The city is full of ugly people! They have pointy ears, skin in various shades of grey - bluish grey, greenish grey, brownish grey, purplish grey - patchy hair, asymmetrical features, wonky dentition, and irregular skin conditions. Here goes a family of nine! There goes a family of twelve! They are crossing a bridge in opposite directions over a broad blue river in a town full of angular silvery buildings mostly seven to ten stories high, interspersed with color - playgrounds, parks, and some open-air markets. She gets looked at but no one seems to think that suddenly appearing human girls are outrageous events.

They don't look like humans. They don't look like Reavers either, though. Do they see each other (and the city) the way she's seeing them? (But this is too consistent for a hallucination - )

They do see each other and the city mostly as she does but they can also see heat and are more offput by bright light glinting off the river. The walkways including the bridge are shaded.

There's no danger but she doesn't know where she is - are these aliens? There aren't many languages spoken in the Alliance anymore, the surviving languages of Earth That Was all blended together, but aliens shouldn't speak the unified tongue -

She listens for their language, trying to focus on sound and not translation.

There are several dialects of one main language, and some minority speakers of others here and there! The languages she can hear have no relationship to English or Chinese or anything else she's heard before.

She usually isn't the one interfacing with people off the ship. Usually if River's talking to a stranger, someone's threatening someone and probably at least one of them has a gun -

She looks around.

She...

Does not, actually, know how to ask anyone 'what the fuck.'

She sits down, wraps her arms around her legs, and starts corresponding thoughts to sentences people are saying in the main language so she can figure out translations.

"How much do those go for these days?"

"Twice as much as they did when I was starting out, new planet loves them!"

-

"Mama mama mama mama!"

"Hm?"

"I love you."

"I love you too."

-

"He pulled my hair, Grandpa -"

"Pull his hair back! When I was your age -"

"Papa says -"

"- used to - fine, what's he say -"

"...says to tell a grownup."

"Now you've done that. Don't know what you want me doing about it!"

-

"Mine!"

"No mine!"

-

"But it's crawling with Elves!"

"Oh yeah but they mind their manners all right. I still don't like leaving Elves where nobody's really keeping an eye on 'em, you know?"

She would've known if the Alliance had contact with these people. They wouldn't have told anyone, not if they could keep it as a weapon, but their secrets have never been very good secrets around her.

She tries thinking in the new language. She's getting better at remembering when she's thinking something versus saying it, so it actually takes her a few seconds to switch over to mumbling words, practicing the pronunciation. She repeats other people's sentences first. "I was new planet," she tries, the first new sentence, until it sounds at least shaped correctly. Sounds ungrammatical - she can steal entire dialects from people's heads, prompted in part by what they think she'll say next, but an entire language is harder... "I used to new planet." No, worse. And she hadn't been on a planet, she'd been on a space ship, but she doesn't know the words for solar system or star or ship yet, and it wasn't new to her, it was Serenity, home, but it'll be new to them, maybe, unless they've been watching the Alliance eat itself from afar and doing nothing -

There's shivery things in the edge of her vision. Flashes of blue hands. People in white. Blood. The people around her don't see them, though (River checks, keeping a constant thread of attention on the senses of everyone looking in her general direction) so she doesn't react to them.

"How long has that human been there?"

"...dunno, a while?"

"Is she... sightseeing?"

"Why not, it's a nice bridge -"

"It's fine but it's not famous and she's barely looking at it. Can she hear us, how well do humans hear?"

(They know what humans are. That's interesting. Maybe someone other than the Alliance escaped Earth That Was?)

She's not sure if she wants people noticing her yet but there's nothing she can do about it, she can't make people not see her no matter how much she'd like to -

Slowly, she takes a deep breath and glances over at the people talking about her. (She makes sure they're the ones actually talking and not just thinking even though talking's so much quieter than thinking, it's such a tiny part of the brain - )

They are a trio of locals and a baby. The one holding the baby waves the baby's hand at her.

Squint.

And...

Wave?

The trio wanders a bit closer. "Welcome to Dha-izubu!" says the one with the baby.

"Welcome?" She's heard most of the conjugations of 'to be' by now, so - "I am new." She still has an accent, unfortunately, and the words aren't strung together smoothly, still with stolen bits of intonation from other sentences. "Dha-izubu is planet?"

She stands, slowly, her posture mostly closed off and wary.

"Yeah, it's a planet - are you from that place with the weird monsters that come out of the ground, I hear that's not a planet?"

"Who has a teleport and not Allspeak?"

"Maybe there's... some kind of condition you can't get Allspeak with?"

"Hey, what languages do you speak for real, human?"

English, Mandarin, Latin, Greek, Old English and Old Mandarin and Japanese and Arabic and Spanish and bits of other languages - 

She says the name of each in its own language, fluidly.

Allspeak - she's unclear from their thoughts if that's magic or a Universal Translator type thing. But they have teleports, and places that aren't planets where people live - not a spaceship, the person's not visualizing a spaceship but instead a world surface - 

"I taked English with school," says the shortest one, haltingly, "but I am not best at it."

Maybe other humans escaped Earth That Was, then.

"That's okay," she says in English. She can read their minds anyways. "I can understand your language if you speak it, and I can learn it quickly." Hopefully. Keeping the words straight in her head's already getting hard, though, the way learning anything these days is hard. She never knows what she got where, or what she imagined or what's real...

She considers telling them she can read their minds. (She's going to have to be careful about not talking instead of thinking if they have a common language. Her crew are used to her babbling, but most people aren't). Most people don't like it. Some of them get mad at her, or scared of her, but she can't not.

"How do you understand it?" asks the one with the baby.

"Osanwë?" guesses the short one, by which he means mindreading.

