Griffie catches... not on fire. Fire is a distinct thing, with its own plane, and is not a result of positive energy, nor nearly this prone to tearing holes in reality. Griffie, one might say, 'catches on positive energy'. This happens for no obvious reason.

The positive energy is on them, they can see it, they can tell it's not fire, they don't know how to handle it. "Under attack, overwhelming positive energy", they manage to telemessage their party. What do they have that can counteract positive energy? Nothing they prepared today, that's for sure. Any expensive last-resort options?

Any expensive last-resort options will have to be done on the other side of that hole in reality.

Clearly, reality has determined the expensive option Griffie should resort to. They go to reach for a gem to call Fremont, a powerful Inevitable of resolving spacetime and planar disturbances.

Unfortunately, Griffie may wish to prioritize dealing with the fact that the space they just entered contains no air. Also no elemental influence of water, earth, or fire, so Griffie had better do something about that before they can no longer be their conventional mixture of solidity, liquidity, gaseousness, and the energy to move.

The stars are pretty, though. Also visible in all directions.

Addressing the logical consequences of being teleported to outer space does seem like a higher priority than contacting Fremont. The standard Life Bubble doesn't account for the total absence of elements, but a variant that would isn't really that distant. They don't have it prepared today, but drawing from a sharply limited capacity to cast it anyway seems like an entirely reasonable alternative to certain death.

The hole in reality is undone, once again for no obvious reason. Griffie falling through it, however, is not.

At least they've stopped dissolving and can breathe. This tends to be a prerequisite for most of their other goals.

None of the constellations around look familiar, but that's to be expected, as there's no view of the planet either, and they're nowhere near the sun. It's a good thing they recently acquired a Ring of Sustenance.

Outer space is like the Astral Plane, isn't that what those astronomers said? Does it, too, have subjective gravity? They can't remember, but they don't want to test it, because if their party traces whatever that incident was they'd prefer to be right at the other end of the teleport.

The stars seem to be a bit brighter, and there are more of them visible in most parts of the sky.

But the brightness doesn't match prewar illustrations of the sky either. Some of them are swirly, but many of them are the familiar points of light. Griffie doesn't know what intermediate state they would have expected the sky to be in if whatever process darkened the prewar sky was still ongoing, but they wouldn't have guessed this one.

Well, they have sixteen hours to replicate the detail work for the spell they just cast the easy but expensive way. They take out their notebook and start diagramming.

There are are no distractions, including rescue teams.

The lack of gravity feels unusual, but Griffie is trying not to think about gravity too much. Remembering precautions they'd seen others take in unusual gravity, they tie their notebook to their belt. The thin layer of Air surrounding them is almost entirely silent. After eight hours of work, they think they've finished drafting the relevant Life Bubble variant. After another hour of review, they're sure of it. They have a sphere-4 slot open, so they prepare and cast it right away, because if the test fails it's good to know while they still have a bubble up. Hopefully it'll work, though.

It does!

Excellent! This is highly relevant to not dying, an activity which Griffie is deeply invested in.

Given Life Bubble and a fully attuned Ring of Sustenance, they can survive in outer space … possibly indefinitely? That's a very strange capability to have, but their current capabilities do seem to add up to it. Which means that now they get to think about other things. Like calling Fremont. This isn't a major planar intersection, but it's got to be illegal to be so far out in space that you can't even see the planet or the Sun, right? And sudden inexplicable positive energy conflagrations also have got to be particularly suspicious right now. Probably Fremont would want to be called?

Griffie gets out a golden gem and crushes it.

The space near Griffie remains empty, and the remains of the gem, now outside of their spell, are no longer capable of existing at all for more than a minute. 

To a close reader, restrictions on outer space travel appear to imply that the power of Inevitables to enforce Law is weaker at extreme distances from the planet. Perhaps this explains Fremont's absence. Regardless of the causes, immediately using their only remaining calling gem would be inadvisable.

It might be sensible to scry their party? But Scrying requires a pool of still Water, which they don't have, and which they probably can't have in outer space. But cheap tests are good. They cast Create Water on an area outside of the bubble.

It lasts about ten minutes, and does not form a still pool but rather behaves like water in zero gravity before it ceases to existence. 

Well, that's not usable for scrying at all, even if they could make it last for an hour.

What are their other options. They could try summoning something, but it seems unlikely that there would be anything to summon around here, and it's not clear how that would help. None of their spells are particularly relevant to this situation. It's not so obviously an emergency that they need to throw more of the scarce expensive resources at it, they can wait a while here.

What do they want to do tomorrow? Make sure to prepare Life Bubble twice, then mostly divination effects? Seems reasonable. As for today, they might as well put together some sketches and a written report. The sketches perhaps ought to be in negative color.

Nothing interrupts this for now. 

The spell that mimics a compass doesn't work, presumably because a compass also wouldn't work, presumably because there's no magnets around, because there's no Earth around.

Other elemental spells behave similarly to Create Water, with higher-sphere ones lasting a bit longer.

No variation on summoning that Griffie is capable of works.

Lay of the Land, a geography divination, typically requires soil. They can't gather a dense clump of whatever they're floating in, but they try with a handful of not-even-air anyway, because why not. It doesn't return any information aside from its failure.

There aren't any animals or plants around.

Attempts to contact the Upper Planes fail.

At least the spell for creating a calming hum that can last for hours if you focus still works.

The MS Lithobraking has been tracking an anomaly, estimated to have started two days ago at this point.

"I've finished the latest analysis of the anomaly."

"Good. What are we heading towards?"

"In terms of subspace, at this point probably nothing. I believe the initial disruption has ceased, and the current patterns are echos."

"Still disruptive though?"

"Highly disruptive."

"All right. I want as close to a working escape path as we can before we reach anything more than long range sensor activity."

Boyd checks if anyone has told Paterson.

Upon learning 'no', he sighs. "It isn't like we were planning a warp before this. She shouldn't be busy. Serrano, make sure the data is prepped."

He then connects to Paterson. "Paterson, we need you up here, new project."

Silvia is indeed not currently busy, and comes up, asking questions as she does so, then begins working with Cornelia's data and models to plot likely subspace escape paths.

"Cornelia, top priority here is safety, make sure Silvia has everything she needs. Second priority is information. Preliminary guesses, unreliable sensors—whatever it takes. If there is anything still there, subspace or not, I want to see it before it sees us, irradiates us, or whatever it does."

The MS Lithobraking continues towards the anomaly.

"I don't like how many of these models have unexpected spatial discontinuities. Captain, by a lot of Cornelia's models, if this activates again I'm not sure Art will have enough warning to adjust course to avoid us being torn to shreds, and I can't give you a course option that handles that."

"'Never tell me the odds'."

"Except, seriously, how much warning are we talking?"

"There should be discharges from such things, but the disruption isn't limited to standardspace or subspace. To figure out where they are, we need to first map out both, then compute. Fee can make sure we get processor priority, sure, but the sensors themselves only work so fast. I have a few models but... most of them have us discovering a discontinuity in our path by hitting it before we get the data. Unless your people have been hiding the fact that your reflexes let you react to things before they happen…"

"No, that level of hiding sounds like a human thing. Did you ask Pheodair–"

"I've been talking with Fee, yes. The captain said to prioritize safety, so we are going for the best data we can get while keeping us out of the more likely ranges of disaster."

"Good. I want extra drones too, and Art ready to work with them. If we don't get things sooner, tell me half an hour before we could spot a typical jelly."

The MS Lithobraking continues to advance on the anomaly, passing the aforementioned distance with no jelly in sight.

"Still no evidence of ongoing discontinuities, but we got something. Strange thing too. Small and it's absorbing, emitting, and reflecting light, but no thermal at all. If it was just on one sensor, I would assume damage."

"In drone range yet?"

"Signal won't be good, but we could send one. Trajectory of the object matches what we picked up earlier, and seems regular enough, no acceleration."

"Then I want us further away, and a drone sent to intercept. Art, stay focused on the ship, let the drone run on auto. Actually, make it three drones, different intercepts. If this thing destroys them, I want a chance of seeing what happened."

Three metallic spheres, occasionally emitting little pulsing ripples of light to push their trajectory, approach Griffie.

"What is that?"

The object is a bit over a meter tall. Its light-emitting portion is moving relative to its estimated center of mass, back and forth at irregular intervals. On closer inspection, the entity appears to be roughly mercurialoid. It has the same broad body plan as one, though it's more comparable in size to a child than to an adult. It's – they're? – holding a light source and waving. They appear to have a bubble, like a jelly might use, but much smaller and less ellipsoid. They also appear to be attempting to yell. With their mouth.

The spheres don't look hostile. If the spheres were hostile they could have just not had their lights on, or moved on a collision course with a blade out, there's nowhere to hide. There's been nothing around for days, so unless meditating for decades in the void sounds appealing, which it doesn't, they should try to get the spheres' attention, and maybe grab one. The spheres have lights on, so maybe they'll pay attention to other lights? They pull out their Continual Flame necklace and wave it. "Please help!", they yell in every language they know.

"Cornelia, language analysis software."

"Already running, Captain. Checking the light, the... mouth..."

Unfortunately for the language analysis software, the light is not linguistic at all. Furthermore, the mouth movements are intended to be heard, not seen.

First Contact. She knows the procedures, of course. And once again, a creature... well, more different in appearance than the Mercurials, but... leave the science to Cornelia. People can fight over the implications later.

Priority One: Peace.

Priority Two: Keep the Mercurials placated.

Priority Three: Cooperation.

Speaking of priority two, Arithnu is already out of his seat, sword drawn and pointed at the Captain.

Priority One: Peace and happiness.

Priority Two: Keep the Humans from messing things up.

Priority Zero: Honorable conduct.

"Captain. I assume you have your procedures and orders, but I have my oaths and honor. You have been a trusted friend, I dearly hope I do not have to use force."

This was hardly the first time a Mercurial had brandished a blade at her, and after her training she wasn't about to jump at the sudden motion. With the blade at that distance... good, he was confident they could work together.

How far to push... protocol encouraged keeping the Mercurials out, but this was a Martian-made ship, Art was a good friend, and given the number of Mercurials on board...

Not everyone would like it, but...

"Boyd, I want Art to be able to inform the rest of the Mercurials on board."

"If we tell the Mercurials, we are telling everyone on the ship, unless you have further orders?"

The Mercurials couldn't keep a secret to save lives. The aftermath of everyone knowing was going to fall on him, wasn't it?

"Would everyone knowing outright prevent you from keeping the ship under control?"

Boyd sighs "Probably not outright. I can't promise no injuries."

"Please, ask my kin to help with any out of control humans. Few would turn down such a glorious and important opportunity as the potential of a third allied species."

"And what about keeping your kin under control?"

Arithnu looks devastated.

"Boyd, please tell me you don't mean to suggest that we would fail to respond to a dishonorable Mercurial? The mere suggestion wounds me. Please, if you truly believe that, let me offer you a blade that you may wound me properly, for–"

"No, no, no duels! Arithnu, I mean it. No duels. As First Officer, I believe under your rules I have the authority to demand temporary mitigation of expression during times such a this? No duels, poetry, chants, anything loud kept to text or out of the upper public areas, and no vengeance except under the specific permission of human members of ship security, for the purpose of ship security."

"Very well. You do have that right, and though you may not understand how to balance such restrictions for the most good, it is better that we at least obey, in this case. I shall hold to this, and speak to others so they can hear from a trusted source."

