As he closes his hand on the fish rock, the shell cracks, something inside is squashed, and viscous goo flows out over his hand and onto the floor. 

There is not a flash of light. Almost the opposite, for a moment the fish rock seems to pull in light. Then there is a invisible pulse, which is felt in the gut, in the mind and in the soul.

It is a scream, and it carries out and echoes across dimensions.

GRYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!

Everyone within a kilometer can feel it, less intense the farther away. It's not painful, nor damaging, but it's startling, and it's intense.

So everyone notices, and so does...

It is a quiet cycle. The ecosystem is at peace, and the Restorer spent most of it observing a new school which was finding its bearings.

The particular fish species has been gathering in one major population for a long time, and this splinter threathened to veer into new territory, but it seemed they found a set of landscape formations that suited them, so the Restorer could leave them to their settlement.

 ..gryaaah..

The distant echo rises beyond the background noise of what can be conceptualized as a psychic ether, only because it is a ~frequency of sorts the Restorer is paying close attention to.

The Restorer feels a moment of joy.

<Ah, the humans!>

<Wait, it's been a while. Why now? It's likely an emergency. Let's go!>

They stop in the middle of their swim, change their fishtail into bipedal legs, and disappear in a warble and a rush of bubbles.

8 seconds after the scream, in the next available space that Vornmeth is not occupying, the Restorer appears, accompanied by a warble.

They promptly inflate like a balloon. and then gradually acclimatize and deflate over a few seconds.

Then they notice the goo all over Vornmeth's hand, and they make a gesture with their hand. The goo drips off of Vornmeth and becomes a blob which eagerly crawls over to the Restorer's foot.

The Restorer looks around and takes in the room, curiously.

The room is actually a tent, pitched on the sand, because the diplomats were worried about their chances of communicating the problem with limited vocabulary.

Vornmeth turns to them and begins signing.

"Hello Restorer of Salt Water. I am Vornmeth. That is a hurricane."

He points out to sea, at the dense storm clouds crouched on the horizon. Already, the wind has started to pick up and fat raindrops spatter across the tent.

Then Vornmeth gestures back at the city, visible on the other side as a collection of tall glass and steel buildings.

"The hurricane will crush our town halls. The hurricane will crush us."

The vocabulary is, as always, fresh in their mind, but vocabulary they have not before heard remains unknown. They'll repeat back what they understand.

"I am Restorer of Salt Water. You are Vornmeth."

Oh, that is macroscopic atmospheric movement.

"That is a hurricane. Hurricane... is the crusher of town halls? Hurricane is the crusher of humans?"

That does seem like an emergency.

Time pressure, potential large scale improper death, explicit call for help.

Yes, Vornmeth will be able to bear the cost.

"I atypically-display... I am the atypically-displayer of Vornmeth? I atypically-eye Vornmeth? Vornmeth atypically-eye me? Vornmeth is a screen that displays me? I am a screen that displays Vornmeth?"

They seem like they're hesitant in which words to use.

<Wait wait wait there was a thing...>

"I atypically-link me to Vornmeth?"

None of those sentences make a super amount of sense except the last one. But it's quite promising.

"You atypically-link you to me," he agrees.

<Ok great!>

The Restorer makes eye contact with Vornmeth, and the normally quite intense eyes become multiply more so. The red of their eyes start glowing, and others in the tent can see it lightly tint the room. 

For Vornmeth it is as if the eyes pierce through him. 

He suddenly gains awareness of a pressure on his mind, which his brain conceptualizes as a

knock knock

He can feel a new affordance in his mind, related to it. Does he do the new thing?

A) This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened in his life!!!

B) Yes.

He takes a deep breath because this is actually still an emergency situation, and then reaches out toward the new mental affordance, intending to 'link' into it.

Some thing enters, or is invited in, or makes itself known. There is so much new stimulus, so the brain does what it always does, and maps it to something familiar.

He finds himself in the part of his home or other safe location where he'd eat with visitors, perhaps a dining room. 

On the walls, there is a tapestry of thoughts, memories and associations. When he thinks of the hurricane, there is a miniature of it on a desk. When he remembers talking to the diplomats, their faces appear in a painting. Deeper memories and tacit knowledge appears faintly on the wallpaper.

A being which quickly condenses into the shape of the Restorer enters the room. They walk carefully, as if wary of stepping on anything that can't take it. They also carefully keep their eye fixed on Vornmeth, and do not look at the memories and thoughts on the walls.

Vornmeth finds himself sitting in a chair, and the Restorer sits down in a chair across from him, mimicing his posture.

What is the location his mind picked for this meeting?

