Minaiyu wakes up, and his first thought is relief.

He feels so much better today! His fever has finally broken!

Of course he shouldn't do anything remotely strenuous yet, not so soon, but he's looking forward to being able to focus on that history-of-rubber book he tried to read earlier this five-day and had to set down--

--wait, hang on, what's that sound? What's that smell?

He opens his eyes.

A low hum pervades the soundscape. It's not the hum of a ventilation system; it's more organic than that, it ebbs and flows. The smell is of unwashed human, beeswax, and sheep, all quite strongly. 

He appears to be in some sort of hexagonal capsule hotel; a faint beam of daylight at his feet shines in to provide a bare minimum of visibility. He's lying in a pile of sheepskins and other furs. 

...what??

...so, on the one hand, he has absolutely had a bunch of fever dreams this five-day. But this doesn't feel like the fever dreams did. Those felt like believing something while also, simultaneously, knowing it to be false (something which is, if anything, even more unpleasant than it sounds); this feels straightforwardly real.

Just in case, he reaches blindly for the place where the emergency call button would be if this is secretly his convalescing bed, and presses down. If he's fully lost in delirium, his family can send in an appropriately-hazmatted tripsitter to keep an eye on him and determine whether to call an ambulance.

Is there enough space to turn around, or is he going to have to shimmy out feet-first if he wants to get a better look at things?

His hand lands on some kind of wooden object that is certainly not a button of any sort. 

He has just barely enough space to turn around. 

He wonders what the wooden thing is, but he will start by cautiously poking his head out of the capsule.

His capsule appears to be a few meters off the ground, and open into a roughly circular room made of wood and daub construction, the walls of which are lined with similar capsules. The central volume of the room appears to be filled with several enormous honeycombs, swarming with bees. Many of the bees appear to be about the size of a sheep or large dog, but not all of them; there are regular sized bees around, as well as at least one enormous bee larger than a horse. As well as the bees, beneath the honeycomb a number of sheep are sleeping on a pile of hay. 

The only source of light is a vent in the ceiling through which the morning light streams, the comb parting in places to allow it through, and even that vent seems to be largely clogged with bees.

Marcus appears to have woken up and started to get out of bed without noticing it, which is hardly unprecedented, but he appears to have done it wrong, which certainly is something he hasn't done since he was maybe six. He goes to reset his position to one where his feet will be able to reach the footholds in the wall properly, and it doesn't quite work. 

Almost reflexively, he pulls his head and torso back and away from the possible attention of the giant bees what the fuck, and ends up lying in the capsule like a dog, with his arms out in front of him.

His arms are now visible in the light, and...those...aren't his hands. That's not what his hands look like.

...oh. He didn't make it.

His leg tries to move, and he instinctively halts it, then realises that wait no that's a terrible idea actually.

He flails around a bit mentally, and manages to get himself into a position where he is, not not fronting exactly, but not actively interfering with his host's motor control.

What the fuck. Why did he flinch back from the bees, like they were spiders or something. 

Oh. There's something in his head that's not him.

It's not, at this second, controlling his voice. 

"Hey, I think I've been enchanted!*" He shouts. 

*This is a single syllable and extremely shoutable word. 

What a concerning thing to have a one-syllable word for!

This is a fucking demon world, isn't it. Fuck.

(Or, you know, a world that believes it's a demon world. He suspects that demons per se aren't actually real and are just mangled rumours of malicious walk-ins, but right this moment what matters is what his host society parses him as being.)

At least he can understand what the guy is saying.

"I-- I promise I don't mean you any harm," he says hurriedly.

He doesn't fully take command of the body (and he'll get out of the way if his host tries to move something he's using), but talking does bleed over into making facial expressions. He looks scared.

Yeah right. Fortunately whatever the thing is doesn't seem to be controlling him very well, so he's going to flip himself around and get out of his cell, because if he's going to be tied up or something, he'd rather not have to be literally dragged out of bed to make that happen. There's a trick to getting down to ground level elegantly, but he can manage it in his sleep. 

He thinks for a moment, and leaves his belt knife and bow here. Not worth the risk. 

Marcus's father and one of his cousins will meet him as he gets down. 

"What's all this about then?" 

"It can speak with my voice. I don't know what it is." 

That's the most important thing to communicate. 

Well, he knows what he is.

As for how to convince them of the truth, he has no idea, but he can at least give them his side of the story.

(He really hopes he isn't going to get his host killed.)

"...uh, hi?" he says tentatively. "My name's Minaiyu. I'm a--" he is disappointed but not surprised that his host doesn't have a specific word for this, and he is definitely not calling himself a demon or a god "--dead soul from another world.

I'm very sorry about all the trouble, I don't get to decide who I possess, it just happens."

He is sufficiently embodied at the moment that he not-quite-consciously puts their hands up in what is hopefully recognisable as a placating gesture.

"All right whatever this is I want to deal with it outside." says Marcus's father. 

"Volta! Run and fetch the witch! Tell him it's urgent!" 

He will gesture for Marcus to move towards the smaller of two doors out of this room. A gaggle of concerned looking people and bees are going to follow them out. 

Minaiyu might at this point notice that the crowd, while generally appearing to consist of human people dressed primarily in wool and sheepskin, have a bit more variety in their appearances than you'd expect. Most people have normal human colours, but there are two people with neon pink hair (a father and a daughter, possibly) and one person whose skin is the pale green of new shoots. 

Marcus is going to gesture for his bees to stop following him. It would be terrible if they decided to follow Minaiyu's orders instead of his in a fight, and also he just generally doesn't like the idea of trying to interact with them in this state. 

That gets them out into the cold only with the bees which aren't his following the crowd, where he gets to have the fun experience of being interrogated in freezing weather. Well, at least it didn't snow anymore during the night. 

"How, exactly, does a dead soul come to escape Foundation's grasp and start possessing someone?" 

"Ghosts are a thing, I think." Says his father. "An intangible sort of resentful dead." 

The hair could be dye, but he does not know how you would end up with skin that colour. It's less weird than the giant bees, though.

"Uh, if you have a system here that 'grasps' souls and prevents them from ending up in otherworlders' bodies, that would help explain why possessions are comparatively rare when death is so common? If you're not, like, contributing to the pool of potential souls.

We don't have a system like that at home, though."

"And where exactly is home?" asks Marcus's father. 

("Is that what happened to people who died before Foundation ascended?" asks someone in the gaggle of onlookers. "No clue. Maybe?" says another. Several people start petting giant bees with various degrees of nervousness.) 

"We call it Rekka, in my language. I don't, uh, have a multiversal coordinate system, or anything.

We only have small bees there.

I live..." he makes a face "...lived...in--" he does have a coordinate system for this, but he refrains from using it: it won't mean anything to them "--a town in the grey area between temperate and subtropical, on the east coast of Tashay. Bluecoral Bay, it's called."

(He translates the name of the town. Place names are usually concepts: it's not like they get accustomed to being called by a particular string of phonemes.)

Minaiyu has not touched anyone in six days. Minaiyu did not know, when he hugged his kith-uncle goodnight seven days ago, that it would even be the last time he hugged anyone that five-day, let alone the last time he ever hugged anyone he'd ever known.

He is having some sort of emotion about the people petting their giant bees, which it really does not seem like the time to unpack.

The father makes a face. "Some kind of heathen then. I don't know what I expected. What sort of place was this Bluecoral Bay? A trade port? A fishing village?" 

Marcus is keeping quiet. He's grown up on the same adventuring stories as his father, and understands what he's doing: when confronted by something strange and powerful, keep it talking. It might reveal its nature by accident, or even if it lies with every breath you're still getting evidence with which to disprove those lies, and either way we stall it on killing us all for a little bit longer. It's not like they can make a decision until the witch gets here. 

He hopes the witch gets here fast.

He sure is a foreigner who doesn't have whatever relations with spirits this culture considers proper.

(Are the bees spirits? Are they beloved of spirits?)

"It's not a great harbour: usually you'd want to go three hops north to Greenport if you want to ship something by sea.

We're not very specialised, though we export more than our fair share of fish and amaranth--" he breaks off, and looks thoughtful for a moment.

("Amaranth" is a suspiciously long word. They've heard of amaranth, but it sounds like it isn't their staple crop.

He wonders what the foodways here are like. He wonders if he'll live long enough to find out.)

"--um, it's not a great location to put a thing that people would come from hops around to visit, since there's nobody to the east. Like, we have a small medical centre for routine things, but the big hospital I--" slight pause as he catches himself on the tense "--worked at is two hops west."

It feels like a slightly odd question for the man to ask, at this stage of getting to know each other. Like...like it's a question he would ask a foreign visitor from his own world, underestimating how alien Minaiyu's world might be. Or like...it's a proxy for something else? Alien subtext?

Maybe the man is trying to get at what sort of role Minaiyu played in his society?

"I worked in emergency medicine," he clarifies.

"Oh? What circle were you?" He's not quite managing to sound unsuspicious. 

This man is definitely treating him too much like a foreign visitor from the same planet.

"I...doubt our qualification systems are directly comparable?

Uh, late apprenticeship, but I don't know what your medical apprenticeships look like and that might mean something pretty different in practice."

"So you haven't even managed to cast cantrips, then?" 

...it sure does mean something pretty different in practice.

"...do you have magic learnable by humans here?

I am, uh, not a medical mage, because we don't have those. I mean, like, in theory you can use magic to tell whether a comatose body still has a soul in it or not, if you can find a spirit and convince them to check for you? But that's not very feasible these days, they're pretty reclusive, so we pretty much just have to make our best guess; and sometimes care for bodies we're mostly sure are empty, just in case."

did his heart stop in the night, or did they find his empty vessel when they noticed he'd dropped out of contact, and how long did it take them to give up on him still being in there

If humans have magic here, with a broader variety of effects, it's possible they have exorcism methods that work but don't kill the host. Maybe, just maybe, he will not get anyone else killed if this goes badly, just get kicked out of this world as if he'd happened not to land here.

(On the other hand, maybe he can become a medical mage, if he survives.)

Should he--

--probably he should not ask yet what they are planning to do to him? He desperately does not want to come across as hostile if he can possibly avoid it, and he's not sure there even is a way to ask that question that doesn't make it sound like he's trying to formulate a plan for how to fight back, given the likely expectations of people who have this prearranged distress-call system.

He will just have to wait and see what happens when the...witch, who is almost certainly very literal, arrives.

(He wonders for a moment if he should be fronting less hard right now, see if he can avoid rudely inflicting the somatic effects of nervousness onto his host-- no, he'd be shocked if his host isn't also nervous, it won't help.)

Marcus would be very good at suppressing visible signs of his fear thank you very much. 

"So you're saying in your world you have no mages? So you're trained to do what, sheep medicine to people, because there isn't any alternative? Heh, not often we hear about people worse off than we are." 

"...I mean, I don't know what your sheep medicine looks like, but maybe.

We have pretty good tools, though. Like, we can do surgeries without it being a desperate last resort, because we've figured out medicines that can keep people unconscious for a few hours fairly safely so they don't feel the pain, and how to keep the operating theatre clean enough that they reliably don't get sepsis. Things like that."

It is probably not the time to give a full tutoring session on medical-tech bootstrapping. He doesn't have a good sense of what they do and don't have already though the sheep dung in the house seems like a bad sign, nor what gaps they're already filling with magic. And you'd really want people to be able to take notes.

...also they think he's a demon and probably won't listen to him.

Marcus's father sure does look like he's a man who is taking mental notes to the effect of 'demon thinks drugging people and cutting them open is sound ethical practice'. 

"I'm glad we don't need any of that sort of thing around here." 

He reserves judgement on whether they need any of that sort of thing around here!

He nods, going along with it for now.

Marcus's father is going to allow the conversation to lapse into silence. It's not like he can make a judgement call here. 

The gawkers are mostly going to head back inside. It's freezing out here, after all. 

Elsewhere, a witch has been awakened from his slumber. It's urgent, so he casts Longstrider, and about halfway there, he also decides on a Bear's Endurance as well, and between them manages to get down a forest path in nearly the same time as it would have taken the nice young lady who ran to get him. He dresses lightly, as though snow and thorns and cold winds and tripping roots were problems that happened to other people, and his cane is green with fresh shoots and green leaves otherwise unseen in a stark landscape of snowfields, dead grass, and conifers. 

Nonetheless when he gets to the house where the problem is happening, he has the immediate urge to lean against the wall of their great hall (a great conical building of thatch and wood and wax, large enough to hold 27 humans, as well as all their bees and sheep.) and slump to the ground. He's not the man he was, and running is not something he has in him these days. Presumably one of these nice young people will be along soon to get him something to sit on, but for now the ground is fine. 

"What's all this then? I've been told there's some kind of urgent enchantment situation?"

"Yes, honoured one." starts Marcus's father. "Marcus appears to have been possessed by - well it claims to be a well-meaning spirit that's gotten lost on the way to heaven. Some kind of student doctor from a land without magic. I don't know what it is." 

Marcus would like to force his way to the front here. 

"I would like to clarify that I appear to be capable of over-ruling the spirit on its control over me. At least sometimes." 

He wonders if the specific form of magical appearance for the cane carries meaning, to someone familiar with the types of mage around here. It could just be personal taste in decoration, but he does feel a little like he is looking at a sign in a language he can't read.

Oh, they are willing to tell him his host's name (or some sort of handle, anyway?). He hadn't dared ask for anyone's name, in case they thought name-magic was real and that he was trying to obtain weapons against them.

(...or, uh, come to think of it name-magic could be real for all he knows, though the name is now providing some evidence against this.)

Minaiyu will get out of the way when he feels Marcus try to say something.

...Marcus's phrasing suggests that he does not think Minaiyu has been deliberately getting out of the way. Minaiyu is not going to clarify, because Marcus will definitely take 'you can move because I allow you to' as a threat.

(Also, like, Minaiyu does not actually know who would win in a battle over control. But he has no intention of finding out!)

"Um, hello," he says. "I'm Minaiyu, I'm the spirit. I'm sorry about all this: I wouldn't have done it, if I'd had a choice.

I wouldn't say 'lost': I think we just don't have a heaven, where I come from."

(Wait, hang on, is their soul-catching system going to catch him now that he's here?

He hopes it's nice in heaven.

(Well, also for their sakes, but right now for his.))

"...forgive my ignorance, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to call you 'honoured one' or not."

"Well, that depends on if you intend to offer me honour and respect, doesn't it?" says the witch, with a voice that seems to indicate sarcasm and good humour. 