"She's a human though. My friend's a test subject for the Osanwë Repair Project -"

"Ew."

"If they get anywhere take it to the Representatives. Anyway I think he'd know if there were humans with osanwë before they even figured it out for orcs!"

"It's my power. I'm not from - here. I don't know anything about orcs or osanwe. I was in a ship, and then there was a snake, and then I was here. So I don't know how things work here."

Technically these are true statements.

Orc with baby: "Ohhhh, one of the snakes! Yeah, that happens sometimes."

Tall orc: "Like... twice."

With baby: "I think more than that."

Tall orc: "Okay but not frequently."

With baby: "Anyway, that means you're within a hop of this world and that's great, this is a nice neighborhood." She's planning on reporting the matter to some offplanet authorities.

"Nice how?"

"The Empress's magic works around here."

"Who's the Empress?"

"Empress Isabella Swan. There's also her wife Lúthien" (short orc makes a face) "but she's got different magic, works wherever."

"What does her magic do?"

"Grants wishes. Also mess with time but I think that works more places. Lúthien has a weird teleport."

Blink. "Wishes to - anyone?"

"...you have to get screened first so you don't make a dumb wish."

"That's good." Some people should not have their wishes granted.

...She wonders if she can wish for her reading to work differently. She needs it for security but it isn't very pleasant.

"Also there's other stuff but I haven't looked into it much. I'm Plumub, that's Lagl, that's Kunol." (Orc with baby, short orc, tall orc.) "And the baby's Rus."

"I'm River." She doesn't like her last name much. No point giving it. (The skin over her hands is starting to twitch, like there's something crawling on them. She's not used to this many people being around. It's noisy.)

"Well, nice to meet you, River. Do you... need anything?" asks Plumub.

Needs aren't safe. They are on Serenity, but not around most people. But it's hard to get things if you don't tell people you need them, and she'll know if the orcs are planning to betray her.

Reading minds is slightly less overwhelming if she can't see people.

"Somewhere to be less - crowded."

"...like out on the lake, or in the woods, or on my great great grandpa's farm, or -"

"Don't care. Less people. I lived on a spaceship, before. There were only five other people." If they feel like putting her out of mental range of crowds, that might be nice. But she doesn't actually know what her range is. She knows she can hear the Reavers screaming several light minutes away, but they're Reavers. It's different.

"I have a spaceship," says Lagl.

"We'd need to, like, pack," says Plumub, "to go anywhere for five days."

"It's stocked. Humans can eat what we eat, except some of them don't like bugs. Anyway, you don't have to leap it, it can just go up and hang out," says Lagl. "But we'd have to go to the spaceport to get on it."

She can't feel the ground from orbit, she thinks. Or she couldn't last time she parked Serenity around a planet.

"Maybe," she says. 

"Spaceport's way more crowded than this bridge though. You wanna go?" asks Lagl.

"How far away is it?"

"Ten minutes walk to the streetcar station and then another ten and then five getting to my ship from the station in the port."

Her range already encompasses the spaceport, then.

"Spaceship would be - good."

So they lead her up the bridge and into the city, full of orcs upon orcs upon orcs, orcs laughing and orcs kissing and orcs playing with their babies and orcs selling groceries and orcs reading and orcs drumming and orcs in apartments and orcs on playgrounds and orcs jogging and orcs rollerskating and orcs working on gardens and orcs working on theater productions.

The streetcar is about three quarters full and they take the last seats. People look at River; humans are not well known here.

This is not a happy human. Noise outside clashes with noise in her head - people's words don't always match their thoughts - and she's very strongly relying on borrowing everyone else's senses because her eyes and ears have given up on making coherent sense of the world and just started screaming dizzying twirling colors - walking when she's having to piece together her movements through other people's eyes is hard but she's done it before but she usually only had just one set of eyes to look through - 

Her mouth stops working the way it's supposed to. She makes sure she's muttering in Mandarin whenever she catches herself through someone else's ears, mostly repetitive phrases to try to anchor herself - bits of poems she liked once - 

Her companions take this pretty well as it goes. They usher her out of the streetcar at the correct stop and lead her through the spaceport. It's got shops full of snacks and souvenirs, bathrooms marked with strange symbols that don't gender-segregate, play areas for kids, moving sidewalks.

Largl's spaceship is about the size of a house and is parked in a way suggesting it's capable of vertical takeoff and landing; there are lots of small ships parked close together here. Largl's is painted green and black in spiky patterns.

They all pile in. Plumub says, "We're not leaping, right, if we leap I need to tell Nini, he'll be back from his trip by then."

"Not leaping, just getting up in the quiet," says Largl.

Quiet sounds good. Leaping is a weird concept, but it's hard to hold onto amid all the noise.

The ship goes up. The planet falls away. It's green and lit up prettily on the night side's continent. Lots of islands.

She uncurls a bit once she can only hear the people on the ship - pretty far up - finally looking around with interest.

...Now that her head isn't screaming she might want to reconsider letting them know she can read minds. They've been nice. Though she doesn't like that they're planning to involve a government. But it's not good to hide stuff from people you're working with.

Plumub is showing Rus the view. Rus is more interested in chewing on his hand.

"Here's better," she says after a few false starts.

"Oh, good," says Lagl. "My family thought I was silly to want one. But sometimes it's nice."

She smiles. "It's really nice." 

"So what are you gonna want to do, longer term?" asks Kunol.

"Dunno."

"My power is noisy when lots of people are around. I might apply for a wish to fix it or something. It doesn't turn off."

"Your power?" asks Lagl.

"People aren't quiet even when they're not talking. Everything they say and mean and want and can't say and don't want is all jumbled and screaming."

