A meteor streaks through the sky.

Its trail is thin; it's not very big. But the trail widens as it gets closer and closer to the hanged man's position.

By the time it arrives, it's not much more than a cloud of black specks, haloed in flame. They rain all around him, bouncing off the ground and the poles and the dead people, leaving small scorch marks in their wake. They range from barely visible to little chips not much bigger than a pinky fingernail, and it's only those last that are recognizable as having once been bone.

One of the larger fragments bounces off his jaw, and for just a split second, he can hear it screaming.

What the fuck.

What the fuck??????

No explanations are forthcoming.

After a few seconds, the biggest fragment stirs slightly.

A smaller one next to it flips over.

Yeah uh no.

He decides being tied up and upside down is not what he wants to do right now so instead he's going to not do that. And now that he's not doing that he'll... crouch really close to the burning sand, lower his face to almost touch it and... peer at the little thingy???

It's...

...growing?

A third fragment skitters haltingly toward the other two.

That's definitely bone, now, the charcoal flaking off to reveal ivory beneath.

He pokes it.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

He jumps away like he's been shocked and assumes a defensive position like he's expecting the bone to jump at him and attack.

Nah it's just chillin.

Other fragments are also beginning to wiggle toward it from the surrounding area; they all seem to be growing now, bit by bit by bit, gradual but steady. The growth is fastest nearest the center, where the first two fragments have joined together into a single larger bone chip and are increasing in size from there.

That's not Nai. He'd have recognised Nai even in incoherent screaming situations. But that's also not... not what he'd have expected to happen to Nai or himself should they have found themselves in a situation where they'd been reduced to bone chips. He might've expected more growth and less "bones wiggle back together" but what does he know, he's never been reduced to bone chips.

Another independent plant?

...another independent plant that had been on a ship which explored and then only the plant themself somehow managed to arrive here?

Except, no, now that he thinks about it he can't imagine that he wouldn't be able to just talk to another independent plant. Plus, whenever he's died he's pretty sure he was completely unconscious for the duration and not screaming in agony while healing. Hell, just now he was unconscious until he wasn't, and while there was some agony for the tail end of that most of it was just being dead.

Okay. Probably not a plant.

But then he's out of ideas.

Some other kind of alien? Most likely, actually.

Hum.

He goes over to the bone chip again and presses a finger onto it. [can you hear me?]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA??AAAAAAAAAAAA

There was an emotion there! Other than agony! He heard it!!!

[is there any way I can help??]

AAAAAAAAAAA???AAAAAAAAAAA

[I am psychic and you are bone chips! does that help with the confusion?]

In amongst the screaming there is a vague wordless notion of sweeping him into a pile. Though the chips seem to be making a good effort at that part all by themselves.

He can help with that! Bone chips guy will get a feeling of wordless assent and then psychic guy will get to work. He can get some clothes off the corpses—they won't miss them—and use those plus a stick to make a makeshift broom and then use that to try to push the bones together

Getting the fragments all piled up helps them connect with each other much faster, and also seems to speed up their growth. Soon there is a heap of mostly actual bones with only a few bits and pieces still wiggling around silently seeking their homes, and the actual bones begin to spread out and reorganize into the recognizable shape of an ordinary human skeleton, and then as each pair of bones links up into place, they start in on regrowing their connective tissue.

...it's still gonna be a bit. Ballpark a couple-few more hours, if the current rate of growth holds steady?

That's okay, he can uh. Try to project at this poor person? Some soothing feelings? Until this poor person can string thoughts together again.

Time crawls on. The bone-person probably appreciates the help, but it's a little hard to tell because being a skeleton is apparently very distracting. Eventually he starts regrowing some nerves, which hurts but actually seems to result in less pain overall because whatever he was using to feel sensations as a scattered spray of bone fragments lets the nerves take precedence and they're a narrower channel with less intensity available.

Organs and muscles construct themselves in the framework of his skeleton; blood vessels crawl out of a trembling heart to thread their way along limbs still mostly devoid of muscle. Then the layers of flesh intertwine with all that, and at last, to his immense relief, he gets skin appearing in patches that spread to cover his body.

...he's... maybe just gonna lie here for another minute, if that's okay.

Yeah uh this was fascinating from a scientific perspective but it sure looked excruciating. But also it was the most interesting thing to see for miles around (except for that one time a bunch of people rode by on large blue flightless bipedal birds, from whom psychic guy hid) so he's been watching intently.

He opens his eyes, lifts his face out of the dirt to look at the psychic stranger, groans, and puts it back down.

No. Okay. He's here now and should deal with wherever here is and whatever it's up to.

He sits up stiffly and gives a little wave.

He waves back. [hi. are you, uh, less in agony?]

So much less! He smiles about it. Not without some wincing; his newly regrown body is still a little tender and also he doesn't have any, uh, clothes, which would help with sitting his tender butt on the ground. But wow he is so very much not a heap of charred bone fragments experiencing being a heap of charred bone fragments, and that is a good way to be!

[cool! I can, uh, let you borrow my shirt and my trousers and my shoes? would that help?]

...he peers at the shirt and trousers and shoes. Do they look to be reasonably sized for him?

Psychic guy is about 6'4 and not exactly scrawny but not extremely heavily built either.

Oh good, his height and build aren't too far off. Sure, he'll take clothes—he gestures for them, not entirely sure how this whole psychic business works—but he looks a little more dubiously at the shoes, uncertain of how to guess the fit when they're so weird and foreign. Maybe the very blond man can just keep those.

[...I don't get that much detail from you if we're not touching but that sounded like you don't want all of this, from your face I gather not the shoes? aren't you gonna get burnt walking on the desert sand without them? I'm] Zash [by the way, nice to meet you.]