This person probably gets to decide if he lives or dies or possibly enters "Foundation's grasp"! He is hardly going to ignore or spurn the power dynamic!

"...yes, honoured one?

But we don't have honourifics in my native language, so I don't have good instincts for where to include them. I apologise in advance for any errors."

"Very fair, very fair. Who can truly expect honour and respect from heathens and strangers? But making the effort is much of the matter." He nods firmly. 

"Since we're showing each other respect." He pauses. 

"Oh ancient ghost, who visits us from beyond the veil of death, what is your desire? What wrong keeps you from sleeping the long sleep of ages with your ancestors?" 

"Uh, I...did sleep the long sleep of ages?

And then I-- well, I wasn't conscious for this part, of course, but presumably-- my soul happened to bump into Marcus's brain as I drifted through the worlds, and it was compatible enough for me to lodge here. I think the body was asleep, when that happened: when it woke up, so did I."

Was there supposed to be an honourific in there somewhere. He does not know.

"But there isn't something in particular that's got you up in arms here. No murder to avenge? No buried treasure to report to your loved ones? Not even a little annoyance that your grandchildren aren't leaving flowers on your grave and resetting the traps anymore?" 

"...no, honoured one?

I...wouldn't expect to be able to avenge my death or report to my loved ones from a distant world, in any case. And I don't have any children."

How would he even know whether people are still performing remembrance rituals at his grave?

(They're probably not. It's very rare to get enough information to even hazard a guess at how long you were in the sleep-between-lives, but it's not completely unheard of to land in the same world you left, or meet people from your world who landed faster (and are thus from later in the timeline) and can provide a lower bound. From what data points they've managed to get...centuries at least, millennia, maybe longer.)

"Hmm. Well, for the benefit of everyone here, let me lay out a few possibilities. You could be some kind of mad restless dead. Ghosts are often not entirely clear themselves on their own nature." (someone in the background gasps - "Wait, ghosts are real!?") "You could be an evil demon possessing the body for some nefarious purpose and lying to us about that so we'll let our guard down about it. You could be an evil wizard* acting out some esoteric plan which I cannot help but summarise as 'fucking with us'. Marcus here could have just gone entirely mad. It's hardly without precedent. Lastly, he could be telling us the truth, and will presumably tell us the truth about how to get rid of him."

"Now, let's leave aside the possibility of possession by ghost or demon for a moment. If you are an evil wizard, why are you doing this? Possession is no mean feat, and the sort of wizard who is good at deception is not the sort who is good at possession. So to suppose that a wizard is possessing Marcus, and carrying out some elaborate and convincing bluff, we have to suppose a very particular wizard - perhaps the only such mage alive in all the west - has decided against all common sense, to use their unusual and valuable skill-set to come to this little hive in the middle of nowhere, and achieve nothing more productive than making us all doubt our own sanity. I'm sure in the full breadth of history wizards have done such things, and felt they were acting rationally at the time, but it stretches plausibility, to me, without any additional evidence to that effect." 

"The possibility of madness is of course, difficult to disprove, unless you have spells or abilities of your own to - " 

*for those following along at home, the word here translated as wizard connotes "mage whose power far exceeds their sense" without implying membership in a specific spell-casting class

At this point Marcus' father interrupts. "When it was talking about its ... profession, it used words I hadn't heard before. If you know those to be real words, which Marcus hadn't known, that would prove my son was sane, yes?" 

"I rather suppose it would, yes. Oh dead one - what did you have to say about your profession, that you practice so far from our home?" 

Minaiyu feels much more respected by the witch using person pronouns for him than by the "oh dead one" thing. The "oh dead one" thing seems kind of sarcastic, or at least insincere; the noun class seems candid, a signal the witch maybe hadn't noticed he was sending.

...well, that's not going to work to prove Marcus isn't...delirious? Is that what that word means? It feels stronger than that: did setting up the soul-catching magic accidentally strengthen people's brain-soul connections and make them capable of remaining in delirium for longer?

Anyway. Minaiyu only speaks this language as well as Marcus does, since he's getting it from Marcus's brain. Maybe his housemate--father, apparently--hasn't happened to hear some of these words, but Marcus clearly knows them.

(Maybe it would be for the best if Marcus gets declared delirious? They can pretend to "recover" in a couple days, and Minaiyu can remain closeted thereafter. Maybe later they can move somewhere nobody knows them and pretend to be twin-souled, if this is one of the demon-world cultures that accepts twin-souled--

--no, that isn't going to work. Marcus won't go for it. Maybe if he were the sort of person who would rather attempt to quietly tolerate being possessed by a demon than suffer the consequences of being outed as a host, but he clearly isn't: if he were, he wouldn't have made the distress call, at least not right away (before trying to figure out whether Minaiyu was the lesser of the two evils).

(And Minaiyu definitely isn't going to hide his continued existence from Marcus: he could maybe deal with being a secret voice in someone's head and fronting only when no one could see them (or perhaps, eventually, in circumstances where he was confident he could fake being Marcus), but--even if you ignore the frankly horrifying ethical issues with spying on someone all the time--being a silent passenger for decades sounds sufficiently torturous that he'd rather they killed him.))

The note of distaste on "profession" suggests the man is thinking of the part about surgery, which he seemed rather put off by.

"Uh, it doesn't work like that, I get my ability to speak the language from him, but--

--I talked about how we've compensated for not having magic by developing good non-magical medical tools? And how we can do surgeries now without it having to be a desperate last resort, because we've invented medicines to keep people unconscious during it so they don't feel the pain, and we can keep the operating theatre clean enough that they don't get sepsis?"

Sepsis? Is that what Marcus's father hadn't heard of?

"Ah, sepsis, yes. No, people around here would just say that a wound was infected without technical specificity, wouldn't they? I wouldn't expect anyone around here to know what an operating theatre* was, either. I only know because of my misspent youth in the lowlands. Do say more?"

*Lit: "vivisection dungeon" plus the same linguistic drift in meaning that keeps earth claiming we do surgery in theatres. 

Minaiyu does not say more, not immediately. He's standing there, brow furrowed, prodding at the vocabulary.

There is...kind of a lot of technical jargon in here, actually. There are words in here for things he only knows about from medical training. He doesn't get results for everything he looks for, and some of the terms are just taking the obvious roots and connecting them in the obvious manner, but...

"...Marcus, do you know what an ossicle is? What about an aneurysm?"

"... No. Why would I know what an ossicle or an aneurysm were?" 

"--because they're in your head. I reached out for your words, and they were there."

"They're not in my head. Except in as much as you have brought them there." 

Also he's not entirely happy with the idea that the demon is stealing his words but what's he going to do about it. 

"Then where did they come from? I didn't speak this language before I got here!"

He turns to the witch, looking lost. "Does this make any sense to you, honoured one?"

"Well, you could be a demon with the ability to speak in tongues and a bizarre agenda for deceiving us all? But assuming you're generally telling the truth? No clue. Not even sure why you're so certain you can read his mind, really." 

"Not his mind, just his language.

It-- normally, when you lodge in someone's brain-- it doesn't always happen, sometimes you have to learn the language the hard way, nobody's sure why-- but sometimes their language sort of bleeds over to you, and you can share their ability to speak it.

But it's always their language as they understand it. If they don't know a word, you won't either."

But also bees can't grow that big and humans can't do magic, so really, what does he know!

"Well, clearly you misunderstand something about your own nature. It happens to the best of us." 

"The important point, though, is that we're all convinced that Marcus going mad and obtaining inexplicable knowledge of medical lore in the same moment seems rather implausible, so we can assume that Marcus is sane and you're a real entity?" 

He looks pointedly at the onlookers and receives affirmative gestures from them. 

"Then, we have to rule out that this is a deceptive possessing spirit of some sort. Fortunately, this is a solved problem! I can't cast the spell, but I have here" The witch rummages around in his bag to retrieve a small container. "An unguent whose effect is to temporarily suppress possession or other mental influence from malign beings. I would be happy to contribute this towards the benefit of your family, here, but this stuff isn't cheap, and I'll have to demand compensation for it."

Marcus's father sighs. "How much?" 

"Three sheep." 

"That's highway robbery! Do you want my family to starve?"

"I have to buy this stuff from Old Blacktooth upriver! It's not cheap!" 

"I'll give you one sheep. It's that or nothing." 

"You'd pay two sheep if I was selling a potion of Cure Light Wounds for your son on his deathbed." 

"And you wouldn't charge that, because you'd have spell slots open. I'll give you a sheep and a jar of honey." 

The witch sighs dramatically. "Very well. A sheep and a jar of honey, and I'll use this unguent to drive any demons from your son." 

This is giving him snake-oil vibes, but again, what does he know.

(He still can't use the snake oil as an excuse to pretend to go away, not without buy-in from Marcus that he doesn't expect to get.)

"...drive, or temporarily suppress?

And, uh, does it work on non-malign beings?"

would they be able to tell the difference between it driving him off and it rendering him a silent passenger for decades

"Temporarily suppress! But there's a second half of the plan you don't need to know about. All of the things it works on would be doing the possession intentionally." 

He's not actually going to stop the process of dragging himself out of a sitting position in order to give a hypothetical demon a chance to talk its way out of this. Have some weird-smelling goo on your face (and relatedly, +2 to AC vs. attacks from demons.) 

...yeah, that's fair. Minaiyu really can't blame him.

He wrinkles their nose at the smell.

"I'm still here," he says.

(He is still kind of wondering if this is even a real medicine. But if Marcus and his household end up with a justified true belief that Minaiyu isn't malicious, well, he supposes he can make that work. All he really needs at the moment is for them to let him have the chance to prove with his actions that he's a mutualist and not a parasite.)

This witch is wishing he'd bought those mix-ins that let you add glows and sparkles and fizzes to your potion effects if they don't have them natively. The things we do to save money. 

Urgh, that's a terrible smell. 

"So. Now what? You're not a demon or an enchantment, apparently? How do I send you on to your rightful destination?"

"...well, that's not...normally what happens is that the dead soul stays with the host for the rest of their life, and when they die, the two of them--separately--wake up in new hosts somewhere else. There are people back home who have been through this several times.

I'm...not sure what it would mean, for a destination to be rightful. Although, well, there isn't anyone back home who's done it dozens of times, so maybe eventually they all end up in worlds with heavens and stay there."

He sighs. "I'm sorry. I know this is all very disruptive. I'll make it easier wherever I can."

It's very disruptive for me too, he doesn't say.

Marcus is silent for a bit. He's considered the problem of making friends with things other than animals and family members but has not yet had a chance to put theory into practice. 

"Well. We've been terrible hosts for you. We should all go in and talk over breakfast. It's not right to keep an innocent guest standing out in the cold."

That last bit is addressed at his father, whose reluctance to let this situation go on without Doing Something is only overcome by the horror of possibly being seen as a bad host. 

He nods, smiling a little awkwardly at the self-deprecating apology. Some warmth would be nice right now, as would some food (though the anxiety and general turmoil has been largely drowning out the false-tiredness).

He turns to the witch and gives him an acknowledging nod. "Thank you, honoured one."

(It doesn't seem like this person still holds the power of life and death over him, at least not actively, but it's still best to err on the side of being polite.)

[People may have noticed, by this point, that Minaiyu's voice is a bit different from Marcus's. It's subtle enough that if you weren't expecting two people you wouldn't catch it, and even then it's still entirely plausible that Minaiyu could pretend to be Marcus if he actually tried, but it's otherwise pretty doable to tell who's speaking.]

He holds the power of life and death over everyone here! He's the only person in two hours walk who can cast Cure Light Wounds! But you can't go pointing that out to people too much. They get resentful for some reason. 

"All is well that ends well! If you two need to get away from this lot, my door is always open. ... metaphorically speaking, even I don't want this weather in my house." 

He's going to hike off before he is overcome by the desire to sit back down again, because that would be the bad sort of undignified. 

The interior of the house feels even more cramped now that most people are awake. People sit on the edge of their cells, or are still lying inside their cells, as they eat breakfast and get ready for the day, but the corridor isn't even really wide enough for two people to pass in opposite directions without having to edge past each other, and Marcus has to stop to reassure each person he passes that no, he's fine, the witch took care of it, life can proceed as usual. Bees constantly flit through the air and land on people, and everyone takes care not to squash them. A small child is antagonising a sheep and needs to be dissuaded. But eventually Marcus finds the cousin who is making breakfast. 

Breakfast is unleavened rye bread with honey. To drink, they have room temperature water. The bread is frankly stale and even before it was stale, it wasn't exactly the best rye bread, and stone-ground rye is hardly the prince of grains, but the honey is very good honey. 

Minaiyu lets his host take point here. It's not like he knows his way around this place.

(This also carries the advantage that the body then doesn't flinch when bees land on it. Presumably he will get used to that eventually, but not yet.)

He's torn between the part of him that is unnerved by the giant bees and the part of him that kind of wants to pet one. He wonders if there is a trick to petting them in a way that they like. He really would not want to upset them.

It's a big breath-bond, especially if you count the sheep. Not a big enough group to sustain internal circulation, but a lot of opportunities for someone to carry something home. And the bedrooms are very much not distinct airspaces.

He wonders whether magic makes this less of a concern: perhaps plague cures are a less niche and expensive product than anti-possession ointment.

he wishes he had magic plague-curing ointment

He tries at one point to ask about Marcus's schedule for the day, and while he is still shaping the first syllable, Marcus clears their throat and hurriedly greets the next upcoming passerby. Between that, and the phrasing and tenor of the reassurances, and "if you two need to get away from this lot", Minaiyu is starting to wonder if the 'move somewhere nobody knows them and pretend to be twin-souled' plan is in play after all.

He's not very fond of the flavour, and it certainly isn't the comforting familiarity of amaranth porridge, but it will do. And it is good honey.

Upon reflection, he thinks they are not skilled enough (yet!) at fluid co-fronting to converse while eating, so he will not try regardless of what privacy level they have.

(He pokes at possible internal communication a bit, but it's not immediately clicking, and this isn't really a good time to practise.)

Marcus has no idea that internal communications are even possible!

Externally, he's going to communicate to his siblings that he's had a change of plans and is going to be spending the morning going and looking for trees to log and bring back and maybe do some hunting if the hunting seems good. The subtext of this is that he wants to sneak off to his personal lean-to and sulk for a bit, as is a normal desire for the middle of winter, especially given the morning he's had. 