"Like osanwë?" asks Plumub.

Lagl and Kunol are not thrilled at that idea.

"Different. I think. Maybe. I can't not."

None of the orcs are sure if Elves and Ainur can not.

"Does this thing have a subspace transmitter?" Plumub asks Lagl.

"Yeah. Why?"

"I want to call my therapist."

"Your therapist? What does your therapist have to do with anything?"

"She wished on subtle arts and took classes in Warp."

"Oh. Yeah, okay."

She curls up, miserably.

"You okay?" Kunol asks.

"Dunno."

"Do you not like therapists? Some people don't."

"Not really."

"Plu, she doesn't like therapists."

"Mine's -"

"She says she doesn't like them!"

"...well I don't know what else to do about always-on osanwë she doesn't like!"

"It's okay," she mumbles. "I don't like the screaming more."

"I mean, we could just try to get it escalated straight to the Empress," says Kunol. "She's not an orc, that wouldn't be orcs failing to manage orc things."

"It doesn't batch," says Plumub.

"Are you sure? Hey human, are there lots of you back home?"

"With my power?" she asks. "There's lots of humans. Planets and planets. There's the Reavers, which are people like me the Alliance drove insane. More insane than me. They took the planet Miranda. It's theirs now. There's thousands and thousands of them. There's lots of people like me. A tenth of a percent of the population. But most of us aren't trapped listening to all the screaming. They can't hear anything, not consciously. I could intuit things before, but not everything. Core population is over thirty nine billion. Border population's nearly seven billion. Rim's got about one billion."

"...okay, that's kind of gotta go to the Empress," says Plumub.

"Ugh. I'll subspace Representative Buth," says Lagl.

"What're they like?"

"We haven't met them," says Kunol. "She'll get somebody in Buth's office and they'll get her on the comm and she'll talk to the Empress about it. Buth's all right. From the Interregnum."

"Interregnum?"

"Uh, huh. I never tried to explain the Interregnum to somebody, I don't have kids yet. So... orcs're a created species. A god called Melkor made us. Melkor did his... thing... for a while. Then he was put in prison for hundreds of years by the other gods of our world. Then they let him out and he did some more of his thing. But orcs still existed, in between, and things were sorta different then. Buth was born about fifty years before the end of the Interregnum and then died ten years in and when everybody came back she ran for representative."

The idea of 'when everybody came back' is... Interesting.

This world has a lot of weird stuff.

She nods.

"I died when I was like four, so I don't remember all that much from then," Kunol goes on.

"Is people dying and coming back normal here?" she figures out how to ask after a few moments.

"- oh, yeah. Well, dying isn't anymore. Orcs don't, you know, by ourselves, if you leave us alone we're just immortal. But coming back's normal."

"That's good for you guys."

"Humans don't anymore either, not in the explored neighborhood of Mîr. Buth'll tell the Empresses and they'll get on your world pronto, it's got lots of people sounds like."

"Alliance might not like it. Takes away their control. Think the whole 'verse is theirs, or should be."

"...well, what are they gonna do about it?"

"Last time someone tried rebelling they bombed the planet so hard it doesn't have a breathable atmosphere anymore. They wouldn't mind if they get to decide who gets put back or who gets to be immortal, but there's lots of people they want to stay dead 'cause they put them that way."

"Okay, but it sounds like it won't be that hard to find people to make wishes for the world anyhow."

"Yeah. Lotsa people want it better."

"So it should be okay. The Empress pretty much knows what she's doing," Kunol says.

"Too chummy with Elves," says Lagl.

"She's not an Elf, she's a magic rock," says Plumub.

"You know that's just semantics in the absence of oaths," Lagl replies.

"All right, she's not an Elf, she's half-Maia."

"Still."

"What's so bad about Elves?"

"We were at war," says Kunol.

"They slaughtered our children," says Lagl.

"War's bad. No one's nice."

"Hear, hear," says Plumub.

"Elves think they're nice," says Lagl. "And everyone fucking believes them. Even half the orcs."

"Propaganda does that."

"You'll probably meet Elves, eventually," says Kunol. "There are a lot of them around."

"They can read minds too?"

"Yeah," says Kunol.

"Not the cyborg ones," says Plumub. "Well, those can't read your mind, anyway."

She considers this. "People reading my mind's okay but my mind's not nice to be in so they might not want to."

"That's their problem," says Kunol. "If it's a problem. I'm not sure if they can stop but maybe they can."

She shrugs.

"Representative Buth's office," says a voice.

"Hello," Lagl says, "somebody got portalsnaked onto Shatog Bridge in New Kalaj, she's a mindreading human from a big civ."

"I'll forward that right up, thanks. Can someone teleport to your location?"

"Yeah, we're on my ship."

"Thank you. Is there anything else we should know?"

"Doesn't like therapists."

"Uh, okay."

"I can't choose not to read someone's mind," she says, tiredly.

"Yeah, that too."

"Okay. Uh, don't bring her to the capital planet."

"I know that."

"Gotta remind people anyway. Please hold for Representative Buth."

The image changes to show a different orc. "Hello. May I speak to our visitor?"

"'M here."

"Hello. I'm Buth. What's your name?"

"I'm River."

"I hear you got here via one of these?" The image is replaced with a photo of a portalsnake.

"Yeah. Thought it was a hallucination."

"They're real. Was anyone near you at the time? They sometimes eat multiple people."

"The rest of the people on my spaceship. Five people at that time. They'd probably try to shoot it but I dunno if that works."

"It can, depending what one shoots it with and where you hit, but sounds like we should assume your crewmates could be in trouble. Can you list them?"

