What's the weirdest body anyone on Mars has?

What's the coolest hobby that doesn't exist here?

Does Mars have monogamy?

What would you miss most about Mars if you were stuck here? Is there anything you'd be relieved about if you were stuck here?

Are there astrophysicists on Mars?

What's the best question you don't think anyone's going to think of to ask?

Can our birds be smarter if they live on Mars?

What's the angriest thing you've ever heard anyone say about Sing?

Does Mars have an ocean and can you have Sing make you fins and live in it?

Can Sing make it easier to get used to new senses or does that take just as much practice?

What if I want my own planet?

Who's the saddest person you know and why?

Is Mars where you want to live or just where you can live?

What is the largest number of limbs anyone you know has?

Can you have eyes that glow? Can they change color?

Can you see UV?

If you couldn't do swordfighting what would you do instead?

How many biomes are there? Can you camp in all of them?

What do people on Mars think makes people cool?

Can you cure insomnia?

Can you be smaller?

What's Martian porn like?

Will we think Martian food is weird?

What's the worst job that anyone on Mars does?

Are there things you've noticed are allowed here but not allowed on Mars? Are there things you've noticed are allowed on Mars but not allowed here?

What if someone doesn't want any enhancements?

Do sports just escalate until everyone involved can lift five tons?

What kinds of families exist on Mars?

Oh these are good questions.

Weirdness is hard to measure objectively but Tarinda's heard of somebody who's a snake with wings! They had to get it done in stages so they'd be able to move around, remapping to a new body plan takes some practice.

TARINDA'S own personal hobby is combat dance. She thinks that one's coolest. But her girlfriend likes trail riding on her pony! It seems like it would be hard to go as far as some of those trails go in this bubble. Also she hasn't seen any horses.

Some Martians are monogamous. It's a personal decision.

Tarinda would most miss her girlfriend and friends, but assuming those don't count, definitely the robot servants. She can't think of anything she'd be particularly relieved about, though she guesses she won't have to ever tell her friend that she's gotten kind of tired of all the Greek-themed set pieces and would rather circle back to the Egypt stuff they were thinking about doing together?

There are astrophysicists.

Tarinda's not sure anyone's going to ask about non-Mars places! There are plenty of those! People live on asteroids and space stations and moons and Earth and Titan and stuff! Mars is the second largest population concentration, but there's more options than just Martian ones.

Birds on Mars are not all that smart so Tarinda is not aware of any special bird-smartness-favoring circumstances there but perhaps if it's important to them for some reason that has not historically come up among the Sing-influenced population it'll be doable?

She met a Sugardream Friend once who had an entire tirade about how Sing, uh, murdered and ate his friend. (Sing runs an emulation of parts of Sugardream to talk to the people it made friends with, since they were very attached to the point of being kind of dependent, though Sing itself does not do making friends and tries to avoid new people befriending the Sugardream emulation.)

Mars has oceans! People can be mermaids if they want! Tarinda tried being a mermaid for three and a half months once when she was 17 but she decided to stop.

New senses being hard to get used to is probably the sort of thing Sing can't help with.

Full planet sized planets within easy travel distance of the solar system are not a dime a dozen. However, not all the dwarf planets have anything on them yet, there are loads of unclaimed asteroids, and magic might make it possible to go farther and reach more planets.

The saddest person Tarinda knows is a guy whose daughter died unfrozen before Sing took over. He spends a lot of time on drugs listening to smart music but he pops out for major holidays and stuff when people invite him to things.

Mars is where Tarinda wants to live! She was born there and all her friends are there. She's been to Earth and a few other places and they're nice and nobody would stop her from moving in, but Mars is her home.

Tarinda has a friend of a friend who had 50 arms at once but it was only temporary for a particular elaborate dance project she wanted to do, usually she just has four.

You can have eyes that glow and change color if you wish!

Tarinda can't personally see UV but some people get that done.

Swordfighting is only one of Tarinda's many fighting related hobbies, but assuming she is not allowed to shift focus to unarmed or archery or something, she does also like singing and flying and hiking and watching shows and dancing.