Boyd leaves to wrangle the rest of the ship.

"Cornelia, get us more information, drones only. Tell Fee this is her top priority, forget chores, I'll arrange someone covering now and for the next year, I don't want to wait on the right drones."

The three drones continue to visually examine the unidentified object, getting closer for more resolution.

The unidentified entity is a small pale greyish-blue mercurialoid. They appear to be wearing armor– not the gleaming sort with oversized pauldrons that some of the exercise-room VR games favor, but something made from many small pieces of some low-albedo material, without any tolerances for clipping through itself at all. They also have an ancient backpack of some kind, a crude book strapped to their belt, some tools strapped to their wrists, a headband with plants growing from it, handflowers, a tunic, pants, and shoes. The oscillating light source is on a band they've strapped to their wrist and are waving around; the band also has some reflective bits on it. They have a Viking-like shield strapped to their back, with a pseudosymmetric depiction of the L10a140 link on it. If one was to generalize from Human and Mercurial facial expression and body language patterns, one would assume the entity was agitated, but not hostile.

Nothing much happens for a bit, then more drones start to fly over. The first simply hovers nearby, but the next three each have a light source carefully engineered to glow with approximately the same spectrum as the Continual Flame. The first turns on and off at a fixed frequency, the second alternates on and off with duration of prime numbers times the duration of the first (on for two, off for three, on for five, off for seven...), and the third has a set of sticks holding its light source. The sticks' joints move, causing the light to play back the pattern of motion the creature used.

Griffie has received attention! From entities who seem to be attempting communication and don't seem to be attempting to kill them! Probably this means they can stop waving around the Continual Flame necklace now. One of the spheres is waving around a similar light source, but it wasn't the behavior the spheres were using at first, so it's probably an attempt to demonstrate the capacity to mimic another.

The spheres do not have souls, not even small ones like intelligent clockworks have. Maybe it's a side effect of some wards they have, or maybe they're unintelligent and being operated at a distance. Griffie goes through the incantations and gestures for Detect Magic, touching their headband. The spheres do not appear to be magic. Nonmagic remote-control methods? Such things are possible.

What are the other spheres doing? That's ... they think Griffie's primary communication mode is light, don't they. Apparently they can't hear any of the yelling. That one's pulsing at a constant rate, and the other one is doing what? Off, now on for 5.5 cycles. Ehh, let's say 11 half-cycles. Then off for 13. Then on for 17. This seems like that sequence that's a generalization of the cicada numbers, isn't it. The spheres are demonstrating mimicry, so maybe Griffie should too? Griffie gets out their notebook, starts writing down as much of the sequence as they can remember, remembers that they probably won't be able to recognize the digits, looks irritated, and draws rectangular grids with extra squares tacked onto one end to represent each number in the sequence, attempting to keep their journal in view of the spheres while doing so.

Another set of drones come out, this time carrying a rod together. Attached to the center of the rod is a passable imitation of Griffie's backpack. Attached around it are many other objects, similar in engineering purpose but different in structure and method, including a satchel, a plastic bag, an open briefcase, a money belt, a bag-in-box, a ziploc, a bindle, a bandolier bag, and a bayong.

More mimicry, huh. A demonstration that someone is guessing at the purpose of the backpack? A confused attempt to offer them the contents of the replica-backpack or the other containers? No, probably not, the transparent one doesn't contain anything and neither does the open boxy one. The transparent one also looks mechanically weird. Also, how and why did they make a boxy waterskin?

Maybe the sphere-operators want Griffie to put an object in a bag? They probably don't speak Celestial, but Inevitables do and they're built kind of like Inevitables, so maybe it's an easier language than the other options? Griffie writes in Celestial "I see you have brought me many containers. These include a copy of my backpack, a boxy waterskin, a strange transparent bag, and some others. I do not know what you want me to do with them, so I am going to try putting this note in the copy of my bag." They then sketch themself, the spheres, the backpack, the boxy waterskin as well as a box and a waterskin, the transparent bag, and smaller sketches of the rest of the containers at appropriate points below the text. They show the note to the spheres, moving it slowly so that it directly faces the different spheres, and then tear the page out and attempt to put it in the backpack-copy.

The rod-carrying drones quickly fly away, the note, unknown to the crew and unremembered by Griffie, ceasing to exist shortly after leaving the protective magical field.

A drone returns with a series of notes on strange paper with strange (and very colorful) inks.

The first note contains images of the sketches created by Griffie, and pictures of the items above them. Above them also are unknown gylphs, and above the whole thing, in larger writing, another series of glyphs.

The second note contains a series of things following a shared schema. Multiple columns of matching boxes were placed across the page. The top box contained a series of glyphs, the next a box a picture of one of the items, under that a box containing Griffie's sketch, then another box with a series of glyphs. The bottom series of glyphs was always one of two options. The series of glyphs that match the ones on the first note have one series of glyphs at the bottom, and the ones that don't match have a different series of glyphs.

The third note contains the same schema, but all of them have the gylphs for matching ones, and have the gylphs at the top be the larger glyphs from the first note.

The forth through eighth notes contain the same schema, but with the bottom box left empty, and copies of sections of Griffie's text, mostly from near the sketches, in the top box.

Sometimes those samples are actual words, sometimes they break in the middle of characters, but a subset of them do actually have the matching descriptions.

Wow, those inks are colorful. This sure does look like a communication attempt. If the spheres were hostile with nonlethal intent they probably would have at least tried to make a grab attempt, or gotten out a giant net or something, and they haven't done that, which is promising. OK. Time to look at the details of the notes. This looks complicated, but language learning when you can't talk, or stand near each other and perform actions and pick up objects, has got to be complicated.

The glyphs look very regular and precisely drawn. The repeating symbols seem to repeat exactly. Probably not a manual process, then. So probably if they can copy my note they can make lots of copies of these, so I can hold onto this one.

Note 1: Copies of my sketches, next to much better images. And then maybe those are the sphere-operators' words for the objects, and a title?

Note 2: The better images again. With words on top, that sometimes match the first set of words and sometimes don't. And then one word or another word below. Maybe it means something in the genre of yes/no or true/false?

Note 3: The better images, with words all matching the first set of words on top, and the word we're tentatively calling "correct" on the bottom.

Subsequent notes: Trying to match my words to things! Probably? I should copy the unknown symbol-series that I'm tentatively calling "correct" below the correct words, and the symbol-series I'm calling "incorrect" below the incorrect words.

Griffie fills out the possible-feedback-section with attempts to mimic the relevant probably-words on the first sheet, then hands it to the sphere.

Once Griffie withdraws from the sheet, the pencil marks begin to vanish. As there is no backpack in the way, this is visible to both Griffie and the crew.

Griffie looks at the vanishing pencil marks with an irritated expression. Of course the markings would behave like that, they require access to the Earth field to exist, and that isn't present outside of the bubble. How the spheres are staying together is unknown. Probably the note disintegrated too, then, but at least they clearly saw it.

Griffie rummages through their supplies for something small and pointy. Holes in the non-elemental paper should persist, and in theory you can write words with them, right? After the first minute of attempting to laboriously copy the glyph-sequence that might mean "incorrect" – they don't know which parts of the shape matter and which don't – they look frustrated again. They get out their pencil, finish rewriting the glyph-sequences, and then just show them to the spheres. The same slow pan that clearly worked last time.

They continue this process with the rest of the pages unless interrupted.

While this is happening, another drone shows up. This one has a screen on it. It alternates between displaying a video of Griffie poking the center of a ring on the screen on a drone, and said ring.

Well, it's pretty clear what this is requesting. Or at least it appears pretty clear. How much do I care whether that display is an illusion or not? Honestly, not that much compared to demonstrating that I'm capable of promptly getting the message. This probably isn't some very complicated hostile act because there are so many simpler hostile acts available.

Griffie pauses in their attempts to label correct and incorrect words and pokes the center of the ring.

The ring turns into a solid circle, flashing black and white for a moment, then switches to display something like the second note, except rather than having only one series of gylphs in the bottom box, it has both stacked on top of each other, one with a ring next to it, the other with a solid circle. The solid circles appear next to the text that appeared in the second note's bottom boxes. At the bottom righthand corner there is another ring, not in any of the boxes.

OK. This is like checkboxes? And here there is a display like the second page, but with the checkbox-circles next to what I'm calling "correct" and "incorrect". And then a checkbox-circle for saying I have looked at this page too?

Griffie taps the checkbox-like ring in the bottom-righthand corner.

The ring turns solid and flashes, then the text/image pairs change and the bottom boxes only contain rings, no already filled in circles.

Griffie gets out the first piece of paper and attempts to use it to fill out the checkbox-circles with the same scheme that the previous display-image used, tapping the rings that they want to turn solid in each pair.

The tapped rings do turn solid, and after answering them all and tapping the last ring, it goes to matching up bits of Celestial with images, like Griffie was doing before.

Griffie successfully rates the bits of Celestial as matching or not matching the images, hopefully with no mysterious technical difficulties this time.

There are no technical difficulties this time! After some of that, though less than the full papers that were given to Griffie, another drone arrives carrying what looks like a precise copy of Griffie's pencil, and the screen turns to look like Griffie's parchment.

Griffie tries making a few marks on their parchment and on the strange paper with the strange pencil first, and also decides that it's a good time to use Detect Magic again. Hopefully the sphere-operators will not be too concerned that Griffie isn't immediately doing the thing that they are very obviously being asked to do, namely writing on the glassy image tablet.

The strange pencil doesn't leave any marks on Griffie's parchment or the strange paper, and the tip doesn't feel like the right material.

None of the objects except for Griffie's appear to have magical auras.

Alright. Time to do the obvious thing now. Griffie attempts to use the pencil-replica on the glassy image tablet.

That results in marks! However, it is somewhat difficult to write on the surface, as the drone gets pushed around by the process.

Griffie holds onto the tablet to stabilize it before making some labeled sketches.

A few seconds after Griffie starts holding onto the tablet, the screen goes black.

Does tapping it with the fake pencil get it to return to its previous state? How about letting go of it again?

Upon being let go of the drone flies away, tablet screen still black.

Well, that didn't work. Maybe the tablet that doesn't rely on the Elemental fields to exist can't handle the presence of the Elemental fields either?

Maybe the sphere-operators will try another thing soon. In the meantime maybe, since they seem to have good image processing, it's time to show them a book? Holy text or Sylvan dictionary? The holy text has more images, but it's not like the images are labeled, and the dictionary is a dictionary. The sphere-operators might be annoyed that these aren't in Celestial. It still hopefully looks like productive effort.

Griffie gets out the holy text of Immonhiel, carefully keeping it in the Life Bubble effect, and starts showing the sphere-constructs pages. A bit faster and with less panning, this time, if they have such good images of the containers that's hopefully overkill?

While doing that, the tablet drone returns. This time, however, as it approaches, the tablet pops off the drone, attached by a cable, and with an imitation pencil also attached by cable.

Alright. Apparently the sphere-constructs don't want to be grabbed. A reasonable preference. Griffie attempts to draw with the new fake-pencil and glassy tablet.

This works a lot better.