They're in his tiny city apartment — small because it's on the top level, and has a view out over the city — with all the reconfigurable furniture packed in the public-facing configuration. That means his personal belongings are mostly packed away in opaque cabinets and patterned screens have been pulled down over the edges of the room, to conceal the exact details. It's a location that takes easily to being used to display memories.

Vornmeth spends a moment to take this in, but quickly grasps the metaphor. He puts his sense of direction on the table, and paints the path of the storm (past and projected) onto the resulting map. Then he grabs the memories of the briefing meeting about population numbers and evacuation progress, and layers that on top as a purple haze — sparse in the industrial district, packed elsewhere, narrowing into dense channels that run away from the city along the primary train routes.

The Restorer picks up on the intention to Show something to them, and looks down at the table.

They take this in, carefully cataloguing the information about the storm. As they sit in this space, their body language gradually becomes more human. When they get to the population numbers, they startle.

<So many!> 

The thought can fuzzily be made out by Vornmeth, as if it was an echo.

They point to the purple haze and sign "Humans?"

Vornmeth nods, and then realizes he has better options.

"Yes. The purple haze corresponds to population density. There are other creatures that live in the city, but it is primarily designed by, built for, and inhabited by humans."

He speaks slowly, speaking and signing at the same time, each word following the previous with a deliberate pause as he thinks about the meaning of these things in a way that he hopes echoes to Restorer of Salt Water in the same way that a fuzzy thought came to him.

The Restorer squints and focuses through this. Then they interrupt him with a very human shake of the hand, palm toward him.

"I am the... atypical-pusher of Vornmeth."

They reach out a hand as if to give him something, and a glowing ball materializes, hovering over their hand. They nod invitingly and gesture to touch it.

Might as well pay for the full hour, as the saying goes.

He reaches forward to touch the orb.

As soon as he touches the orb, images flash through his mind. He experiences a series of concepts tied to hand gestures, one after another, in rapid succession. Then a set of templates of how these are allowed to be combined. And then it ends.

If he's studied the records of the first contact, this list very closely matches the complete known vocabulary and grammar of LCTL sign language of the Restorer, 

There are some areas in which his understanding of the sign differs from the conveyed one. For example, the intuition behind "town hall" seems to be closer to "nest". It seems the new, constructed meaning of "atypically" is consistent between the þereminians and the Restorer, it's indeed the supernatural things the Restorer can do, but there is added context of them being "gifts" as in literally gifted, as well as a sense of "channeling" or being the conduit. The grammatical construct for "if .. then .." seems to not imply any causality, it's just a list of events in sequence.

This rapid transference of information blanks out his sense of the mind space. He comes to in the apartment, now with a complete understanding of the very few words the Restorer knows.

"Vornmeth is the atypical-pusher of me!" they say, with a sense of invitation and reciprocity.

Ah! That's really cool!

Vornmeth spends a moment working to isolate LCTL, since sending a mixture of languages sounds likely to confuse things. With determined focus, they pour their understanding of the language into the same kind of abstract glowing ball.

It is bigger than what Restorer of Salt Water shared. Maybe too big. A whole grammar, thousands of words ... but Vornmeth has trusted them so far, so he continues to trust that they will not ingest an energy field big enough to harm them.

The Restorer doesn't seem concerned about the size of the energy ball. They reach out and touch it, and then relax back in reverie as they sort through the large collection of concepts.

Unlike Vornmeth, they seem able to continue to be present in the mind space while experiencing the transfer, and they gaze out over the landscape outside the apartment window. As they do, they seem to borrow a bit of the space, using the landscape to place word-concepts upon, so Vornmeth can follow along in the progress.

It still takes a while, and Vornmeth has a moment to think while the Restorer absorbs.

How is Vornmeth's own understanding structured? Or, which artificial structure did he create as part of collecting LCTL, if any?

Is he providing the spoken mode as well, in addition to the signed mode?

Vornmeth learned LCTL as a second language, his native language being SCOL. So, he has the regimented, explicit understanding of someone who learned first by rote, and only after that became fluent.

LCTL's signed, spoken, and written modes aren't really separate. The grammar corresponds exactly, and he learned all three forms of most words at the same time. So the Restorer gets it all, a wibbly-wobbly pile of pragmatics layered atop a more structured framework of grammar and semantics.

Utterances are made out of statements, statements start with relation-words, the arguments to a relation have marked cases, here is how converbs work, here is how reparenting works, ... And then here are the words, as they are defined, and then as they are used, which is almost but not quite the same. Here are the phrases that are in the middle of lexicalizing but which have not yet been rendered down into vocabulary. Here are the rules for inventing new words.

He was going for thoroughness, over purity. Some fragments of SCOL come through as context, no matter how much he has tried to get LCTL and only LCTL. There are still gaps in his technical vocabulary. But it is, by and large, complete.