"Malcolm Reynolds, Zoe Alleyne Washburne, Jayne Cobb, Kaywinnet Lee Fry, and Simon Tam. Though Malcolm just goes by Mal and Kaywinnet by Kaylee, if nicknames matter. They're all normal humans."

"Okay, we can get some thop - local magic-bearers - looking for them. Can I send you somebody to collect a mental image of the ship?"

"Sure."

Somebody - not an orc, much more symmetrical, with a long ponytail and a sleek uniform, teleports into the ship. "Hi. I'm Shaut. I can read minds. Can I read yours?"

"Sure."

She's currently hallucinating, but only a little bit, and it's the kind where the edges of her vision blur into weird trippy shapes and colors, not the kind where it overrides her mental abilities. She's constantly mind reading everyone on the ship, people's verbal thoughts only barely distinct from their words and their visual thoughts often overlaying her own vision. She's mostly ignoring her vision, and instead navigating through other people's eyes, which don't have the problem where the world doesn't stay very stable.

She's trying very hard to think of the ship she comes from - she's terribly fond of it, Serenity - and the faces of the people still alive on it, but her memories are fairly jumbled up with a mixture of past-present-future and things she's hallucinated and things she's read off of people's minds, and her brain doesn't really distinguish between those. Still, the memories where people are burning or their faces are melting or the ship is twisting are probably hallucinations, and the stable ones are probably real. (She thinks this, at least.) Her knowledge of the ship isn't just visual, is all of her senses piled on top of each other - and she has some kind of extrasensory perception, and the ship and her friends feel very distinct in this. Her brain doesn't seem sure how to cope with said perception, and keeps randomly flicking it to overlay on other senses, but she's mostly figured out how the overlays work.

She's currently scared but not actually feeling that, and sad and feeling that, and cautiously hopeful but she's not too sure about this trusting governments to do things thing, people trusted the Alliance and look at what that's gotten everyone -

She focuses her mind back on Serenity and her crew.

"- huh. They can probably use that... I might need to come back and try again if they can't."

"Okay."

Shaut disappears. Buth, on the screen, says, "Are there any other emergencies in your world right now?"

"Probably stuff going on all the time, but dunno about specifics. Reavers don't attack too much anymore, but there's a lot of riots we keep hearing about. Not making the news, though, and it usually gets put down fast since no one's uniting. And the Alliance keeps inventing new ways to be shitheads but that's ongoing."

"Okay. Do you need anything?"

"There's some medications I've been trying. They make my brain work clearer. I can skip a dose but shouldn't skip two."

"...when are they next due?"

"Brother usually keeps track of that for me. I think - in the morning ship's time, it was... I think people were mostly considering going to sleep so it was probably ten or twelve hours before that."

"Okay. I'll try to get ahold of your meds by then. Are you getting along with the people you're with or do you want somewhere else to stay?"

"I like them but I dunno they like the mind reading."

"What's the range?"

"Varies. Can't feel normal people on a planet from orbit but I can feel Reavers at that distance. Usually can feel everyone in a city if I'm in it unless it's really really big."

"Are you claustrophobic?"

"Don't mind living on a spaceship about this size but I don't like having just a small room to be in."

"Oceangoing boat all right?"

"Should be."

"Okay. I'm going to have you placed on Weatherstation Logon, which is sometimes crewed and has food and facilities but doesn't have anyone on it today. The teleporter who brings you will show you how to use everything, including a communicator to get in touch with my office again if you need anything. Is that all right?"

"I can't really see or interact with things consistently if I don't have someone around to check the senses of. My senses are usually wrong."

"...the teleporter can bring someone who can stay with you."

"Thanks. That's okay, then."

"This'll take a few minutes."

Her image disappears.

To the orcs with her: "Thanks for helping me so much."

"You're welcome!" says Plumub.

She nods. "Sorry about - problems."

"It was interesting," says Kunol earnestly.

And someone - two someones - appear and nod at the other orcs and teleport River to the boat. It's on a calm sea.

She startles.

"Are you okay?" asks one of the orcs. "I'm Hluth, I'm going to stay here with you -" (The other orc vanishes.)

"That was - sudden."

"I'm sorry. You can file a complaint with the office if you want. There aren't that many people vetted for teleportation so they try to keep everything short..."

"That makes sense."

She sits down and curls up a bit.

"Probably people should not startle me." Especially since she's actually not sure when the killing thing turns on or how much she was joking about being able to kill people with her brain, and that sounds like it'd be awkward if it came up accidentally.

Though if something's actually dangerous she usually knows ahead of time. Maybe she can convince her brain of that.

"Okay. I'll just sit here and you can tell me if you need something."

"Okay."

"Probably I'll need food and water soon but right now I'd like to just sit." And try to get her brain in order some.

"Sure."

Meanwhile a team of thop teleport to Serenity.

The Firefly class ship Serenity is a small spaceship, heavily metal on the inside, fairly dingy with a number of signs of wear and tear. They seem to be hauling something. From the look of the bay, it seems like they shot at something, hit it a few times, then got the exterior doors open and let everything not tied down fly out - there's certainly no portal snake in evidence. There's three people - two men, one woman, all human - wielding guns standing in the bay. All are wearing harnesses designed for tethers. Two other people, a man and a woman, don't have guns and aren't wearing harnesses. They seem to be the five identified in River's memories.

They're presently arguing about where River could've gone, but the two unarmed crew members fall back when the thop teleport in, and two of the three armed ones point their guns at the intruders.

"What the gorram hell is going on now?" the armed man not presently pointing a gun asks.

"Hello," says the one in the lead. "River's safe. We came to see if the portalsnake was still endangering anyone. Are you all okay?"

"Not injured. Where's River?"

"Someone's sitting with her on a weatherstation boat; we can bring her back here now that the snake's gone." She nods at another thop, who disappears.