Griffie holds onto the tablet for stabilization. Alright. What vocabulary to convey. Let's name some of the objects that are actually present and events that recently happened in full view of the sphere-constructs? It's not a good vocabulary-set but it's a very concrete one. Griffie draws and labels in Celestial the following:

• A shaded circle, mimicking a sphere lit by a single light source. Labeled "sphere".
• The pencil, writing squiggly lines on actual parchment. Arrows pointing at the pencil and parchment. Labeled "pencil" and "parchment".
• The fake pencil, writing on the weird paper and failing. Arrows pointing at the pencil and paper. Labeled "fake pencil" and "paper". Speculatively, the fake pencil is also labeled with the alien glyph-sequence that might mean "no" or "false" or "incorrect", followed by the word "pencil".
• A drone, labeled "sphere-construct".
• A sprig of mistletoe, like one on Griffie's headband, labeled "plant".
• A sprig of holly, like one on Griffie's headband, labeled "plant".
• A stylized drawing of an unclothed leshy, the sort of being Griffie is. No anatomical detail is present save for dots for the eyes. Labeled "plant-construct".
• Grids like Griffie used for the prime numbers, going from 1 to 20, labeled "1 rectangle" through "Set of 20 rectangles".
• A sketch of the most visually prominent constellation, labeled "Set of stars".
• A spiral, labeled "spiral".
• A swirly star, labeled "spiral-star".
• A leshy holding a pencil, labeled "Leshy holding pencil".
• An open backpack with a piece of parchment in it, labeled "Backpack holding parchment."
• A leshy grabbing a tablet-drone, labeled "Leshy holding sphere-construct". Next to this, the alien sequence that might mean "no" or "false" or "incorrect" appears.
• A leshy grabbing a tablet on a cable extended by a drone, labeled "Leshy holding tablet from sphere-construct". Next to this, the alien sequence that might mean "yes" or "true" or "correct" appears.

At this point Griffie notices that they have drawn and written an awful lot of things without checking whether the communication format works very well, and decides to stop and wait a bit for a response.

After a long pause during which the tablet ceases to receive input, the screen is completely replaced.

The screen now contains a series of rows. Each row has a box with an alien glyph sequence on the left and an oval with an image in the middle. 

On the right each row has one of two things: Some have a box containing a Celestial glyph sequence followed by two rings, one with the alien glyph sequence used for matching words and the other with the alien glyph sequence used for non-matching words. Others have an empty box with a parchment-like background.

The first several rows have ovals containing each item from the container collection that Griffie labeled, with the alien glyph-sequences corresponding to the containers from the first page on the left and with Griffie's labels for each of the containers on the right along with the ring setup.

The next row has an oval containing the entire container collection, the document header on the first page on the left, and a parchment space on the right.

The next row has an oval containing Griffie's sketches of holly and mistletoe, with no label on the left, and the Celestial word "plant" with a ring setup on the right.

The row after that has an oval containing a pictures of many different varieties of holly and mistletoe, with an alien glyph sequence on the left, and the Celestial word "plant" with a ring setup on the right.

Then, at the bottom right corner, there is a single ring, like the one that was previously used to advance.

Alright, it's time to label things and correct labels again. It's quite convenient that the sphere-operators have so many images of things.

Yes, the backpack is a backpack. Yes, the boxy waterskin is a boxy waterskin. And so on. And now there's an oval containing all the containers. Maybe that header text was a category word? Is there a narrower category word than "containers" to use? The category seemed narrower than that, there wasn't a crate, but Griffie's not sure that they have a more specific word that still includes everything, so they write "containers" in Celestial in the parchment space.

Griffie probably should have tried harder to convey "set of", but it makes sense that abstractions would be harder to communicate.

Yes, the holly and mistletoe sketches are sketches of plants.

...the sphere-operators have pictures of holly and mistletoe varieties. Their machines, even their backpacks that look like Griffie's backpacks, don't depend on the presence of the Elemental fields. They seem to not use magic at all, even the basic sorts of wards you'd want to put on an otherwise entirely mechanical device you're sending into messy situations. They don't recognize even Celestial at all, and the glyphs they try with unrecognized people don't look like any of the Languages of Power Griffie's seen before. And they have holly and mistletoe. What.

Does this mean that they're from another region, like Suaal, with stable Elemental fields supporting conventional matter, and they got holly and mistletoe seeds somehow, but have no contact with the Outer Planes at all?

The screen cleared last time there was a while with no input. Given this, Griffie manages to refocus on the task at hand somewhat promptly. Yes, the beautifully-rendered holly and mistletoe varieties are plants.

Page complete.

The tablet attached to the drone continues to present examples in approximately this format. It introduces ovals with videos, and ovals with parchment, some with word prompts taken from the vocabulary Griffie has given it thus far and some for Griffie to pick the words for as well. When Griffie sketches in the parchment ovals, the result is shortly after replaced with alien attempts at examples, each example accompanied by the ring-words setup and alien words. The contents of the book Griffie showed the drones pages of do not make an appearance.

Griffie continues with this process, and attempts to introduce the concepts of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. Maybe once these are conveyed they will get that Griffie, like holly and mistletoe, would really prefer to be in an environment where the Elemental fields exist. During this back-and-forth, Griffie also ends up introducing concepts such as wind, candles, metal. During an attempt to convey the concept of Water, Griffie casts Create Water once more.

The conjuration results in a pause in the replies, but eventually images of water show up, along with the glyphs.

Create Water is a divine spell. An inability to recognize it isn't that surprising, since they don't recognize Celestial or any of the images in Immonhiel's holy text? Maybe they just have pictures of so many varieties of holly and mistletoe because they have pictures of that most of the varieties of most plants.

Anyway, yes, Water. That is Water. Please offer to take Griffie to a place where Water doesn't spontaneously vanish?

They would like to teach Griffie something new now. Specifically, they use an image of Griffie's hand with a finger sticking out to indicate where to tap and drag as they show a sort of game where colored shapes are dragged to go with similar things, either in color or shape depending on how the existing ones are sorted.

Griffie can play this game. It's nice to not need to be doing all the drawings, and that this device can store data more quickly than Griffie can.

They gradually add some complexity to the game, having more than two groups of the same luminosity or shape or pattern at once.

Griffie can tell that the white shapes are in one circle and the grey shapes are in another circle and the black shapes are in another circle and move the unsorted shapes accordingly. The same applies regarding geometry and texture.

The aliens would like to branch out from shapes now. Can Griffie sort fire, water, and containers into their respective groups?

Yes!

They would like Griffie to match videos to the groups "objects combusting destructively when exposed to a lighter", "objects performing some task when exposed to a lighter", and "objects not reacting to a lighter".

Griffie can match videos to those groups, though some of the task-performing objects are confusing and it's kind of a weird category.

They add a picture of Griffie to this sort task.

Griffie moves the image of themself to the "combusts destructively" category, although they would in fact react by extinguishing themself, and a small flame would only cause superficial burns.

They now show various things having rocks fall on them and either being damaged or not being damaged, then ask about Griffie.

Griffie would be damaged if a rock fell on them.

They now show Griffie taking various actions that either lead to, in one group, being lit on fire or having a rock falling on them, or in the other group just being undamaged. They then add drones doing things that might or might not lead to rocks falling on them, seeing how Griffie sorts those.

Griffie sorts the sphere-constructs having rocks fall on them in the same category as Griffie having rocks fall on themself, and the sphere-constructs being undisturbed by rocks in the same category as Griffie being undisturbed by rocks.

They add spikes going through Griffie to the set to see how they get sorted.

Griffie's circulatory fluid is white, not silver, but that's otherwise fairly realistic. It looks like a question, not a threat, though. The spikes go into the rocks and fire category.

How about Griffie being given a pencil by a drone?

Griffie receiving a pencil – or maybe a fake pencil? They're visually similar – goes in the category where no injuries or damage happens.

They show pictures of weirdly clothed humans being stabbed with spikes, lit on fire, or hit with rocks, and put them in the rocks-and-fire-and-spikes category.

They have humans? That's not necessarily weirder than the holly and mistletoe. It does suggest promising things about eventual linguistic compatibility. Are the sphere-operators humans? Can Griffie go to a human environment?

Anyway, yes, injuries to humans work like injuries to Griffie and presumably work like injuries to sphere-constructs.

They add Griffie going through a space with various lines, and whenever their body reaches a line it comes out of another line like a portal, leading to Griffie being shredded.

Yeah, that can happen with naked portals. Griffie's lucky it didn't happen when they ended up here. It is another kind of injury, like spikes and rocks and fire.

Videos of humans undergoing that also get put in that category.

A reasonable sorting decision.

They are now going to clear the categories, and instead play videos where things happen that strongly telegraph leading to either one category or the other, but don't actually depict it. Including cases where they show that one of two tunnels lead to it by having people go down them, and then end with someone beginning to go through one tunnel or the other.

After a few examples, can Griffie play this game as well?

Given how blatantly telegraphed and how non-technology-reliant the video examples are: yes, Griffie can play this game.

They now add a video. It has bigger drones with multiple circles of light coming out of them when they move coming to Griffie, and moving Griffie to a strange metal structure floating in space, then being taken inside where there are humans. Which category does this go in?

Griffie looks uncertain and wiggles the video around a bit in an attempt to indicate this.

The sphere tablet screen went black when grabbed, what if Griffie's presence breaks more things for some reason? And as much as they would like to be in an environment where humans can survive without personal life support, they can in fact wait a month if that is necessary for safety.

The screen reverts, depicting scenes like the previous stages, but with two changes. 

1) There are mercurials as well, who are also vulnerable to fire, stabbing, rocks, and naked portals

2) There are arrows pointing to some or all of the individuals, and only those individuals getting injured puts it in the injury category

This classification task is also one which Griffie can handle.

They now give two versions of the final video with Griffie being brought inside for Griffie to sort. One has only a single arrow pointing to Griffie. The other has arrows pointing to the humans and mercurials on the ship.

Griffie guesses that they would be safe inside the big metal structure. The area shown is full of friendly looking people and nothing that would be more hazardous than outer space. Griffie drags the video with an arrow over their head to the non-injurious category.

Griffie is less confident in the humans and the other humanoids being safe. Their life support systems might be made of technology that shuts down when in the Life Bubble effect, like that sphere's glowing glassy tablet maybe did. If that's the case, Griffie could probably stay away from the important systems, but they don't currently know where those systems are.

Griffie wiggles the video with arrows pointing at the humans and the other humanoids around near one circle and then the other in uncertainty.

New game! They show a video that strongly telegraphs that something is going to happen to the people with arrows, then it goes to a sketch of the thing. The person as on fire, the person as stabbed, and so on. Can Griffie play this game when instead of a sketch there is a parchment-like space after the video?

Yes, Griffie can, but if this is going to lead into asking what exactly will happen when Griffie goes inside the humans' and other-humanoids' large metal structure, a new medium isn't going to help as much as the sphere-operators (who are presumably humans and other-humanoids?) might hope.

It does indeed lead to that.

Griffie draws multiple rectangles inside the parchment area. In one rectangle, Griffie is on the ship and nothing bad is happening. The Griffie in this image is smiling. In another, the ship's lights are off, though it's a bit hard to realize at first that that's what the line art depicts. The Griffie in this image is frowning, as are the humans and the other-humanoids. In a third rectangle, the humans are uninjured but frowning, and the other-humanoids appear to be in anaphlytic shock. The Griffie in this image is frowning. In another, Griffie is near a larger sphere-construct like in the video, but it's stopped emitting light and is dented. The Griffie in this image is also frowning.

