"I don't figure they are but if they're worried that - say, if I wanted to be - something other than more masochistic - more sadistic? If I wanted that, and they wouldn't do it because there was a chance there wouldn't be a Val after they tried, I could make another of me. I'm willing to commit to dying if I turn out to just be an inconvenient spare. Would that change things?"

"...huh. I don't know. Sing doesn't let people die if it can find another way for things to work out but it doesn't usually have spares."

"Does dying here even count?"

"I don't know! It doesn't usually have backups either!"

"...Now that I think of it, not everyone who's dead here got to set their own conditions. Is that something Sing can work with gracefully?"

"Mostly people who were preserved in a way it could wake up before it was customary to ask them for conditions were preserved that way because they'd done something unusual to arrange for it just in case it was possible to wake them up. I think it construed that as consent to wake them for updated instructions."

" - Oh, yeah, culturally we assume people want to be alive until they deliberately kill themselves while sober. We could be wrong about that but no one's expecting opt-in resurrection. What I'm worried won't mesh well is that we have the death penalty."

"Yeah, it doesn't let people do that. ...I guess I can't totally rule out that it will leave some people dead if they're both hostile and magical."

"We never - I can't promise no one has ever wanted someone to just stay dead, but when it comes up politically it's always, 'we are small and weak still recovering from the last apocalypse, we don't have the resources for a prison' or 'it wasn't really their fault, but we can't have them around until we can help' - it's just, there'll be conditions that they didn't set, and if Sing figures, well, this person wants to come back no matter what, but we've been counting on only bringing them back if there's a big inescapable place where they can see the sun and can't get to any children or weapons..."

"There are places like that. Conditioning on them not being magic, I don't know about if they're magic. I visited one once, there's a part of one where they're trying to re-invent everything from scratch except for being immortal, and they let me use it as a backdrop for a piece I was doing with spearfighting."

"...Okay, I am not sure if dropping people on some immortals reinventing everything is actually reasonable and humane criminal justice but it dramatically improves on 'keep them and their victims trapped within thirty miles of each other' - also that sounds great - and no one is, inherently, magic. Whatever the trick for drawing power from another universe was it wasn't among the things that got passed down and might not even be possible in all worlds, I don't even know it and I'm a scout. And you also can't keep a hold of magic after dying and being resurrected. I don't think there's anyone to be particularly worried about unless Sing wanted to try to get back one of the original refugees who were magic-touched and they're not - you couldn't get them back anyway."

"They weren't backed up from before they got magic-touched?"

"Probably not, because if while they were contacting the magic from their other universe they'd been able to back anything up, then they would have been able to use that when they were making this place, and the whole place and the notes we have about the first round of creation would all be different. There'd technically be a few seconds where they were backed up and only a recoverable amount of magic-touched but they were conscious so it's not a usable backup."

"I'm not sure I understand the timeline here."

"People in the old world do strange rituals, the old world is destroyed and they move here without any time to pack or plan, but at the time 'here' means the amount of space the magic made just to have enough room to fit them all with no overlap plus enough air to breathe for a while, so nothing like a closed off room with one sound-baffling black hallway for the magic to hide in. At this point, anyone who lands in the magic is lost, the rest have varying numbers of seconds in which to find some way to protect themselves, most of them make it and they win the inevitable fight with the things wearing their friends' bodies. Although if you read really old literature you get a sense that none of them felt very victorious about it. And, uh, then they made the world."

"And then they - refined the strange rituals into the current method of doing magic?"

"Sort of? Less 'refined' and more 'dropped all the parts about reaching into another universe' and - things here don't actually happen for narrative reasons, they follow rules about how atoms relate to each other when you're not directly doing magic to them, I wouldn't expect a bloody diagram to do anything just because someone thinks it has the right vibes - "

"Was this universe made with the - rules of magic in mind?"

"I think it might've initially been copied from an empty world that hadn't managed to destroy itself but I'm less clear on - why the initial refugees didn't immediately dissolve from the strong force not happening to exist here, than I am on why it has the things it has inside it. But the magic made there be enough here to build on, and I assume it had its own convenience in mind."

"The strong force didn't exist?"

"No, it did, and I don't know why it existed instead of not existing. There are worlds where it doesn't, although I've never been to one because I would die if I did, and - I mean, in some sense the answer is 'because the magic wouldn't have used a set of physical laws that would kill us' but I'm not clear on where it got them from or how it went about causing them to apply to this world or how it knew in advance what kind of laws would be necessary."

"Huh. Maybe once everything more important is figured out Sing'll ask it."

"I hope that works."

Nothing that interesting happens in the rest of the day. Val fixes dinner and borrows a neighborhood oven for it. They offer Tarinda a room with what might in fact be the softest blanket in Sathend.

In the morning someone tracks her down to offer her a lot more questions. "At least these seem a little lighter than the last ones," he says with a half shrug. "Metaphorically."

Tarinda is up for giving them a try! What are they?