And appears by River. "There are five people all okay on your ship," he says. "Ready to go back?"

She tenses but doesn't really startle. "Yeah."

Pop!

"Hey. I'm alright. They've been acting nice," she says once popped back. The unarmed man steps up, puts a hand on her shoulder, and seems to be visually checking her for injuries, brow furrowed.

To the thop: "What's gonna happen now?"

"We're gonna collect what's left of the snake - people study 'em," says the leader. "Gumalaj should be able to phase through your wall and go pick it up unless there's anything she'd need to know about the wall. Then we'll put in for some tests of the world's properties and get the place on the Empress's docket for contact."

Gumalaj gestures inquiringly to the wall of the ship.

"We just spaced the thing. Expect it's a good ways off now."

"I'm fast," Gumalaj says. "I just don't know if you have anything exotic running through the walls."

"Wall's not got anything exotic far as I know."

She steps through the wall, glowing faintly yellow.

"Do you need any help with anything, short term?" the leader asks.

"We can manage ourselves."

"Okay, do you want our contact information?"

"Don't got the net out here too often."

"We use magic for that."

"Uh-huh. How's that work?"

The orc offers him a pad of stationery. "You can write on this, or copy any one line of the text on the back of each sheet - we don't have all languages squeezed on there but we do have English - into another non-encrypted medium and append your message. It gets checked every minute, relayed to our head office for triage in less than a minute, response time's usually less than five for a real problem."

"What're y'all calling a problem?"

"...well, you can write in if you stub your toe, if you like, it just won't pass triage. Is there a particular edge case you have in mind?"

"People getting into conflicts with other people, mostly - figuring y'all'd do something about Reavers, any decent folk would, but the only reason this system's not in a full blown civil war anymore is the Alliance keeps killing anyone not being smart about questioning them. And we find ourselves in the middle of shit a lot."

"Gosh. Uh, we won't let people kill you, if we show up and people are trying to kill you."

"Thanks. - Did River warn y'all 'bout the Reavers."

"She mentioned them but we don't have a full explanation."

"Yeah, she don't like talking about them much. They're mostly the far Outer Rim - there's a pretty far flung planet, Miranda. Got settled decades ago. Alliance decided to experiment with a riot control drug they were calling Pax. Ended up making most people just stop taking any actions, 'cept a few who got real violent. They started attacking and eating anyone the Pax didn't kill, and then they got on the leftover ships and started attacking the Outer Rim. We don't know if there's anything person-like left in their heads - River'd be our best word, but she freaks out whenever they get within a few hundred thousand miles - and it's not safe to get that near them anyways. They might have some powers like hers, too, but we're not sure."

"...okay. Uh, might speed things up on that if you can help us identify candidate individuals to power the magic our world mostly uses. Involves making wishes, runs on strong emotions - positive or negative, either somebody who's really upset that they're how they are now or really wants them fixed, or both. Then probably we'd drop them in a kind of, uh, therapeutic magical forest, that's what was done with the people who were under a mountain range for millennia and the people who were turned into despair monsters and the prisoners of the evil god, probably good for ex-Reavers too."

"I can list a good number of people who've lost someone or other to them, but if'n you're wanting them fixed and not killed the list'll be a whole lot shorter," he says. "Most people hate 'em or fear 'em or think they're a quaint Outer Rim myth to explain away piracy."

"I feel bad for them," the unarmed girl says. "Must be awful horrible, being a Reaver. Some people don't just always want revenge..."

The man sends her a fond look. "Most Outer Rim folks've gotten their nice a bit more worn down than that."

"Well," says the girl. "There's people whose families were on Miranda who'd probably make a nicer wish, too. And River might make a nice wish. She got real upset when we were on Miranda..."

"If River comes up with a wording, that can go on the stationery, the wish department can vet it and if it's good it can go through to the Empress, who grants the wishes."

"I can talk to people I know, too, see if there's someone who feels really strongly about fixing things right up," says the girl.

"Great, thanks! Any other questions or remarks before we pick up Gumalaj and go?"

No one seems to have much to say, or a desire to keep the strangers on their ship very long.

"Thanks for the help," River manages.

They disappear. Off in space, so does the portalsnake.

A fairly short time later, River sends in multiple wish wording candidates.

The first assumes she and the Reavers fundamentally work the same way, and that the Pax fucks up people like her's powers in such a way as to cause Reavers (she has loose proof for this from Alliance officials' minds). Accordingly, she wants to change how psychic powers work in at least her species. She suspects she'll feel more strongly about this than the other options because she hates her power's manifestation (this is crammed in very small print under the wish). The proposed wording looks like it was gone over by someone who's worked in contract law. It'll change River-like psychic powers to be default off, so that psychics are usually ordinary humans, and to be much more under control when turned on, with psychics able to turn individual components and senses on and off, choose who to mind read, ask for consent to read minds even at a distance, and chose what thoughts and memories they receive. Offensive psychic powers will be unable to hurt people on accident. Telepathy, precog, postcog, and other extrasensory perceptions will work conveniently.) It has an easily removed clause that will revert mental damage done as a result of possessing powers in order to heal current Reavers.

The second and third are just for the living Reavers to be reverted to how they were prior to the Pax - one wording for with memories of being a Reaver intact and one wording for without - and put in the healing place mentioned (which River knows the name of, despite that not having been mentioned out loud).

The fourth version is complicatedly worded to undo the effects of the Pax without invoking actual time travel or erasing memories, so that all the Reavers and everyone who died on Miranda will be restored and resurrected and everyone killed directly or indirectly by Reavers will be resurrected.