He starts stripping, though, jacket first then shoes then shirt and trousers. Bone chips guy will get the sense that Zash feels a little bit bashful, and the reason is pretty obvious: he's covered top to bottom in scars. His left arm ends in a flat metallic stump the prosthetic is attached to, but there are many other metal plates and stitches covering him looking like they're there to keep flesh together. It doesn't look like these scars are the type that imply events that should by survivable by humans. If nothing else, he's clearly been cut and shot pretty vital places a lot.

"Siran," he says, gesturing to himself, when Zash gives his name.

...wow that guy's body is a whole situation.

Siran shrugs and accepts the clothes. He puts on the shirt and trousers, but passes the shoes back to Zash with a gesture to the scars and then to Zash's feet and then to the hot sand all around them. Surely if one of them is going to get burnt walking on the desert sand, it should be the one who heals cleaner?

[...I see where you're coming from but I'd heal cleanly from the burns. but I won't insist, if you're sure.]

The shoes can go back on and then the jacket and then the arm. The jacket is floor length so if he zips it most of the way up he looks kinda comical but not like he's just in his underwear.

Siran gets to his feet and takes a couple of tentative steps back and forth. It's not fun but you know what it also isn't? That's right, it's not being a heap of charred bone fragments!! He'll take it.

Anyway. He glances at Zash and then spreads his arms horizonward, looking this way and that. Any particular direction his benefactor was headed?

Yeah that-a-way, they can start walking, but uh, [I'm not sure how I'm going to explain you. this planet only speaks one language so I guess we could say you're mute?]

[also I gotta say I'm very curious about the whole everything that just happened here]

At 'only speaks one language' he pauses, looking intrigued, and asks a question out loud (in, indeed, a totally foreign tongue).

"And that's not any of the languages I know that aren't the language spoken on this planet," he replies, psychically projecting the meanings at the same time. Not that he expected it to be, Siran's probably an alien, but. "—also, by the way, this is about as far as I can be from you physically to be able to project even this much, any farther and I'll lose fidelity and precision really quick. Twice this and you won't be able to 'hear' me at all." The "hear" there has the relevant psychic connotations in the mental version if not in the word version.

He nods thoughfully, absorbing all this, then holds up his hand in a 'wait' gesture. A few seconds go by.

"—there," he says, perfectly comprehensibly. His accent's maybe a bit odd. "Sorry, I do have translation, I just wasn't even sure you had a language and I couldn't get at it without you using it a little."

"Uh what the fuck?"

"Magic," he says, in a heavy, wry tone that suggests there's a lot more to that story.

"That's. Not a thing."

"What d'you call your business with the mind talking, then?"

"Telepathy! But it obeys physics!"

"It does what?"

Here's a mental concept of physics: fully universal well-defined exceptionless mathematical laws governing everything that happens in this universe.

"I'm not sure we... have those where I come from? I mean, maybe we do. I just don't think I've met them. We sure do have magic, though." There's that sense of weight again.

"I'm picking up on some mixed feelings about magic, here."

"That's because I wrecked a continent with it."

"Man I have no idea how to say that this is relatable but this is kind of relatable."

"Really?"

"It wasn't a continent, but it was the population of—if not a continent at least a very large country.

"This is, uh, not a well-known fact about me." Or Nai. "And the whole magic thing is very likely to attract unwanted attention. As is the telepathy, I haven't told anyone about it. I know I didn't ask you to not tell anyone about me before I told you about me but I'd appreciate it, and would recommend you the same. At least at first."

He shrugs. "Happy to not bring up your personal stuff if you don't want me to. Though I don't much like lying and probably won't do it. I'm probably not going to use much magic besides what I've already got, though, the translation and the immortality and—" he makes a brief, abortive gesture, "—aw, fuck, not my sword. Figures. Mostly just the translation and immortality, then. Thing is, when you use magic, it gets out of your control sometimes and does stuff you didn't mean to. The more magic, the bigger the problem and the harder it is to keep hold of it in the first place. I tried to do something bigger than I should have and fucked over a whole continent and got upset about it and wandered around until a problem got me and that's how I ended up a pile of bones. So I'm not too keen to try casting anything else at the moment."

That implies rather a lot of power for this magic, then, doesn't it.

"A problem?"

"We call them 'cursed cities', where someone's let a whole piece of land—usually a city, there just aren't enough idiots anywhere else—get soaked in spellfray until it's magic through and through and not in a good way. They generally kill anyone who steps into one, though sometimes they just fuck them up instead. I'm sure if I wasn't immortal I'd have died of whatever sent me here."

"Cursed cities made of evil magic that send immortal men places. Okay. That's happening now. Sure."

"I don't know that I'd say it's evil magic, just sort of... cursed. But I guess I see what you mean."

"That's the stuff of stories. ...I'm a little bit the stuff of stories but your thing is the kind of stuff of stories about entirely different worlds, fantasy settings that aren't even trying to be realistic and are just trying to be fantastical, that's how out of context you are. —by which I mean the way you should expect to be treated by everyone is 'you are literally lying' if you tell them about that, even your immortality isn't as outlandish as all of that. I know you're not lying because psychic," and pretty damn good at reading people besides, "but I think most people wouldn't really believe you."

...but also, out of context magic might... well. He guesses it depends on what that magic can do, doesn't it?

"Well. All the more reason not to bring up magic until I'm comfortable doing some, I guess. Which may be a while."

"So, we have a fair amount of walking to do and thus time to kill, wanna trade stories about our respective worlds?"

"Sure. You first, all my stories are upsetting."

"Surely not all of them, but alright. Is wherever you're from the kind of place that has planets? I wanna know how far I should be backing up."