And then, he's going to dress up warmly and get his bow and knife and one of the good axes and one of the good saws and various other essentials, and call over his hunting-bees, and head off into the forest. 

Once he's far enough into the forest that he thinks his voice won't carry back to the house or the fire-shed, he will turn himself mentally towards his guest and say:

"... Once again, I have to apologise for the poor treatment I've given you. My family will worry until we can give them an explanation of why - this isn't just mysterious and confusing for everyone. It's like a wedding. People will want to bicker and give their input until it looks like a completely settled thing and then they'll just sort of deal with it. So we need to work out how to work together. And then you can talk to them without having the interaction being you being a mysterious confused heathen constantly, like a houseguest eating my brain. And I think that will be a much better first impression of - you as a person - than this morning has been." 

Unfortunately, he is a confused heathen.

"I forgive you. I thought demons were a myth before, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe you did the right thing on average, and it just happened to be wrong in this case.

Hmm. In terms of roles I can fill, I would be very glad to share my medical lore. And other lore: some of it my people taught me specifically so that I could teach people in future worlds. We have unusually good technology where I'm from, and it's brought a lot of benefits to our lives, and...fundamentally it's because of a dead otherworlder who gave us what she knew, and who made us realise that it was possible for things to be better than they were. So we want to pay it forward."

(He worries that he is going to do a much worse job of this than Amethyst did. He has nowhere near her aptitude for politics (and it doesn't seem like Marcus is in a good position to pick up the slack), and she wasn't facing the uphill battle of a culture that assumed possessing spirits were evil, or even one that had no prior history of receiving useful technical imports from otherworldly walk-ins.

He can probably do better than nothing, though? And...maybe people here have less to lose, if dying doesn't strand you away from everyone you've ever known; and doesn't land you potentially anywhere, in any of the wide variety of horrible situations that are out there.

He would still rather that no one else ever have a miserable five-day dying of influenza, even if they know where they're going.)

"But I don't have a good sense yet of what your people have already, nor of what they have perfectly good magic for instead. And...I'll need to know more about what your life looks like currently, before I can know what our life together could look like."

"I was also apologising for stopping you talking to my cousins, which I suppose I'd also do if I had brought a friend home who they wouldn't get on with but which is still very rude." 

"It would be very good if you can put your knowledge towards the benefit of clan and god." The two concepts are very nearly the same thing in his mind. "But." He hesitates to say out loud what everyone in his family knows without being said. "I was going to be an adventurer. And most people who leave to be adventurers don't come back." 

He considers clarifying that he hadn't actually tried to talk to Marcus's cousins yet, and that Marcus had ended up answering his aborted question before too long and giving an explanation of how the ~closeting isn't permanent not long after that, but this next bit seems rather more important.

"...'don't come back' in the sense that they die, I take it?"

(Marcus's tone seems pretty indicative, but Minaiyu has not completely ruled out the possibility that it's "if we leave too soon, it will be some other place that gets the benefits of your knowledge and not my childhood home, and I feel conflicted about this", and he would feel very stupid if he allowed the death interpretation to stand without checking and it turned out to be the other one (or a secret third option!).)

"Nobody I've ever talked to has ever talked to anyone who thinks that less than half of the people who try die. Fewer than that come back, to our clan in recent memory. I suppose in principle that some of them could have made it and be living it up in some lowlander city or something rather than ever visiting their family again." 

So, it's very dangerous and also this society is bad at keeping statistics.

(Or bad at making their statistics accessible to people who live off the train grid in especially rural areas? His father did mention, earlier, something about them being unusually poorly off.)

(Some households are terrible, and often their children leave and never return!

But it would be very insulting to imply that Marcus's household is one of those, on so little evidence. And anyway, there's still the part where it's more than dangerous enough that you don't need to keep statistics to notice.)

"And what do you gain, in return for that risk?

Or, maybe I should ask first what sorts of things adventuring entails here. Maybe that makes the gain obvious, once I know."

"Adventuring is a pretty big category. You could say that it's all of the work which involves - stepping out of the everyday and doing risky and interesting things? Tomb raiding, monster hunting, mercenary work, bounty hunting, protecting people from raids or rescuing them from slavers. That sort of thing. I was thinking of starting out with monster hunting and work my way towards the lowlands, but it depends a lot on what opportunities for work I find and who I end up in a party with. It's profitable work and the best way to get stronger. Or at least the best way I have access to, I hear that in the east some people can go to university if they have a lot of money. The reason why my family has its own hive is because my father's parents were adventurers." 

Huh.

(Tomb raiding seems...he's not even sure what to make of that. Rude? But also they're not using the stuff anymore, and maybe it's the tomb-builders who are being rude by locking something-valuable-enough-to-be-worth-stealing in a place where nobody would ever make use of it again??

The rest of it sounds...like it suggests concerningly weak and uncoordinated social contracts, but given concerningly weak and uncoordinated social contracts, maybe reasonable?)

He feels like he's missing something in "best way to get stronger": surely it can't mean muscle strength. Political power?

Put a pin in that.

So, on the one hand, money can be exchanged for goods and services and cloth factories, and he has a very bad feeling about trying to convince somebody to give the mysterious otherworldly spirit venture capital.

(...maybe especially a mysterious otherworldly spirit who is used to stronger social contracts.)

On the other hand, if he dies, who will even know to try to build the cloth factory? Or, hmm...

"...I have multiple questions there, but I think my next most important question is: what is it that you're risking, when you risk your life? The ability to-- do things and complete projects that require 'being in the land of the living' or 'having a human body' to do, I assume, and that's pretty serious in its own right, but...what's heaven like? How are the lines of communication between there and the land of the living?"

(Maybe Marcus is a bad person to ask about this. This particular area seems like a place that maybe has poor lines of communication with the town four hops over, in a way that might not be reflective of "will there be anyone alive who is in a position to read his posthumous tech-bootstrapping advice".)

(Minaiyu is such an optimist, assuming that Marcus and his family has good lines of contact with a town.) 

"They say in heaven you're in constant communion with God, who is - like the voice in your head asking you to be your best self, the thing which is hard to hear on earth. You don't have to work, they say, unless you want to. They say it's better for a strong soul to be in heaven than a weak one. I don't know what heaven is like for heathens. Northerners try not to go there, because they hate the gods, but in the south or the east they do even though they believe in different gods." 

"We can talk to God sometimes. If you're particularly holy or visit the temple of the gods or take the right potions. The dead can return if you anger them, somehow? We don't have much contact with the afterlife. Powerful healers can raise the dead and powerful wizards can summon shades or angels or demons to bind them or talk to them. Even more powerful mages can travel between the world of the living and the world of the dead."

Those rumours sound mangled, but he has no idea how much. It could be almost any mix of truth and falsehood.

"You need to take certain medicines in order to talk to this spirit" is normally a huge red flag that the "spirit" is a dream-figment (and then, if you fucking die of disruptor poisoning, they claim you "angered" the spirit or that it "called you away"); "the spirit is like a part of you" is if anything an even bigger red flag.

But also, he can't just filter everything through his pre-existing lens on how the multiverse works, because translation magic is real and he has somehow acquired some.

(And people back home already suspected afterlives might exist! Only about 1 in 30,000 people are hosts because they keep statistics on this, despite the sheer number of departed souls you would expect to be out there! They have to be going somewhere!)

can he declare that the appropriate remembrance ritual for him is wearing masks around non-breathbondmates (yes even outdoors, learn from his mistake), and he can come back and yell at them if they don't do it? it is how he died, after all, at least the first time!

"Strong" soul in the same sense that adventuring makes you stronger?

Why do northerners hate the gods, and is it justified he's clearly not going to get a straight answer out of the locals (or possibly anyone) for that part, and probably this entire thing is a very delicate topic for a heathen to ask about.

Do they know more at the temple about what heaven is like for heathens? Marcus did say it was a temple of multiple gods, while his people had a relationship with one in particular.

Fundamentally, he can't start an industrial revolution from a "little hive in the middle of nowhere". And there's only so many people here that he can teach about medicine and sanitation practices.

(And if heaven turns out to be a myth, he will just have to try and help someplace else.)

"Right, uh. I have enough questions that it's hard to know what to ask first.

I don't know what timeframe you were looking at, but I think we should start by learning from each other, get me more grounding in this world--" at least the parts of it that they actually understand, although if he and Marcus end up pretending to be twin-souled on their travels it will be useful to know what bullshit to claim to believe "--and give your people more understanding of what I know. I can write down some reference materials and guides, get people to make multiple copies, so that perhaps--at least to some extent--others can pick up the torch if we fall. And I can help you make...the small things, the things that a household can make on their own.

But a lot of the things I know how to build will take much more resources than a household can muster. I think we're going to need profitable work.

Though maybe there are ways to get enough resources to build...a set of cloth-making machines, probably, we can probably become cloth merchants from there and use those profits to build other things...with a higher success rate, I don't know. I do expect it's going to be expensive, with a lot of complicated metalwork, not to mention inventory and workers. And I'm not getting the impression that this place has strong systems for connecting inventors with funders, let alone connecting otherworldly idea-exporters with funders."

"I certainly wasn't going to leave until the summer, so we have time to plan and practice and learn to work together. Writing things down could end up being quite expensive. I don't know how much you have to write down." 

Becoming a cloth-merchant somehow seems like it's substantially more terrifying than hunting spiders bigger than a horse. 

"It's true that inventors won't be able to get funding. I'm not even sure how that's a thing people would do. People would certainly never loan money to adventurers. I think mostly that kings and merchant princes and that sort of person get to take loans?" 

"...yeah, this does seem like a place where writing materials would be expensive, now that you mention it.

I could go on for a while, but I'll think about how to be efficient with my use of paper.

I suppose kings and merchant princes have a hard time quietly disappearing with the money, in a way that it sounds like most people here wouldn't."

"That is one reason. Basically impossible to tell if someone skipped town or if they died somewhere obscure and will never be seen again. But successful adventurers have often acquired a lot more power - political power too - so they can be difficult to collect on loans for. Even if you can reliably collect, the collecting process is difficult, if they choose to struggle." 

Never mind tomb raiding, that is definitely rude.

"Because their...souls are stronger? What does it mean, for a soul to be stronger?"

"... I'm not clear how you could have souls and not be aware of souls getting stronger? Like, lots of people don't bother noticing or manipulating their own soul but it's not like you can - oh this is probably related to why you thought magic was impossible somehow isn't it?" 

"The short version is - your soul is like the fire within you that makes you yourself? And as you - strive and achieve and survive and push yourself to your limits - that fire burns higher. Doing powerful magic requires you to have more of that to ... feed into whatever spellcasting is, exactly, I'm not a spellcaster so I don't know." He's not resentful of this fact at all. Really. "But even if you're not a spellcaster, having more of that - it reinforces you. Makes you better at your skills, makes you harder to kill. If you get good enough you can do things that seem impossible. Be so deft and agile that you can dance on the tip of a blade of grass, or so good with a sword that you can parry fire. And if you're a spellcaster, you get spellcasting instead of that, mostly. Very powerful spellcasters still get a bit of toughness and skill as they get stronger. There are a lot of special cases and variants to this concept, but that's the core of it." 

"Huh.

Yeah, I've never heard of that. Something weird about the fabric of your world, maybe?"

Can his soul strengthen, or do you have to have formed here?

He'll probably find out.

"I wonder if it's enough for either of us to grow as a non-spellcaster, to make our body harder to kill, and maybe I can provide magic to the team without holding you back on that. Do you--

--actually, I have been meaning to ask, how does this culture treat people who were born sharing a body? Is it fine, or side-eyed but largely tolerated, or are the twinned souls all pretending to be single people so nobody thinks they're demons? I was wondering if we should pretend to have been born like this to people we meet on our travels, but if that's also stigmatised then maybe it wouldn't help. And then you also wouldn't know what happens with the physical parts of reinforcement when a body's souls have different specialties."

"Maybe it was something the gods did, before the Fall. They said they did many things to change the nature of the universe in those days. That's purely my speculation." 

"I don't ... think people would have an issue if two people were born into one body somehow? But I've also never heard of it happening so maybe I'm wrong and they're all hiding. I don't know how foreigners would treat us. I think generally people are much less concerned about a stranger having something deeply weird going on as long as it's clearly their problem and not your problem. I wouldn't be surprised if there were places in the lowlands where being obviously possessed by a demon was merely the sort of thing that got side-eyes. Like, if a travelling merchant showed up and they had a habit of discussing everything with themselves like we are now, I don't think that would be the strangest travelling merchant we've ever bought stuff from." 

('The Fall'?

He's putting a pin in that one too.)

"It's about one in a hundred bodies where I come from, but maybe that varies, I'm not sure.

Well, all else equal I would prefer not to have to maintain a web of deception, to the extent possible.

And-- uh, to be clear I expect this to be a skill worth practising even if we don't hide-- but with enough practice we can probably learn to talk to each other mentally, so that nobody can eavesdrop. It varies a lot how intuitive it is--I already checked, we're not on the high-intuitiveness end--and the exact form it takes, but people can generally get the hang of some form of internal communication eventually."

"I think if it was that common, I'd know about it, even if it was normally hidden. I think I've heard stories about more than a hundred different Name-level adventurers and people put up with much worse idiosyncrasies from the great Names than that." 

"Being able to communicate internally would be extremely useful. Do you have any sense for how people manage it?"  

is that a bad sign for their survival chances, if none of the very strong adventurers are twin-souled

"Sometimes it feels like...thinking words very deliberately at someone, or pushing concepts at them, or like grasping something in the back of your head to hold open a link.

And if you-- oh, it's usually also learnable to...detach yourself completely from awareness of the body, and build a little lucid dreamscape that you can go to, to give each other privacy. And sometimes--especially if your internal communication tends to be verbal in general--you can talk out loud in there and the person controlling the body can hear you, though they'd still need some mental motion to reply the same way."

"I'll try now, then." 

A few minutes later, and every time he thinks he's getting anywhere, he sees something moving in the forest or has to duck to dodge a branch and is immediately shocked out of it. 

"... Maybe we should try this when we get to my shack." 

"Agreed."

It is kind of hard to focus on experimenting with mental motions when there is so much else to take in, even when he's not the one ducking.

"About how far away is it, would you say?"

"Perhaps an hour more walking? Two, if there are trees down we need to clear."

