"They're hunting a shadow where they're shouldn't have been one. More specifically during our project to make better maps of our solar system we've caught a few images of something big eclipsing the sun from certain angles the thing is we only seem to be able to take pictures of it when it's between the camera and the sun. We haven't seen any similar sized blockage of distant stars or the planets. The Shadow trackers have been narrowing down where we can find it and they're pretty sure they're getting close. Like I said we don't really know what we'll find when we go there though. As for information on the Bramble the base camp we've built there is pretty safe. It's built near an entrance you can walk into and that entrance leads to a pocket without any of the fish. It's a safe way to dip your toes in at least."

"<Mysterious. I don't think we'll be waiting on that, given how little is known about it, but if more is found out we might look into it, and if it's something that improved speed would help, then Wrinkle's considerations might also be some help.>"

Speaking of, if Chert is ready, Sandy can begin relaying what Wrinkle noticed during the forging process, as well as his ongoing thoughts on how to use the cores the forge produces for other applications aside from drone retrieval as they currently do.

Chert will listen and record. Occasionally, they'll ask a question to clarify a detail. And in not too much time they'll arrive back at the teleporter. "I can ask when the next trip to Bramble is but it'll probably be at least a few days and then at least few days in transit after that. You're lucky we have a favorable confluence at the moment between Bramble and Giant's Deep. Sometimes it takes a month to get out to Bramble."

There's quite a lot of high-flying ideas, from a way to replicate some of the functionality of the teleporters in the hub to a way to burn cores as a sort of fuel for a propulsion system that could achieve some truly absurd speeds. Both of the designs require more of this 'magic' that Wrinkle has been using to actually create, but there are additional, somewhat vaguer designs, based on what he saw with the capturing of the etheric pseudo-sound in cores, for additional equipment constructed from similar but not identical formulations of gravity crystal-based ceramics that should be able to replicate the etheric manipulations he's implementing magically via more self-contained gravitational effects.

"<It's all a bit tentative, naturally, we only just showed up here earlier today so there may be deeper insights into the particular nature of your local ether background that we're missing, but hopefully these will be helpful.>"

They listen as Chert explains the timing, and it continues to sink in just how utterly massive the empty spaces of this world are. "<In that case, it sounds like we should probably try and find somewhere to stay, and maybe some proper currency to pay for our room and board. Do you have any recommendations on that front?>"

"If you just want somewhere to stay there's plenty of space here in the hanging city and we don't tend to use money much out here. The Nomai's beds don't work for us but we have extra cots around.

"Back on Timber Hearth I'm sure Hornfels will spot you a few days out of discretionary funds and if you'll promise to stick around long enough to help us try out some of what you just said I'm sure we can get you a grant for that work."

Wrinkle gets an excited look at that. "<It seems Wrinkle feels getting to tinker would be payment in itself, so I believe Timber Hearth will be where we'll head next.>"

And indeed they will, presumably, take the Timber Hearth teleporter, then make their way back to the museum (unless someone informs them of a better place to find Hornfels) to see about arranging a place to stay while they wait, and also discuss more about potentially helping them make some prototypes.

Hornfels is still at the museum. They're happy to put up the group in some of the temporary housing near the museum for a little while and help them go through the grant process.

They're also very excited by the idea of expanding the teleporter network and making gravity engines.

"The biggest limit to our spaceships is really the fuel. We've got ways to get to orbit more easily on several planets and that helps a lot but once we're in flight the real constraint on how fast we can go is how much fuel we can carry. And of course we won't need nearly as many trips if we can just teleport to the Attlerock and Dark Brambles and some of the smaller places we tend to revisit."