There are many ways to classify types of biome but there are like... at least 28 according to Page, apparently. You can camp in all of them.

People on Mars think lots of different things are cool. Tarinda's coolest friend is the recreationally sinister Lord Proster, who was elected Lord on the basis of enough people thinking it would be cool to have a guy playing the villain archetype complete with a shark tank as Lord - Lord being a basically ceremonial title that means idiosyncratic things in different places, so other Lords got that way in other ways. There's one who became Lord by personally excavating the entire subterranean city she is Lord of. (Not, like, by hand, she had machinery, but she planned it all out herself and did an unusual amount of personally piloting the machinery vs. just instructing robots.)

Yes.

Yes.

Very varied! Tarinda personally is a lesbian and kinks on heroic rescues and devastatingly adorable hurt-comfort scenarios. She just likes the concept of saving sad girls from horrible fates like having lived in a pre-Sing world and then being very patient and sweet and caring till they're all better even if that takes five hundred years. She is missing this week's update of a serial she's been reading for the last 12 years.

Martian food might have some things they think is weird but they don't have to try it, there will soon be local ingredients and recipes that the robots know how to make and they can order up whatever they want. If they do want to try Martian food, though, she can recommend some stuff!

People only do jobs if they want to, basically - anyone who would rather be lying around listening to music while on drugs, or playing video games, or hanging out in a sex club, or whatever, can just do that - so the jobs that seem unappealing to most people are mostly the ones that somebody is doing out of religious or ideological conviction, or because their time horizon is weird somehow. Examples of the former are mostly living on Earth, but of the latter type, Tarinda's aware of some very frustrated mathematicians who Sing isn't telling spoilers to, presumably because it's more ego-syntonic for them to work things out for themselves.

Tarinda has not noticed things that are allowed here but not on Mars besides, like, killing people and stuff like that which isn't happening where she came from for obvious reasons. She's not pressingly aware of things that are not allowed here and are allowed on Mars though it wouldn't surprise her if there were some, everybody here is kind of trapped in a bubble together and that might lead to having more behavior strictures than you need on a whole planet.

Some people, mostly on Earth, don't want any enhancements. Sing doesn't let them be lost forever when they die but it otherwise doesn't bother them.

Sports sometimes escalate like that but often they instead get more complicated and multivariable so it's not just making a single variable go up. For example, swimming races now typically take place in extreme weather.

Lots of kinds of families. Tarinda personally has a mother, a father, two sisters, and a lot of family friends who were around when she was growing up, but people form all sorts of arrangements, and any combination of people who want to can have children. Without anyone having to be pregnant if they don't specifically value that experience.

All those answers can go up on a cliff and in a newspaper and probably spread by word of mouth from there.

Oh good! Is that all of them?

It's all the non-harassing non-duplicates as of when these were sent out, there could at some point be more but maybe everything else will be a duplicate of one of these. ...There could maybe also be follow-up questions, some of those answers are pretty out there.

She'll happily take followups.

"Personally, I don't know what everyone else is going to say, but I'm wondering if being a Lord means doing anything or being treated any particular way, or what happens if you call the wrong person Lord, and - people using mind-altering substances a lot sounds worrying, I think we try to set things up here so that it's inconvenient to get alcohol and easy to end up accidentally quitting it..."

"Alcohol in particular isn't a problem any more, though people still like it if they've developed a taste or are into making historically accurate mead or something! And most people don't take a ton of drugs, but I'm glad that the saddest person I know can use them to get from party to party till he feels like he's ready to pick up something else. Being a Lord is - honestly mostly just playing pretend, because there are some situations where you want to do that on a larger scale than just having a role in a play, if that makes sense? I can have a setpiece with Proster where he's kidnapped somebody and I have to rescue them, and I can also do that with somebody else, but there are ways in which the fact that Proster was really elected Lord makes the first thing have more depth. You can live your life completely ignoring that anyone is a lord if you want though. Earthlings do, usually, when they come by, they have some continuity with pre-Sing governments and those are at least slightly less pretend and they think Martian lordships are silly. But I think it's fun, so when I visit Proster I bow and call him milord and stuff."