"Well, I wouldn't mind some quiet walking," (he considers some sort of remark about being "alone with our thoughts", but it feels like it's in an awkward middle ground where it doesn't land right as either serious or a joke) "and it doesn't seem like a good time of year for local botany lessons-- wait, that word felt pretty technical and I can't trust that me knowing a word means that you know it...uh, lessons about what the local plants are and what they're like, if that wasn't clear--

Anyway, uh, I was saying: while we're here...I was wondering, you said something about 'the Fall' earlier, what was that?"

"Herbalism, is how you'd say that. Botany sounds like something a wizard would do. Maybe a druid? I'm happy to teach you but as you say. Not a lot going on right now."

"The Fall was ... in ancient days, more than two thousand years ago, there was an age of great prosperity, where we lived in towers of glass and steel, where anyone could talk to anyone and learn anything, where civilisation was so great that we raised the gods themselves up out of nothing. There was ... a war, I guess, or a disaster, maybe. The gods against something else, something alien and terrible. We call it 'the outsiders' or 'the excrucian host', but we don't really know much about it. They fought over the fabric of reality itself, destroyed cities, nations, tore the stars from the sky, even removed entire concepts from the universe. The gods won, but there wasn't much left. They say these mountains around us are rubble from a battle in that war, and there was good farmland here before." 

(The mountains, if Minaiyu has been paying attention, are great shards and spines, like someone picked up a mountain range of tsingy karst and dropped it all in a heap, with the spines and shards facing every which way. They're walking up a low valley where good soil has filled in the gaps between two great spines and a few leafless deciduous trees manage to hold on; the higher peaks are home to evergreens alone, where they aren't bare stone knives.) 

...aaaaaa?

(Even with parts of it presumably exaggerated into myth, the underlying event must have been awful.)

he sure hopes the outsiders never come for his world

...he saw pictures, once, of a household far in the north that had encased their entire house and garden within a single, massive greenhouse. Glass, and steel. (Or something near enough to them.)

It's kind of over-the-top, and you'd want to be very sure it would never be hot enough outside to want to cover your solar glass in summer-whites (though maybe cloth?), but you could. And there would be some advantages to encasing an apartment building in a greenhouse, he supposes: management of the solar-thermal collection would naturally centralise in the property manager, you wouldn't need to coordinate the residents on opening and closing their shutters and all that...

(And...if their healing magic is good at plagues, and if you and everyone around you were raised with ready access to it your whole lives, were never burned by being too close to strangers...maybe you'd want to live in an apartment building. Maybe even a big apartment building, though it's plausible Marcus would think of even a medium-sized apartment building as a "tower".)

For that matter, after two thousand years and in a place where glass is presumably expensive, you might describe even a house with ordinary solar-thermal collectors (plus windows for lighting) as being "made of glass".

(The gods claim to have been made by humans, that's interesting. He's not quite sure yet what to make of that, but he's filing it away.)

He is now even more curious why northerners hate the gods, and even less willing to ask about it.

"...yikes," he says.

"That-- yeah, I don't really know what to say. Condolences hardly seem like enough; although, it was thousands of years ago, I guess you're probably used to it personally..."

"This is ancient history to me and mine. We wouldn't even know, if God hadn't made a point of asking us to remember. Presumably some lowlander with a lot of books would know more."

He nods thoughtfully, and they fall into silence for a while.

(Today sure isn't the day he was expecting to have, but...at least it didn't come completely out of nowhere. The average rate of influenza-induced brain failure is something like one in twenty; he was young and previously-healthy and not overtly ill enough to require hospitalisation, and those all make it less likely, but still not shockingly rare. If he hadn't only just woken up, he'd probably have realised immediately what had happened, even before seeing his new hands.

He still wishes he'd had a chance to say goodbye.)

Marcus, meanwhile, is composing lesson plans in his head as they walk. 

Eventually, they reach what appears to be the top of the valley, but in fact, if you look from the right angle, two rocks appear to rest on each other but in fact conceal a passage between them. Through that narrow way, there is a triangular dip between high stone walls, and within another small patch of trees perhaps a few hundred meters across at its longest. 

This place isn't secret, per se; the sheep and the bees come here to graze in their proper time. But it is out of the way, and it's here that Marcus has a little lean-to of unfinished wood and a sod roof, where he goes when he needs some privacy. Many people have one, and there are similar ones on the traplines and the high places far from the hive where sheep and bees are sent in summer. There's a fire pit and a little stream that's surrounded by berry bushes during summer, but nothing but snow covers both right now. 

Marcus will sit them both down under the low shelter and let his three bees snuggle up to him and start whittling away at some tinder for a fire, since they might be here a while. 

"So. If you're going to be a part of my life, I need to teach you how to handle hunting bees properly?"

It's a very weird feeling to have someone else's domestic animals snuggle up to you under the mistaken but also correct apprehension that you're them.

(It's also kind of weird to be snuggled up to by giant bees, but never mind that.)

He supposes he will have to get used to it, but on the whole he would prefer a hug from someone who knew who they were hugging.

(Maybe the bees will start catching on that there are two of them. They'd kind of have to, right, if there are practice sessions in which he is clearly much less accustomed to handling hunting bees than Marcus is? He's heard dogs can often tell who's fronting, even sometimes with visitors they only see occasionally; but then, dogs are about as smart as you can get without having a soul, and he doesn't have a sense of how smart the giant bees are.)

He almost nods, but nodding someone's head while they are whittling seems like potentially a bad idea.

"Where do we start?"

(The bees are quite warm! Since the air temperature is still holding around freezing point, this is a major feature.) 

"I have to impress upon you the moral responsibility of beekeeping! You haven't grown up around here so you won't have learned it the long way! But! It's very important! We are the brains of the hive and the hunting bees are the stings! They trust you! If you order them to their deaths, they will assume you have a good reason for it! One day, you will in fact have a good reason for it. They are warriors like we are and they want what is best for the hive, like we do. But it's up to us to make that call! You might not know you're making it when you do. Fights don't work like that. But you have to give every order you do, with the weight behind it that the bee's life deserves. Their lives are shorter and more numerous than ours, and so they're more easily spent, but that doesn't make them worth less than us in the eyes of God!" 

He's not actually shouting, but he is speaking with incredible passion. 

He is glad that he is not currently embodied enough to unconsciously raise an eyebrow.

...so, do the bees have souls, or...?

...no, he's not asking that question: he has a feeling Marcus will be insulted by it. He will ask later, after finding some other excuse to ask it that has nothing to do with moral responsibility.

And anyway, he can see how "bees are very instrumentally valuable" could culturally bleed into "bees have inherent moral worth". He is sufficiently on board with 'not spending your instrumental value lightly' that perhaps it doesn't actually make a difference, in practice, whether or not there is inherent moral worth involved.

(Plus he's hardly going to do anything to make an enemy of people who believe that bees have inherent moral worth, certainly not when he is sharing a body with one.)

He nods solemnly.

With that in mind, Marcus will start teaching the commands he uses to command his bees, which are for the most part words or signs in his native language and fairly literal ones (or at least ones whose only semantic meaning is 'this order'), as well as the basics of caring for hunting bees and how to read their body language. The bees are apparently smart enough to communicate useful information in scouting reports when properly trained, albeit much less than a human could. This is a subject he knows in encyclopedic detail and could talk about for hours. 

And paper is expensive, so he can't take notes. Unfortunate.

Still, he does reasonably well at it. Stop, up, go over there; happy bee, worried bee, hostile bee; waggle dance for this, waggle dance for that...

Do the bees have names?

Is there a practice exam?

The bees are named 'First', 'Second', and 'Fuzzy'. Marcus didn't name them; that honour goes to whoever is in charge of the cocoons for a given year, and it's usually a kid. Marcus can tell them apart effortlessly but it seems this is an acquired skill. 

There's lots of room for practical testing of skills one by one, but unless Minaiyu wants to go hunting for ptarmigans or snow elementals or something, Marcus can't think of a way to test all these skills at once. 

Telling humans apart is also an acquired skill, so he's not surprised.

"Well, you did say you were thinking of going hunting today, but I think we were planning to practise internal communication first.

...also, are snow elementals edible? 'Elemental' doesn't sound like a thing that would be edible, but maybe it's not literal."

"I agree practising internal communication first is a good idea. Do you want to direct that?" 

"Snow elementals aren't edible, but keeping down population numbers where possible is good forest management practice - they delay the thaw if they can - and rarely their bodies can be processed for magical materials we can sell."

(He is a little worried about the inherent moral worth of elementals, but he is willing to believe that it needs doing.)

He can go into more detail about the mental exercises that often help with establishing communication. There are several, and different pairs find different ones more suitable (though it's generally the same for both). They'll have to test things out and see what turns out to resonate best with them.

They probably want to start off sitting still and quiet with eyes closed, to allow for as much focus as possible.

And after a few minutes of quiet meditation, while Minaiyu is doing a concept-pushing exercise:

:Hello.:

Wait, did that work? That felt like it did something.

"Ah! You ... greeted me? I think. How?" 

Should he--

--no, he's not good enough at it yet to explain the same way, not in a reasonable timeframe.

"It was the concept-pushing one that worked! I had to focus on it pretty hard, but that should just be lack of skill."

Now that he's controlling the face enough to talk, he's grinning.

He will yield the front and focus further on the exercise. Eventually he tries the exercise with concepts more intuitive to him than the idea of a word's meaning. 

:The sensation of being surrounded by your hive abuzz on every side, supporting you in what you do*.:

*Two words in his native language, and a fundamental social and spiritual concept. 

Oh, that is so cool.

It runs deeper than words, yet is also clearly distinct from his own mind.

(And what a choice of concept.)

He speaks aloud the term it verbalises into, grinning if anything even harder, then looks thoughtful and makes a 'wait a moment' gesture.

:Acknowledged!:

There's some noticeable flavour of excitement to this one, like the tone in a person's voice.

Hmmmmmmm. 

:The satisfaction of seeing an arrow hit home in its target.:

:Indeed.:

:A task accomplished, and the healing of the hole in the world where it should be.:

He thinks he's starting to get the hang of this. Let's try a slightly longer train of thought...

:What should we do next?:

:We should strive - : The rest of the thought cuts off awkwardly when he loses focus while looking for the next concept to send. 

"You wanted to try hunting? Or we could talk about what we're going to tell my family." He says out loud. 

He will try practising a bit more.

:There is more to hunting than knowing how to work with one's team.:

:I have never been hunting anywhere before, let alone here.:

:I should probably observe at first.:

And now he will let the new mental muscle rest a little, especially since talking about 'what to say to people' seems like it should be verbal anyway.

"Well, you know a lot more than I do about what framings are well-suited for your family; that'd be true even if I were from this world. But maybe something about...a trade, or a partnership, where I share knowledge of medicine and technology and you share local knowledge, and later we'll work together in your...adventuring party?

...I have a feeling your father will think I was lying earlier when I said I couldn't read your mind. Which is not the same thing as being able to receive things you send me, and also I couldn't even do that much at the time, but we'll have to be careful in how we explain it, I think."

Marcus thinks back to the first hunts he went on as a small child. Or at least the first hunts that weren't huge collaborative efforts involving all the humans and bees from multiple hives all in a vast net of barely coordinated chaos.

"When we finish talking, I can go find us a tree, then."

"My family. They want things to be safe and happy and predictable. If we try and frame this as being about an exchange of knowledge they'll be confused. I think if I sell this as an adventuring party thing that will make sense to my grandfather, and if things make sense to him nobody will worry. He's certainly a believer in the idea that fate has a strong hand in your party composition, and treats his own party as closer than blood. You should probably meet my grandparents sooner rather than later." 

"My father probably thinks all sorts of ill of you, and much of it is speculative at best. I've had more time and space to get a feel for you. But mostly he's just worried for his son and feels powerless to make the situation better. Maybe he'd feel better if we could provide for him a clear set of things he can do to benefit me in this trying time." 

Safety and happiness and predictability are very nice, and it can be so very tempting to settle into a local optimum; but it's also important to at least sometimes resist that temptation, to venture forth scouting for new heights. Things are much safer and happier and more predictable in the long run if you are not dying of cholera at apparent random.

(Are they dying of cholera at apparent random? He needs to look into that.)

"I would be honoured to meet your grandparents.

And...well, I can think of a few things that would benefit me in this trying time, but I admit I don't have a great sense yet of what would benefit you?" he says, with some self-deprecating amusement.

(He does expect building a headspace would benefit Marcus, but there's not really anything third parties can do to help with that, at this point.)

His voice gets a bit quieter. "...I can see why it would be rough, to watch your child go through this. Especially with the cultural scripts he has to hand, by the sound of it."

"If there's something he can do which would help you, we can see about framing it as being for me instead?" 

"I thought he was more used to the idea of losing me than this, though. Maybe it's different if it just happens at random for no good reason." 

Oh, he hopes nobody thinks of this as losing Marcus. Though he supposes that if you had mentally prepared yourself for a loved one's departure from the land of the living, having them merely end up sharing their body ought to come as a relief in comparison.

of course they could very well still end up departing, but anyway

"...I haven't actually told you yet how I died, have I?

There was a plague. Not a big one, we think, we've gotten pretty good at not letting them get big, but...big enough.

And one of the ways you keep plagues from getting big, is...I don't know how much you know, about how contagions work." (He doesn't bother to test the vocabulary: at best, he'd get 'some speakers of this language have terminology for talking about germ theory', and Marcus still plausibly wouldn't know.) "But some of the species of parasite come out in the breath, and drift through the air, like dandelion seeds. Until they settle, or until you breathe them in.

Where I come from, you don't go into a public building with a naked face, not unless you have some infirmity that interferes. You cover your nose and mouth, to help catch any parasites you might be carrying without yet having noticed, and catch any parasites already lingering in the air before that air reaches your insides.

Outdoors, people don't do it as much: there's more ventilation, more space for parasites to scatter into the open sky where they can't reach anyone. Some people do it anyway, especially if they have hayfever since it'll filter that out too. But I didn't have hayfever. And I didn't wear a mask at an outdoor festival, and unknowingly there was an unusually large amount of unusually dangerous parasites there, and they didn't scatter into the sky quite enough, and that was what killed me."

(Tens of thousands of years ago, maybe, and also last night.)

He sighs. "The really good kinds of filter, the kinds you can rely on, need kinds of cloth that I'm pretty sure don't exist here, and that we're not going to see for a long time even if everything goes well. There are a lot of steps between here and there, and also only so much I could memorise, though I know the starting points.

But wool is better than nothing. You'll still get sick, but all else equal it will be somewhat milder and somewhat less often, because you reduced the size of the invading swarm and gave your body a head start on fighting it off.