"Let's say I'm not totally sure what you mean about 'having planets'."

"That kind of fantasy setting, then.

"So, we're standing on a sphere of rock. It's so large that it looks flat as far as your eyes can see. That's a planet. And in this universe one of the laws of physics says that everything attracts everything else proportionally to how heavy it is; as far as this force is concerned, you and I are very light, so we attract each other almost not at all, and this enormous planet attracts us only enough that we can walk on it, but we can still jump anyway, even if we fall again afterwards, so it's a very weak force, relatively speaking. That's gravity.

"The sun," and he points up at it, "for that matter, is a sphere of not exactly but kind of fire, and it's millions of times heavier than this planet, millions of miles away. The planet is kind of always falling towards it but since it's going really fast it keeps overshooting by just enough that it goes in a circle around it instead; the time it takes to complete a full circle is a year. Also the planet is rotating around itself, and one full round is a day."

"...all right, I'm with you so far. I don't know if that's exactly what people expect the sun to be where I'm from, I didn't pay much attention to that sort of thing. I do think we knew the world was a ball and down went toward the middle and day happens to the side of the ball that's got the sun shining on it, I think that stuff matters for navigation because of... reasons I understood once for a couple of hours when I was fourteen. Now what's this about planet-s?"

"The universe is really big, probably infinite, and there are then an infinity of planets in it around an infinity of—stars are the same kind of thing as the sun, don't know if you knew about that part, they're just even farther away than that. And most stars—maybe every star? not sure—have planets circling around them. Our sun in particular here has five, this one is the second closest, the farthest one is ten times as far from the sun as this one is.

"Most planets aren't inhabitable by humans or the kinds of things that live on planets with humans. Many are mostly gaseous with an icy core, many have toxic gases instead of breathable air on the surface, many are too close to or too far from their sun to be able to support the right temperatures, many suns don't even have planets around the right distance to support our kind of life."

"...'a whole world where all the air is poison so you can't breathe it' is more cursedness than I thought there could be and now I'm glad in hindsight that I didn't do that to my planet. Anyway, go on."

"...you know, when you put it like that, yeah most of the universe is just very cursed."

"Anyway! Reason I bring this up is that I wanted to tell you that this planet is not where humans are from. Humans are from another planet on another star so far away you can't see it in the night sky, you can't even see it with a telescope."

"...huh," he says. "I guess it makes sense that there's stars you can't see at all, since there's stars you can only see some of the time..."

"Stars you can only see some of the time?"

"Yeah, you know, like on brighter nights or cloudier ones, you can't see as many."

"Oh. No, not really like that, it's... man, how do I even explain it. Do you want the long explanation or the short explanation or to just accept as fact that stars very far away can't be seen and move on?"

"I think if you try for the long explanation then years from now I'll be saying 'and I understood that once for two hours when I was nineteen.' Sure, stars very far away can't be seen, go on."

"Cool. Anyway, very far away planet, yeah, because they... I guess cursed is not a bad word for it? Humans kind of cursed that planet by polluting it too much and consuming so many of its natural resources that it couldn't really sustain them anymore. So with the last of their resources and technology they launched a grand expedition that sent spaceships out looking for other planets where humanity could live. There were billions of humans then, and the vast majority of them left that planet on one or another such colonisation project."

"They cursed it so bad that poison air worlds sounded like a better bet? Or they had a way to look as far as a star that can't be seen, to find which worlds have air you can breathe?"

"Second one, yeah. But also, it turns out that we can turn planets habitable that wouldn't normally be, at least within a certain range of ways they're not by default habitable. So what they did was they sent the ships out to locations they'd scouted out in advance and then once the ships were close enough to target they started doing more targeted scouting.

"The group of ships that got to this planet was actually extremely lucky," in a way, "the air here was almost completely nontoxic and the temperatures are in very liveable ranges."

"That does seem lucky! And here I've been taking air for granted all my life."

"It's really relatively very rare, in the universe at large.

"Anyway, the trip from that planet to here would take thousands of years even on our very fastest ships so everyone aboard a ship got put into a frozen sleep that kept them from aging and dying so that they could just wake up here without having to wait."

"...huh. Useful trick. How well does it work?"

"Held up for the requisite thousands of years and everyone survived, so I'd say pretty well!"

"...well, everyone survived the trip itself, that is."

"That sounds like there's an upsetting story somewhere in there."

"There is, yeah. My equivalent of the destroyed continent. Let's not get into too much detail about that."

"Suit yourself."

"The ships crashed onto this planet, the majority of humans died, various emergency systems had to be deployed out of the ships that didn't get turned to rubble to make the air breathable. Humanity was nearly completely wiped out, on this planet, I think they were at the thousands, maybe low tens of thousands post crash and lots of people died shortly after that because of the conditions we were all in back then."

"Yikes. Wait, wasn't this a place without poison air? Was the air still kind of shitty?"

"Yeah. It was almost completely nontoxic, but still not good enough for people to live in long term, it took a while for us to get the air to stabilise into a perfectly breathable version."

"Bizarre to think air could be so delicate a thing..."

"I don't know how it was where you're from but back where humans are from here it was because of plants and algae, they were able to recycle the toxic parts of the air into breathable air so it was a stable cycle. Actually one of the ways in which humans cursed that planet was in fact by messing with that cycle. And this planet doesn't have any plants or algae at all."

"...does that mean you still have to do fancy stuff to make the air keep being good and not bad?"

"I... am honestly not sure? I haven't kept up with it since we managed to stabilise everything and people weren't dying of asphyxiation left and right anymore but I assume there must still be something making sure there's enough oxygen in the air for everyone."

"...concerning. But all right."