(And now we arrive at the moment where the character knows more about a conlang than the author, which means there is bound to be mistakes in the text, that a deep sea creature specialized on learning to communicate with anything would not make. You have my condolences, though not my regret. I made this bed very consciously, I'll lay in it snugly. :3)

As they make their may through the vocabulary, they start signing along, very quickly. Relation-words, statements, utterances. Words, sentences, grammar of increasing complexity. They pause with some amusement when they arrive at words they learned wrong the first time.

Then they examine the written and spoken modes.

<Oh that's how the noises work!>

They go back to the beginning and try the new modes out, by doing all three modes together. The written, by summoning text on the landscape, letters flashing by. The spoken, audiating sourceless words out loud to the mind space. The sounds are all in Vornmeths voice, or in the voice of the person he associates the phrase most strongly with.

When they've done a pass through the corpus a second time, no more than 2 minutes have passed.

They look back at Vornmeth and summon noises (mouth closed), images of written word and sign along at the same time. Sometimes stopping to search for a word or to correct themselves, they say:

"Thanks you... Thank you for the gift of your patterns, hm, language. It is a beauty of experience... It is beautiful to experience.

The noises. The spoken... mode of the language, you make the sounds with your... Mouth, yes? Do you have an understanding of the shape... Of the anatomy of the.. vocal apparatus? Would you be willing to share that understanding? I have opportunity... I have the ability to change myself, if I know what to change into."

"Oh, certainly!" Vornmeth agrees. "Here —"

He recalls basic anatomy, a cut-away diagram of the human airway appearing on the curtain behind him. He quickly runs through the phonemic inventory of LCTL ("pa, ta, ga, na, ..."), the diagram moving along with his speech and the points of articulation labeled.

"The trickiest part is probably the voice box," he adds, tapping his Adam's apple and creating another diagram, this one a close-up of a voice box. "There are folds of muscle that stretch like this to change pitch, and you can use that to alter the quality of the sounds. But using only the signed mode is also acceptable — there are some humans with broken voices who just sign, and that's fine."

They follow this with interest, and seem to gain as much information from what is being explicitly presented, as from tacit knowledge absorbed through the mindspace through the implicit consent.

"Thank you very much!"

As Vornmeth was describing the anatomy of the human voice, a background ~noise that had been steadily rising gets over a threshold of being noticable. Vornmeth can conceptualize it as noise, and simultaneously as a distorted blackened fuzz covering everything in the landscape beyond a certain radius from the apartment. It slowly creeps closer, and the noise slowly increases.

If he pays attention to it, it feels like the nonsense generated in the space between waking and sleeping, like a thousand dreams and a thousand despairing thoughts intermingling, like white noise meets static meets clipping, like the desire to give in and fall, like the space between remembering and forgetting.

The Restorer perks up at this, adopts a worried expression, and speaks somewhat hurriedly:

"The way we're, hm, linked at the moment is not stable. Your type of mind can only experience it a limited amount without a break. If we push it too far, you'll experience harm, best described as echoes of insanity.

We yet have a fair degree of margin, but we shouldn't waste time. Try not to tune in to the noise.

Are there more spheres of information, or spheres of a skill, you wish to share before we end this connection? Something it would help if I understood in detail, or a task I could perform competently, that would help for this crisis? I estimate you can safely share about two such transferences."

Vornmeth struggles not to focus on the noise, an unpracticed sort of mental exercise.

"I — now that you have language we can explain things, but ..."

And he builds another 'skill ball' about Emergency response — what systems are in place to help support people during emergencies, what the plans are if Restorer of Salt Water cannot help with the hurricane, where he expects things to break down first, and the sort of wordless intuition of 'how bad is it' that one builds up during a career in Emergency Services.

"I can give you another on the mechanics of hurricanes, if you need it? But I would prefer to disconnect with more margin before going insane."

As they absorb the emergency response skill ball, they adopt the concerned expression which is so often associated with such professions.

"Thank you. I do not have intuition for how... Air behaves at scale. It seems quite different than the streams of the Depths. It would be useful for using my gifts on it. And I do think we have safe margin still, but it's your call."

They gesture to a lever stuck to the ground, which Vornmeth automatically understands is an affordance for ejecting the visitor out of his mind.

a tree with an umbrella with a flower pattern that grows new petals that fall in fall as the leaves brown a platonic triangle snuggle the essence of every concert there is a concern about how we handle crises and you've always known your mother was always behind you with pancakes the train is late cold sweat overheating computer core an awkward interaction in a queue throwing cue balls at the wall making patterns and writing that haunts you if you forget and

Just fall

... yeah Vornmeth trusts their visitor a lot but he's out. Someone else can explain hurricanes with actual words. He yanks the lever.