River would suggest that she wishes the first one without the mental damage reversion clause and someone really upset about Pax specifically wish the fourth one. She has a file with notes on how the Reavers work, what experiments the Alliance has done on Reavers and psychics, how reliable her knowledge (usually from mind reading) of those experiments is, how her own powers work, and her logic on each wording, which she gives the title of.

Her powers involve involuntary mind reading at highly variable distances depending on the other end's own psychic sensitivity - a few dozen miles for non-sensitive people and apparently people outside her universe, and a few hundred thousand miles for Reavers. She has uncontrollable precog and postcog, usually extending a few seconds. The postcog has ever extended decades, and the precog sometimes gives her farther future glimpses. The farthest she's confirmed is fifteen minutes. Danger is more likely to trigger precognition. She can sense physical objects in her surroundings, and sometimes get glimpses of their history. She can mentally impact people, making them disoriented, confused, or outright killing them. This is easier if they're psychically sensitive and harder if they're skilled. She can access memories but this isn't on by default. She probably has more powers but they're all hard to experiment with, use, and focus on, and it's hard to tell what is and isn't a hallucination sometimes, so these are just the ones she's confirmed. Some people are immune to mind reading and influence but not to featuring in precog and postcog.

She suspects Reavers are in a feedback loop reading and attacking each other's minds. Reavers extremely separated from other Reavers act more confused and less aggressive but get violent again if there's any psychically sensitive humans around them. Reavers can turn other psychics into Reavers.

After she submits this someone knocks on the windshield about twenty minutes later.

She's piloting, curled up in the seat while she mostly watches the alerts generated by the basic autopilot.

She waves.

Wave. She teleports into the cockpit. Weirdly pale person, moves with unnatural precision, blank mind. "The logistics of knocking before teleporting in are awkward on spaceships. Am I shielded enough?"

"Yeah. Like you're not there." It's kind of creepy. River's on a slightly adjusted dose of her meds, though, and pretty sure she's not hallucinating. If she was the person would have blue hands, after all.

"Oh, good. Then I'll be able to shield the Empress of Mîr, if and when you make your wish."

"That sounds smart. Were there any problems with my suggestions?"

"How were you imagining toggling powers off and on would work?"

"Mental action driven by intent. The thing I'm imagining is - kind of a mental motion that would turn them on that takes practice to do but that turning them off just requires wanting them off or doing the same action again, so it's harder to turn them on accidentally but easier to turn them off. Most people's powers are different enough the toggling individual powers on and off would have to run on people's own definitions and intent. I think the Reavers could figure manipulating them pretty easily since the thing they do to attack people's minds is in the same brain space. Like - holding a knife and pressing a button are both actions I can do with my hands, and right now my brain's only action is 'knife' and I want to add a bunch of buttons and sliders that'll do what people hook them up to within limits."

"Okay. That seems like a clear improvement but I do note that it leaves a bunch of people nobody has vetted running around with psychic powers."

"I don't really trust vetting groups. People in that other world had a good opinion of their empire but the Core worlds people like the Alliance and the Alliance is evil. Also I don't actually want to take away people's powers or prevent people being born with more powers. 'Anyone in the verse can just decide to be immune to psychics' would be good, but it's going to be really really weird and probably distressing to have the majority of my senses turned off until I can figure out what I want on at what intensities."

"So, the problem with doing it as an immunity is that it means we wouldn't want to let psychics leave this world-neighborhood." She illusions up a map. "You're here. Mîr, the place with the wish magic, is there, right next to you. But if one day you want to come visit me, say -" She pokes her world. "Then the wish magic allowing anybody to decide to be immune to psychic doesn't reach that far, and random passersby you meet on the way are subject to psychic powers. We already have this problem with this world," she pokes another, "where some species - they've got lots - have various amounts of psychic powers, some under good control and some not, and this one," she pokes a neighbor of the last one, "where people of any of the species there sometimes have them, occasionally incontinently - we don't travel there, but we're trying to evacuate it. And with all of these," a bunch of worlds light up, "where Elves, they may have come up on your excursion, can read minds. And this one." Another blinks. "Where some people acquire the power to learn to read minds. If you start as we do from the assumption that somebody going about their life shouldn't have to be subject to psychic powers this is pretty bad, it's not just us being authoritarian for no reason."

"Are people from those worlds not allowed to travel either, then? What would you do if most of the people in a universe you found were blind and really objected to having sighted people around them? And would some kind of way you could tell if someone was using a psychic power, so you could just make it illegal some places, work? Or could someone make it so my type of power can't be turned on outside of this neighborhood?"

"Continent mindreaders who state under lie detection that they aren't going to read anybody outside designated emergencies or consensual situations are allowed to travel if they don't have anything else stopping them. We haven't encountered the sightedness analogy but somebody'd dig up a blind agent to do work there if it came up. The last idea has promise but might be the kind of thing that'd take two wishes - one to turn them off, one to make them locally conditionally turn back on. It's one wish to a customer so there's a wisher-finding step that gets worse the more complicated you make it."

"Dunno what your thresholds for emotions are but I know people who're generally more emotional and empathic than me - the wording I figured out for the first wish is something I made sure my friend Kaylee felt just as strongly about doing as me, though she doesn't know what the mental stuff would look like. She's mostly just really nice and emotional, so 'this would help me' is enough I think. She feels bad for how often I get overwhelmed, so should be able to turn powers off, and I could turn them back on with limits. And for fixing Reavers - I know a number of people who feel as strong about undoing the Pax as I do about fixing my powers. Some of them almost definitely wouldn't decide to do other things, and I checked the specific wording with someone whose husband was killed by Reavers and she felt strongly about it. - Assuming I hit the threshold, if I don't then screening probably gets more complicated."