He considers that for a moment, though Wrinkle is nodding along quickly, seemingly quick to intuit at least the shape of why things are like that. "<Wrinkle believes it should be possible to set up teleporters aboard ships about as easily as on a larger body, which should potentially allow for mid-flight refueling, so will hopefully be less of an issue going forwards.>"

Before Wrinkle gets fully enthralled by working out various prototypes and their manufacturing details with Hornfels and whatever other specialists might be brought in, Sandy and Mischief drag him off to their temporary housing to settle in for however long they'll be staying in these particular accommodations. The process of the three of them "settling in" will be strange, if anyone cares to watch. There's more chanting of unfamiliar words and waving of crystal dowels, but also some additional dowel-pointing by Mischief along all the edges and corners of the room (and they will all be staying in the same room, even if more are provided) along with the outline of any doors, windows, vents, or other potential access points, projecting a line or string of utter-dark from the end of the dowel that clings into a thin web wherever it lands. Regardless of whatever methods are used to watch (including through any potential open doors or windows), it will become progressively harder to make out what's going on inside as Mischief does her work, until eventually it the room has become a total black box.

Then once that's done, the three of them will emerge again. "<I'm sorry for the delay, but there were some preparations we needed to make if we're going to be staying here overnight. These zone-suits are not terribly comfortable to sleep in.>"

"That certainly sounds like a Slate idea. They've proposed it a few times but the first few tests ended explosively and that was before we had figured out how to manufacturer more cores so we put it on the back burner and haven't gone back to it."

Hornfels is fine waiting and it's happy to talk more once they're done.

"Of course. Our astronauts, often end up sleeping in theirs but they definitely complain about it so I understand wanting to get out of them if you have the option."

"<I don't know if we've met Slate yet, but fair enough. Wrinkle certainly would like to look over any records you have of just how those experiments went awry, if you can spare someone to read out the textual records at least.>"

And once they've returned from their preparations, they will go ahead follow Hornfels to wherever they lead, whether that's to an archive or a workshop or somewhere else.

Hornfels takes them to a nearby building. Inside there's some large machines for wood and metal working, various workbenches and what they may recognize as partially dismantled Nomaian devices connected to Hearthian devices.

"Well look at who you've brought me this time Hornfels. Never expected to see real living aliens. Any particular reason you brought them here?"

"One of them, specifically Wrinkle here has some ideas about improving our spaceships. They also think they can crack the problem of replicating teleporters but I thought I'd lead with the spaceships part."

"Well the spaceship part sounds interesting at least. Can't say I'm that enthusiastic about the idea of making ships mostly obsolete but I figure that was always coming eventually."

Wrinkle clearly opens his mouth to speak, before remembering that he does not actually speak the language, and directs his thoughts to Sandy.

"<The ships should still be useful for going places that teleporters haven't been built yet, or as liquid transport capacity that can be more freely reassigned to handle fluctuations in demand beyond what the teleporter network can handle at the time.>"

"That's true enough. It'll be different though. But that's just me being nostalgic for how things started. What sorts of ideas have you got?"

Before Sandy's even opened his mouth, Wrinkle's already drawn a crystal dowel, waved it a couple times, and produced illusory diagrams he's been working on in the meantime.

"<The rough gist is that Wrinkle believes that by combining some etheric manipulation techniques he's already familiar with and the gravitational extremities captured by teleporter cores to briefly cause a sort of metric flow in a region of spacetime,>" he attempts to explain, a little bit beyond his own depth, as Wrinkle gestures in various ways, causing the diagrams to animate, displaying...that's a ship, the kind that goes on water, modified with wings, flying a nondescript patch of sky, with a cut-out and zoomed-in section indicating a sort of engine that is housing a teleporter core.

With a gesture, the engine activates, the teleporter core sort of evaporates, and the diagram is modified to show the expansion of a marked region around the winged ship, initially mostly spherical, with a black dot in front and a white dot behind, but the shape quickly distorts into a cardioid, then smears further into a rough rough cylinder which fades away into nothing at one end and is capped by a convoluted ring-shaped vortex of black and white behind. During the smearing process, the ship itself is displaced a massive distance (enough that, as the diagram zooms out to have both the ship and vortex in view, both shrink to essentially just points) almost instantly, with a line stretching between them labeled with what is plausibly its length, written in an unfamiliar writing system, which was initially extending extremely rapidly and has now slowed to merely linear growth.