He very suddenly finds himself alone in his own mind again, chair across from him vacated. 

The whispers and the noise don't disappear, but he can see the fuzz immediately stopped approaching. Instead it seems to have started to recede, getting farther away at a pace much slower than the previous approach. A certain kind of pressure disappeared.

loneliness on a hilltop with tea and biscuits falling into deep water and joyously fleeting like a trumpet with a toothache

As he examines the emptiness left by the Restorer, he notices he can see his real world senses overlaid. Perhaps he always could, but wasn't paying attention, like when you're focusing on feeling the shape of something in your pocket to the point where you don't pay attention to your visual stimulus. He has a sense that, with practice, he could act in both places simultaneously.

Without the Restorer's presence, though, the awareness of the apartment room starts to fade, to completely disappear after a few minutes. If he tries, he can hold on to it and have it fade slower, but he can't stop it.

In the tent the Restorer is still looking at him, but without the piercing red glow active. The body language has changed dramatically, they now meet eye contact and then look away periodically in a socially comfortable way, they stand at ease instead of completely still like a hunting animal, and there are readable facial expressions. While paying attention to how he comes out of the mind space, they're also palpating their own throat.

How has the people in the real word reacted to the two of them staring silently and unmovingly at each other for the last five minutes, lit by the red of the Restorer's eyes?

As much as he wants to cling to the visualization, the topic expert said that he should avoid paying attention to the fuzz. So. He is going to let it go.

While they were out, someone helpfully moved the table such that if Vornmeth had fallen over, he would have fallen safely on the sand instead of bonking his head on a metal table. Other than that, and some cautious staring, the attending Emergency Services personnel left them alone to complete the process.

"Sorry to eject, that ... thing on which I am not focusing was scary and uncomfortable," he speaks-and-signs, because he's not sure how much the Restorer has integrated their knowledge of the modes. "A hurricane is powered by the evaporation of warm water off of the surface of the ocean. This rising warm air meets descending cold air to create a vertical storm cell. When these cells form in the right pattern, they can create a low-pressure zone in the center of a spiral of cells. The existence of the low-pressure zone draws the storm cells inward, speeding their rotation and reinforcing the motions of the storm. To stop or weaken it, you need to either kill its angular momentum, decrease its temperature relative to surrounding air, eliminate the low-pressure zone in the center, or ideally some combination of these. But we don't actually have to stop the hurricane, we just need to keep it from hitting the city. Diverting it south is safe; that area is not inhabited by humans at the moment, and the ecosystem is more used to hurricanes, since they rarely hit this far north. The hurricane has some momentum, but will change course to follow low-pressure zones."

"... if you want to try linking with someone else, I can get you a meteorologist, who will have an intuitive understanding of these processes."

The Restorer listens to this, with a look of focused attention. At the end, they sign "I see" at the same time as opening their mouth to emit a SCREEECH.

When they see someone startle at this, they sign "I apologize. Could you all look away for a moment?"

They put their fingertips back on their throat and massage it thoughtfully. They then walk up to the wall of the tent, and when everyone is looking away, there is a warble, just the same as in the recordings of the first contact.

When everyone looks back the Restorer has walked back to where they stood, now experimentally sounding out vowels. If someone peeks into their mouth, there is a black tongue and marbled teeth instead of the earlier baleen.

"Aaa.Ooo. O- A- Eee" 

They then move on to the consonants, in the same order as Vornmeth described them in mindspace.

"Pa. Ta. Ga. Na..."

They start experimenting their way through longer combinations of phonemes, and try some sentences out.

"Oadev is oed. Wader is wed. Water is wet. Water is wet."

"The trickest bart is brobably. propaply. Pro-ba-bly. The voice box."

"The trickiest part is probably the voice box."

"A hurricane is powered by the evaporaton. Evaporation of warm water off of the surfaf. Surface of the ocean."

They then address Vornmeth again, now mimicking him in speaking-and-signing. People around may notice that the Restorer has inherited any dialect or idiosyncracies that Vornmeth has when speaking.

"I have some doubts about whether I can affect the hurricane directly. Air is not my domain, the scale is grand, and my power here is limited - I am far from the depths and thus my connection is weak. Perhaps there is something I can do to encourage the water to redistribute in such a way that less warm water is close to the surface of the ocean, so it doesn't... Evaporate?

Communing with a meteorologist may well give me the understanding required to know more.

What other areas of the emergency response may I be helpful in?"