"It's been a hundred and forty-eight years since the ships crashed. Humanity's been trying to rebuild since then. With... mixed success."

"Mixed how?"

"I really don't know how to answer that question in a very accurate way. Some places are very large and now have hundreds of thousands of people, some are... like the place we're going to. Which isn't like that. And there are some, ah, people who have been making reconstruction much harder than it would otherwise need to be."

"...all right," he says, not sure how to interpret this answer but not really wanting to push.

"Sorry, I realise that's really unhelpful. I, ah, haven't been to most bigger settlements in decades—really, I mostly don't visit the same place twice at the time scale of a few decades, people start noticing I always look the same."

"I suppose I'll start having the same problem once I've been around that long."

"Anyway! That's an abridged history of Gunsmoke. Your turn."

"...the empire my father ruled was called Isettavar. I grew up there expecting to rule it one day and being annoyed and impatient that it hadn't happened yet. We had... air to take for granted, and cursed cities to avoid, and I'm pretty sure my father was good at ruling it though I suppose I don't have much idea of what being good at ruling an empire should look like. Smarter people than me knew things about how the sky works but not nearly enough to get up there and fly through it. Anyway. Then I fucked the whole thing up, the end."

"Do you want a hug?"

"...sure."

So he can stop walking to hug.

He is very nice to hug. His jacket is floofy and comfortable and he is very cosy and he also projects his emotions when they touch. He's sorry this happened to Siran, he wishes it hadn't been so, he wishes the world were not this way, he wishes he could help, he wants to help if there is any way he can.

—seems to him that it's not something that happened to him, it's something he did—for no good reason at all, just because he was impatient and reckless and short-sighted, too caught up in the fantasy of power to see the reality of a world where actions have consequences and you can't get everything you want just by throwing enough magic at it—the worst thing, well, no, the worst thing about it was the sheer scale of destruction he caused, but the second worst thing was standing in the crater where his capital city used to be and realizing, too late to do anything about it, that he wouldn't even have liked having an empire—

He buries his face in the puffy jacket and squeezes Zash with mildly inhuman strength.

That's okay, Zash has substantially more than mildly inhuman resistance to injury. He'll hug Siran as long as Siran wants, and there's an offer to properly talk about it if Siran wants to talk about it but Zash can be just a reassuring presence if Siran wants him to be.

He's not sure he could talk about it if he tried; he's not sure he could put words to the memories or feelings. He thinks, looking back, that he walked into that cursed city half hoping to not come out, and he has no idea what to do with that realization—and—really, the thing is, he's just so fucking tired of destroying things. He has destroyed so much and none of it did him any good and he doesn't know what to do in order to not do more of it, all the patterns and habits of his being are oriented toward destruction, he's a fire ready to burn whatever crosses his path.

...it's a very good and cozy hug, though. He has not really been hugged very much in his life and he is beginning to suspect he was really missing out.

Yeah... If it helps, Zash hasn't hugged anyone in a long time either and does also really appreciate this.

What, exactly, causes him to destroy things, such that he doesn't know what to do to stop?

A tangled mess of impressions all flash through his mind at once. He gets angry, and then lights things on fire, because he's very well-practiced at lighting things on fire and not very well-practiced at refraining—and refraining feels bad, viscerally, it feels bad to want to hurt someone or destroy something and have the power to do it and choose not to, it feels like weakness and failure and ignobility, a crime against the nature of his being—and he has other reasons to want to hurt people, if they're attractive and he's interested, though just at this exact moment he feels pretty alienated from that mental state, but he has the same problem there with mercy-as-crime—but, on the other hand, he is generally pretty upset right now, and when he's generally pretty upset a lot of things begin to look like problems best solved by lighting something on fire—he killed a bunch of monsters on his way into the cursed city that wrecked him, just because he was generally pretty upset and they were there and bothering him—he has just spent so much of his life building toward rage and power and violence, all these little habits of thought and action, all these ways of relating to the world, and now he is sort of helplessly flailing in the direction of Not That without much idea of what Not That looks like or how to get there from here—

—anyway he's glad Zash is also appreciating this hug. Zash is cozy and should have nice things.

And yet... Zash notices he is not, currently, on fire. Even though he is the second most likely person on this planet to be fine if set on fire. ...third, now that Siran himself is here, probably. So Siran is in fact taking steps towards his goal, here.

He doesn't think 'not having lost his temper yet with this guy who's been really nice to him' counts for much! Because—he can't figure out how to not be so destructive just by staying away from anything that might make him angry or horny. Things that might make him angry or horny can happen outside his control, so if he wants to not be destructive he has to learn how to not be destructive even when something is making him angry or horny; he has to learn how to be better at it, and learn how to be more comfortable with it, so that when it inevitably comes up he'll do something different from the habits he's been building all his life.

...well, would it help to have a designated target for his anger and/or horniness? At least as a stepping stone towards figuring out how to not need one? Like Zash said, he is the third most likely person on this planet to be okay after being set on fire.

...proooooobably not but that's very sweet of him. Bizarre, but sweet. He is game to try this strategy if it comes up, but he mostly expects that he won't actually be able to redirect himself like that. On the other hand maybe he'll be distracted enough by trying that he'll have time to get hold of himself?? Hard to say.

Alternative idea: would Siran like to be shot if it looks like he's about to do something he'll regret?

[...and do let me know if I'm overstepping, here, we don't need to figure this out right here in the middle of the desert]

...well, that'll sure help with the redirecting! He's... not sure??? He likes this thing where Zash is being nice to him and giving him clothes and hugs, and is wary of complicating their relationship with violence. It might make the hugs worse.