Griffie considers adding some text indicating uncertainty, but doesn't think the sphere-operators have enough vocabulary for it. Hopefully this will suffice. At least if some of the sphere-operators are humans or know about humans, smiling and frowning should work?

There is a long pause. Eventually, however, there are images of the sketches from the aliens next to photorealistic depictions of the same, then some of Griffie's most recent sketches next to similar images. They seem to have the 'nothing bad is happening', 'lights are off', and 'broken drone'. Next to each of these is the rings with the two words.

The sphere-operators correctly have figured out what those three sketches represent, and Griffie indicates such.

Griffie supposes the allergic reaction depiction wasn't that clear. Maybe if they get another chance they should sketch some more visually clear but less contextually likely signs of medical problems, like vomiting.

They share a video of a human in gravity pushing a rock and it moving away, followed by a video of a human pushing on a drone and its pulsing light beginning to flicker until finally it falls down and emits sparks, then a video of a human pushing on a bigger drone, then getting pushed back by the bigger drone instead.

Then they show a video of Griffie grabbing the drone, and it going black, then flying back to the ship, and a human being next to it for a bit, then it flying back to Griffie and detaching the screen.

Humans are among the sphere-operators! Hypothesis confirmed.

It looks like they were able to repair the sphere-construct. And like the sphere-construct turned the screen off just to say "no grabbing" but it was only a little bit broken. Both of those things seem good. Lastingly damaging the humans' high-value equipment would probably not have been the best starting point. Griffie smiles at the video.

They would now like Griffie to select one of the two rings for a pair of frames. The first frame is Griffie being brought into the ship, the second is the lights off.

The larger constructs are more durable, and it's really pushing or grabbing the small sphere-constructs that's the issue, and they can detect damage before failing and indicate 'stop that'? Very promising.

Griffie looks contemplative in an exaggerated manner, but ultimately selects the ring associated with the glyph-string they believe indicates "no/false/incorrect".

The screen returns to playing the video of Griffie being brought aboard, and then gives a place to sketch again.

Griffie sketches one rectangle where everyone is doing well and smiling, and one rectangle where Griffie is frowning, the humans are frowning, and the other-humanoids are vomiting. It's a little bit overdone and the exact scenario seems unlikely, but hopefully gestures at the "maybe you should offer to let me inside your box capable of supporting human life, but do biosafety checks" message.

The video plays again, but this time Griffie is put in a large glass box with the humans and mercurials on the other side, followed again by a space to sketch.

Griffie draws a happy Griffie in a glass box with no bubble and happy humans and other-humanoids outside the box writing with styluses on tablets.

They do the safety sorting again, with the latest video.

Griffie sorts the video where the humans and other-humanoids put Griffie in a large glass box as safe for everyone.

There is a pause, then the screen changes to all parchment. 

Griffie draws a series of images with arrows from one to the next, left to right and then top to bottom.

First: Griffie is gardening. Griffie is smiling. Griffie is not surrounded by a bubble.

Second: The space in the garden where Griffie was is on fire, but the fire looks weird.

Third: Griffie is in space. Griffie looks very very scared. Bits of Griffie are disintegrating at the edges.

Fourth: Griffie, still in space, is making some kind of weird gesture and mouth shape. A few different images of the hands and arms overlap each other, as if to indicate motion. A dotted-line bubble appears around Griffie.

Fifth: Griffie is in a solid-line bubble in space and looks less scared, but they are frowning.

Sixth: Griffie is writing things on a tablet connected to a sphere-construct, and is frowning less.

Seventh: Griffie is inside a glass box inside the humans' and other-humanoids' large metal structure. Griffie is not in a bubble and is smiling.

Leonarda had never had three mercurial blades pointed at her at once, and the one poking her carotid artery actually hurt a little.

"I'm not planning to just abandon the creature, but the creature is clearly functioning fine and has been for over a day at our estimate."

Mercurials. It was the truth, it wasn't like she had been planning to leave the creature out there on a whim, but being told at the point of a sword that if she left the creature out there… no, remember your training, be fair to them. They weren't saying anything stronger than if she did it without giving them a good reason she would be killed, and it wasn't like they were very likely to kill her even if she didn't cooperate. They knew the sword at her throat was not actually likely to make a difference to the fate of the creature, it wasn't like there was a button she could press to kill it in some desperate race between human and mercurial speed. They were just… being the way they are. Though with the less familiar mercurial involved… well, it wasn't like she was someone making first contact with them. She had training.

"The expressions of the creature match humans and mercurials, and given that we found each other, that is hardly unprecedented. Look at those drawings. The danger we were concerned about isn't this creature, this creature is one who was hit by it and left in the void."

"That does seem to match the claims, yes, but even taking it for granted, the creature clearly has... something like a spacesuit. Bringing it on board is not urgent. The creature itself brought up risks–"

"-risks to us! Yes! A show of concern. We have quarantine, I myself will volunteer-"

"Denied. You are our best pilot. I am not letting you risk your life on a symbolic gesture."

"We still must reciprocate somehow. Ask the creature what we can do for it, if you won't accept immediately taking it on board. Captain, I insist on this."

"…fine. Boyd, ask Arete how she feels about a shuttle, and Fee about what options we have for constructions that don't bring it on board. Is that acceptable?"

The swords pointed at Leonarda, except the one poking her throat, are withdrawn a bit.

"And I'm not planning to murder it! Why would I even do that? Even excluding moral issues, can't you at least appreciate that it would be pragmatically stupid?"

The mercurial whose blade is still poking Leonarda's throat glares.

"That you so focus on such hardly speaks well for your trustworthiness."

Arithnu moves his blade to slightly push back against the one against Leonarda's throat.

"Leonarda is my friend, you judge humans too harshly based on the actions of a few throughout their history. It is not as though our history is pure. Her concern for all rational and moral factors is a virtue, not a vice, and for you to suggest otherwise is–"

"No duels!"

The screen transitions again. There is a video of a human, a wall that can be seen over, another human, and behind that human a shelf containing two different kinds of objects, one elaborate with gears, the other simple bricks.

The first human points to one of the elaborate objects, and a not photorealistic line appears from the pointing to the object.

The second human takes the object and tosses it gently over the wall, where the first human catches it and looks at the camera with a wide smile as they begin turning a crank.

The scene repeats again, except this time the second human tosses one of the bricks over, the first human catches it and looks at it, then purposefully drops it.

Then there is a scene where only the first human is there, holding one of the elaborate objects, but then drops it and it breaks, and the human frowns dramatically.

The videos are then placed in circles like in the sorting tasks, and a photorealistic picture of Griffie gardening (though the plants are all wrong) appears.

Well, Griffie sketched the plants pretty roughly in that scene, it makes sense that they couldn't identify matches. Griffie gardening goes in the category with the smiling human who got the object they pointed to.

The screen transitions to a line with the three videos from before, in the order 'item breaks' 'get brick' and 'get item'.

At the 'item breaks' end of the line is an exaggerated face of a human frowning, and at the 'get item' end there is an exaggerated face of a human smiling.

Another video appears on the screen, showing the first human pointing to an item, the second human trying to pick it up but finding it attached to the shelf, then the first human sighing dramatically and pointing to another elaborate item, which then gets passed over the wall.

An image of a human hand, finger extended, then drags that video to between 'get brick' and 'get item', closer to 'get item'.

At the bottom right, there is another ring like the previous ones.

This looks like preference ranking? And the human prefers getting a brick to having their item break, because if they get a brick the item is still there? Griffie taps the bottom-right ring.

The videos vanish, and the pictures of the human smiling and frowning are replaced with images of Griffie smiling and frowning.

The images of Griffie aren't quite right, their face doesn't work quite like that.

Many videos appear below the line, waiting to be dragged.

• Griffie gardening without a bubble.
• Griffie in space without a bubble.
• Griffie in space with a bubble.
• Griffie in space with a bubble and a drone with a touch screen.
• Griffie in a glass box in the spaceship.
• Griffie in a glass box in the spaceship with people around.
• Drones flying and assembling a glass box around Griffie, after which the bubble around Griffie vanishes.
• Drones flying and assembling an opaque box around Griffie.
• Drones flying and assembling a glass box around Griffie (with the bubble vanishing), then a closed metal structure around the box, then humans coming in to the structure and standing outside the box.

Finally, there is a parchment-space off to the side.

Griffie draws a glassy image tablet in the parchment space. They would like to indicate a preference for communication options. "Life support outside the bubble, but no communications" and "communications, but no life support besides the entirely-reliable-thus-far bubble" are things they are not sure how to weight against each other.

The screen turns dark for a bit, and then lights back up with a smaller image of a tablet to the side. A sample Griffie hand shows dragging the tablet, which promptly duplicates, leaving one where it started and one to be dragged to one of the videos of Griffie in a glass box, and a tablet appearing in it, then it reverts to just the tablet image off to the side and the video the way it was.

Using the tablet-adding option, Griffie creates the following ordering:

1. Griffie with an exaggerated fake smile.
2. Griffie without a bubble in a glass box in the big metal structure with a tablet and with people near the box.
3. Griffie gardening without a bubble.
4. Sphere-constructs assembling a glass box around Griffie and a tablet, with the bubble vanishing, then a closed metal structure being built around the box with humans entering the structure and not the box.
5. Griffie in the big metal structure with a tablet and with people further from the box.
6. Sphere-constructs assembling a glass box around Griffie, after which the bubble vanishes.
7. Griffie in space with a bubble and a sphere-construct with a tablet.
8. Griffie in space with a bubble and nothing else around.
9. Griffie in space without a bubble.
10. Griffie with an exaggerated fake frown.

The image of Griffie in the opaque box remains unsorted.

The screen changes to show the video of a structure with a glass box in it being assembled around Griffie, with a little ring in the bottom right corner.

Alright, sounds like a plan. Griffie taps the ring.

Larger drones begin to bring out various components, including glass, metal, and complicated items Griffie does not recognize. The actual process is a lot more complicated than the video, and actually involves building multiple layers of box around Griffie first.

If Griffie still has a good view of everything, having more than one layer of box is acceptable. Construct-operators often like redundancy, and also redundancy.

The boxes are all transparent, at least the main panels. They are joined together by a more diverse set of metals, hinges, and welds.

Yeah, that's how it seems like building a glass box would work. Griffie waves to the sphere-constructs and smiles.

The tablet now displays only the parchment texture.

Hmm. Which is more important to explain, "I know what humans are" or "actually, the other book I showed you is in Chraiqun, and if I'm going to show you the third book, it'll be in Sylvan". Let's go with the second one.

Griffie draws the setup the tablet had used for linking glyph-sequences and Celestial words, but with each row having an oval to the left of three sets of boxes. Griffie gets out the holy text and the dictionary, tying them to their belt. They then put each of the particularly illustrate-able words from the holy text in the first column of boxes, illustrate the words to the left, and put Celestial and Sylvan translations. The column of Celestial text gets a drawing of Griffie writing on the tablet above it. The column of Sylvan text gets a drawing of the dictionary cover above it. The column of Chraiqun text gets a drawing of the holy text cover above it.

The sketched boxes turn into boxes with actual nice columns to make it easier for Griffie to use.

Alright, they get the concept. Griffie fills out a few more words, then shows the sphere-constructs a few more pages of the holy text, then a few pages of the dictionary.

Then, in the parchment space, Griffie draws the line from the frowning human to the smiling human.