They look around the room. If there is a standard for which roles are filled during an emergency response meeting like this, they'll start identifying people in the room from clothing or context clues, with only slightly worse accuracy than Vornmeth would if he found himself in an unfamiliar team. ("And you must be the diplomat..?")

Who is there with them?

This is þereminia! Of course there's a standard!

In this case, it's specialized shoulder patches denoting roles. Present in this tent are: a linguist, because they were expecting communication problems; a coordinator, who is currently helping to organize the deployment of storm barriers; Vornmeth, for executive decision-making; a communications specialist, currently idle after getting the satellite link up; and a general gopher and a driver, who are both double-checking the high-wind-rated anchors on the tent and equipment.

This isn't actually the main dispatch area — that is, sensibly, in one of Emergency Service's hardened underground bunkers about two hours north. This team was just intended to try to contact Restorer of Salt Water and then retreat into the city proper.

(After seeing powerful and finely-controlled wide-scale hydrotelekinesis, they weren't inclined to underestimate how much water Restorer could stop).

"If you can bring cold, deep ocean water to the surface, and send the surface water to the depths, that will help," Vornmeth agrees. "Same thing with inverting the air layers, but if air is harder than water it's not worth focusing on that. While the winds are dangerous, most secondary damage is going to come from the storm surges. Are you capable of either quickly erecting or acting as a break-water to keep waves from hitting the city? Alternatively, can you get the water that is currently in the city drain system out into the ocean so that the drain system can handle the storm better? Part of the danger of the hurricane is that the early rains are already taking up capacity in our drainage system, which lowers the peak surges of rainwater they can absorb."

"If those are unviable we have a list of more ideas."

Just because they weren't inclined to underestimate Restorer of Salt Water doesn't mean they didn't make a priority-ordered list of possible interventions. That's just good planning.

The Restorer asks a few clarifying questions about the responsibilities of each person in the room, partially to verify they're using their bestowed emergency response skill correctly, and partially they ask questions that resolve ambiguities in a way that implies fairly high seniority.

If any of the humans communicate that this is a temporary shelter, they will suggest that they start moving.

"I could probably have a noticable effect in moving ocean water around at scale, but this water is not my water. It is not of the Depths. It does not heed the call as eagerly. It is likely worth a try though."

"Air, I'm profoundly inefficient at. At this scale, it's not viable at all. There are costs associated I'm not willing to pay."

"I could likely easily act as a break-water, and there are possibilities for erecting permanent structures, but they would involve bringing a piece of the Depths here, which has its own downsides. Your species are brittle to many of its effects. Not to say I would veto it, it just means there will be cleanup and follow-up problems. It would be quick though, and I wouldn't need to stay in place."

"Moving water through narrow pathways to move it is feasible, but I would need to commune with someone who has a deep understanding of where those pathways lay. As mentioned, this water is not my water. It would not tell me its location lightly."

The Restorer looks out at the hurricane again.

"Shall we start with one of these ideas while continuing to communicate and plan other actions? It seems we're under a bit of time pressure."

"I have the gift of Transversal. It is the gift of making large distances small. If at least one side is the Depths, my range is immense. If none of them are, it's modest but significant. I would need to be able to see where I'm going, or commune with someone who has a good understanding of the location I'm going to. I can bring people with me, but experiencing the, hm, atypical (they smile slightly) is something one of your kind only can do a limited amount before needing time away from it. Several trips should be fine, with only temporary symptoms. Many trips I will not agree to bring the same person on."

"Is there something we can do right now? Is anyone willing to come with to continue communication?"

The coordinator glances at Vornmeth, who nods an approval.

"That's my role," she volunteers. "Coming with you to maintain communications, that is. As for which thing to attempt first ..." 

"Can your Transversal of distances carry large quantities of water? Does it affect temperature gradients? Does it maintain momentum? If so, you could make an impact by connecting one side of the storm cell to the other. If not, it's best to get barriers deployed before the first storm surges hit, and then clear out the drain systems. Salharn is familiar with the places barriers should go, and can put you in touch with one of the engineers familiar with the drain system."

"What are the effects that your barrier of the Depths would have, to necessitate cleanup?"

He gestures for the others to pack the temporary shelter back in. It was a reasonable thing to prepare, but now that they're not having communication or transport difficulties that need to be managed from the front, they should pack it in and get somewhere less exposed.

"I can use Transversal to ask two equal shapes across distances to find themselves in each other's place. This is less costly to use often, but more costly to use for large shapes."

"I can also allow space itself to find a tear inside it, which continuously allows the collapse of distances. This is quite costly as a starting point, and requires me to continue to pay dues as time goes on. Space does not always look kindly upon being torn, bent and collapsed. This certainly allows moving large amounts of water, especially water that can be accelerated, since it's a continuously open rift. "

"The barrier would be made out of something that is by no means brittle or malleable, and which would have slight passive effects on members of your species, not unlike those which communing have. It would be possible for me to come back after recovering for some time, and encourage it to return or decay, but you would have to live alongside it for some time."

