"I wouldn't have said so this morning! There are plenty of fun things here. You kind of learn to accept the bad things as 'just how it is', if you don't have the option to jump ship. Now, I'm not entirely sure. I'd have to see other worlds to tell, maybe."

Now they're passing through a windy cliffside road. The lake is still visible in the far distance, but there's no trees around anymore.

"Sure! Visiting other worlds is a great way to know what works and what doesn't and what you really want to see changed. Maybe one day you'll go out and earn your own spark and come back to contest the ownership here."

"I'm not the ambitious type. I'm mostly content wandering around doing what feels right in the moment, hanging out with friends, having sex with friends, shopping for cool stuff, helping people with things like that old cursed bunker, that kind of thing."

"That's okay too. It would be pretty boring if everyone was a world hopper. It's great that there's so many different sorts of people!"

"It really is, hm? I'm thinking of people you might get on well with. I mostly know other kitsunes, at least as, like, close friends..."

"If you don't have lots of sorts of real people then you have to fill things out with fake people. And even the most sophisticated ones of those always have something missing. You can't really maintain a friendship with them and weird things happen if you go too far away from their scripts. It's part of why I travel a lot. Home is mostly filled with fake people and there aren't even that many of them."

"It does sound awfully lonely. I'm getting the impression that there's no real - serious stakes? Nothing that will be ruined forever if you fail?"

"Back home, mostly there aren't except for you know the limited number of tries a challenger has if they want to earn a spark. There's places that try harder to make choices matter, but it's a bit a hard balance to strike, the best way to have real stakes is to have real people involved in a persistent environment. 

"But then it's harder to have a curated experience for new people. Also you need to make people buy into the artificial stakes you're creating. While also not making those stakes so harsh that you end up exiling or driving away a bunch of the people you need to make the world work."

"We go too far in the other direction. I don't think it was deliberate, per se... Or at least not deliberately set up the way that the Light Gods as they stand now would if they were starting from scratch. They had a Calamity to clean up after kicking out the bad ones and the current system is designed to help with that. The stakes are pretty harsh for most people, mostly in the day to day material conditions and the Great Wheel of Reincarnation- It respawns people, but stripped of most memories, which is in some ways, not the same people anymore."

"That's weird, both in being a very harsh memory management schema and in being universal. Are you sure that's how things work?"

"I don't know if it's entirely without exception, and I may be giving a distorted view of it, but I'm pretty sure, yes. I sometimes talk to the spirits of the dead, and help them resolve their last requests or last business here before going to the Wheel. I've died before, and... It's hard to describe without feeling it, but I definitely lost more than the years I didn't have a body."

She thinks about that briefly. "I see... wait no. I'm just confused now. I really don't know what's going on now. What you're describing feels close enough to what I'm used to that it doesn't sound like it's just a made-up story like some worlds use to frame what they want people to do but it doesn't quite line up how I'd expect either."

"Hmm! Perhaps we can try again later."

For now, though, their passage through dream-woods has turned to a nice dream-cobblestone road with flickery, drifting, cartoonish farmhouses in the distance.

"We're about there, no trouble today."

"That's good, and sure I'm not in a rush to figure things out."