And—it's not that Zash is overstepping at all, he's flailing enough that any help is welcome, even weird possibly unhelpful help—but being asked prompts him to observe that he is having the beginnings of a dilemma here, specifically a dilemma about the fact that he does not want to stop having this touch-enabled mental conversation and does not want to stop having hugs but his body is getting restless about the amount of standing still they're doing. He tries to think of ways to keep walking while also hugging, but can't find one that doesn't turn out silly and weird when he imagines it with his body.

...uh... would he be okay being bridal carried? Zash has very good senses and can drop him onto his feet if he sees or hears anyone coming long before they'd be able to see him, if Siran doesn't want to be seen that way. He's not sure that'd solve Siran's restlessness, though, being carried.

You know what, it'll be better than standing still. —though, now that the thought is in his head, he is considering scooping up Zash and carrying him and he cannot think of any reason why that wouldn't work.

Sure, Zash is fine going that way around. Hyup?

Scoop! He keeps walking in approximately the direction they were headed. Zash may need to help navigate.

Anyway, what were they talk/thinking about. His problems? Right. He is wondering, actually, if Zash (being a mind-reading sort of person) has encountered anybody with similar problems, whose solutions Siran might be able to borrow? Or even just, has examples from his own life, of being someone who doesn't have Siran's problems? An awful lot of what's in his way here seems to be just... sheer lack of any idea how to be other than the way he is... and maybe if he had an example to compare to, a thought process for handling potentially violent situations that is different from the one he's used to, that could be a good start.

...well... he does have some experience handling potentially violent situations that... might...

Siran feels like a very sensorially motivated person, so the mental afterimages he projects are mostly focused on his bodily sensations at the time.

(Spoilers for this thread, you might want to read it first.)

There are four people in the middle of a street surrounding an armoured car, with guns. They're trying to steal money from it, and one of them is pretending to be Zash, himself, projecting bravado he doesn't really feel. And something interesting about this town is that lots of people in it have old guns that don't really work. But the important thing is: they all have guns, and how well they work, exactly, isn't that widely-known.

"Now, I know you've heard rumours about Frank Marlon guns over the years, but tell me..."

And he knew they were coming, not only because he heard them but because he set them up: many people, many of that town's people, all of them holding guns and emerging from behind crates and around corners and through windows, pointing their guns at the four would-be robbers. "Do you think you're lucky enough that if the whole town shoots you'll survive?"

One of the robbers tries to call Zash's bluff. Zash sees it in a fraction of a second and—

—here he focuses on his own body, on the feeling of exhilaration that he can't deny he feels, the knowledge that if he fucks up something really bad might happen but he knows he won't fuck up, the muscle memory of it, the lightning-quick calculations in his head—

—his gun is in his hand and he shoots the gun out of the robber's hand.

"That would have ended really badly for you, Human Typhoon. Thank me for saving your life."

And afterwards, when the robbers are all gone and the city is safe, the feeling of a job well-done. The feeling of gratitude, of all the people being so happy and relieved that they're safe, the warmth and love and, even, admiration. Once again, he cannot deny that he enjoys it, being admired. It's not why he does what he does but it... feels nice.

He loves being Zash the Stampede.

Does that help, any?

...huh.

Huh.

Yeah, it does.

He's thoughtful for a while, walking through the desert with Zash in his arms, turning those memories over and over in his mind. Feeling the difference between how it feels for him to be in a conflict like that (the thirst for violence, the thrill in his blood demanding to hurt or kill) and how it feels for Zash (a different kind of thrill, a different kind of—power? There's something recognizable as power, in the way he uses his skill to get what he wants, even though it's not a kind of power Siran has thought much about before) and, especially, feeling the way it felt for Zash to have all that warmth and love and gratitude. Feeling the way it felt for Zash to reach into all those people's lives and change them for the better and bask in their happiness afterward. There's something to that, definitely. Something related to the way it feels to be hugged? He's not sure what the connection is but he feels that there is one.

...Zash apparently forgot to tell Siran about plants and he should do that at some point before they get where they're going because plants are incredibly important to this planet's culture but also because the way Siran just had thoughts there was, uh. Incredibly plantlike. And Zash is very good at talking to plants, so maybe he can improve the way he talks to Siran by leaning into that.

There's definitely a [~] feeling, there, Siran is not wrong, being hugged and being loved/admired are pretty similar. Not identical, though, and this telepathy method is very very good at sussing out that relation. He can project the comparison between "being hugged" and "being admired/loved" pretty directly and with many details, more details than he's been able to project anything so far: on the likeness side, there's being the target of someone's positive attention, there's the primal feeling of being a social animal doing a social thing they're primed to do, there's the feeling of safety, of being in your pack, being part of a greater whole; and on the unlikeness side, there's the difference between the physical and the emotional, there's the social status-related things (that are also related to the power thing from earlier) that are mostly absent from hugs, there's the sort of inherent self-centeredness of wanting to "show off" versus just sharing in a moment together...

It's a very dense comparison, but that's the atomic unit of Zash's brand of telepathy, and Zash can hold it still in front of Siran's mind's eye for as long as Siran wants him to, to be processed and poked at and understood.

!!

Oh that's—that's really something, is what that is. That's so much of a something. Yeah, these two feelings are like each other in these ways, and different in those ways, and he can look at them where Zash is holding them up for him and feel out the similarities and differences—and, at the same time, feel out the similarities and differences between the ways Zash feels these things and the ways Siran does, how they're different kinds of lonely and those flavours are expressed in the ways they react to comfort and affection, how they process and experience the world differently and that affects how they experience their emotions and which parts of a scenario they focus on, like, Siran very much lives in his body and a lot of the way he sees social things is as the sight of someone making a certain face or movement or posture that echoes in his own body a faint reflection of how it feels to make that face or movement or posture and then translates to a feeling in his mind of how they're feeling and what that means, but Zash of course sees social things in other people's heads and in the ways he's learned to translate what he sees into what someone must be feeling, so it's a whole different thing—but there's still sameness there, still a fundamental connection between feeling this way as one person and feeling this way as a different person even though the feelings themselves aren't literally the same—what a good telepathy Zash has.

