"I'm not sure if that means your answer is two or three different kinds but I suppose categories like that can be a bit arbitrary. Least that's what I hear from the biologists talking about things like ring species and such."

Wrinkle's eyes twinkle just a bit at the mention, and he chatters a bit to Sandy over the link.

He nods in return. "<According to Wrinkle, in terms of strict interfertility, the two primary distinct kinds of people where we come from are tallfolk and smallfolk, but that phenotypic variations within these kinds can still be pretty extreme.>"

He ponders for a moment. "<I'm also not sure whether I might be a kind unto myself, since the exact nature of my creation, and my bonding with Ounu-- that's the being whose dreamflesh* I use for shapeshifting and who's allowing us to communicate right now despite not sharing a language-- but yes, the fact that I was created artificially, and then further changed by the fusion between my and Ounu's vital substrates, seems like it could introduce some uncertainty as to what 'kind' I am. So I suppose overall "either 2 or 3 kinds, depending on how you look at it' is just about the best answer we can give.>"

(*This word seems indicate of the strange sort of shifting mass that, for example, composed his wings and the pseudopods he was holding Wrinkle and Mischief in earlier. It has some unclear implicit further context regarding how it might be different from ostensibly normal flesh.)

"The language thing is mighty strange. Took us a good ten years of work to get a handle on the Nomai Language and you just fly up being able to be understood. It's convenient but it also seems a little like cheating. All those unfamiliar concepts as addendums are a tad unsettling too."

"<I suppose I can see how that might. For what it's worth, at least the level Ounu and I are proficient in and comfortable using, it's only effective for communicating between two entities that both contain a very particular kind of informational embedding of the language itself. We wouldn't be able to, for example, pick up one of your books and read it.>"

He pauses to sigh.

"<And that's only fair, I suppose. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much I can do to avoid it. We don't really know anything about this place other than that it's very, very surprising that it's not even more different from where we came from, so I'm not really able to tell beforehand what things will be normal and what things will be strange.>"

"I expect it's good you ended up here then; if we've learned anything from the space program it's that most ways for things to be strange are also dangerous if you're not careful."

Space?

"<'Space' might be an example of the converse sort of conceptual roughness. You have a program for...sending things into the sky, where there is a lot of empty space?>"

"We do. It's more about going to the pockets of something in among all the nothing though. We have lots of names for those pockets, planets, moons, asteroids, comets. But those are mostly different on how big they are and what they're made of."

Sandy nods along, and the look of fascination on their taller companion intensifies.

"<The ways that's similar, but also completely different, from what we're familiar with, continue to baffle us. Wrinkle says that sounds a bit like the Astral Sea* and the Lower Heaven*, but I get the feeling they're much, much further away than either of those. He also asks, do any of them lead to separate spatial domains, or is this all just one enormous continuum?>"

(*These refer to two distinct skies, somehow. The Astral Sea is the outermost sky, and contains 96 immovable stars that form thirteen constellations, but which is also apparently full of some kind of liquid rather than empty space, and has various other things floating in it other than stars. The Lower Heaven is apparently underneath a part of the world, and its stars are mobile and flow in currents, and mostly don't have anything else amidst them. In both cases, stars are themselves composed of portals that lead to otherwise-separate, self-contained spaces.)

"If I'm understandin you right they're all in the same spatial domain, well except maybe the insides of Dark Bramble. When we had to save our planet from the Bramble Infection we learned some mighty strange things about it."

Sandy chuckles. "<Oh, now Wrinkle is very curious. What was the Bramble Infection, and what did you learn about the place I presume it came from by overcoming it?>"

"A long time ago there was an icy planet where Dark Bramble used to be. Now all that's there are fragments and that damn plant. What we call the Infection is when a seed from that plant managed to land here and started to grow in the same sort of way. We don't know how long it would have taken but we knew it was bad news.

"The weirdness we discovered is that the seed was bigger on the inside what's even weirder is that the probes we sent through also triangulated as being inside Dark Bramble when we cranked up their beacons loud enough.