Below the line, Griffie draws rectangles: one with a picture of Griffie writing more things, one with a picture of Griffie showing the sphere-constructs the holy text more, one with a picture of Griffie showing the sphere-constructs the dictionary more, and an empty rectangle.

"Captain? Entropy analysis on that last book. You… probably want to see this."

"…I see. Figure out how to ask. That goes for all of you! Anyone who can figure out how to ask if that thing is a dictionary or just a list of ancestors or whatever tells me immediately."

The screen remains that way for minutes. Then finally, a video plays. A human writing a book, with another view added to make it easy to see what is written in the book.

They take an apple, look at it, write down a word, then write a bit more on the book. Then they take another object and repeat the process, over and over and over, with no apparent relation between the objects.

That video is in one circle, the other circle is empty. A picture of Griffie's dictionary appears.

Griffie's dictionary contains more than just nouns, and probably wasn't made that way, but that does seem like a similar sort of book? Griffie drags the dictionary picture onto the circle with the human writing down words after looking at objects.

The screen shifts to a picture of Griffie's dictionary surrounded by lots of smiling humans.

Griffie takes a bit of parchment, starts moving as if to hand it to someone, and lets the corner of it disintegrate. Griffie points at the disintegrating corner and frowns. (This is what Griffie thinks would happen if Griffie tried to give them the dictionary right now.)

Griffie then starts showing the drones dictionary pages again.

They show a video of Griffie showing the pages a lot faster, not quite just flipping, but pretty close, transitioning to a video of very smiling humans looking at the video of Griffie doing so on a similar tablet, and tapping it to make it show individual pages completely free from blur.

Alright, they are very good at building sensors. Griffie shows the drones the dictionary pages at around the suggested pace.

The tablet shows lots of smiling humans as Griffie does so.

Griffie is mostly focused on the dictionary, but does notice this, and smiles back.

Constructing the quarantine box and station around it, even in a pretty minimal form, will take more than a day.

After showing the sphere-constructs the rest of the dictionary, Griffie moves onto the holy text as well. Then, since there still aren't any of the Elemental fields in here, Griffie re-casts Life Bubble with the usual safety margin.

After that it might as well be time for sleep. It's not like there's a day-night cycle around here. Griffie puts away their possessions, awkwardly curls up in the absence of gravity, and switches from making deliberate irregular movements to much smaller and slower regular movements.

When Griffie wakes up, the place looks superficially assembled, but drones are still flying around doing things to it.

Griffie tries some friendly yelling, to see if it echoes off the sides of the structure, and tries Create Water again.

No echos, and the water-sphere disappears after about ten minutes.

Griffie does nothing for another hour, except for the occasional gesture, but appears conscious.

After that, Griffie goes for the tablet again. Griffie draws Griffie in space in a bubble, Griffie in a bubble in a box, and Griffie unbubbled in a box.

Griffie writes the text "has air, fire, earth, and water" in Celestial, Sylvan, and Chraiqun, then writes the alien glyph-sequences for the elements, prefixed by the alien glyph-sequences first used to indicate images matching text. Arrows extend from this block of text to the bubble and the box with an unbubbled Griffie.

Griffie then writes the text "has no air, no fire, no earth, no water" in the four languages, using the alien glyph-sequences first used to indicate images not matching text for the alien-language part. Arrows extend from this block of text to the starry void and to the first box.

Griffie draws the line from a frowning Griffie (rendered better) to a smiling Griffie. On the frowning side, Griffie draws the box with a bubbled Griffie, and shows water and paper disintegrating on the bubble edge. On the smiling side, Griffie draws the box with an unbubbled Griffie, and shows water and paper being distant from Griffie with no problems.

Some Sylvan sentences appear, some with boxes in them in place of various Sylvan words, with various words listed in the box with rings next to them, and at the end of each sentence there is a ring that says the word Griffie has been interpreting as 'no' or 'incorrect'. Some of the sentences are nonsense, but many are perfectly reasonable.

At the bottom right, there is a ring as well.

Griffie attempts to complete the reasonable sentences using the most appropriate words, and labels the nonsense sentences with the alien-word at the end of the sentence.

There are more sentences as followup, along with various words and pictures and the two alien word options with rings.

Griffie continues to either complete the sentences or mark them with the alien word, and says whether the pictures match the words or not. The aliens are doing surprisingly well at having pictures match words.

A woman enters the room containing the quarantine box Griffie is in, and holds up a tablet which says "What is your name?" in Sylvan.

Griffie looks very excited to see another person, and waves. Griffie writes "My name is Griffith of Erlonn. What is your name?" on the tablet, then turns it towards the woman.

Griffie then realizes that the woman probably does not have a name in Sylvan script, and has no real way of having a transliteration reference, due to the lack of audio transmission thus far. Griffie arranges themself so that both they and the woman can see the text, then points at the words and reads them out loud slowly and clearly. This probably won't transmit sound, since there's still no air, but it might at least communicate that the words go with sounds.

She says some inaudible things, and the words on the tablet change "We have going down."

Gravity begins to gradually affect her, and she stands on the ground outside the box.

"Do you want going down?"

Griffie points to their ear and shakes their head while the woman is talking, then writes: "The name for 'going down' is 'gravity'. I want gravity. I want air and water and earth and fire more."

Griffie reads the words out loud slowly and clearly while pointing to them. They've heard that lip-reading is a thing.

Arete changes the tablet again "I can get you all of those. I do not know how to write my name. I could show you it in my language if you want. We have regular air, like us and our friends use. You look more like our friends than you look like us, but still very different. Do you want us to try the regular air, or can you describe what you want in more detail?"

"You look like a human woman. Your friends look humanoid, but I do not know what kind of humanoid. I usually use the same air that humans use. I use air to photosynthesize, and to breathe. Humans use air to breathe. I want to try the regular air."

Griffie skips the reading-the-words-out-loud step this time, it doesn't seem to be causing much to happen.

The woman speaks again, and the text changes "All right. Before we begin, I have a few things I want. Show me what you look like distressed so I can recognize, and I will give you two things to hold. One you keep pushed down unless you need us to stop doing things, the other you push down if you need us to stop doing things. If either of those happen, we will stop."

And two cylinders with buttons on the end come in through a slot in the glass box.

Griffie writes "I am going to act like I am very afraid now, as though I think something bad is about to happen." Griffie shows the tablet, performs a moment of flailing terror, and then takes it back.

Griffie does the same with "like I tried to breathe air but it was bad for breathing", then mimes choking.

"When you add air and fire and earth and water, I will keep using my bubble. If you do it wrong, I should be able to figure out if there is a problem, but my bubble should protect me from the problem. Then I will not act afraid and I will not act like I tried to breathe bad air. Instead I will write more words."

"My main concern is what happens if something happens to the bubble before there is any earth and fire and water and air here. When I cast the spell 'create water', it should create water that is there indefinitely."

Griffie casts Create Water by their leg, crossing the bubble boundary.

"When I cast the spell 'create water', and there is no air or fire or earth or water, the water disintegrates. The water disintegrates slowly. If something happens to my bubble and there is no air or fire or earth or water, I disintegrate quickly. If I disintegrated entirely I would die. I do not want that."

"I think adding gravity and adding air and fire and earth and water should not make something happen to the bubble. If something happens to the bubble, stop making changes, even if I don't do anything to those objects. If I want to stop having the bubble I will tell you first, so you will know it is not an accident."

When Griffie stops writing, the Water inside the bubble is still present, and the Water outside the bubble has disintegrated.

Griffie takes the cylinders and begins holding down the button they are supposed to hold down if they are safe.

Arete edits the tablet again "I will see about getting you the earth and fire and water faster then. We will need to make sure nothing will eat you or make you sick. Do you want the air and fire and gravity first?"

"I do not need soil or containers of water. I need the air field and the fire field and the earth field and the water field. I also need air. I want the air and the gravity first."

"You mean little bits around you, like air?"

"I don't know if we're talking about the same thing. There is air, and there is what makes air possible. I need both of these. I need the things that make water, earth, and fire possible, but I do not need mist or dust or tiny sparks. Actually, I do need a little mist, but it's not important like air."

"I do not know what that means. I can give air and gravity and light fires and get dirt and rocks and water and mist. Should I do the air and gravity now, then figure out the rest later?"

"You should do that. Also, you should talk to the people who make metal structures where you can breathe, even though there is none of the field that makes air possible outside of the structures. They should know what I mean when I use the phrase 'air field'."

"I will do that after I make sure you are not harmed. I am a healer, and you are my patient. Do you want air or gravity first?"

"Air first. I will hold the cylinders like you said, after I stop writing. Tell me when you do not want me to hold the cylinders."

Griffie, as promised, picks up the cylinders and holds them as instructed.

The quarantine box begins to fill with a human and mercurial friendly atmosphere!

Griffie does not use the buttons to indicate distress. Eventually, they hear the sound of air entering the chamber. Without letting go of the cylinders, they say "Can you hear me now?". Griffie waits for the human to say that they can let go of the cylinders.

"I would like you to hold the cylinders a bit longer in case something goes wrong, but all the air is now in the box. They are telling me you said something. Now that there is air, we could work on voice if you want. I could tell you my name and you could tell me how to write it, and you could tell me how to say yours."

Griffie continues holding the cylinders. Griffie repeats the same sentences that they read out loud before, at the same speed and with the same clarity, because this might be productive and they can't write yet.

Arete nods, then uses her tablet "I think we got some of that. Could I show you some words, and you say them one at a time slowly?"

Griffie smiles and, optimistically, says "I want".

Arete uses the tablet again "They say they aren't sure which part that was. Was that 'I want'? If it was, quickly tap one of the buttons."

Griffie quickly taps one of the buttons, then returns to the holding position.

Arete begins showing words, including "Griffith" and "Erlonn", "Yes" and "No", and asks if 'Erlonn' is a place.

Griffie reads the words in order with long pauses in between them, and answers "Yes" when asked if Erlonn is a place.

After about half an hour of this Arete puts on the tablet "All right. It looks like at least with your bubble you aren't having any bad reactions. Do you want gravity now?"

"Yes, I want that."

There very gradually starts being gravity in the box.

Griffie moves to the bottom of the box and sits down.

Arete uses the tablet to ask "That is normal gravity for us. Is that a good amount for you?"

After the gravity stops changing, Griffie stands up, walks around the floor, does a tiny experimental jump, and then says "yes" out loud.

Arete smiles and uses the tablet to say "Excellent. You can put the cylinders down now. Would you like to talk together more?"

Griffie sets the cylinders down and says "yes" out loud.

Arete can use speakers to play sounds inside Griffie's box, and would be interested in knowing how to write her name in Sylvan!

Griffie writes multiple transliterations of "Arete Aldana" and explains the subtle differences.

After getting her name down, Arete uses the tablet to ask "Now, I am a crew member of a ship that travels between the stars. Some of the other crew would like to talk to you, including the captain. Are you up to talking to them now?"

"Yes. I think I am up to talking to other people who are crew of the ship that travels between the stars, including the captain. Your people are good at making tools for talking. Thank you."

A large screen is brought in by drones and set inside the quarantine box. It turns on to display the bridge of the MS Lithobraking and the crew currently on it. They are looking at Griffie.

"Hello Griffith," Leonarda says, in what sounds from Griffie's side of the screen like Sylvan. "We have set things up so we can speak to each other, though we did not understand all the words in your language. I am the Captain of the Planet 'Mars' Ship Stopping By Crashing Into Stone."