Zash is feeling inordinately pleased right now, and even a bit smug, though he recognises being smug about being part of a species that has a certain kind of telepathy is a little bit silly. It'd be like being smug for having toes. ......well, he made his toes, plants don't have them and he didn't have them when he was born, but still, you get the picture.

Now going back to another thing Siran thought—Zash wants to contrast the way Siran feels about thrill and about power with the way he himself does. He doesn't know that much about the way Siran does it but he felt like there was something there they could look at, and maybe they can just show each other themselves and then contrast? He'll go first.

There is a thrill and a power there, Siran is absolutely right. Zash doesn't often focus on it or lean into it but it's... it's a bit like...

Side comparison: it's a little bit like his hair. His ridiculous fluffy bright-yellow hair, which is so attention-grabbing, and which coordinates with his orange shades and his red jacket and his boots and his gun. He feels a bit embarrassed to admit this but he is an aesthete. He's a little bit vain. There's a certain aesthetic that he plays up, plays into, embodies. He's an incredibly skilled gunslinger, he can literally shoot a single wing off a wormfly from fifty yards away, and he loves the aesthetic of using that skill to never, ever kill anyone. To, in fact, prevent people from being killed. He understands that his pacifism comes from a position of privilege, that he can afford to be pacifistic because if he decides a conflict isn't happening then it doesn't happen full stop. That's part of why he doesn't, really, judge others for not being as pacifistic as he is, doesn't demand it of them.

And that, of course, circles back to the power thing. He is incredibly powerful. He is incredibly skilled, and deadly if he wants to be (which he never does). And there is a thrill there, there's an ego thing there. He is that person, that powerful superhuman creature who could kill dozens of people a second and who instead chooses not to, and chooses to help them. The ego thing and the power thing and the thrill thing aren't the reason why he does this but they do help.

And there's another thing that attaches to the tail of that: much of his power and skill was earned. He was nowhere near this good, a century and a half ago. And... people suffered because of it, people died. The central motivation here, of not wanting people to die, that core is probably unshared between him and Siran, but here, Zash can show him how everything else he is fits around that one thing like a jigsaw puzzle. He cultivated his skill and his power and his image around that core, and he became better, and stronger.

...huh. Yeah, he sees it. He very much sees it, the way all those pieces are built on that central foundation—

—and he doesn't have it, doesn't have anything like it, it's alien to him, the idea of not wanting people to die, it's the opposite of everything he's stood for all his life. Except. Except that that's what he wants, now, what he's looking for. His tiny confused flailing desire to Not Fuck Up Enormously Again, his half-formed questing notion of not being an engine of destruction that burns everything he touches... it's a shape that's very reminiscent of that shape at the core of Zash's soul. An echo, a reflection, not the same but—connected, related, similar. Almost like, what he has is a question, and what Zash has is an answer. Not the only answer, by any means. But... an answer, an answer that works.

He looks with great dismay on the prospect of learning how to be skilled enough and smart enough and powerful enough to do the things Zash can do. He hates being bad at things, most of all when they're things he really wants to be good at. But... he can see how it works, to do that, he can feel out in his mind the way he could—try, and still probably fail, but fail with a purpose, fail toward succeeding. He wouldn't be the same as Zash, because, among other things, what the fuck is a gun. But—he could learn to build his own skill and power and aesthetic around his own desire to be in control of his actions and their consequences. He could reach for that power that Zash has, embrace it in ways that Zash isn't, become someone who loves being powerful enough to earn people's gratitude and adoration by helping them when he could have done nothing and by—by doing nothing when he could have hurt them. He stumbles a little, over that part; mercy still hurts, as a concept. But he's going to have to learn mercy if he wants to succeed at this at all. There was no way out of this situation that didn't involve learning mercy, when mercy, fundamentally, is the only way he could have avoided cursing his father's empire right off the map.

Zash is... not sure how well this will land, because it might feel to Siran like lying, but Zash sees it as a... reframing. Looking at it from a different angle, it's the same thing but it's approached differently. This whole thing, mercy. Not hurting someone when he could hurt them. When they deserve to be hurt, even. There's...

(This isn't how Zash himself does it, it's not the core of it, but there is an echo of it in himself, a part of him that also uses this dimension of it to fuel his own mercy.)

...there's a few things, here, that aren't just about mercy.

Zash himself, as he said, is very vain, and an aesthete. And while much of it is for himself, is him playing this person because it resonates, this is heavily informed by the existing narratives of the world, by what other people perceive. And there's a narrative of mercy as weakness, but there's also a narrative of mercy as strength, as superiority. Of understanding that the people who you want to hurt—they're not worth your time, your attention. They don't deserve that you dirty your hands for them, don't deserve to have the power over you to make you regret your choices. The choices Siran wants to make, from now on, are choices of creation rather than destruction, right? The only one who gets to choose whether to create or destroy, whether to build up or tear down, to heal or to hurt, is Siran himself. No one else. And these people, who have moved Siran to action, that don't deserve that Siran make any but the choices he wants to make, be anyone but the person he wants to be.

And Siran does have the power to do that. He hasn't explained to Zash the details of how his magic works but Zash has seen it in the colour of his thoughts, in the unsaid but still felt words, that Siran is a powerful mage and that part of that power comes from how he can handle and subjugate his own magic to do what he wants to do, to not escape his control. And he sees that there's also something Siran feels about having lost control there, and... well...