...I don't know, maybe here you have magic plague-curing unguent and it doesn't even cost a whole sheep and I objectively shouldn't worry. But, psychologically, I'm not going to do well breathing unfiltered air when there are strangers around. Especially not indoors, but...probably not outdoors either, after this.

So, I'm going to want four pieces of cloth, two pairs, about yea big," he gestures an area roughly 25 centimetres by 15 centimetres, "each pair with one of them woven horizontally and the other vertically, about as tightly woven as I can get. Plus enough cloth to make strips to tie them on, and a needle and thread to put everything into place. I can make do with one pair, if I have to, but one is none-- that proverb maybe doesn't translate directly, does it. Uh, but if I only have one, I have no backup plan ready if something damages it.

And also there are smaller things, like...we eat a lot of amaranth where I'm from, and it was disorienting not to have any for breakfast, and if you happen to have some spare amaranth seeds on hand I would find some porridge at some point to be a comfort."

Yeah those sure do sound like expensive preferences. 

"Yeah if we go around all of the major settlements of the world with my face covered then I'll look like - someone who wants not to be recognised? Because they either want to commit crimes or because they committed crimes elsewhere and don't want the consequences to catch up, or because they're artificially constructing that sort of spooky personal aura around themselves for other reasons. It might be an acceptable price to pay if it's very important to you. I don't think our people would care so much, as long as we were obviously one of us, and I don't particularly want to die of lowlander plague either. I hear they keep fires in their houses and let them fill with smoke, so I'm really not sure how much time I want to spend indoors in a lowlander house anyway."

"A potion of disease healing would be very expensive. More than twenty sheep? Maybe a lot more. Maybe a hundred sheep if the guy selling it thought they could ask that much. It's a second circle spell, so not many healers can even cast it. Spells are cheaper if you can buy them straight from the mage and don't need them bottled, but then you have other issues."

Marcus can actually price things in gold pieces fine, but why would the stranger know how much a coin is worth. Everyone knows how much a sheep is worth though. 

"For now, would a scarf work? We have a lot of scarves. I think the only thing we have which would count as tightly woven is felt."

"We don't have any amaranth in stockpile, it's pretty much a seasonally foraged thing? Would rye or oat porridge have the same effect? I can probably get something like that made the next time someone lights a cookfire." 

Minaiyu looks initially confused, then like he is having a dawning and unpleasant comprehension.

"...oh, is this one of those places where most people are..."

(Wait, how the fuck does he even phrase this. 'Obsessed with faces' is too insulting probably; he gets the sense that 'hyperprosoponic' is the translation magic giving him 'this is what roots you would use to coin a neologism' rather than a pre-existing word; even 'facial-recognition savants' is too technical, not to mention incomplete...)

"...talented at facial recognition? Probably pay a lot of attention to facial expressions also?"

Why did he have to land one of those places? Especially after the fucking five-day that he has had??

He does not bury their face in their hands, because they are not at home and he is not a small child.

"I...might be able to be fine with outdoor gatherings again, with practice. And...is it less suspicious to only wear it indoors, because you're clearly not just hiding your face in general? And it would help keep the smoke out, to the same sort of limited extent that wool can keep the parasites and hayfever pollen out.

A scarf is...where you take a strip of cloth and wrap it around your nose and mouth to keep warm?" (He's vaguely heard of them, but never worn one.) "Maybe. I don't know. It only works if you're breathing through the cloth rather than around it, and that would be a lot harder with a untailored strip. And a felted one at that: felt is theoretically a better filter than woven if you can breathe through it, which is a big if."

(He would be fine with doing the weaving himself if he can get the materials for it, he actually quite likes weaving, but they kind of have bigger problems here.)

"It's..." he sighs, and again restrains himself from burying their face in their hands.

"If we had a good mask, I'd say it was worth it, definitely. But it maybe. Isn't worth it. To only reduce a swarm by four-tenths."

He sounds as if the words might be physically paining him to speak.

(The porridge discussion has frankly slipped his mind.)

"Yes, we do live in a society that cares a lot about facial expressions." 

"It might be less suspicious to only wear a mask inside. I guess you'd spend a lot of time explaining that you ... know a secret martial art that requires you to protect the purity of your body in this way?"

"What's hay fever? It sounds concerning."

He laughs, at that, though it's not a pure laughter.

"Oh, I wouldn't say 'secret', that implies I don't want them to know. I absolutely want them to know.

We-- my people warned me that there are some worlds where people care a lot about seeing each other's faces, in large part because they-- wanted me to be mentally prepared for the possibility that my host society would take poorly to masking."

(And you know, they were right, this would be so much worse if it hadn't even been in his possibility-space.)

"But I want them to know, even if they think it's almost never worth it, even if it doesn't cause me to be in rooms where everyone is doing it and parasites have to get through two masks to spread from one person to another, even if there aren't enough people doing it commonly to have meaningful cascading effects where someone manages to reduce a small swarm down to a few scouts that their body can pick off before they can breed, and so they never become contagious when they otherwise would have, and all the people they would have infected are saved.

But someone out there is tending to a sick person and needs all the help they can get, wants all the help they can get, and I want them to have it."

"Oh, and, uh...

...well, technically hayfever is at least two things that operate by different mechanisms, but they look pretty similar from the outside, so a lot of languages only have one word.

Broadly, it's where your body acquires a sensitivity to the pollen in the air. Sometimes it's because your body has mistaken the bits of pollen for parasites and tries to fight them off, and it feels like-- not a full-blown infection, but like a very mild or very early one that never fully develops. And once your body's defence systems have gotten it into their metaphorical heads that pollen is parasitic, it's hard to persuade them otherwise.

Other times it's more like-- a fragility in your throat, easily irritated by having pollen or dust contact it.

It-- well, it can start at almost any age, but most often in your teens or twenties; and it tends to get gradually worse over time, especially the second kind, though it's not unheard of for it to eventually go away. And there's nothing stopping you from getting both kinds at once.

Uh, rates vary a lot place to place, so if this isn't sounding familiar then maybe this area just isn't prone to it? It's common back home, something like two- to three-tenths of adults: I think it depends on whether you measure 'fraction of people who have it' or 'chance that you'll develop it at some point in your life', since at any given time there are some adults who are going to develop it but haven't yet, I'm 24 and I wasn't out of the main danger zone..."

(Which was a big part of why he usually didn't mask outdoors, because that was an option he might not have in the future, and he wanted to smell the petrichor and have picnics and such while he still could.

A policy worth-it-on-average-but-with-occasional-and-sometimes-catastrophic-failures, maybe, like treating all possessing spirits as demons.

He really does not feel like assessing whether he still believes this was the correct-on-average policy, right now.)

"...that was how it started. Before we knew that there are creatures smaller than those bugs that are so small that you can hardly even see them, small enough that you need to look through a magnifying lens, and that some of them are parasitic. People with hayfever covered their faces when they went outside, and often they would keep the masks on inside because of leaks of outdoor air or because of other people opening the exterior doors on their ways in and out and letting the air in, and gradually people started to notice that even though hayfever sufferers often felt like they might be getting sick, they got fully sick less. And it's not obvious why, if you don't already know then it's plausible it's because your body's defence systems are already on high alert all the time or something, but eventually people without hayfever started to figure out that if they wore anti-hayfever masks they got the same benefits."

"Huh. Maybe that's why we don't have such masks. Having a reaction to pollen feels like ... having a reaction to bread, or to wood? How would you even live? Maybe there are some generically sickly people who wouldn't be if they weren't exposed to pollen. But preventing exposure seems functionally impossible."

"If you want to convince people to ever do it, at least without somehow becoming a famous scholar of disease, I think you need to pitch it as a secret. If you met a stranger who wanted to give you a weapon for free, why would you think of it as having any value? Strangers who give you things for free are giving things which they would gain no advantage to keep for themselves. There's a story people tell sometimes, about a king of old, who wanted to introduce to the people a variety of flower he'd found in a distant land while adventuring, which he thought would be a better source of nectar. And he tried to make his vassals plant the seeds in their lands. And they refused, because vassals are wont to maintain their independence, and new things are risks, and kings do not actually selflessly want the best for their vassals or even really know what would be best for them. So what he did, was plant his own lands with the flower, and declare that it was his secret plan to achieve great wealth, and post many patrols protecting the new meadows, and by various designs ensured that his patrols would fail to protect the flowers from thieves. And thus his vassals felt that they were cleverly getting one over him by stealing it from his meadows and planting it in their own, and the flower became widespread. If you want people to think your advice has value, you need to charge for it. Especially if you intend to sell a four-tenths reduction for a hundredth of the cost, rather than something which actually competes with spell-casting or divine intervention as ways of handling disease." 

...yeah, probably the people who live inside beehives would need to be very robust against pollen, wouldn't they.

Oh, he is so not good enough at politics for this shit.

(--oh, fuck, and he's going to have to deal with that thing hyperprosoponic societies do, where they use "flickering one's face for a moment" as a vital communication channel, and they think they're conveying stuff to you when they're actually not--)

He takes a deep breath. (Of outdoor air in the middle of nowhere.)

"...I mean, I don't gain an advantage from keeping it to myself and in fact gain an advantage from not keeping it to myself, because, like...that person who doesn't become contagious and so all the people they would have infected are saved, sometimes one of the people they would have infected is me."

(Or, you know, two of the people they would have infected, but anyway.)

"But...yeah, this really isn't a society that's used to things that work like that, huh."

"It is not. Convincing people to make just better decisions is bashing the balrog, even amongst the people, and lowlanders are all sorts of other flavours of impossible to deal with." 

"But I think we can manage to make some kind of felt mask for ourselves, and we can tell my father it's an idea you had to help me while we've adventuring." 

He nods.

"Okay," he says, sounding just slightly shaky.

"And if the felt turns out to block too much and we can't breathe through it, I think I can make some suitable cloth if you can spare me the wool. I know it's a hassle to weave cloth as densely as one can manage, but I don't mind."

He almost says something about how it might even be soothing to have a craft project as long as he doesn't think too hard about the stakes, but he has a feeling it might be hard to explain to someone from a pre-industrial society why you would do fibrecrafts as a hobby, and he is not super feeling up to it right now.

every person who gets burned out enough by needing to make lots of cloth by hand that they can't see how objectively cool and fascinating it is is a tragedy, for this and other reasons

"--oh, uh, I never actually answered you about the porridge, did I...

...oat porridge would help, I think, even if not as much as amaranth. I've never had rye porridge before, so like, it could well be good, but it's not going to be comfortingly familiar."

(He is not even going to ask if they have cardamom. There's no way they have cardamom. He does not want to know how Marcus would react to being asked about cardamom.)

"I think it would be better to talk to an experienced weaver about it, if we can? They'll take less time with it, and then we can spend our time doing stuff I'm good at. Even if it's an adventuring preparation and I'm trying not to take too many resources from people that I won't be able to earn back later in the year. Unless you're very certain it won't be more trouble for you than for them. We can certainly manage oat porridge." 

"... Do you need a break, or do you have more questions you want to ask?" 

(He tentatively rests a hand on one of the bees.)

"You said you didn't think you had anything dense currently, which suggested that it...might not be in the realm of reasonable requests? If there's nothing repurposable, then I'm putting more work onto someone who has more than enough to do already, and unusually slow and finicky work that they clearly don't normally find to be worth the trouble on balance.

I-- I do have more experience with weaving than you would expect of someone who grew up with access to cloth-making machines, but...yeah, definitely not as much as someone for whom it's one of their main roles. Even if it were my job, and not...art projects?...I'm still fairly young and have only had so much time in which to gain experience.

And..." he sighs "...yeah, you're right, it would take up your time as well, or at least your hands and eyes."

"Uh, as for other questions, I don't think I have anything else urgent-- or, I guess I don't actually know if this is urgent, come to think of it, I suppose it could be...is there a ritual that you're supposed to do here, when you move to a new home in a new area, to greet the local spirits or introduce yourself to them? I know I'm a heathen and all, but I don't want to be on bad terms."

(It's important to be polite to the Lords and Ladies, after all. And he's not going to bet on none of the local sapient spirits being real.)

"There might well be rituals for greeting the local humans also, but...demons: I know our neighbours aren't going to understand, why someone wearing a body they've seen around all these years is introducing himself like he's new. Might do more harm than good.

But spirits will know I'm here, if they see us. Can probably tell by looking at me that I'm not a demon, too. I wouldn't want anyone asking why I didn't bring them a gift of music from my home, or whatever the custom might be."

"To be clear I don't think they will do this. But if you go ask a wise elder if it's worth their time to do the sort of thing they specialise in, and they say it's not worth their time to bother and they don't say that this is because we should do it ourselves or get their heir or apprentice to do it, we should trust their judgement of the matter not being worth doing rather than trying to do it in secret around our actual responsibilities, and use a piece of ordinary cloth or wait till we can buy something in the lowland." 

"There are rituals to build a new hive, and ways to politely enter a sanctum, and ways to welcome a new child, and weddings I guess? I think we should take you to a priest or the hall of gods if we want to get your relationship with the gods proper sorted out. An adventurer can't be too respectful to lesser spirits; keeping them sorted out is one of our jobs." 

they're specialists in weaving, though, not disease control he probably does not actually lose anything in practice by retreating from this hill, and he should not die on it

It does sound like there is a pretty wide variety of spirits here, if people are hunting elementals as pest control. (Not to mention possibly getting possessed by demons.)

He nods. "Alright.

Is it time to find a tree, then?"

"Sure!"

Marcus will get them up and start hiking. He never actually got that fire going, so he'll hide the tinder in the back of his lean-to and maybe it will still be dry, and then set off hiking. 

Eventually, he finds a place where a stand of old growth spruce overlooks what's a large clearing full of berry bushes and wildflowers during the warmer months. 

The hunting strategy is simple. Climb a tree and sit in it. Find a position from which you can use a longbow comfortably. Wait for birds to arrive in the clearing. Take any shots you reasonably can. Signal the bees to drive them to the air out of the bushes. Take as many shots as you can without compromising accuracy. Get a bee to bring you back any birds which got shot from where they fell. Repeat until the light starts to go. 

Any issues? 

He is quietly concerned that this activity is shaping up to be all of "a task that is not improved by having two minds to bring to bear on the problem", "a task that is mostly very boring to watch", and "a task where it is important not to distract the person in charge of doing it".

(He could be the one doing the bee-signalling, but it doesn't seem like they would actually gain anything as such from the division of labour: it would only ever be an excuse to get him more experience with handling bees.)