"Please look away for a moment."

Something warbles in their hand. When they turn back, they present a small clam, black as (an unpolluted) night sky, with an ornate pattern and some spots of light. It languidly opens and extends a short tentacle with a pearl on the end. When nothing happens for a few moments, it slowly retracts it and closes around it again.

"This is one of my friends from the Depths. They've agreed to convey a communing connection, should it prove useful. If there is someone whose knowledge you'd like me to inherit, have them touch its pearl and they will be invited to commune with me, even across distance. Unlike several members of the Depths, their body is safe to touch for your species."

They offer the clam to the room.

That sounds like an (esoteric, scary, fascinating) specialized communication device. The communications equipment specialist steps forward to take hold of the alien.

"Does your friend have environmental or food needs that we should take into account?"

Meanwhile, there is a rapid discussion about whether a long-term barrier or a spatial portal would be more helpful. Vornmeth makes the I have follow-up questions but do not wish to interrupt gesture.

The Restorer looks into space for a moment.

"Try not to ask them to open when it's windy, they'll dry. They don't particularly need anything on these time scales, but they prefer being submersed in the water of the depths when they are not busy helping. Your kind of sea water is a sufficient substitute."

"If this draws long, they've agreed to click their shell twice to indicate they'd like to communicate their needs. You are then invited to commune with them specifically so this may be arranged."

The Restorer looks into space again.

"In addition, if I need to get ahold of whoever is holding them, they've agreed to click thrice."

Great! That's all quite reasonable. The communication specialist goes to track down a bucket and a microphone that should be able to pick up clicking.

"Do you know how fast you can move water?" Vornmeth asks. "Based on your described limitations, we suspect that the storm-barrier option is probably the best bet, but if you can move water fast enough through a portal, you might be able to cause a big enough shock to collapse the storm cells feeding the hurricane, and then our existing infrastructure would deal with the remnant storms without too much trouble."

The clam opens carefully and licks the arm of the communications specialist in an exploratory fashion, then retracts the tentacle and closes again, seeming satisfied with what it learned. The residue feels like something between salt water and dissolved potato starch.

"Well, I can apply pressure to water to the point of..." the Restorer quotes a few approximate numbers of pressure and area of continuous traversal within comfortable strain such that the þereminians can get an impression.

The meteorologist that Emergency Services roped in does not believe that will be sufficient.

"Okay — we're going with the storm barrier plan. I have a specialist who is willing to share her detailed understanding of the city's layout and storm drain system. Do you see that building with the 3-4 blinking red light on top?"

(Why yes, of course tall þereminian building's navigation-lights have distinct patterns for identification.)

"Could you teleport the two of us up there, meet with the specialist, and then use her knowledge of locations to go around creating storm barriers in the most important spots? Alternatively, we can take the truck if that is more efficient."

The Restorer turns and peers into the distance.

"Certainly. Give me a moment."

The Restorer steps out and around the corner of the tent, and there is a warble. 

As the Restorer comes back, the people in the tent can see a new growth on the side of the Restorer's body, and the tail end of some sea water floating through the air to pour into this new pouch. The blob of goo that used to be a fish egg scurries up the many-knee'd leg of the Restorer and dives into the pouch.

The Restorer then speaks. "Try not to focus on the way the air moves for a few seconds, please. The rest of you might want to look away, but it's not crucial."

They give everyone a few seconds to react, they put one hand on the shoulder of Vornmeth, and one hand on the shoulder of Salham. The hands are still moist with water of the Depths, and the hand is slender and gentle.

And then it feels like something is pulling their stomach into itself, as the interior of the tent disappears, and the air does something absolutely incomprehensible.

For a moment, as long as instant between exhale and inhale, there is only void.

And then they are on the top of the building, overlooking the city. 

In their mind, the memory of the void echoes, like the reverb of a dark cave, for a few moments. Then it dissipates.

The Restorer looks around curiously, both at the top of the building, and at what they can see of the city.

Gah.

The city is: big.

It is a fairly typical þereminian city, which means that it is laid out in neat hexagonal blocks (more efficient packing of things into walkable areas, fewer distressingly long and open straight streets) each of which contains either a park (green space is important to mental health) or a cluster of buildings with shops and public venues on the bottom floors and residences on the upper floors.

