge - he thinks that bulge is an island here actually - and on the other continent they have some big lakes in the east, those are about as far south as the ice gets over there in his world.

They flip through their phone, looking up historical ice maps.

"The ice has been down that far a few times, but the most recent one was, uh, ..."

They put 32,0000 into their calculator to convert it.

"... 26,000 years ago, I think. Hmm. That matches up with mammoths being relatively common, and it is much older than our earliest records."

Wow. 

"Oh, did you want to see the maps?"

They put up a map of the known locations of the polar ice sheets during the last glacial minimum.

He has to peer at the map for a second to make sense of the projection, but that's home, yep! He grew up on the eastern side of the big southwestern lake on the other northerly continent.

"Neat! I've never been to that area, but I think that's where Windy Beach City is."

They lean back and look thoughtful for a moment.

"So it's possible you're from the past, then, and something happened to crafting between now and then. Or the future, and the planet's going to get colder between now and then. Or another planet that is just extremely suspiciously similar to this one. But supposing you are from the past, that gives us a general time to investigate. Do you know where your library is?"

Yeah, it's up in the mountains north of the middle lake on the other northerly continent - the main part of it, at least, there are a couple other sections connected by ansible. If the mountains are the same too he can probably find the exact spot here, he's been there often enough.

"I imagine the mountains should be the same, but of course I don't know. It would be interesting to see if we can find anything buried there."

He'll definitely want to go check it out at some point; the area he grew up in, too. Really there are a lot of places like that that he'd like to get a look at.

They nod.

"Do you know where you want to go once you've seen all of this city you want to?"

Not really; they have that upcoming planning event that he thinks is a cute idea, so he's waiting for that to think about it much. He might just do some wandering to get a feel for how things are different outside of cities before anything else.

"Life is definitely pretty different outside a city. People still rely on each other, but less. I grew up with my parents in a—"

They pause, trying to think how to translate it.

"— small communal farming territory, with about eight people. But a lot of our neighbors were completely solitary. We ended up moving here when I started losing the use of my legs because a city is easier to navigate on wheels."

Huh. He doesn't have a walker design with a footprint small enough to comfortably use in buildings yet but he wants one, he should see about getting that distributed here once he has it if they don't have a good all-terrain personal vehicle design of their own.

How does an eight-person household work here, he's curious - like, how is it organized, how are the decisions made?

Xenife gazes into the distance, thinking how to formulate their explanation.

"So there are lots of different ways to do it. One of the advantages of a small group — by our standards — is that you can frequently find a few people who want to live in any given way. The way our house worked was, most of the adults had a single area of responsibility where they were in charge: farming, managing stores of things, and house maintenance. In their area, they were the final decision maker. But the adults had big conversations every few weeks to make sure they were all on the same page, and if something affected multiple areas they would work together on it. I think technically we had some more formal way of deciding things if everyone disagreed, but it never really got to that point, or if it did I didn't notice as a kid."

"But it was a changing sort of organization. For a few years one of my parents had a ... I don't know the exact Crafter word. An injury to the mind, not the body — and they stepped down from handling the stores. And two of the adults never really had that sort of responsibility at all, they just worked on the farm and lived with us. The kids started off with no responsibilities, but we could get more as we grew up. My older sibling still lives there, actually. I liked it well enough — it was a peaceful way to live, and I liked visiting the other children who lived in neighboring territories — but I like the city, too, for different reasons. Not having to cook is really nice."

That way of organizing it makes sense, yeah - he wouldn't expect it to work very well for Crafters, they don't do well with needing to do things for other people in a consistent way like that, but he's not surprised to see it work for people with different instincts. And the city is really neat.

"I can definitely see why you'd prefer not to have that kind of obligation," they agree. "But there's things you are always going to have to do for yourself, consistently, anyway. Things like cooking, cleaning, repairing your things, and so on. So if you live without relying on someone else, you have to do all those things consistently anyway. But not all of those things are equally bad to do for different people. Some people really like cooking or cleaning or sewing. So if you can find a group of people where you all enjoy different things, you can end up only committing to the parts that you find easier to do."

"It obviously isn't always possible to find groups that balance perfectly like that, but I think that's the idea. Living alone, you have to be good enough at everything; living in a group, you only have to be good at one or a few things."

Yeah, there's a difference in there somewhere; he thinks the locals might just enjoy that kind of chore more overall? Or - the problem Crafters tend to run into with it, in his experience, is that other peoples' problems are ultimately theirs to deal with; Crafters do like helping one another but that's only really reliable in the short to medium term whereas for a household structure you want things that work in the long term. Cleaning for himself because he wants something clean is different from cleaning for someone else who's not an overt dependent, even if he likes cleaning and likes the person.

Xenife stares at him in flat incomprehension.

"... what?"

"Sorry, let me expand that into a more useful question. Do you always manage to want things to be clean when you'll turn out to enjoy them being clean later?"

Well, no, but if he doesn't want it clean and doesn't clean it that's not going to bother anyone but himself, is it. (This is accompanied by a self-deprecating chuckle.) And he does manage it most of the time.  - he would have that problem more if he was trying to live closely with other people like the locals do, he spent a lot of time in his middle son's primary parent's territory when the son was a baby and he did struggle with it then, it's harder when he's less secure in his territory situation. And noticing that they're going to want something in the future and setting up systems to get them act on that before it gets overwhelming is a skill young Crafters have to learn, most of them are only really any good at it after they've had their own territories for a few years. Most Crafters do manage it all right, though, is that different for the locals?

"Well ..."

They tap their chin consideringly.

"So we definitely do manage to do that, but it's ... the same skill as doing things for other people? Yourself-in-the-future is another person. So hearing you say that you can establish systems and muster up the energy to do things for your future self consistently, but not to do things for other people consistently, is kind of strange."

"I mean, I do see that there's a difference there — it's a lot easier to know what your future self is going to think about things, for one — but it feels to me like a difference of degree, not kind."

Okay, that's definitely a difference. It's not wrong, exactly, to say that his future self is a different person from his current self, but that doesn't put his future self in the same category as other different people at all. Now that he's thinking about it he almost wants to say that his future self is a dependent of his current self, his future self needs things from him in particular the same way his animals or his kids when they were babies have needed things from him in particular, and that's not true for other people - even if a Crafter has a dependent adult in their household it usually doesn't feel as true for them, he knows a some people who live that way and it's hard.

"Don't be too quick to generalize — what I said is true for me, but I've never really discussed it with people before. Maybe I'm just unusual," they warn.

"If your future self is more like a dependent, do you have that thing where it's easier to care for your dependents than it is to care for yourself?"

...maybe a little easier in some cases, but overall about the same.

"Do you know if that's normal for Crafters? It's not everyone here, but maybe a third or so of people have it."