"Gem can check you. How many total psychics are we talking about here?"

"Population of this solar system's around forty seven billion. Psychics strong enough to become Reavers are about a tenth of a percent, so about forty seven million. I think most people vulnerable to becoming Reavers don't have all the powers, so they can't all read minds, and there's psychics too weak to become Reavers, but I dunno the numbers there or if weaker Psychics ever get mind reading, and once someone's a Reaver they get everything on blast. There's also usually at least three thousand Reavers around their planet, probably some thousands more working around the edges of the system, but they almost definitely have less than a hundred thousand and are probably nowadays closer to ten thousand overall. I also dunno how many aliens we have and if they have psychics, and we're probably not the only human system - not sure anyone still lives around Earth That Was but the Alliance has records of other ships fleeing in other directions."

"...I'm going to guess your Earth isn't there any more because we do check for those."

"Dunno exactly what happened to it. The nice sanitized story in the history books is that people left unchecked got into wars and polluted it so we made the Alliance to keep everyone under control, and the planet became uninhabitable so we left. Alliance maintains we're the only humans out here but pretty sure that's a lie. The Alliance can't blow up planets, but someone else might be able to."

"We can look into it at some point and then it'll be online. What's a good way besides knocking on your spaceship to get ahold of you when your wish is through vetting?"

"I can tell people someone might teleport into the cargo bay. We're usually not in there. I also have a computer that can hook up to a net and get messages but usually doesn't. I also don't mind having my mind read if someone else psychic wants to get in my range and contact me that way."

"Noted. I'll see you when it's wish time if that happens. Questions, comments?"

"Do you have a vague idea of how long vetting takes?"

"For this less than a day."

"Huh."

"Don't think there's anything else then. I'll tell people to expect visitors."

"See you later."

She's back later that day, teleporting into the cargo hold.

River and Kaylee decided to hang out in the cargo hold and play dice while they waited. Dice are a bit harder to cheat at. River's vision's gone wonky again, so Kaylee's keeping her in her line of sight so River can actually move around well. Zoe's hanging out in a corner, watching them fondly, unarmed and slightly grumpy about this. There's a nervous tension running through all of River's friends, here and off elsewhere in the ship. Jayne's grouchy, cleaning Vera. Mal's in the cockpit, staring at Wash's things they left up and occasionally thinking jokes at River. He knows she's probably nervous too. She's holding together well, he thinks. Her brother's in the medical room, nervously fiddling with everything. No one's really sure if they believe in wishes, but Mal trusts River and River believes it, which is good enough to go on.

Zoe looks over when Golden teleports in. River doesn't bother looking; Kaylee turns just enough she still has River in her line of sight.

"Hi," Kaylee says, smiling.

"Hi. So, your wish suggestions were really good, but Gem has a preexisting generalized solution for death, takes six wishes, she'll advertise for it pretty soon after formal contact, so separately resurrecting this one planet seems out of scope; she wants to test you on your first proposal entire, with an additional clause in about putting the Reavers in a Lórien, she's got one emptied for them."

"Alright. With the modifications for where it works and opting out? Or other modifications?"

"Your version is a clear improvement on the status quo as-is and she's not sure you'll read high enough for a more complicated version. Complications can be added as a patch with someone else's wish in plenty of time for the inauguration of teleporting bus lines in and out of your world. You can try the whole shebang yourself and fall back on the version you outlined, if you do have a promising read."

She nods. "That makes sense. I dunno fixing the powers would entirely fix the Reavers without a separate clause for that, and separately reverting Reavers naively might undo my changes, but if they can't hurt anyone in a Lorien that's better than what's now."

"We do have a precog who's going to check if it fixes them; if it doesn't Gem'll dig up a wisher who can do it so they don't hurt each other or swarm out of the Lórien."

"Alright."

"Do you want to bring someone along as a seeing-eye assistant, since I'll be extending my shield to Gem and there won't be anyone else on the planet?"

"Yeah. Kaylee and Zoe both offered," River says.

"If it's just River wishing I'd rather be the one along," Zoe says, evenly. Kaylee pouts a bit but nods.

"You can both come if you like, there's not a cargo limit on the teleport."

River looks at Kaylee, who shrugs. "I can also tell the Captain and all them what we're doing and that y'all left, if'n it'll take any time."

"Okay. Back in a bit."

Pop.

Gem, who looks just like her alt except for being less pale, brown-eyed, and wearing a different variety of crown and a fancy dress with a diamond motif and buckler shield, meets them on an empty planet. It's freshly terraformed and nobody's moved in yet. In the first instant after their arrival, Isabella has her covered in her shielding power.

"Hello. River and -?"

"Zoe Washburne," says the woman.

"Hi," says River.

"Pleased to meet you. I put a new Lórien on this planet so there's no neighbors at risk if the recovered Reavers flail around psychically, so keep it in mind when you're making your wish. Go over the wording you have in mind again and I'll get your read?"

New wording: includes neighborhood limit and opt out clauses and moving the Reavers. It's less tightly considered than the old wording.

Old wording, also offered as fall back: like what was written.

"...Okay, this is good enough to give it a whirl. But we're talking about a pretty big population you're trying to affect and sometimes large populations need to batch, so I think you should have a second backup where you restrict yourself to the psychics of a planet of your choice, maybe two or three if you want to pick more sparsely inhabited ones. You'll need to be quick if you have to fall back twice, I apologize for my wish-granting device, I did not invent it. Oh, also, disclaimer, by making this wish here and now you are passing up the chance to go through a screening process to become a magic rock."

"Probably I'll restrict myself to just Reavers, there's less of them but they're stronger psychics and more upsetting." Reaver and River only wording is easier to come up with, too.