She glances to the side.

"That last segment apparently translated awkwardly. There is a planet that this ship was made on called 'Mars', and Stopping By Crashing Into Stone is a more amusing single word in our language."

Griffie waves at the display.

"Hello Captain. Thank you for setting things up so we can speak to each other. If I use a word you do not understand, I want you or someone else to say 'We do not understand you'. Then I will try saying what I wanted to say with different words."

"There were quite a few cases where we found words that looked like they referred to two different things, but we did not understand the difference, and some cases where we were not confident in our guesses. Do the following all mean approximately the same thing?"

Cornelia taps a tablet, and at the bottom of the screen appear phrases in boxes: "Deity", "High Ruler", "Ruler of Rulers".

"No. 'High Ruler' and 'Ruler of Rulers' mean approximately the same thing. A text might compare a deity to a ruler of rulers, but this would be a metaphor. An arrogant ruler of rulers might compare themselves to a deity. You might not have contact with deities here, you seemed not to recognize it when I did this."

Griffie casts Create Water again.

"A deity can give some people the ability to do cast the spell named 'Create Water'. And other spells, but this one is visibly obvious and I can do it as many times as I want to. I don't get that spell from a deity but most people who have it do."

"Yes, you have done that a few times. What… are you doing there? You use a word to describe it that we do not know."

She taps the tablet again, and the word 'spell' appears at the bottom.

Do these people not have magic at all, even arcane magic? They figured out how to build advanced constructs, and ships for traveling between stars, and never figured out even the most basic portions of wizardry? Griffie wishes their party's wizard were here. He would be better at guessing how hard it would be to invent wizardry from scratch.

"I am casting a spell. Using a shard of the power of Nature that I contain, I can prepare the power of Nature in specific shapes, by taking an hour every day after I sleep. Once the power is in specific shapes, I can use it by making certain sounds with my mouth, and gestures with at least one hand, and displaying my Divine Focus, a sprig of holly and a sprig of mistletoe. A friend made my headband grow these, so I use my headband, but I also have a magically preserved sprig of each of these that is separate from my headband. Some spells I can use over and over again, like 'create water', and others only a few times each day, like the spell for creating my bubble, which is named 'Life Bubble'."

"It is also possible to cast spells with your own power, but I do not know how. Do none of you know how, or know of anyone who knows how?"

There is a long pause as the crew looks at Cornelia.

"It sounds like your inventions have taken a very different path from ours. I'm sure our researchers will want to learn a lot from you. Are you familiar with these creatures?"

She taps her tablet, and images of what look to be jellyfish with many different kinds of tentacles on each creature and what at a glance look to be more tentacles but actually look closer to trails of often glowing gas. The creatures are against backgrounds of stars.

"I'm really surprised that you don't know any spells at all, even the kind that you draw on your own power for, but I actually don't know how hard that kind is to invent on your own. I don't have the right tools for teaching you that kind either. Maybe we can figure it out with worse tools, but it will take a while."

"The creatures in that picture look like jellyfish, a category of unintelligent creatures that live in the ocean, and Sky Dreamers, which live in the sky near ley lines and are usually asleep. If you don't know about spells or deities you might not know about ley lines either? There aren't any in space. I could try explaining but I'm not sure that's actually important. I've never seen a jellyfish or Sky Dreamer with so many different kinds of tentacles on one body, and I've never known of one that could go into space and survive."

"You would be the first pre-jelly intelligent species we have discovered then. You drew what looked like pictures of how you got here, could you describe what happened?"

"Your picture shows the creatures in space. I have never been to space before this incident. Nobody I know has been to space either, I think. It's illegal to go very far away from the planet."

"Yes, those were pictures of how I got here. I experienced something which was like catching on fire, but instead of fire there was Positive Energy. It started tearing a hole in reality. I told my friends what was happening, but they couldn't get there in time. I ended up on this side of the hole in reality, not the side with my garden. I noticed that I was falling apart because there was no air-field or fire-field or earth-field or water-field, and also that I was suffocating due to lack of air. I cast the spell 'Life Bubble', and it created a bubble around me and my possessions with all of the fields, and air to breathe, and a bit of water for moisture and fire for warmth. But by the time I was done casting the spell, the hole in reality had closed again, and I was on this side of it."

"Those things you mentioned there not being, they are related to… one moment."

Cornelia taps on her tablet a fair bit, then text appears: "The elemental fields, are they related to elemental planes? We do not know what these are. We believe your word 'plane' may correspond to a thing we know of two of, one we call standardspace and one we call subspace. Standardspace is where we are right now. We detected what we think you mean by 'hole in reality' and came to investigate. Many of our concerns were that more might be created and destroy our ship, and that you might be the cause of them."

"The elemental fields are closely related to elemental planes. I don't know what the relation between 'standardspace' and 'subspace' is like, but it sounds like they might be planes. If you want to know, you should tell me more about what subspace is like and how something could go from 'standardspace' to 'subspace' and back. I don't know if more of the holes in reality will happen. They don't usually happen where I come from? I am not the cause of them. If I worked very very very hard for a very long time, I might be able to figure out how to do something like that on purpose, but I don't know how to do it right now, and if I was going to do it I would either tell you or be far away from you and your ship. And it would be a safer kind. I might be able to figure out how to ask someone from where I come from for help, and then maybe they could do it for me, but that could cause a lot of problems for you, so we would need to talk about it a lot first."

Griffie pauses.

"It might also cause problems for you if I took myself home, though if I somehow figured out how to take myself home, maybe I would also be strong enough to conceal your existence? I don't intend to take myself home, or ask people to take me home, unless I have talked to your people about the problems first or there is an even bigger problem and I don't have time to talk to you."

"Our navigator might be able to figure out where your home planet is if you can tell us about the stars you can see from it. We cannot travel fast everywhere, but we can often find paths to particular places if we know where to look. We could–"

Art stops turning over the alien's words in his mind, and stands up from his chair, drawing his sword.

"–you said 'illegal' to go away from your planet. Not 'impossible'. As in, it can be done, but someone prevents it, correct? Someone who entraps an entire planet of people?"

"That's Axis, the Plane of Law. I don't usually consider that 'entrapment'. If I had a good reason to go far away from my planet, I could probably talk to them about it and work out a way to do it with their permission. They would want to know lots of details about the plan, and they might require that their constructs observe me during it, but I could probably figure out a version of the plan that they would agree to, or they would tell me that my plan would make things unstable, like you were worried the hole in reality would do to your ship. And they also consider accidents, like the way I got here, to be a reason not to retaliate against the victim of the accident."

"But normally it is illegal for people to go far away from the planet, so when an accident took me far away from the planet, I tried to contact them and ask them to take me back to the planet and figure out what the accident was."

Arithnu relaxes and sits back down, putting his sword away.

"So, has your planet even begun to colonize the other planets around your star yet?"

"What do you mean by 'around our star'? If other planets were as close to us as the Sun is, and going around the sun, I think we would have seen them, and at least the astronomers and the deities and Axis would know about them. We have telescopes. Everyone I know thinks there is only one planet. But apparently there is another one very very very very far away, far away like the distant stars? I don't know how we would have seen 'Mars', much less colonized it, though."

"Could you draw a diagram of what is around your star and your planet, and what stars you can see? It might help us figure out where you are from."

"Can you put a grid like you would put on the inside of a sphere on the tablet I write things on?"

Such a grid appears on the tablet.

Griffie draws a star chart. There are no galaxies and no large patches of anything, just little points.

"I am trying to draw a recent star chart. I'm not including the moon, it's pretty close to the planet and it isn't a light source so it'd probably be hard to see from far away."

"And what is your planet's orbit like?" Cornelia asks, frowning a bit

"That's a strange question. I can draw a diagram of the planet and the sun and the moon?"

Cornelia looks at Griffie, a bit perplexed, then says "All right."

Griffie draws an orbital diagram. The planet in it has visible continents drawn, is labeled "Planet named Suaal" and has no orbit drawn. One sphere, smaller than the planet, has an elliptical orbit around the planet, and is labeled "Moon". A larger sphere, much further away from the planet, has a circular orbit, and is labeled "Sun". Lines with arrows on both ends go between the point where the moon's orbit is closer to the planet, the point where the moon's orbit is furthest from the planet, and from the planet to the sun. The lines are labeled with lengths. The planet, moon, and sun also have notes about their diameters. (The diagram is not to scale.)

Cornelia asks Griffie to say how long a sample object is, how long a sample duration is, and how much a sample object weighs so they can translate units. The dictionary they scanned was able to tell them how to convert between different units, but they still need a starting point.

Griffie gives estimates of these, stating margin of error.

"And you were taught that… everything goes around your planet?"

Art looks tense, and is looking between Cornelia and Griffie.

Boyd is looking warningly at Arithnu.

"Yes? A few of the distant stars don't, but even some of the distant stars curve enough to make very big and very slow orbits? Uh, is there a problem?"

"And you were taught that earth, air, fire, and water are… primitive things that make up matter?"

"I wasn't just taught this, I study it! I work with the four elements! How do you think I built this bubble around me? Are you saying there's a secret fifth one and you think everyone I know who knows is hiding it?"

Arithnu stands up, looking enraged and turns on the other members on the bridge "The suggestion that this is mere mistake is absurd, and I will no longer keep this quiet from this creature who has shown such concern and kindness! The creature was quite clear that they have developed the capacity for space travel, that someone has embedded some advanced technology in them that lets them do amazing things, these could not happen without the actual inventors understanding what–"

Boyd moves towards Arithnu, and the screen goes dark.

In engineering, Pheodair, watching this, turns the screen back on. This is contrary to the controls the captain is using, but those are a mere interface for sending instructions. The machines themselves, under her control, need not listen.

The screen shows Arithnu with blade drawn and pointed at Boyd.

Boyd is holding a strange object in his hand which Arithnu just dodged the projectile of.

"Stop fighting! Even if someone is lying to me, and you don't agree about whether you should explain the truth yet or not, you don't need to fight about it! I am not in a big hurry and I don't want people to get hurt!"

"I thought—Fee! Art, the creature itself said not to fight, and are you trying to make it so the creature will be killed if it goes home?"

"If its home is controlled by people so corrupt, let them try it! We can bring a fleet, free the planet from–"

"Art! Sword down. Now. Boyd… everyone calm down and listen to the creature!"

"I want you to take no drastic actions at least until I stop talking."

Arithnu, carefully watching Boyd, sits back down.

Boyd, carefully watching Arithnu, steps back to his typical position.

"So, uh, there are definitely deities at home who would kill me because I had very interesting information. Deities are strange people who live on different planes and are more powerful than rulers-of-rulers. There are also deities who would try very hard to protect me and use the interesting information to help people."

"A while ago, the deities who want to help people and the deities who want to hurt people and the deities who wanted other things had a big war. A lot of things broke. Now almost all the deities, and all of the strongest ones, including the ones who want to help people, are trying very hard to make sure disputes get resolved through means that do not break quite so many things."

"I do not want to go home without talking to you a lot more, because the information that you exist is interesting. If you don't know what spells are, or what deities are, even if you are very very strong in some ways and can build many ships that can travel between stars, you might not be able to defend yourselves from the deities who want to hurt people."

"If you want to use your strength to help my people, that's great! They definitely need help! But we need to be very very careful to make contact with the deities who want to help people, and not let the deities who want to hurt people notice quickly. And we should understand each other and our capabilities a lot better and do a lot of work on planning."