"That does sound fun. I think you have... more time to fill with making up different exact amounts of pretend for your games to be, than we do. Because no one is farming, because there are more people, because people live longer... Anyway. ...I think I'll keep scouting, at some point, not soon, but if there's your world and our world and there was also the old world then we're two out of three on worlds with humans also having powerful friendly aliens who help us raise the dead under different circumstances..."

"That's true! Maybe somewhere something else can get back all the ones that Sing and your magic can't."

"I'm not giving up, anyway, and I don't think Donna or Val will, either. Not if - I didn't really process it before - not if billions of people will stay dead if we don't." She puts a hand to her mouth and whines a little. "I really thought I'd noticed all the things like that."

"What other things are like that?"

She sighs.

"We wouldn't need anyone to suffer if I had just already found somewhere. Or if anyone had. I guess now we don't, and I was wrong that the only way we'd ever find anywhere was if we kept scouting, but - like that. And I don't think birds are quite smart enough to make good choices about life and death. And every year that we don't solve aging is another year that people miss, another year that more people have to miss time, and another year that people hold on too long and make stupid mistakes and snap at people they love and leave everyone's memories of them tainted. And the longer it takes the more the culture will have drifted and at some point - it's not going to go well, when people come face to face with the oldest ancestors we can get back. And their generation didn't have the custom of writing wills and dying intentionally yet, and some of what they wrote sounds like they don't want to be back but we aren't sure. And sometimes I think about whether it's morally right to have kids, and whether that means it's morally wrong to not have kids, and exactly how many and when would be optimal, and then I want to scream. And we treat it as a success that mages as fraction of the population are declining but in absolute terms there are more now. And when we get everyone back that's going to cost so much, resurrection is more expensive than almost everything. And - people don't stop and think about - when they get something by magic, what exactly happened - but why would they, when if they really thought about it they'd notice how little they matter and how much they cost - I have an ongoing argument with Donna about whether beating yourself up about that is worse than being a mage, but we met because she put the scout team together. She's the single person in the world who does the most magic for free, and if she wasn't in the top five I wouldn't have met her. So yeah, she loves her job, of course she does, and I don't think she's friends with anyone who couldn't tolerate it.

"And we don't bring birds back. Or anyone who wasn't born yet. And even if we get the refugees and they all do want to be alive they're still... I don't know if they'll be sadder than your guy. They might be and I don't know if we should fix it first or bring them back before we've spent another five hundred years forgetting things and changing. I do know it probably doesn't even matter what I think we should do."

"Is there something going on with the birds that's - unusual, artificial -"

"No, they're just - a bad idea, someone had in mind that they should have cute personalities and so they're not like fish or insects, but they're still animals, or, like, they're like if children didn't grow up - I don't actually know that no one has ever brought a bird back, I've never personally heard of a specific example and it wouldn't be cheap and the bird couldn't have bought insurance and I don't think we have a list of birds who've died of old age that we're planning to bring back someday. And we do have a list of humans. Multiple copies of it."

"Oh. So people get especially attached to birds but they can't - take especially good care of themselves."

"Yeah. Or, they're fine if they're healthy and wandering around foraging, but not if things get more complicated."

"Well, I think they'll be - safe on Mars, but if they weren't frozen Sing's not going to be able to get them back by itself. Maybe Sing plus magic can do things neither could do alone though."

"Good, I hope that works out. Um, and Sing's not... still murdering and eating people's friends, right?"

"No. The Quiet War's been over for decades."

"Okay. And you're really sure we're not going to destabilize things in a way that'd start another war?"

"The magic is... more like Sugardream than most things are. But it's - I think it would almost have to be too useful to destroy? And it's not the same kind of thing as Sing so Sing can't just plain eat it."

"That's probably for the best. It'd make my husband sad if we got any of his coworkers killed, I think. And differently sad if he didn't get to retire and take up painting."

"I hope they can paint as much as they want."

"Yeah. I figure that's not one of the parts that's very likely to go wrong."