"<We aren't familiar with the capabilities of your ships as it stands, so it's not certain whether stresses the process would put on the structure would be survivable, but even if not with this design, that should hopefully be resolvable with further iterations.>"

"That's a strange looking ship in your demonstration there but aside from that it's mighty interesting. Our ships can take a fair beating but they do have their limits couldn't say for sure whether they could take whatever stresses you mean without more details or some tests. I wonder if that's at all like what the Nomai journey cores do. I'm pretty sure those don't eat themselves in the process."

Wrinkle considers that for a moment, before Sandy relays his thoughts. "<Wrinkle believes he could design something that produces a similar effect non-destructively, it would just need an alternative source of the high-intensity etheric vibrations. This design is using the teleporter core both as a tool to manipulate the ether and as fuel for that manipulation. As for the kind of stresses the process produces, the way Wrinkle is thinking of it as similar to peeling a banana*, with the central axis experiencing forward thrust and the front of the ship experiencing divergent forces away from the center along its perpendicular plane, but to be more detailed about the specifics...>"

(*A type of fruit that, relevantly, has a skin that naturally breaks from its more tasteful flesh starting at the flower-end of the fruit, then rolling up along the sides towards its stem-end.)

And then he will begin attempting to convey the precise physical measurements that Wrinkle has in mind. There might be some difficult with differing unit systems, different understandings of how various materials behave at high-energy that appear to behave as the party expects at more ordinary energy levels, and similar tricky recontextualization problems. In the end, it seems likely that a combination of letting Wrinkle getting a destructive high-energy scan of a (hopefully not difficult to replace) piece of equipment so that he can be more confident in precisely how they'll behave under extreme conditions, or else just building an actual prototype and seeing what happens.

"Well I'm always down for trying to build new prototypes. And with Chert's work building cores is easy enough it isn't too bothersome to risk losing a few."

Slate can get into more details about what the materials they have to work with and how they tend to build ships. They also talk a bit about the way they take advantage of gravity anomalies to launch their ships off Timber Hearth and cheat the rocket equation a bit.

Coming from a world that is filled with ambient matter to push off of at nearly all elevations, the rocket equation isn't something any of them were terribly familiar with prior to arriving here, but Wrinkle intuits the value of being able to bank on gravitational assistance when you have to carry your reaction mass with you, and Mischief and Sandy pick up the principles not long after.

Related to getting things off of Timber Hearth, Wrinkle does some additional simulations, putting the toy model of a flying ship in an environment more like flying over the surface of Timber Hearth rather than floating in a void, and discovers that being situated inside of nearby gravity well distorts the formation of the metric vortex generated by the gravity engine, causing the ship's resultant displacement to be bent 'downwards' towards the center of the gravity well unless the engine was oriented perfectly straight upwards, and also causing the vortex to destabilize, resulting in it essentially exploding with considerable force as all of the metric tension stored in it is released into ether, subjecting everything nearby to potentially quite extreme 'stretching' and 'squeezing' forces.

"<So, we'll probably want to test any prototypes well away from anything important.>"

"Always a good plan. We set some people's houses on fire before we learned that lesson. It was an exciting time but generally people are happier now that we can do the dangerous tests a ways away. We'll need to figure out how flat, we need gravitationally. Everything in the system curves towards the sun in that sense."

"<Wrinkle has some estimates, but isn't entirely certain how to describe them. If I'm understanding him right, and if he is understanding the physics, then I believe as long as it's not on a trajectory that will take it up or down the gradient of the gravity well, on a scale similar to the minor radius of the vortex's toroidal envelope-->" he pauses for a moment as he convenes with Wrinkle about the measurement on that, "<in the simulation we showed you, that's about 140 feet, though it can be changed with the design, and has a minimum related to the longest dimension of the vessel, since the entire ship needs to fit inside the initial bubble that the vortex forms from.>"

A moment later, after some evident further thought from Wrinkle, Sandy adds, "<That's assuming that the gradient is linear, both towards and away from the source of the gravity. If it decays towards zero rather than falling linearly with distance, then the further away the vortex is, the more room it has to move radially before becoming unstable.>

"Ignoring the anomalies, gravity decays as a square law. So at twice the distance it's a quarter of the strength."