Griffie stops talking, waiting for the humans and other-humanoids to respond.

"…Cornelia, if we are going to consider that the creature's claims are accurate, I want you to show me just what this creature's 'water' looks like on a lightning dot microscope."

"So you think what I call 'water' is different from what you call 'water'? That would explain how you appear to have stable metal and glass without the earth field. I will warn you that if you don't have the water field, the water I create is still going to disintegrate after about ten minutes, like you saw it do previously. Can you analyze it in ten minutes? If not, I can try to figure out how to get it to be stable for longer. I also might be able to put the spell I use to keep myself stable, 'Life Bubble', on a container too, and then put water in it. That spell lasts about sixteen hours, and the water will be stable inside the bubble."

Griffie pauses.

"I'd rather use one of your containers though. Mine may be irreplaceable."

"I can do it that fast, though I'll need to arrange things on site."

"All right. Lets do this." she opens a channel to Pheodair "Fee. I need–"

"Already putting a package together. Either we learn something new, or this is helpful to present to Griffith, regardless of if you backed down."

"You know, on ships with all humans, 'brief mutiny' is not protected self expression."

"We are well aware of your willingness to go along with immoral and dishonorable things, yes. I would offer you a list of some of the more horrific cases we have heard about, except they are just the ones we managed to find out about, you likely know worse."

"…unless someone objects, I will head over to the station and begin preparing?"

There are no objections among the crew.

"Preparing to analyze the water sample with your, uh, 'lightning dot' microscope? Sounds like a good idea to me. If anyone wants to fight someone on my behalf they can ask me first."

Cornelia heads over, and begins working on more sensors to examine Griffie and what Griffie is doing while Pheodair continues working on transporting over an electron microscope setup.

While Cornelia is setting up sensors around Griffie's box, she frowns "Up close as well..." the translation software causing Griffie to hear her words in Sylvan, though her mouth movements remain unchanged.

"Are you cold?"

"Greetings, probably-Cornelia! What's going on up close? I don't feel cold, 'Life Bubble' maintains a comfortable temperature for me."

"Could you 'create water' again for me, while we are waiting on other things?"

"Yes. Inside or outside the bubble? It will go on the floor at least mostly outside the bubble, unless you want it inside a container."

"Outside the bubble. I'll give you a bowl."

She uses machinery to put a metal bowl into the quarantine box.

Griffie walks over to the bowl. It looks like a normal metal bowl, if very well made. Griffie casts Create Water, causing Water to appear in the bowl.

"Do you have any metal objects you wouldn't mind heating up?"

Griffie rummages through their backpack, and eventually pulls out a much cruder-looking metal bowl, with a hole through it, and some dining utensils attached to a string.

"I wouldn't mind heating heating any of these, but if I'm not holding a piece and it's not in a container I've managed to cast 'Life Bubble' on either, it's probably going to disintegrate quickly, and if I am holding a piece, I don't want it to be too hot because then it will hurt me."

Cornelia thinks "You claim that fire is a specific, single, substance. If I gave you some fuel, could you make fire?"

"I can make fire without using any of your fuel or burning any of my belongings. It might look threatening but I won't touch the surfaces of the box with it. I will need to meditate for a little while first, and then when I am ready I will tell you, and you can say when you are ready for me to make a fire sample."

"All right. I would like you to make fire, and try to ignite or heat a few samples I provide."

She sends in some metal, a strange extremely black material, and some bowls of liquids. All are on little stands fitted to them.

Griffie meditates, then stands up and approaches the objects. "I am ready for the fire tests."

"All right. First let me examine it before it comes into contact with any of the samples. Begin."

Griffie casts Flame Blade, with the beam pointed away from the objects. They hold the blade like an experienced combatant.

"…all right. Now, hold that to the metal please."

Griffie touches the metal sample with the tip of the beam and holds it there.

It does not take long for the metal to begin to glow red-hot.

"…and the black sample."

Griffie moves the tip of the beam to the black sample.

It eventually begins to glow as well.

"…and the liquid in the first bowl."

Griffie moves the tip of the beam to the contents of the first bowl. What are the liquids and what was that black substance, anyway? Cornelia looks focused. Griffie can ask later.

"…all right, the next now."

Griffie moves on to the next liquid.

This one catches fire after a bit, the fire looking normal to Griffie.

"…next…"

Cornelia seems surprised by things. Hopefully she will explain soon. Griffie moves on to the next liquid.

The next and final liquid catches fire quickly.

Cornelia looks down at her tablet, blinking, then taps on it and the screen to the bridge turns on again.

"Have you found something? Fee is still working on packing up the microscope."

"…I still want that, but…"

"…I think Griffith may be telling the truth."

"Even if I were going to lie to you, I wouldn't lie about my own life-support requirements to someone offering to help me."

Leonarda is focused on Cornelia "Explain."

Cornelia sighs, and turns so she can face the screen and Griffie.

"All right. I'll explain this to both of you. But I should warn you, this makes meeting the mercurials look… mundane."

Griffie doesn't react much to the mention of meeting the mercurials, but does appear to be listening intently.

"We have multiple, radically different, yet superficially similar, phenomenon here. I'm going to give tentative names to them. 'Oxygenation Fire', 'Elemental Fire', and 'Heat of Motion'. Matter as we know it is typically made of tiny objects we call 'atoms'. I am no longer confident that Griffith or their objects are made of this. We have, in various cases, created or observed or predicted alternatives. 'Neutronium', for example. There is some set of forces that enable matter as we know it to exist. Extrapolating, Griffith is made of and manipulates some sort of exotic matter that uses… those things they were talking about. 'Oxygenation Fire' is not a substance, but a process, more like how things might bubble–"

She cuts her self off with a look of alarm.

"–Griffith, is bubbling where you come from a process where a gas is inside a liquid and rises up, or is that different too?"

"Where I come from, bubbling is a process where a gas is inside a liquid and rises up."

Cornelia looks a bit relieved.

"All right. 'Oxygenation Fire' is not a substance, but a process, more like how things might bubble. This process can be triggered and sped up by 'Heat of Motion', a thing where there is lots of little wiggling of the atoms and tiny things made of the atoms. What Griffith generated when I asked for fire, however…"

"One of the very strong laws about how 'Heat of Motion' works governs what is called 'black body radiation'. Objects glow when they are hot with 'Heat of Motion', and in an extremely predictable way. When 'Elemental Fire' is applied to them, they also begin to glow in a similar way. However, it does not follow the same curves for different wavelengths of light. When Griffith did something to the metal, my best estimate is that it did some other change which produced both its own light and 'Heat of Motion'. This then decayed according to a curve very similar to how Griffith's 'Water' decayed. 'Elemental Fire' does not create the level of temperature fluctuations required for standard ignition, to ignite our matter with it involves a process between applying fire and applying uniform heat."

"If exposure to 'Elemental Fire' produces light and heat, but decayed similarly to the 'Elemental Water' which didn't, and back where Griffith comes from the 'Elemental Water' just doesn't decay, wouldn't that mean that a non-decaying sample could–"

"Art, you are hereby required to leave the bridge and are confined to your quarters with no contact with anyone who was not in this room at the time of this conversation."

"I'm not going to try to weaponize things in ways which would produce persistent problems you can't clean up, if that's your concern! I don't know how to permanently make the fire field exist. If I did, I would probably also know how to make the air, earth, and water fields exist, and then that would allow a means of extinguishing the fire. Also, I wouldn't do that without talking to people unless I was very very confident that it was a very important thing to do without talking to anyone first. Also if I could make the elemental fields permanent, I would want to do it in a space for me to live and a space for you to study, not everywhere at once without testing. Also if I made a fire that you couldn't extinguish, and it kept causing problems for a long time, my shard of the power of Nature would be displeased with me, and it would stop giving me the power to cast spells and some other things."

"Apparently you are aware of how weaponizable your abilities are. All right. Art, you are instead confined to the bridge. Boyd, figure out if Fee was listening in and make sure this does not get out."

Boyd gets up to go find Pheodair.

"Captain, I have no intention of–"

"Your intentions are not my concern here. My concern is safety, for this ship, my civilization, your civilization, and who knows who else. Your people cannot be trusted to keep secrets on their own, even to save lives. I know this. You know this. So you will obey. Unless you want to risk the life of the creature you have so vocally called for the protection of, along with every person in either of our civilizations."

The captain turns to Griffie.

"Now. You mentioned a large war that people don't want to repeat. You mentioned concerns about how if we came in contact with your world, they might be able to destroy us without us getting a chance to resist. I would like to apologize for not taking this seriously enough. I believe I am starting to get the picture now."

"At the time I had said that, I had not realized that persistent-elemental-fire alone could cause such destruction to your world. The threats I was thinking of are a lot worse than that. My world contains very intelligent, very powerful beings who would probably want to kill all of you and all of your people, unless they have a plan which is like that but even worse."

"We are not talking about this, or any other interesting abilities you have until I have things far more secure than they are now. Understand?"

"Understood. You should also secure your scans of both of my books, then."

"…I'm distracted and a lot of things might be tangentially related. Why don't you pick a topic."

"Captain, in the interest of reciprocation, wouldn't it be reasonable to–"

"–Fine! Go ahead. I have security to arrange, it isn't like we could keep anything that mercurials know a secret anyway."

Arithnu turns back to Griffie with a smile "While our Captain is doing that, you have told us a lot about yourself and permitted us to learn a lot about how you work, would you like to ask us any questions or run any safe tests?"

"Uh. Yes. But right now I am really worried about you so I am not the best focused."

Griffie pauses and looks a bit calmer.

"I think I recognize your captain's species. Some of my friends are of the species your captain and Cornelia appear to be. I don't recognize yours, though. Could you show me anatomy diagrams for your captain's species? I suppose I'm not in a healer's role, right now, but I am a healer. Also, when you were asking me about the word 'plant', you showed me pictures of varieties of holly and mistletoe. We have holly and mistletoe in my world. This is very strange. Show me pictures of more plants, and maybe some animals?"

Arithnu laughs. "We felt the same way when we met the humans! Though it's even stranger in your case."

Arithnu pokes at his tablet, and images start appearing on the screen below the video feed of the bridge, with a picture of a human as one header and a picture of a mercurial as another.

Human anatomy diagrams match Griffie's expectations but are much more detailed with more color.

Mercurial anatomy looks different from human anatomy – the heart is on the other side – but not outside the range of humanoid anatomy Griffie has studied.

Agricultural, ornamental, and wild plants from Earth are shown. A lot of the wild plants are familiar to Griffie. Many of the agricultural ones are as well, though they seem to have been more optimized for food production than Griffie's world has managed. Fewer of the ornamental plants look familiar, but some do.

Agricultural, ornamental, and wild plants from the Mercurials' home planet are shown. Many bear a strange similarity to the Earth plants, despite many of them having darker pigmentation. The agricultural plants again look more optimized than those Griffie is familiar with, and of the ornamentals, fewer than even Earth's ornamentals look familiar. However, even some of the wild and agricultural plants that do not have Earth counterparts look familiar to Griffie.

Images of animals are also included. The Earth animals are extremely similar to those Griffie has seen. The mercurials' animals are less similar (their cats come in strange colors), but the mercurials have what look like flagfish, while the humans have a very different fish called a 'flagfish' apparently named for scales having a pattern sort of almost like a famous historical flag.