Zash feels like the situation is pretty analogous, see? His magic isn't his only source of power, nor the only beast he can tame; his self is also that, a raging fire he can wield to burn only and exactly what he wants to burn, and not a hair further.

He spends a while turning that one over in his mind while he strides across the desert. (Moving his body makes everything come easier, his thoughts, his feelings, his whole being. He's not fully consciously noticing this, just a little relieved in the back of his mind not to be standing still anymore.)

There's definitely something to it, at first glance. There's something to all of it. The idea of mercy as an expression of power, as refusing to let someone control him—that speaks to the same parts of him that have so much trouble with mercy in the first place. And the idea of himself and his feelings and desires as being like magic, a wild power that can be turned to a purpose or let loose to rampage unchecked, that can be controlled with careful attention and skill or slip free and wreak havoc...

...well, that's just true. Startlingly, kind of upsettingly, unequivocally and directly true. In a sense, that's just literally what happened, when he made his grand mistake. He got out of his own control, gave in to... Siran-fray... and did a bunch of stupid shit culminating in doing the exact same thing with magic, trying to spin up a spell too big to hold—though he held it for surprisingly long, in the end—without even a clear idea of what exactly he wanted to accomplish by it, and it tore itself out of his hands the way magic always does when you get overambitious with it. He can clearly see the echo there, the similarity in structure between the spell going wild and soaking the continent in spellfray, and his own ego going wild and grabbing for power in a mad idiot rush without thought to the consequences. And... it is, he thinks, a helpful way to think about himself. Magic is the way that it is, and you have to learn to work with it, and he did learn to work with it, he's one of the most accomplished mages in the world (though 'accomplished mage' is kind of a backhanded compliment at best, carrying as it does the fundamental connotation of the kind of reckless idiocy that's necessary for anyone to try to become accomplished as a magic user). He's starting kind of from scratch on learning to work with himself, but... the parallels are helpful in figuring out how to work with himself. There are differences too, definitely, lots of them, but the basic approach of 'this is a powerful force you need to learn to handle on its own terms, and until you do it will keep wrecking stuff every time you mess with it' is... apt.

He's thinking about his sword, now. He used to have a sword that ate spellfray. He was really proud of it; it let him cast spells that would've been stupid to cast without. He only managed permanent translation in the first place because of the sword. Also, it was fundamentally a tool of destruction, getting more and more unwieldy and inclined to lash out at everything in reach the more spellfray he fed to it, until he discharged the excess by annihilating a few trees with it. He lost it when he walked into a cursed city and got torn apart.

There's no reason why an artifact to eat spellfray has to be an engine of destruction. It's just... easier, to build it that way. If you want to build something to eat spellfray and you want it to do anything other than mangle things, you have to put a lot of careful thought into what exactly it should do instead, and how to get it to do that and not something else, because spellfray is fundamentally about not doing what you expect. It seemed at the time, when he made that sword, that of course it would be ridiculous to try to make it anything other than a dangerous barely-controlled weapon. But... he'd like to stop being a dangerous barely-controlled weapon. And he thinks, if he makes himself another spellfray artifact, he'd like it to not be a dangerous barely-controlled weapon either. And—most of the details of designing such a thing are going to be totally inapplicable to designing himself—but, he thinks, there are still useful parallels in the underlying approach, again. Creating, healing, helping, mending, these things are much harder and more delicate than destroying. Most things you do, if you're not being careful, will destroy more than they create. But if you pay attention and put the work in, you can find ways to build up instead of tear down.

(As a side note he's sort of confused by the 'deserve' framing; it's not a concept-structure his mind naturally falls into. Like, he's heard of the idea, he just doesn't personally tend to think that way. But it doesn't interfere much with his understanding of Zash's point, it's just a quiet little aside as he considers things.)

(Yeah, personally Zash doesn't super jive with the "deserve" framing either, it's mostly scaffolding for the narrative he's familiar with and since it doesn't resonate with Siran himself Zash is more than happy to do away with it.)

(There's a certain flavour to those thoughts, too, that isn't leaking overtly into the thoughts themselves, that suggests Zash jives with the exact opposite of the concept of "deserving". What that exact opposite is isn't something Zash is explicitly thinking about and most certainly not projecting, but... "people deserve bad things" is almost the complete antithesis of Zash the Stampede.)

Zash also wants to observe another parallel: Siran's sword, and Zash's gun. The thought has some wryness attached to it, and Zash will project words alongside the feelings because unfortunately Siran does not have the telepathic equipment to be able to literally see the visual mental pictures Zash projects and Zash does not think this is the kind of thing he even can project, in principle, to humans.

[guns are a sort of weapon that creates a miniature explosion to propel a small metal object (a bullet) with such speed and force that it can pierce through bone and flesh and occasionally even solid objects such as wood and stone and metal. my gun is a .22 caliber, which is to say it's made for bullets yea thick, and this is relevant because it's a good caliber for precise trick shots and fast reloading and a bad caliber for killing people with.] And the reason Zash is amused by the comparison is the way he does use this supposed weapon of destruction almost exclusively nondestructively.

He's not suggesting that Siran make a magic gun, of course—if nothing else, he wants Siran to decide on what his aesthetic will be uninfluenced by Zash (though the mental image of the two pacifistic gunslingers roaming the realm getting into trouble together is very amusing to him, also)—just idly musing about the parallel, with a side observation that with some creativity one can often figure out (fun, interesting, cool, aesthetic) ways to apply tools to ends they were not designed for.