Buildings less than three stories (of which a few are visible, even this close to the city center) generally have exteriors designed for climb-ability, with little ledges and hand-holdy bricks. Taller buildings have paintings or murals on some of their faces; all of the buildings have window-boxes with plants in them. This is one of the tallest buildings in the city, so the roofs of other buildings are visible. These tend toward gravel raked into elaborate patterns surrounding the vents of AC units and the rooftop tables and gardens of a people who enjoy standing on top of tall things.

The regular pattern of the city is somewhat broken up by the mouth of the river that flows through it and opens out into the bay, splitting around a pair of oblong islands. The waterfront is a mixture of industrial loading equipment and beach, separated off from each other by walls of trees to isolate the sound some. Normally, the whole area would be alive with people. Right now, it is eerily still — there are still plenty of people in the city, but many of them are underground, on the subway as they evacuate. The remainder are sheltering indoors and staying out of the way of the Emergency Services people. There aren't too many of those either, but the ones that are visible are moving from building to building, doing wellness checks or checks that buildings are fully evacuated, or laying sandbags to direct flood waters, or reporting on the state of the storm drains. A few stragglers jog through the empty streets to get back home before the storm properly makes landfall.

The river is already visibly swollen with rain, fast-running and cloudy as it empties out into the bay.

A woman in a rumpled green robe ducks out from under the shelter of one of the doors up onto the roof, and has a brief word with Vornmeth where he explains what to expect about linking with Restorer of Salt Water and double-checks what information she plans to convey.

The woman turns and gives a bow. "I am Gravilhon, chief engineer of Adequately Un-Swampy City's underground works, including our drainage and subway systems," she tells the Restorer. "I believe I will be able to give you an accurate understanding of how everything is located and connected, and how to place different kinds of barrier for maximum effectiveness."

The Restorer is quite taken with the view. It is noticably larger than the small town they landed in during their first visit, and it's not the scale, it's the intricacy. Their reverie is broken as Gravilhon speaks, and they turn and listen to this.

Their body language is similar to Vornmeth's, reassuringly steady, as if they're carefully integrating what you're saying, deferential to your expertise without giving up their decision making. It's less reassuring with, you know, the scales and the red eyes and the alien fins, though.

"I see. I don't have a name in the same way you do, but my role is to tend to, and care for, the Depths from which I come. I've gone by Restorer of Salt Water here, and while it is incomplete, it's not incorrect, and I'm happy to continue to go by it."

"Are you ready to commune?" they say, and their eyes go from carefully listening to piercingly intense with a red glow. 

knock knock

Her eyes are dragged to theirs, and she marvels at the unexpected sensation.

She was prepared for this! By an explanation all of 30 seconds ago, but, you know, that counts.

She invites the Restorer of Salt Water in, and finds herself in a recreation of her childhood home — a cozy log cabin up in the mountains, strewn with piles of projects. Some are complete, some are in progress, and some are being taken apart for parts. The real house has her dad's model train set, and her parent's card-loom, and her childhood robotics that they're too sentimental to get rid of, even if she hardly visits ...

This mental space has more abstract representations of projects, memories, and periods of her life as well. She lifts a representation of her gaming group's plans for a magical flying castle out of the way and drops the big tuck-away work table down from the wall so that they have somewhere to focus that isn't covered in all of her ... her.

She pauses for a moment, and then remembers Vornmeth's advice about visualizing things. She digs around in the clutter, pulling out a miniature (extremely detailed) model of her city's infrastructure, and letting it unfold on the table. The above ground parts are kind of hazy, although a few buildings are fully detailed, but the parts winding through the transparent concept-of-ground are perfectly detailed. Here is the main subway railyard, and its connection into the wonky interchange under north-downtown. Here is the place where the subway has an inexplicable (infuriating) kink in it because of poor surveying, here is the place where it slopes up to avoid the higher water table from the river. Here are the caverns for holding extra discharge, here are the pumps that motivate that water out into the sea (running full tilt right now, of course). Here is how the rock is permeable, here is where the deep-driven spikes of skyscraper foundations reach down to the deeper layers. Here is where the underground electricity and sewer lines run, and the two pumping stations that send sewage to the water-treatment plant to the north. Here is the remnants of the badly-designed and short-lived pneumatic tube system that has been repurposed to run fiberoptic interconnects, and the place where the fresh water supply lines have to shift down to avoid them.

She gets a bit lost in making sure all the details are exactly right, and almost forgets that the Restorer of Salt Water is there.

As before, the Restorer enters and takes the position that is subconsciously indicated as the visitor's place, in this case standing next to the big tuck-away work table. Again, they carefully avoid looking at things not indicated by Gravilhon, mostly through continued eye contact which might re-add some of the alienness of their presentation.