"Wow. A lot of these match my world. Should I say which now, or later once you figure out more security?"

"I think the Captain would prefer you wait. These aren't the only weird things either, we all seem to share sort of the same expressions, despite not sharing them with other creatures on our own planets, have similar values… there is even overlap in a famous nonsense poem between our two civilizations and we… have pretty much no understanding of why."

"The humans on your ship seem like the nicer humans from my world. And I want to ask for summaries of your values, but that's a really complicated question and I couldn't answer it entirely myself. Show me the nonsense poems?"

"Sure. They, uh, sound better in their original languages, I don't think the translator will be able to make anything but the nonsense words rhyme."

Griffie's eyes go very wide in a moment of sudden, horrible realization.

"Freaky, isn't it? Was there some cross-cultural contact long ago that only left this? Some plot by the jellies? Some strange law of the universe? Keeps people up at night wondering."

"Wow. That. Uh. Sure is, uh, freaky." Griffie forces a laugh, but doesn't sound amused at all. They probably ought to not discuss dangers. So Griffie probably should appear more amused and less concerned.

Jabberwocks have the little-known powers to manipulate vorpal swords and their wielders, and to have every society inevitably conclude that vorpal swords are important to defeating them. If you fight a Jabberwock, scrupulously avoiding those accursed blades, and kill one, then almost everyone you talk to concludes you must have found a vorpal blade by "luck" and used that one. If you point out the insane-looking statistics about Jabberwock attack victims, almost nobody cares. If you ask a person to repeat the sentence "The Jubjub Bird recommends not acquiring a vorpal sword," they will usually say "The Jubjub Bird recommends acquiring a vorpal sword.".

Griffie is so far from home that the elemental fields do not exist, but the civilizations each have a poem about Jabberwocks, which promotes vorpal swords. "People underestimate the power of the Jabberwocks," huh? Even Griffie still did, apparently. Probably still does, this isn't likely to be the deepest layer of the onion.

And they think the poems are nonsense poems. Many of the words appear nonsensical. Do they think "Jabberwock", or "Jubjub", or "Bandersnatch", or "Thrasfyr", or "Sard" are nonsense words? Does Griffie need to worry about the rest of the nonsense-seeming words?

Arithnu looks at Griffie with concern.

Why is Griffie handling information-hiding. Griffie is a terrible liar. "I maybe shouldn't talk about this right now. Ask me about it later once security gets worked out, I guess."

Arithnu looks concerned, and more than a bit torn, but eventually settles on "All right."

"Can I get a time estimate for security being resolved? I am starting to wonder if almost any conversation we have is going to end up touching on some topic that should maybe be considered sensitive information."

"I will ask. And yes, if I can't even share cultural trivia without it apparently being a huge security issue, I am left uncertain about what topic could possibly be safe."

"You could play me some music without lyrics, and I could cover myself so that you can't see if I react strangely to it? You could get me another tablet that isn't connected to your systems, with more color drawing options, and I could draw things for talking about once we figure out security? You could have me fill out translation tables between this language and the other languages I have used, but you'd want to avoid picking words in ways that reveal lots of information I could react to? But all of this is less important than figuring out security and I am willing to stare at a wall for hours if that lets you figure it out faster."

"Music, blankets, tablet features, even furniture are all options that shouldn’t make a difference."

"I want to do useful things. If you can figure out how I can make translation tables without causing potential problems for you I would like that."

"That I'm not sure about. The people who would know about that are busy."

"Alright. …How about I hide under a blanket and you talk about things and then if I make faces that reveal interesting information you won't see them? I was in the void recently and there weren't any people."

Arithnu laughs a bit "All right. I'll get you a blanket. Any other items you want? As you saw from the containers collection, we can fabricate a lot of things pretty quickly."

"Paper and pencil, or an image tablet that doesn't connect to things? A pencil that actually draws on the paper. Not a tool for poking tablets that is pencil-shaped. Oh. And maybe dice and a clock."

Griffie would like to have some samples more useful for research, but it probably is the wrong time to do research. And randomization should hide some timing information if it's necessary to hide timing information.

Arithnu sends over all of those things.

The image tablet is simple to use, with some buttons and a help button that explains things in Sylvan.

The pencil has an extremely good eraser.

The paper is very pure white, like the fanciest alchemically cleaned papers Griffie has seen.

The dice are six sided, with dots to count by.

The clock contains both Griffie's units of time (with corresponding numerals) and the units of time used by modern humans and mercurials (with corresponding numerals).

Well, their technology is very good.

Griffie gets under the blanket and, using the pencil and paper and the light of their Continual Flame necklace, starts diagramming a spell somewhat like Life Bubble that can target objects. It doesn't need to create an actual atmosphere at some desirable temperature and humidity, just maintain the elemental fields. It's probably going to be useful for experiments.

Arithnu talks some about his favorite human media. He prefers Star Trek to Star Wars, but thinks the Star Trek with the 'Prime Directive', before they added mercurials, was deeply disturbing.

He talks some about history and subspace developments.

Mercurials and humans classify societies as being in one of two categories: pre-jelly and post-jelly, referring to contact with the jellyfish-like aliens they haven't managed to initiate communication with, but got subspace technology, the technology they use to travel between stars, from. Mercurials and humans classify lifeforms as 'intelligent', 'animalistic', and 'pre-animalistic', and classify planets as either not bearing life or by what the most behaviorally advanced lifeform on them is. They've only found two planets with native intelligent life, the homeworld of the mercurials and the homeworld of the humans. When the mercurials and humans encountered each other, both of their civilizations were post-jelly.

The only known way to begin subspace technology development is to find it. Some star systems have large quantities of the raw materials needed for subspace technology. The jellies used to not guard these fiercely, but after mercurials tried colonizing a star system the jellies were occupying, the jellies developed weapons and now guard star systems rich in subspace-relevant materials fiercely. This incident occurred when humans were pre-jelly.

Subspace travel is really tricky, but Arithnu doesn't know the full details, he mostly follows Silvia's directions. Griffie would need to ask Silvia for the full details. "After security is set up, maybe?" Arithnu awkwardly notes.

The details of whether subspace travel is easy, difficult, or even possible are determined by structural features of subspace, which the jellies seem to build and manipulate, using technology neither mercurials nor humans understand. The mercurial and human homeworlds are very far away from each other, in separate collections of collections of stars. Arithnu frowns and calls this a terribly uninformative translation. The collections of the stars have about 2 to the 36th power stars in them. The collections of collections of stars have about 2 to the 6th power to 2 to the 10th power collections of stars in them. The closest star to the mercurial's homeworld's sun is about 2 to the 46th power miles away. If it weren't for convenient subspace routes, it would be very hard for mercurials and humans to find each other, but by subspace for a standard transport ship, their homeworlds are about 140 to 320 hours' travel apart. The Stopping By Crashing Into Rocks is faster, though, and can take more and better shortcuts, and could make that trip in 8 to 40 hours. 

Griffie wonders whether they could communicate with the jellies. They have a very powerful version of Speak with Animals that works on many intelligent beings, at least a little, and worked very nicely with the Frogs of Bythasilon. Though admittedly the frogs didn't have weapons and only complained when Griffie was accidentally rude.

Actually, the people on the ship have a concept of tears in space. Do they have a concept of tears in time? If their time tears, do the poor frogs fall in and rapidly disintegrate? At least Griffie's managed to get the ball rolling on having other people make contact with the frogs, because Griffie sure won't get to follow up on it anytime soon.

Griffie pauses in their diagramming to roughly convert the powers of 2 into familiar numbers. Wow, that's a fast way of travel and that's a lot of stars.

Leonarda returns, security set up.

"All right. Griffith, everything here will be kept secure. Art, you can stay or leave, your choice, but you won't be telling people about things for now. I'm sorry I couldn't arrange things ahead of time to give you the choice to simply stay out."

"You already know what I would have chosen."

"So. Griffith. I'm told Arithnu told you some things, but now you can ask questions. Might help you explain your strange things to us if you have at least basic post-jelly knowledge."

"I want to talk about categories of information first, actually. There are several different categories we need to discuss."

"One category is the category that lots of people on my world know, and you could find out about if you went to a library. The elemental fields are in that category. If this category is a hazard to your civilization… that's bad."

"Another category is the category that very powerful humans and humanlike-people and deities know, and that you could find out if you were powerful and did research, or if someone told you. If this category is a hazard to your civilization, that's still bad, because if some of the powerful people could use that information to hurt you, they maybe would."

"Another category is information about my personal capabilities and the capabilities of my friends. I'm going to give a false example now. 'I can create a blade of fire like that only twelve more times' would be a false example. We will need to discuss this for making plans, but I don't want it to circulate."

"And another category is information that's hard to share, so very few people know it, and even some very powerful people don't know it. Like, information where if you try to say it, the person hears a different thing, or forgets the conversation. We probably need to discuss stuff from that category too, but I have no idea how difficult this is going to be. And because it would be bad to remember the wrong thing and then tell lots of people the wrong thing, I would need to talk to someone about it who, if I tell them to not mention the subject again, won't mention the subject again, even if it sounds important."

"Oh. Also there are some even weirder categories than that, but they're probably less urgent."

Leonarda blinks "That last category… we have a word for it. 'Antimeme'. It is fict…ion…al…" she trails off.

"Uh, at least I thought it was fictional. I am now wondering if we also have antimemes here as well, and I just don't know about them. So… you definitely have them?"

She blinks some more.

"I get the categories though. I can think of cases for us that fall into all the categories except the last."

She pauses, and puts her hands in her face.

"But then again, you might hear me say that even if I was saying I knew things in all the categories, so my words aren't even… someone go get me writings on this. Ideally someone's… possibly random but now that I think of it… ideally papers on the concept, but even fiction that is known for very well thought out portrayals will do."

She turns back to Griffith "You are a little ball of horrors, I want you to know that. You seem nice and friendly, and I think you might even be nice and friendly, yet you… you…"

"You have writings on the concept of 'antimeme', and lots of people know that the writings exist! That's great! It seems like a good sign. And you're making productive-sounding meta-level statements too. Good work there."

"And, uh, I'm sorry about the horrors. I also used to think there weren't quite so many. The surprise is unpleasant."

Griffie pauses, and looks unhappy but determined.

"You know, your civilizations appear to be very large and doing quite well. I have reason to believe you may already be entangled with some of the horrors. But it seems like not very much? There … is probably a moral argument that you should try very hard to clean up anything people could use to follow me here, and maybe have me work with people who are good at keeping secrets to archive a lot of knowledge and … have human-guarded libraries on the mercurial homeworlds in case of emergencies? This argument probably implies that you should kill me and destroy me and my possessions very thoroughly, so I really don't like it. I don't think it's true. I don't actually have the relevant population figures for my side of the equation, even as powers-of-two with no mantissa. But you ought to consider it."

Arithnu is up and pointing a sword at the captain.

"Things are only statistically urgent, not about-to-explode-tomorrow-and-get-dramatically-worse urgent! You don't need to threaten the Captain on my behalf!"

"Okay, this is a new situation so it might metaphorically explode tomorrow. But still, I’ve been here for days, the next minute is not privileged! So you have time to talk."

"Stand down, Art. I'm not planning to anyway. Ignorance is rarely helpful, and while obscuring any passages here might be wise, I don't see how killing Griffith would help."

Arithnu stands down.