"Since then we've been slowly trying to map the inside but it's terrifying work what with the angler fish that can swallow our ships whole if they catch wind of them. That and the damn fog that means you can't ever see very far."

Sandy and Wrinkle both seem distinctly disturbed by that (which Ounu's telepathic link will convey, if the ordinary interpretation of those facial and postural expressions would be different). Mischief might as well but with her smaller stature and inscrutable face it's hard to tell.

"<That sounds almost Dungeon*-esque-- that's a...it's a sort prison dimension, built to contain a force of malevolence but which sometimes partially intersects with other parts of the world. Regardless, I'm glad to hear that you were able to neutralize the seed, and I believe the three of us are in agreement that we'd very much prefer to avoid Dark Bramble if possible.>"

(*Context was provided, but additionally the word is laden with a sense of isolation, danger, uncertainty, monsters, darkness or other forms of obscurity, chaos, deception, and similar feelings.)

"Sensible of you. We Hearthians are a curious bunch but the main reason we've continued even after losing some people is because that's where the Nomai's Vessel is and it's our best chance of exploring beyond the bounds of our solar system."

"<Good luck to you in-->" Sandy begins, before stopping as Wrinkle is apparently struck by a thought. Sandy raises a hand up to his forehead and drags it downwards exasperatedly. "<So, this seed, and Dark Bramble by association are things you've observed having any sort of spatial complexity to them? And that there's something that makes leaving this...solar system...difficult, or maybe impossible?>"

"No, there's also the black hole inside Brittle Hollow that goes to the white hole in a distant orbit. And it's not that we can't leave the solar system it's that we can't get anywhere else, on account of how far we'd have to travel."

The three of them pause and chew on 'black hole' and 'white hole' a moment, though not for too long.

"<Fair enough, I suppose I still haven't really processed just how large the distances involved here are. Still, given that we arrived here due to some kind of intermittent spatial anomaly, Wrinkle has brought up the valid point that, if we aren't able to find anything useful regarding this 'black hole white hole' pair, then the only other lead for how to get back home that we've picked up so far would be the seed. So...hopefully it doesn't come to that?>"

"I don't know enough to rightly say. Looks like we're getting close now." They point ahead and there's a building larger than the tower built around an enormous telescope just starting to come into view.

Goodness. "<What is that for? How much of your town is inside that one structure?>"

"The Observatory? Not that much, it is pretty important though, even if the telescope isn't quite as important as it used to be back before we could go places in person. The Crater's pretty big and it's full up."

Sandy nods along to that, and they follow quietly for a bit longer, with Wrinkle seemingly engrossed in some mathematical calculation. When he shares the result of that with the rest of the party, Sandy coughs with surprise, and quickly asks their guide, "<Just to clarify, would you say it's accurate that the distances between areas of relevance in space are on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of miles*?>"

(*Units converted to local equivalent)

"Sounds about right, least if you mean inside the solar system. The Attlerock is closer of course."

He and Wrinkle both seem deeply impacted by now having some rough idea of the scales involved for everything other than (presumably) nearest of these other places. They silently confer for a while longer, before Sandy speaks again. "<And you have ways of traveling to these places in person as well. What does that involve? The only thing I could imagine letting you travel quickly enough would be something like teleportation, but Wrinkle hasn't noticed any of the etheric* infrastructure necessary to perform more than the shortest of transpositions, let alone across such vast distances.>"

(*Relating to ether, a substance, sort of, that somehow permeates everything, or almost everything, and implicitly has something to do with how teleportation, and many other things, work.)

"We do actually use the Nomai's teleporters where it's convenient. There's at least one on most of the important planets though since the hub is on Ash Twin it's not always usable. For other trips though we either use our home grown rockets or the Nomai's shuttles. Mostly our rockets though. The Shuttles aren't very flexible."

By all the Powers known and unknown, he wishes he could spend a lifetime just learning about this place. It's all so tantalizingly familiar yet simultaneously mind-boggling in how it arises from seemingly entirely distinct bases.