(Also, he has vaguely heard that it takes a lot of practice to be good at archery, and it seems wasteful to duplicate that work, so--even in the longer term, after he has a solid sense of how one does this type of hunting--they probably can't really take turns being the one at front for this.)

look, subconscious, worst-case scenario here is that he's a silent passenger for hours, not decades

But. It needs doing, and he did promise he would learn the ropes. In the future, he will probably work on headspace-building exercises during times like this, look to maneuver into a position where he can at least physically move (subjectively), but right now he is going to pay attention.

(And it's possible he's overestimating how much of this consists of long stretches of watching an empty clearing and being on guard for birds to arrive? It seems both rude (implicitly complaining of boredom) and inviting bad luck (anchoring on a figure and being disappointed when this instance turns out to be unusually bad) to ask what the pattern tends to be.)

"Hmm..."

:Is it important to be quiet for this?:

:We are ridding ourselves of the vulnerability of needing to communicate in ways that prey can hear or see.:

:That being said, I also don't want to distract you.:

:It's not essential, but it is desirable.:

:A mental image of being so distracted by bickering with a sibling that a ptarmigan lands immediately next to them and they take minutes to notice.:

:Silent speech is still wiser.:

:Noted.:

He takes a metaphorical step back and settles into an observer position, watching for...really anything moving, but especially birds and especially especially birds that look like that mental image.

While he certainly doesn't ignore the main area of vision, he tries to pay more attention to his peripheral vision than he normally would, since presumably that's where Marcus isn't focusing (or else the eyes would be pointed there). Ptarmigans maybe aren't hard enough to spot for it to help to have a second thread of attention there, but he's not 100% sure, and also it seems like a practice that might serve them well when they are later hunting more dangerous prey.

(Probably they should discuss this idea explicitly later, now that it's occurred to him, but for now he will start by trying it out in what is hopefully a low-stakes environment.)

How long does it take for something to happen?

Marcus doesn't make it entirely easy for Minaiyu; he is constantly moving his eyes from location to location, resisting the temptation to ever let his focus rest on one spot for more than a second or two. 

In the silence and the still, all time passing feels a little like eternity, but within an hour some birds arrive. Ptarmigan are bright white and fluffy, and while they're well-concealed against the snow, they aren't so well-concealed against tree-trunks or leafless berry-bushes, and it's the berries they're here for. 

Yeah, fair enough. They should see if they can work out some sort of peripheral-vision-testing setup at some point.

! A thing!!

finally

(It would be easier if he at least let himself daydream, he thinks, but he is trying to put himself in a hunter's place here.)

Time to start shooting. 

Miss. Miss. Hit. Miss. 

And now they're far enough gone it would be a waste of arrows to keep trying. 

:Would you like to try signalling the bees for retrieval?:

(It's weird, to feel his arms go through the motions of using a bow like they're accustomed to it.)

He internally winces. He's always been...not squeamish, exactly, he can handle being around injured people if he's trying to help them, but his violence drive has never quite been fully functional. It didn't take him very long to give up on using scapegoats, and he never actually killed any of them.

(Fortunately, part of the dysfunction is having rage that's relatively weak in general, and he gets by alright. He's glad he doesn't both find scapegoats dissatisfying and need outlets.)

It's just a bird, and not even a parrot or corvid or anything, probably. It needed doing, if they're to get balanced nutrition in their diet. They have made progress towards feeding their household.

:Like so?:

After getting confirmation that those are indeed the correct signals, he tells the bees to retrieve the bird.

Why is Marcus giving slightly choppier orders than usual?

Well, ours not to reason why. 

Excellent! 

Marcus will reflexively start the process of stringing up the bird. Proper processing can be done at home, where there are things like bowls of water. He will try to send along the intent of each step he is taking as he does so. 

:Does this all make sense?: 

He's always been warned against touching dead animals, and told that the reason meat isn't sold raw is because it isn't safe, but of course the bird only just died and there hasn't actually been time for the bacteria to set in.

:I think so.:

(Telepathy continues to be so cool.)

Great! Then it's time to do it all over again, and then again until the sun hangs low in the sky and they'll need to head back home. 

He will endure.

(Occasionally he manages to access a frame of mind where it's kind of meditative, but not at all consistently. On the other hand, it's his first day.)

He wonders how much it would speed up the process of learning archery to have a telepathic tutor who can demonstrate appropriate movements with your own body. Probably still not enough? There might well be other skills where that makes the difference in whether it's worthwhile to duplicate their efforts, though.

Then it's time to head home. Marcus left enough time to get home before daylight fades, but getting home at sunset means having an entire second half of the day to do the sort of things that you can do in the evening in. His uncle has started a fire in the fireyard, so he heads over there first to drop off the birds and make cooking requests. 

:Do you want to try and greet my uncle?:

:As a test run for greeting my grandfather?:

He asks Minaiyu on the way over. 

oh no, first (1.5th?) impressions with the aliens

with his new household members who are aliens

:I suppose so? No time like the present.:

:...oh, is there an honourific for this?:

:The word 'Uncle' would be appropriate in context even if I wasn't literally his brother's son.:

(Well, people sharing a body are normally siblings, he supposes. Even before you factor in that the term "uncle" is apparently broader than that.)

:Noted.:

:Let's go, then.:

Marcus will approach his uncle, who is presently kneading bread. A teenager cousin is using a large wooden mortar and pestle to break up dried meat, which presumably will be made into soup in combination with the big cauldron of boiling water.

"Uncle Aulus. How was your day?" He asks. 

"Very well. How have you been doing?" Aulus seems timid by comparison to his brother, though he's not much less burly. 

"Much better than this morning. I wanted to introduce you properly to the spirit who came to inhabit me this morning. We've had some time to discuss, and we think we can form a mutually beneficial arrangement." 

He gestures awkwardly. "Minaiyu, meet Aulus. Aulus, meet Minaiyu." 

He nods. "Hello, uncle. It's good to meet you."

(He thinks that, for the moment, he should not try to preemptively defuse the misconceptions this person likely has of him. Coming off as too defensive will backfire.)

Oh, wait, he should at least attempt to pay attention to Aulus's face and see if he can catch any meaningful flickers, shouldn't he. No promises on how well he's going to do at it, both the catching and the remembering to pay attention.

That sure was some indecipherable facial flickering. 

Aulus will laugh a slightly forced laugh. 

"It's good to meet you. Ah, Marcus. You take after your grandmother. She could never let anything keep her down." 

(It's going to suck talking to hyperprosoponics all the time, isn't it.)

"This is...well, it's definitely not the day either Marcus or I were expecting to have when we went to our respective beds last night, but I think we'll make it work."

I don't want to keep him down, Minaiyu very nearly says, but that again seems like the kind of protest that makes someone more suspicious of you rather than less.

"I have faith that you will."

"... You said that you were some kind of apprentice doctor, Minaiyu?" He pauses, not being quite sure what question to ask, about this fact. 

That seems like a pretty good reaction, under the circumstances! Hesitant, sure, but not more so than you'd expect from the sudden upheaval. Willing to talk to him like the confirmed non-demon that he is.

Minaiyu noticeably brightens.

"Yes! My focus was in emergency medicine, going to care for and fetch people who were too ill to make their own way to the medical centre.

But I do also have experience in doing non-urgent care, since of course you have to get your feet under you and pick up speed before you can be of good use in emergencies."

"Yes, I know how that feels. You haven't really met Marcus's grandparents, but they wanted us to go into adventuring and none of us had the head for it. Marcus though is very good! He can even give grandfather a run for his money sometimes in spars. I'm sure you'll be in good hands."

:My uncle is exaggerating because he's not a warrior. The spars are intended to minimise my grandfather's advantages over a green fighter and he still beats me nine times in ten.:

:Well, one-tenth is a start, I suppose. But I certainly hope we don't get into a real fight with anyone of that strength anytime soon.:

He smiles. "I'm glad to hear it," he says aloud, "and I hope to be a good contributor to his party."

"Good, good." 

"Ah, but you had some birds for me! That will improve the stew no end." 

He's not actually sure that the birds are for tonight, come to think of it? Presumably they'd keep longer in this weather, if desired.

But he waits a beat and Marcus doesn't correct Aulus on that, so he'll go with it.

"Glad to hear it! How is the stew shaping up?"

"Well, it's so much hot water right now. But some fresh meat will help break up the monotony of borts."

Which implies that the preserved meat doesn't taste very good, because otherwise you wouldn't need to break up the monotony.

(Except for nutritional reasons, but adding fresh meat to preserved meat doesn't seem like it will broaden the nutrients that much, in the grand scheme of things.)

Well, it's still possible he will turn out to disagree with Aulus on this. He can hope.

"Do you add any other ingredients to it?

...I know that probably seems like a silly question to you, one way or the other. But I don't have a good sense of your food customs yet."

"We add salt and honey and, frankly, we add more things in summer. But it's winter now, so salt and honey and you can eat it with flatbread and pickles. We don't eat that literally every day, but we eat that ... a lot, in winter." He is making a disappointed face, if Minaiyu is paying attention. 

Sweetened meat is not something his palate is adapted to, though he knows there are places that do it. Hopefully he will get used to it.

He hopes someday he can give this man...a set of canning supplies, a trade network with professional canneries, a chest freezer, a freeze-dryer.

(A greenhouse, perhaps, wrought of glass and steel.)

There are so many steps, between here and there. So many opportunities for things to go wrong.

He nods, looking sympathetic.

"Though the winter is long, spring shall come again."

(He sounds like he might be quoting something, at least in translation.)

"How far through winter are we, at the moment?"

"It had sure fucking better." He says sympathetically. 

"I would say we have another two months at this rate, around here? Of course you can never know for certain what trials the gods will send you." 

He is not sure if that is a figure of speech or not. If humans made the gods, then surely there were years with unusually long winters before the gods existed. On the other hand, the fabric of reality has apparently been through some tailoring, and mending.

(He can't think of a way to ask which he's reasonably confident is polite, and also there's a decent chance Aulus himself doesn't know how literal it is.)

He nods. "Indeed."

:What was the next thing on your schedule? I'm guessing the appropriate farewell here is probably saying that we're off to go do it?:

:I was going to ask him about the oats if that's okay with you.:

:That sounds good.:

(He doesn't want to delay trying their stew too long, so as to know what to expect going forward, but probably the scheduling will work out reasonably one way or another. Plus it's apparently not a central example of winter stew tonight, in any case.)

:After you? I don't have a good sense of the appropriate etiquette here.:

"Uncle. Under the circumstances, I was thinking that we would benefit from something plain and sturdy and digestible, so I was hoping you could prepare a pot of oatmeal porridge for me while you've got the fire burning. If we have any left in stock." 

"No worries. ... I'll make it nice and plain, the way foreigners like it." He adds awkwardly. 

He looks thoughtful.

"Is it normally honey?" says the voice that isn't quite Marcus's, and anyway Marcus wouldn't have asked that question.

"I mostly eat my oatmeal savoury, but I do eat honeyed oatmeal sometimes, and..." what's a good way of putting this that doesn't make him sound clueless or braggart "...I think the spices I'd normally put into savoury oatmeal don't grow around here. A honeyed version might actually taste more of home."

Also, he finds that it feels...appropriate, on some symbolic emotional level, for a meal welcoming him to this world to be perfectly mundane oats but made with giant-bee honey. Like a...graceful transition, maybe. He's not sure he can put it into words, and possibly not even into concepts.

It dawns on him, after he says this, that...

"...I made some sort of face when you said you put honey in your meat, didn't I, and that's why you're worried about it. Uh, honeyed meat is foreign to me, I'll admit, but not honeyed oats."

"We also sometimes add jam or aniseed. But yes, many heathens get a bit weird about the honey, especially in savoury dishes. But to me, I think it's a necessary counterpoint to savoury flavours! But if you won't mind it with your oats, I'm sure Marcus will appreciate it."

He is going to busy himself finding an earthenware pot that he can fill with water and set to boiling by his hearth. 

"I think just the honey for now, thank you, though I'd be curious to try other flavourings in the future."

He's occasionally had aniseed in things as part of spice blends, but doesn't have enough sense of its individual flavour to imagine what aniseed oatmeal would taste like.

What can he see from here about where Aulus is getting the water from?

Aulus has a big wooden barrel behind him that he scoops the water out of with an earthenware vessel the size and shape of a saucepan.

"Very well! The honey is the best bit, of course." 

(The teenager breaking up borts on the other side of the table nods firmly in agreement.) 

He's glad Aulus has not grown tired of the monotony of honey.

:How do you normally clean your water here?:

:It doesn't seem like the weather is very good for sun-bakers at the moment. Do you cook it over the fire, and maybe make a lot of soups with it to get more use out of the fuel?:

:...or do you just try your best to find sources that were already clean to start with, and occasionally get unlucky and get cholera or somesuch?:

(The concept "sun-baker" here seems to be a dark-coloured (or sometimes transparent) covered vessel left in the sun to heat, cooking to death any tiny parasites that might be living in it.)

:We don't have sunbakers. A small hive like this one doesn't have anything to worry about when it comes to cholera*. Your presence here might antagonize Rivers**, though. That's another reason why we need to speak to a theologian.: 

*Lit: River-goddess's curse

**Like most people on the continent with theological, linguistic or cultural influence from the Pantheonic Church, Marcus has a sense that it would be inappropriate, faintly heretical even, to acknowledge that the gods have specific names and identities and refers to them entirely by domain or poetic euphemism except when absolutely forced to clarify between two people who've wielded the same domain. 

:...I would like very much not to antagonise the river-goddess, yes. Especially if she might smite me with cholera.:

:...might smite *us* with cholera. All the worse to drag you down with me.:

:What is it that makes you suspect I might antagonise her?:

:She thinks that people have a proper place. These people on that side of the river, those people on this side of the river. That people are generally best off in their home country with their native people. There's something cities can do to appease her about all the travel and trade and such, and if she doesn't get it, then she curses the city with cholera. It doesn't come up much here, and you're not the only person in this hive who wasn't born on this land, so I don't think we need to be incredibly worried. But even so.:

To the extent and in the circumstances that leaving your homeland is a bad idea, it is its own punishment. It's a really bad sign if you have to threaten people to convince them to stay.

But he's reserving judgement until he understands her stance better.

(And even then, he'd rather keep quiet about his judgement than get smited with cholera.)

Wait, so if she does get the appeasement, the city doesn't get cholera?