"I don't really want to do most things that involve a screening process." She's pretty sure she'd fail any sane metric of who to give powers to, anyways. "And if Thop are the same thing as magic rocks, I'll pass."

"Yeah, same thing, 'thop' means rock."

"I think I'm good then."

"Okay. Whenever you're ready."

She mentally goes back over her wordings, then - "Yeah. I'm ready."

There is a neat glowy magical effect associated with being hooked up to the wish thing.

And River recites her first - most complicated - wish wording.

With a kind of rushing sensation, it goes through.

"Congratulations. Golden, take them home?"

"Sure."

Pop.

And River, unable to figure out where her body is in relation to her surroundings without her usual senses, stumbles and falls over. Zoe catches her before she hits the ground.

"- you okay?"

She mumbles a bit, then, slowly and carefully and a bit like she can't hear herself for sure - "I think I was using my powers for most everything. Other senses don't work right - probably a me thing, not a all psychics, I have some brain damage... Gonna turn powers back on then figure out what I can have off more slowly."

"Makes sense. Do you need me for anything?"

"Don't think so," River says,

"We're good," Zoe says, helping River sit on the floor so she's more stably balanced. "Oh - her brother might appreciate some way to learn healing that's good enough for brains - River's got it pretty bad but doesn't let other people mess with her head - but it sounds like we'll have proper channels for that kind of thing soon."

"Yeah, Gem has channels for things all over the place. Uh, popular generic healing spell is one and done for everything so if she likes her brain damage and gets hurt some other way get a rock or a wizard to fix whatever's wrong rather than somebody with the sorcery version, if you have the time to be discriminating."

With her power back on she's able to hear that properly through Zoe's ears. Borrowing people's senses is really really nice actually.

"Don't like it, just don't want strangers messing with it. I'll look at what the sorcery version does, I guess."

"I have the sorcery version if you want."

"What's it do?"

"...everything. It took hundreds of years to design, it covers all kinds of weird things apart from excepting old age qua old age and having an option to leave scars behind for obscure political reasons. It does injuries, poisons, autoimmune responses, diseases, ingrown toenails, you name it."

"Does it work off what I want done, or resetting damage, or some idea of what good health is?"

"The latter, but it's species-independent within the category 'humanoids' so it's referring to a pretty broad conception there."

She thinks.

Something finer grained and also slower might be good. Removing her ability to regulate her emotions was one of the first things the Alliance did. It might be best to get that back step wise.

Also, though, River really fucking hates the Alliance and wants them out of her head, and maybe the healing's the type of thing that'd remove the Academy triggers since she's pretty sure those were added surgically and psychically rather than as a trained response.

"Sure. Healing's good."

She holds out her hand.

River takes it.

Boop!

...Suddenly having a functioning brain is really fucking weird. And no built up toxins in her system from the neurotransmitters her brain was spewing everywhere and the medications she's been trialed on and the pollution she's been around. She's glad she was already sitting half propped up.

River has her moments of clarity, points where her brain lines up and works close to how it used to.

This is well beyond those.

With the wish-granted sense of and control over her psychic powers -

She giggles.

"I can think clearly."

She's pretty sure she has projective telepathy, actually, she'd just never been able to access it - she sends Mal and Simon a 'hi the aliens healed my brain' and snorts when Mal jumps and curses and thinks 'more warning next time' at her.

Simon drops the thing he'd been fiddling with, then heads out of the medical room at a brisk walk. He's nervous. She refrains from sending her fondness at him.

She smiles at Golden. "Thanks."

"You're welcome. Anything else before I pop home?"

"I don't think so."

"Bye!"

She vanishes.

River figures out how to walk without her psychic powers. She leaves on the general sense of her surroundings, the precog and postcog, the projective telepathy and specific mind reads of her friends who she knows don't mind it. (Mal, Kaylee, Simon, Zoe, and Inara when she rejoins the crew - Jayne had mostly only been tolerating it as a cost of being part of Serenity's crew - and only the thoughts they don't mind her seeing. She and Mal toss increasingly bad jokes back and forth telepathically.) She gets better at the precog, figuring out how to make the feed more coherent and useful.

And when things start getting fixed proper -

River offers a bit of guidance on helping out with fixing the mess that is the Academy and its graduates, and on which Alliance officials are actually interested in negotiating in good faith. But, mostly...

It turns out she's really, really smart, and it's a wide multiverse out there with a lot of opportunities for a really smart girl - even if she doesn't leave her home neighborhood so she can keep her powers on. She doesn't bother with anything that calls for vetting, not right away, but she enjoys inventing and can do an awful lot of that just sitting in her bunk, and she finds she likes teaching other psychics how their powers work a weird amount. She starts putting together classes, mostly on a whim, and then more seriously when one of the frontier planets offers her space. (Being a folk hero for her opposition to the Alliance is actually kinda really weird.)

Mal rallies some of the Rim planets into seceding from the Alliance's official control. Other planets and blocs follow suit pretty quickly. River teases him about going into politics. Then, when Inara actually goes into politics, teases him about his crush being more popular than him.

Zoe backs him up, but mostly focuses on vacations with her husband.

Simon is almost as smart as River, and starts learning as much as he can about the state of the art in medicine across the multiverse. He, unlike River, appreciates the fact that governments ever exist and starts going through vetting for various healing magics.

Kaylee goes wide eyed over all the engine tech out there, of course.

Book goes back to ministry, once he's back alive.

Jayne drifts, for a while, not really happy with being someone's security and not really eager (or trustworthy) for anything requiring vetting. River dances around him a bit and then manages to prod him into extreme sports. He's good at it, so.

It's not really how River'd set up an ideal world, but... It's all pretty good, all the same.