As Gravilhon starts visualizing the city - her city - the Restorer picks up on the intent to show, and starts absorbing all the details. They carefully absorb all the small connections, all the history mentioned in passing, all the carefully collected details. Gravilhon might notice that collecting the details is more exhausting than it would be on her own. No matter the shape of the transfer, the transfer comes with a cost.

After about three minutes, the Restorer realizes Gravilhon might not end up getting to the locations of the storm barriers before she's spent.

The Restorer, getting a sense for the emotional life of Gravilhon through the osmosis of being in the mind space, hesitates about speaking. Instead they add a set of miniatures of storm barriers of different sizes and nudges them onto the edge of the model, on her side of the table, by way of invitation.

Oh! Right. She was looking at the calculations for these just a little while ago. See, the storm surge is going to be channeled by the shape of the bay, so they need breakwaters here and here. Those are hard to do with sandbags; they should be this tall, and angled to direct the force of the water like this. These other areas won't be directly hit by waves but will have to resist flooding. This corridor needs to stay clear for the continuing evacuation, so lower barriers will be needed here and here, but Emergency Services already deployed sandbags there, and if the Restorer of Salt Water needs space to clear out the existing drains, that water is best directed this way, which means this barrier needs to go in last ...

She rapidly places the desired barriers, sorting them in order of priority, and conveying the wordless engineer's intuition of necessary structural characteristics.

She glances up at the Restorer, and then looks over at the model aircraft hanging in the corner.

"Is there any other information that you'd like me to give you? Do you need to ... take it, or anything?"

"It is your intent of what is for me that steers what I choose to look at and absorb. This mode of conveyance is sufficient!"

They consider for a few moments. In a manner that might feel to Gravilhon like looking in a mirror, the Restorer is absorbed by the miniature.

"Okay, so flush out the drainage systems this way, and... Mhm, mhm..."

"If the barriers could be any size and somewhat free when it comes to shapes, would these shapes be ideal? How many meters would this be, ideally? In some cases, larger might be easier."

"... oh, well if larger might be easier, it would be best to oversize this one and this one. Standard storm barriers are shaped like this for stability, but if you can keep them fixed in place somehow, you could curve the outer wall like this to shed force — Oh! If the shape is free, you could use a valvular conduit here to let water drain from behind this barrier but not come through it. That will only work on these two, though, since the others need to be whole."

She sets a diagram of a valvular conduit on the table beside the city model, and then accompanies it with a sense of the geometry of a force-dispersing seawall.

"For scale, the class A barriers must be at least four meters. The rest have a height profile scaled off of that, like this. But extra height won't be a problem anywhere. Greater length mostly only helps in the sense that it will let you cover further down the priority list, but if it's easier to have longer barriers you can freely extend into these areas — they're shut down to traffic and should be empty — or any of the parks."

"Ah, alas, not that free of shape sadly."

The Restorer studies the area where extra long barriers could go. As they do, Gravilhon becomes aware of a faint psychic noise around the edges of her awareness.

The Restorer notices that she's noticed. 

"The start of the end of our time in this space is here. I believe I've understood what I needed to understand here. If there's nothing else you'd like to show me, I will leave your mind now. Or you may eject me if you prefer." 

They gesture to a button assembled from parts out of her childhood robotics projects to the side of the table.

"Try not to focus on the noise."

She was briefed on this part. She tries to focus on figuring out whether she's left anything out, rather than the opportunity to explore the effects of actual magic.

Nope! No. She has nothing more to say.

"I think that's everything. Thank you; please depart."

They nod, walk away from the table, and out the door to the outside of the cabin. 

Gently, the environment of the cabin starts to fade, and the awareness of her body slowly reappears.

The other two þereminians can tell that this is ending before Gravilhon comes to, by the red of the Restorer's eyes going dim.

The Restorer blinks, and turns to look at the city again. Their city, that they will protect. This time, there is less amazement, and more analysis.

They gradually work through the deep knowledge they inherited and fit it, piece by piece, to the real world. Subways, caverns, drains and barrier locations.

They stand like Gravilhon, when she's too absorbed by something interesting to look awkward.

Gravilhon takes a deep breath, to avoid fretting now that the project has been passed off to someone else for implementation.

"Is there anything else you need to start implementing the plan?" Vornmeth asks. "It probably doesn't make sense for anyone to come with you if you're going to be rapidly teleporting, so it might be best to regroup afterward."

"I think I have what I need, save one question to the both of you. Some barriers might be quite oversized. This might lead to some neighboring areas, not already designated for barriers or overflow, being crushed. In those cases, shall I prefer the collateral damage of crushing, or instead either no barrier or too small of a barrier?"

The Restorer looks to the coast. How close is the hurricane now? In how much of a rush are we, here? What effects are the hurricane having on the city at this point?