Well, Marcus said he doesn't know much about this, so for the time being Minaiyu will hold both "this spirit can be successfully negotiated with for the provision of water-cleaning services for your slum" and "the 'appeasement' process is actually some form of water disinfection system" as potential hypotheses.

:Hopefully she'll be understanding, given that 'in my home country with my native people' is not an option available to me.:

:I'd expect it to be a revoking-of-protection rather than an active curse: cholera and other similar parasites spread very easily in dense living environments that drink raw water, it's pretty much the default outcome.

...setting aside the difficulties of getting people to listen to me, she might be upset if I teach people to cook their water, and thereby interfere with her levers of power.:

(This is plausibly still true even if she's not real or isn't really the one doing the water-cleaning, if whoever is doing the water-cleaning is keeping their methods secret to maintain a monopoly.)

:The gods are big. If we consult with a priest and do what they say it'll be fine, and this isn't the first time someone has been stranded far from home.: 

:I'm not sure what to think about if she's cursing cities or revoking protection. If we end up accidentally picking a fight with a god, I imagine someone will let us know before they decide to smite us. This is why people adventure in parties; so there can be a specialist around to consult on these matters. Among other reasons.: 

:And we have some time to plan, including planning which hornets' nests to avoid whacking.:

(He feels viscerally icky about the thought of keeping water-cleaning methods secret, but intellectually he's aware that the calculus is different if it usually doesn't actually make the difference in whether people get cholera or not.)

:We do. Speaking of time, we've been silent for a bit.: 

"Apologies Uncle. We were discussing something. I think we will head inside now, unless you need anything?" 

Aulus doesn't quite succeed at looking unconcerned. 

"Ah, no worries. I'll let you know when dinner is ready, of course."

He doesn't catch the concerned look per se, but it does occur to him that Aulus didn't actually, like, know, about the telepathy, and also that "discussing something" might seem ominously vague to him.

But Minaiyu is not sure how to clarify matters without digging the hole deeper.

(He originally didn't ask aloud about the water because it felt like too much risk of coming off as an insult or accusation, potentially implicitly calling their current water methods foolish. And he is, on the whole, glad he kept it private, especially if water-cleaning methods are possibly an important secret that people might smite you to protect! But still, awkward.)

"Thank you, uncle," he says. He doesn't exactly apologise, but he is noticeably embarrassed.

Aulus waves them off and returns to focusing on his bread. 

:To grandfather, then? Or do you want to space out meeting members of my family with something else?: 

:Doing something else right now would kind of just feel like procrastinating. I should properly join my new household first, as best I can.:

:I *think* that meeting went pretty well? A bit awkward at the end, but it really was for the best not to have the water discussion publicly. In hindsight, I suppose I could have waited on that until we left, rather than when I was reminded by Aulus's water barrel.

Is it a good sign that he felt comfortable swearing in front of me? I'm not sure how meaningful that is.:

:It would have been a bad sign if he didn't. We are being very polite but we do not generally avoid profanity. I do think he likes you well enough, though. He's a generally friendly person. I think we might need to get better at ... performing the fact that we're thinking about something while we talk? Or something like that.:

He will start walking into the house as they talk. Finally they are once more in a space where the ambient temperature is above freezing. 

:And it might also get easier when people are accustomed to the idea that we might discuss something amongst ourselves. It occurred to me afterward that he wouldn't have known that was possible: it must have come as a surprise to him.

I do hope he didn't feel too left out. And that his assistant didn't feel too left out of anything either, for that matter, though perhaps the assistant was just shy.:

:Assuming only things which you know factually to be possible are happening would be an unwise way to live your life, I think.:

:You shouldn't try and participate in conversations just because you're in earshot. It's sort of rude.: 

:I'm rather getting that impression, yeah. But it's still a surprise when any specific one happens, even if your model of reality had enough flex and open space in it that it's not a fundamental shock.:

:I'd normally expect that to depend a lot on who's in the conversation and what it's about, but I'm not familiar with the local customs on this. I probably couldn't even describe what *my* local customs are in a way that would get an immigrant to my own world up to speed.

I wasn't sure if I was supposed to greet the assistant also, but since they didn't speak up I went along with that.:

:I think generally you need to be very willing to politely ignore people because people don't really have a lot of privacy otherwise. Especially when the weather is worse than this, we might all be basically stuck in the hive itself for days. But that's not always true and I can't really explain what the exceptions are. And people are just rude sometimes.:

People in one big room with open wall capsules don't really have a lot of privacy (at least for sound) even if they are politely ignored, but he supposes it's a useful coping mechanism to think of it that way if you can pull it off.

:Fair enough.:

It's nice to be in the warmth again and all, but...

:...I'm guessing you don't do home-entering purifications^† here, is that right?:

(Home-entering purifications of some form appear in a lot of cultures across many worlds, including cultures that don't have germ theory, but it's not universal (nor even as common as nodding your head for "yes").

plus there's only so much of a sanctuary a home can be when you are keeping sheep inside it)

---

^†cleansing yourself upon return, to maintain the sanctity of the home against outside intrusion: most centrally by washing your hands, sometimes washing your feet and/or changing your clothes, occasionally other forms ↩

:I mean, we take off our jackets and boots and keep them in the entryway? But that doesn't seem to be what you mean.: 

[This sequence of concepts is less closely approximatable as English sentences, but it goes something like:]

:There are many places, and mine is one of them, where we think of the home as a sanctuary. The outside world has its filth and dangers (as I am all too aware, having been recently reminded), but the home protects its people. One doesn't take the precautions at home that one would take elsewhere, amongst things that strangers have touched and air that strangers have breathed and even a tree in the forest that a deer may have pooped on.

The home is kept apart, and one mustn't track the impurities of the world at large into it. So that you can move freely, and be at peace, and have things that belong to you and your kin and are not shared with the parasites.

(To not have to wonder, is this safe? Is this clean? Or is it the thing that will cause me to spend days burning with fever and barely able to tell reality from dream? Or crushed beneath the weight of pure, elemental misery? Or fragile with nausea, and deprived even of the ability to lie down and do nothing? (Or waking up dead one morning?))

So in our entryway, there are jackets and boots, yes, but also a place to keep your bag with the things that are yours but which belong to the outside, and a place to keep new things that *will* be brought into the household but do not *yet* belong, and a handwashing sink with purified water and soap, and a set of...not *fresh* clothes necessarily, it would be wasteful to launder your clothes every time you left the home, but *separate* clothes. (Some cultures put showering areas or places to clean your feet in the entryway, but we normally don't. There are probably other variations I'm less familiar with.)

...some of this was probably rude, and I am sorry. I don't mean to accuse you of foolishness. And I have a feeling that soap is expensive here.

But it...:

(He does not say that "it will take some getting used to", because he's not sure that getting used to it is possible or even desirable.)

:...well, it's very disconcerting for me. I'm sorry for the outburst.:

(He has not known sanctuary in six days, and it is starting to sink in emotionally that maybe he never will again.)

(He's never going to know whether or not he infected anyone in his unwitting violation of the household sanctuary, before he knew he was unclean. Maybe they just hadn't finished incubating yet.)

Marcus does not say 'You shouldn't worry about this. It's not going to be what kills you.' It wouldn't help. 

He also does not say 'We are all vastly more likely to die of a mite infestation than we are of any sickness of the human body, even if you assume the thing we're going to die of isn't violence or the elements.' 

What he does say is: :Don't worry about it. You died, nobody is expecting you to be okay about that, and I understand that outsiders have very different customs. You're right that most of those precautions seem like they'd be prohibitively expensive. It doesn't mean we can't aspire to be the sort of person who can afford prohibitively expensive things.: 

It wouldn't be enough, to have a world where soap is terribly expensive but he personally can afford it. He wants a world where you can walk down to the store and buy a three-month supply of handwashing soap for your entire household for half an hour's wages. Everyone deserves a world where you can walk down to the store and buy a three-month supply of handwashing soap for your entire household for half an hour's wages.

(Okay, maybe two hours for a household this big. But still.)

He sends a somewhat shaky acknowledgement.

And then, because he is scared to ask but even more scared not to, :Maybe I should pet a bee for a bit first before we talk to your grandparents. That might help me feel better.:

(He thinks his clean-sense will have an easier time with the bees than the sheep.)

:Sure.: 

He is going to relocate to his cell for that, navigating effortlessly through the noisy and crowded space of the hive. It's really quite dark; starlight can't illuminate within the hive and there are no fires within. Small wicker baskets glow a pale blue from within, just enough to indicate where people are standing so they can be dodged past, but not enough to make it easy to tell people apart or tell what people are doing. It continues to smell of unwashed humans and equally unwashed sheep. A bee bounces off of Marcus amicably as he travels, on its way to some other destination. On the other side of the hive, there is a light glowing within one cell; two small children are using it to play some kind of game with sheep bones as the pieces. 

Second the bee is going to follow them, having been informed by gesture of the point of this exercise. 

The sensory overload is not exactly helping.

at least it's not too bright?

(On a back burner in his mind, Minaiyu is contemplating how to rig a shower system (even if mostly for rinsing). Squeeze-bottle style is probably the simplest way; he's almost certainly not going to get rubber around here, let alone soft plastic, but he could probably get a small waterskin. And...clay, maybe, for the showerhead? But then how to attach the showerhead so that the water comes out the holes and not around the edges of the attachment point? Hmm...)

It's like...vertigo, but in his clean-sense rather than his vestibular system. This place is his and not-his; he is as safe as he is going to get anytime soon and barely safe at all.

(Would he bury his face in his hands here? Should he?)

Regardless, he isn't taking any motor control, at the moment. Even a well-lit hyperprosoponic wouldn't see anything wrong. They'd just see Marcus, moving through his home.

:What makes them glow like that?:

:They contain a particular species of glowworm! They need to be watered and fed and various other things but it's safer than using fire to light your house.: 

:It certainly is.:

(It's good that they can get away without needing open flames in the house. One less thing for him to worry about.)

(some lightbulbs would be nice though)

They can arrive at Marcus's cell then, and he can climb inside. 

Marcus has no idea what to do under these circumstances. He will try and yield the front. 

...it might be very bad if he wakes up mid-climb one morning. He does not have enough information on what it's like in this body to wake up second to know if that would be very bad or not.

It doesn't feel like this exact moment is the time to point that out, but he is making a mental note to, before they go to sleep tonight, ask Marcus to make sure they're both alert before getting out of bed. (At least at first, until they have a better sense of how it would go.)

Even with much of the noise and the scent and the breath still reaching them, it feels viscerally less dangerous, or at least less overwhelming, to be in their own little capsule. He is surrounded by the comfort of solid walls, where nothing can sneak up on him.

He will reach out and give the bee a tentative pet. Can he tell in this lighting whether the bee seems happy about it?

The bee is in favour of being pet! It will wiggle approvingly, which can be felt even if not seen. 

Aww.

Not something you want to be startled by first thing in the morning, sure, but once you have your feet under you they are pretty cute. Maybe especially when you've spent much of the day learning how to team up with them.

:Do you think it would be okay if I hug her? I'm not sure if that's the sort of thing that makes them uncomfortable.:

[It doesn't directly come through in the telepathy that Minaiyu is unsure whether giant bees take the "ensouled" noun class or "soulless/object" noun class and has started erring on the high side, because he's not actually speaking Tashayan here and the pronoun is more like a mental gesture at that-bee-there.]

:Bees don't like having their wings pinned because they are relatively fragile, so hug them like this.: Marcus passes over a muscle memory of how to wrap your hands around them without touching their wings. 

Hug.

he still kind of feels like he is hugging her under false pretenses, but maybe she's started to catch on by now, and anyway at this stage hugging Marcus's family would probably be more awkward on net

She's very warm.

Which is, first of all, cozy, but also...it's because this place is so crowded that they don't need to risk having fire inside the house. Crowding brings danger, instinctively and also means a great deal to lose if they have unknowingly gotten some infected deer poop on their hand; but it brings safety, too.

Maybe there will come a day when being surrounded by his hive abuzz on every side will feel supporting.

He hasn't steeled himself enough to touch their face directly, but--after a moment's hesitation--he is going to rest their head on the bee.

Second does not mind! She will snuggle. 

He really would not have predicted one subjective day ago that tomorrow he would be hugging a giant bee.

It's nice, though.

There are so many things about his future he can't predict right now, so many things about this world he doesn't know, but...some of them will be good. He's curious what they'll be.

Gradually, his shallow breathing deepens, steadying--

"MARCUS! MARCUS! ARSINA STOLE MY KNUCKLEBONE!" 

"NO I DIDN'T! I WON IT FAIR AND SQUARE!"

He startles.

...well. Other people have problems too.

:You go on. I'll be alright.:

He thinks.

:Thank you.:

Marcus will climb down from his cell to examine the two small children who have come here for his arbitration. 

"All right. Explain to me what happened." 

"Drusus and I were playing knucklebones! And we were bored so he came up with a new rule! And I won his good knucklebone, the blue one! And now he says that wasn't the rule at all!" 

"It wasn't what I meant! Nobody should have been able to roll that much! So give it back." 

"And why did you come to me about it?" 

"Mum was out fetching water." 

"... Mum would have told us to stop playing. And you know all the rules to all the games!" 

"Hmmmmmmmm." He ponders out loud. 

:Do you mind if we go to grandfather now? We could kill two birds with one stone.: 

:I think that works.:

(There will be other hugs later. Probably.

He'll get by.)

He feels an awkward gratitude that it isn't his responsibility to sort out the kids' fight.

(It's possible that if he taught them an alien game (all the games, you say?), they'd get distracted enough by it to drop the fight over the old one, but he is not really feeling up to trying to thread that needle at the moment. Polite introductions are one thing, but being playful and entertaining...)

Oh great. Remaining totally still because someone else in your body didn't really want to move wasn't very pleasant actually. 

:Excellent!:

"It seems to me like you both knew what you were doing was a silly thing even if you agreed to it. I think you should give back all the knucklebones you won from each other playing your variant game. All of them, not just this special one." 

"What! No-"

"And, because you can't keep playing that game, I was just going to go visit grandfather and ask him if he could help with my training. Would you like to watch?" 

"Oooh! Yes!" 

"I guess..." 

Well then. Marcus is going to do a little more cajoling to make sure that they agree they've undone all the bad bets they did, which is really its own punishment in a way. And then they can go visit grandfather. 

(Distraction to the rescue after all.

He supposes they'll find out how politely quiet the kids are.)

He will lead the parade of small children over to his grandfather's cell, which is on the ground floor of the building. It's colder there, but also you don't need to do any shenanigans to get in or out, and his grandparents are old. He knocks on the corner of the wood to get their attention. 

"Grandfather. Grandmother. I would like to speak with you." 

His grandfather and grandmother will drag themselves out from their cell. He is an old man, the sort of man who doesn't look aged so much as sun-dried, withered but still wiry and strong, and she has the look of someone who was once a great beauty who has aged gracefully into being a little old lady. Both of them look to be in implausibly good shape for their apparent age. Based on the objects they bring out with them, he was reading a book by the eerie glow coming from an iron sphere as though it were lit with an unnatural and heatless flame, and she was using the same light to sew repairs into clothes. 

"What do you want, kid?" 

"I wanted to introduce you properly to the spirit who came to inhabit me this morning. We've had some time to discuss, and we think we can form a mutually beneficial arrangement." 

"Minaiyu, meet my grandfather, who is also named Marcus Favonius, and my grandmother, who is named Adiaratou. Grandmother, Grandfather, meet Minaiyu." 

(The small children are capable of being quiet, for a moment, having detected formality.) 

(Note to self: magic lightbulbs exist.)

He should ask at some point how the local name format works. He's not sure what "Favonius" indicates, or whether "Marcus" is simply a short form of the personal name and "Marcus Favonius" the long one.

(Probably there are also Implications of some sort to them having the same name.)

Oh fuck, he forgot to ask how to address them.

Is it too late to ask now without an awkwardly long pause--

--probably, yeah.

He will, uh, perform a head bow in what will hopefully come across as a formal acknowledgement? And will hopefully not turn out to be locally insulting??

"Hello. It's good to meet you."

He does manage a smile.

which is hopefully not locally insulting

Marcus senior harumphs performatively. 

"Well met. We'll have to see if you're a good enough sort, but I would say overall that this meeting is auspicious for my grandson and his prospects. I'm sure I can figure out how to make you suffer without impacting my grandson, if it isn't." 

Adiaratou just watches in silence.

"Please don't threaten my friends! How am I supposed to bring partymates home if this is how you treat them!" 

(He's not really enjoying getting the look from his grandmother that she normally reserves for rabbits, ptarmigan, and sheep rustlers, either.) 

...Minaiyu is feeling really quite lost here.

Marcus's reaction Minaiyu might be having an emotion about being called "friend" suggests that Grandfather's response was gravely insulting? It seemed...honestly pretty good, for a demon world. Plausibly this guy has encountered hostile possessing spirits before, if part of his job was to keep lesser spirits sorted out.

"Um. I, uh, I understand that this world has mostly hostile possessors and that I face, uh, something of an uphill battle here in proving myself trustworthy? But I do hope to be a boon for him, and to-- to leave things better than I found them, including by his standards."

He has enough awareness of common hyperprosoponic customs to suspect that he was supposed to say most of that in the face-flickering channel and put something much more dancing-around-the-subject in the voice channel, but that's not happening, he's sorry. Even if they did all their subtext through normal methods, he'd still probably be too foreign to pull it off.

(Sure, Marcus was if anything even more blunt, but (1) he's family and not uninvited-guest, and (2) probably also can't do much with the face-flickering channel, you don't generally see hyperprosoponics and non-hyperprosoponics in the same brain. (Experience helps, yes, but only so far.))

The old man laughs. 

"Dear. Don't be cruel." 

"Very well! My grandson seems to think well of you, and who am I to second-guess destiny. May lightning strike all your troubles before they find their way to you." 

"...thank you?"

Wait, hang on, is Grandfather testing him to see if he'll fail to notice the problem there--

"Or, um-- I suppose that wouldn't actually be very fair to Marcus, I gather he doesn't want a life that's too easy. May lightning strike enough of our troubles that the rest are manageable, but leave us enough to strengthen our souls?"

(Is it awkward to call his host Marcus when the grandfather is also Marcus? Is there some standard circumlocution here?)

"You remind me of my teachers*. No, we pray for the god of Death-from-Luck to pass us by, adventuring or lightning strikes. You can always find more trouble, if you want it." 

*translator's note: 'the sect elders responsible for giving new initiates orders' might have been a more literal translation

In a place with social contracts as weak as Marcus has implied, "requiring that the trouble be something prosocial to involve yourself in" might not even meaningfully limit your prospects when seeking out trouble.

There might not be any polite way to say that, and certainly not for an alien on short notice.

He nods thoughtfully.

"...Marcus told me that long ago, people raised the gods up out of nothing. They raised a god whom you would want to pass you by? Is it so that there would at least be someone to entreat?

--I understand that it's been a very long time and, uh, a great many things have happened since then, so perhaps their reasoning has been lost. But it seemed worth asking."

"How could you have a god of death whose visits you were enthusiastic for? And how could you have a god of life and no god of death? How could you have even a single god of death? So there are five, and the mantles have changed owners with the passing of ages."

"... That being said, you presume that the ancients were in some way the moral superiors of the present. Firmament had good intentions, but not every divine crown was made without concern for the practicalities of the day. They say Death-from-luck bought his divinity with resources nobody else had the skill to obtain." 

Aaaaaand apparently he has insulted her somehow, shit.

"I-- I wasn't really thinking of moral superiority, more just...what would anyone stand to gain?

If the answer is 'it got one specific powerful person a lot more power', well. That does explain it. I'd missed the part where the gods were made from people."

'Becoming a spirit' sure is one way to keep your enemies from poisoning you.

(Unless he was a spirit to start with? Minaiyu is not actually sure.)

This all probably has something to do with why northerners hate the gods, doesn't it.

(Separately, now that she mentions it, he would expect that people living in the age of great prosperity were in some sense morally superior, in acts if not in inclination. The more prosperous your society, the better a deal it can offer you in exchange for your cooperation, and so the more likely you are to cooperate all else equal. And potential wrongdoers can expect a higher likelihood of getting caught (and factor that in when deciding whether to go for it): if anyone can talk to anyone, anyone can learn that you took out a loan in a town ten hops over and then ran off with it.

But it's true that he wasn't really thinking about that, when he asked about why people would make a god of death. And he's certainly not bringing it up right now.)

"The gods have ascended from amongst many types of being, but primarily people."

"The current Destruction was a cow of some sort, if I recall."

"Yes dear, but he is rather the exception than the rule." 

"...is he sapient now that he's ascended?"

(He is also wondering 'how bad is it that there's a god of destruction', 'do cows normally have souls here, or was that part of the ascension process' , 'how did the cow get a divine mantle', and 'did this even happen, or is it some sort of joke I'm too foreign to get', but this question managed to get out first.)

Adiaratou shrugs. 

"How would you tell? He hasn't exactly started going around discoursing on the nature of existence, but many sapient beings don't do such things." 

"What...does he do? 'Destruction' is, uh, certainly an ominous title."

"Destroy things? He sunk an island once. Bless his cultists and curse his enemies. Convince people to sacrifice fine heifers to him." 

Well. He supposes he already knew he needed to consult an expert on appropriate propitiatory rituals.

He nods.

(He still has more questions about this, but they don't seem urgent, and he's worried he might be bugging the honoured ?clan leaders? too much.)

"That being said. Grandfather, Grandmother, I also wanted to ask the two of you if you would run some spars this evening. For the sake of training, and for the sake of Minaiyu seeing what fighters in this world can do. And because I said I'd entertain those two." 

He's also going to very sharply seize control over the body language, to make it clear who is talking, hopefully. 

"Seems reasonable! Are you feeling up for that, dear?" 

"Hmm. Yes, I think so. Shall we show off a little?" 

"I think we had better, with a guest in the house." 

The both of them return to their cell to retrieve some additional swords and bows and other bits and bobs. 

"Yay!" 

Minaiyu is a bit startled by Marcus's sudden movement and almost instinctively fights him, but manages not to.

Aww, excited kid.

Minaiyu is more curious than excited. He doesn't really know what to expect, especially given the soul-strengthening.

Everyone gathers together and trudges outside, donning their various sheepskin and wool outer clothing and boots. Grandfather Marcus's skinny frame seems all the moreso when covered by a cloak clearly sized for the much larger man he once was, and Grandmother Adiaratou has a poncho with intricate coloured stripes, the style of which doesn't match anyone else's clothing. Another cousin, a teenage girl named Arivina, hears about the sparring and comes to join them. 

Outside, the only light is the stars and the cookfire; Marcus says this is good, since these are the lighting conditions you're most likely to fight under. The smell of smoke and savoury broth and baking bread hang in the air. 

The first sparring match will be between Marcus senior and Adiaratou, to set the tone for the evening. This match will be to first blood; both are using live steel, him a single long greatsword and her a pair of blades. Neither are wearing any substantial armour*. Drusus is asked to draw a circle on the snowy ground and does so with enthusiasm; it's perhaps 20ft in diameter. They take up positions on opposite sides of the circle, and ready their weapons. 

*for those of you following along with the D&D implications of these fights, this is a situation where the cracks in how D&D handles AC will be papered over somewhat for the sake of clarifying the skill of the combatants applying to things such as 'parrying' without them necessarily having built into specialised builds that notionally represent such capabilities. 

(It seems like it would be...emotionally difficult, to try to make your spouse bleed, when you aren't even angry at them or anything.

(Unless they're sadists^†, but they probably wouldn't be so casually exhibitionistic in front of family in that case.)

...he is, with some effort, going to refrain from asking how they plan to treat the wound. He will find out when it happens. They have already made their decision, risks and all.)

---

^†lit. "violence-sex convergents"

The fight goes something like this: Marcus Senior bows with an elaborate flourish, and Adiaratou clashes her swords together dramatically.*

Then Adiaratou teleports behind her husband in a swirl of shadows. He spins and swings, and she ducks back to dodge. They eye each other, and their swords clash several times. He's barely moved from the spot where he started, while she circles around him; his better reach gives him a clear defensive advantage - with every attack Adiaratou makes, she has to devote one blade entirely to controlling where his is before she can even close the distance, but once the dynamic of the fight is clearly established, she deviates from it with a strike that leaves an afterimage glowing in cold light, of what turns out to be a completely different strike. The old man parries her first blade as she closes, and then her second with the hilt of his sword, but the icy afterimage cuts into the flesh of his arm. The cut doesn't appear to be shallow, but it doesn't bleed the way you'd expect. 

They separate and he bows again, while she smirks.  

*These are both gestures of respect, from different cultures and with different implications. 

"How was that, then?" 

The internal screaming would be obvious in his expression even to a normal person, and even in the dim lighting.

"...building threat models must be a nightmare here," he eventually manages to say.

(He knows Marcus told him about it being unwise to assume that only things you know to be possible are happening, and he had even managed to get as far as not intellectually expecting to be able to predict how this fight would go, but it's really viscerally sinking in now. It's a bit like the feeling of shadowing a paramedic and realising that in their place you would have made a terrible mistake, except also mixed with the uncomfortable awareness that in this scenario the success state is fucking up the other person's health.)

(He also knows Marcus told him swearing wasn't a big deal, but nevertheless he cannot quite bring himself to swear out loud in front of superiors he's just met, plus swearing in a language he learned this morning seems like it might not carry quite the same oomph (and code-switching for it would feel weird).)

"I don't think he's a fan..." 

His grandparents are so cool.

"What do you mean by threat model?" 

"A threat model is...when you're planning to do something, whether living your usual life or some specific risky activity, and you take some time in your planning to think through 'what are the plausible dangers I might face here? how likely is each one? at what points might they happen?'. And you contemplate and research and work to build up a sense of what the dangers are and how they would work, and once you have that sense you're in a much better position to decide which countermeasures to take, and which ones would be a waste of resources better spent elsewhere.

And, like, it's not always as detailed as you might ideally want, maybe you don't have precise information on...say, how likely it is that the vehicle you were relying on breaks in the middle of travelling through a remote area. But you know that it might happen, and you can make at least some vague estimate of how big a risk it is, and from there what tradeoffs might be worth it to mitigate that risk. Whereas I'm getting the impression that there are a lot of factors that go into what dangers an opponent poses, many of which are hard to know about in advance even as a possibility.

...maybe I'm overestimating because it's my first day? And actually people who have lived here a while mostly have a decent sense of what capabilities their enemies might have, and it's only occasionally that something comes completely out of nowhere?"

(Like him. He's going to come out of nowhere, from the perspective of their enemies.

...at least, as long as their reputation doesn't precede them.

Something else to put a pin in for later.)

Ugh this is so awkward. He is not avoiding making a facial expression to that effect. 

"Look kid. It does get easier, to know what's up. But you should leave that sort of thing to people who've actually studied it. This is why you need to find a party you trust. Specialisation. Nobody ever made it as an adventurer, who spent all their time worrying about things they had no way of knowing. Keep your options open and have strong fundamentals, that's my advice."

You can't even afford paper! Or soap! How are you going to afford broad-spectrum defences?!

He thinks maybe the thing Grandfather is implying there is that Minaiyu is not going to have time, let alone resources, to do the studying himself.

(The other, perhaps even more worrying possibility is that it hasn't occurred to Grandfather that Minaiyu could do the studying himself.)

What will he have the time to study? It would be wasteful, of their efforts (both future and past) and their talents, to merely be a less experienced version of Marcus: they should complement each other. What can he learn and practise that will go furthest towards making him a better complement, in the time and resources and physical bandwidth now available to him?

the pronouns in "and then we can spend our time doing stuff I'm good at" very much did not escape his notice earlier

Twin-souled adventurers are, apparently, rare enough not to provide any precedent. They're going to have to figure it out from scratch, or at best from advice on how separate-bodied party members should complement each other.

He nods.

"And how does one go about those?" he asks, in his best effort at a polite and subordinate tone.

(He worries that he is still coming off rudely, but the other phrasings he could think of sounded even worse.)

"The thing I was asked to teach today was swordsmanship, which is an essential skill." His tone of voice is not intended to permit debate on this matter. 

It seems he has officially crossed over into annoying the honoured clan leader with his questions.

(they're so doomed he still has several more months in which to coax people into giving him vital background information)

He nods quietly, visibly cringing back.

Marcus would like control over his body language thank you. 

"Perhaps you had better give Arivina the first spar."

"That seems wise. I think you'll do best if you give your spirit some time to collect themselves." 

Arivina looks up from where she was fiddling with a fraying sleeve. 

"Wait what? Ooh yes!" 

And leaps up to grab the greatsword off of Marcus senior.