(Another part of Zash also observes a parallel between that and, again, Siran himself (and magic), though he rejects the idea that Siran was designed for anything. Siran is Siran, and who and what Siran is is up to Siran, no one else. But to the extent that Siran is (or was/has been) a weapon, well, sometimes you can creatively make weapons do things other than what weapons do.)

Ah, so that's what the fuck a gun is.

...he definitely sees what Zash means, about how cool it would be to make themselves a pair like that. But... he thinks he agrees, that he shouldn't decide on his aesthetic based on how glamorous a pair they would make. He wants to take time to think this over, and consider a lot of different possibilities, and not rush into things impulsively like he always has before. He wants to think about what kinds of things he could make, and what purposes he could make them for. Repurposing a tool meant for one use into another is definitely an interesting idea with interesting thematic implications, but since he's starting from scratch anyway, he might as well make something that does what he wants from the start.

Yeah no doubt. Does he have any preliminary ideas for what he'd want? And much of Zash's curiosity here is really curiosity about this magic and its artefacts and all of that.

(Also he's a teensy bit proud of this conversation which feels like it was good and useful to Siran. Eeee he helped!)

Cute. Cute. He did help, it's true!

The first most obvious thing for an anti-sword to do is healing. But of course healing is a lot harder than destruction; there are a lot of ways you can change something that will break it, fewer that will repair it. So he'd have to think very carefully about how to waste most of the power of all that spellfray on things that don't matter and can't get big enough to do any damage, and only let through the tiny fraction of it that actually wants to do something helpful. (That's an oversimplification. It's not that specific bits of spellfray 'want' different things; it's all sort of sloshing around wildly doing this or that, and if you're careful and clever and a little bit of a reckless idiot you can figure out how to bend it away from what it's in the middle of being about to do and push it into something else instead, but you can't get too far from its original purpose and you have to do it much too fast to be able to save any of it in the moment when you have a spell going wrong; his sword used layer after layer of redirection, to catch it all and funnel it into the destructive effect he wanted, but because 'destruction' is so much broader a target it only took a few layers, doing the same for healing would be much more complex and delicate work...) Anyway, the main trouble with healing is that you can only do it when someone or something needs to be healed, which won't be all the time, so his anti-sword might spend a while being overcharged and that's not a good way for things to be.

Then there's water, which is springing (so to speak) to mind because they're walking in a desert. Making water is probably easier than making healing, because there's a sense in which the target is broader—it's hard to explain why; it has to do with things he feels more than knows, his practiced sense of which ways magic is more and less eager to turn—but he's not sure how useful it will be. Well, obviously water is generally useful in a desert. But he's not sure how much water he'll get at a time, and he sort of feels like even in a desert, dumping out several wagonloads at once in an inhabited area is maybe kind of still a destructive act.

Then there's the concept of a shield, one that could potentially redirect these 'bullets' Zash mentioned to make them miss anyone in range. That would be tricky for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it would screw with Zash's trick shots unless Siran put a lot of work into figuring out how not to. But it's a pleasing image, and he thinks motion might be a fairly broad target as these things go, maybe broader than water. It has the same problem as healing, though, in that you can only use a shield when there's something to shield against.

He could, he supposes, also try combining all of these effects into a single item. He's not sure what shape such an item should be. A... shield-wand-cup?? Well, the shape doesn't really matter to the magic, except to the extent that it makes Siran's work easier by making him feel like it's more naturally inclined to the purpose he intends. Anyway it would be a beastly amount of work to set all that up and have all the different parts work without interfering with each other, but if he got it all set up just right, it'd help make up for the comparative narrowness of all these targets. He suspects, though, that if he did it this way it'd be harder to avoid the big obvious problem of any spellfray-absorbing artifact: the fact that inevitably a little bit will leak out around the edges. With the sword that wasn't so bad, because the sword's job was to obliterate things and it didn't matter much if in the brief final moments of their existence it also turned them purple or made them burst into song. Rather less convenient to have random magic effects on the several wagonloads of water you just dumped in the middle of the street. (He's imagining a rainbow flood singing thirty songs at once and it's quite the mental image.) And he thinks, the less unified in purpose his artifact is, the more it will tend to do random things and the bigger those random things will tend to be, unless he puts a whole lot more work in to mitigate that.

...let's table those thoughts for the moment because Zash thinks he should probably explain plants, he feels like their existence and context is probably important to Siran's plans too.

👂

(Siran is also very cute, for the record.)

So, uh, plants are—well, the sapient nonhuman species that Zash is technically a specimen of, though Zash is very very noncentral in many respects and many things about him should be ignored when thinking about plants. Most humans think plants are machines or artificial organisms created by them, but Zash's best guess is actually that plants are from another dimension—(here's a small mental package with a superficial explanation of what "another dimension" means)—and found humans and decided that the fact that humans die was an ongoing moral atrocity and decided to help. Most humans also think plants are not sapient, or even sentient.

Due to not being from this dimension, plants can typically not stay in this dimension by default; it's hostile to them. If they try, they usually die very quickly. In order to counteract that, humans have created machinery that can stabilise them here and keep them alive. In order to survive, they need to be in these vats filled with nutrient fluid, being managed by various automated systems that keep them from popping like an overcharged light bulb. Plants can reach into their origin dimension to bring matter and energy over, as far as anyone knows with no limitation in quantity, only in throughput. Each plant has a "gate", a personal portal to this other dimension, which is one-way only, and which for most plants has a fixed size and ability to transport matter.

Plants are absolutely necessary for humans to survive here. Remember how Zash mentioned that humans had cursed their planet of origin? It was to the point that it was beginning to become unable to sustain them. And plants are basically a solution to this, because they can create water, and food, and minerals, and electric power, and gravity, and air, and chemical compounds, and on and on and on, without limit. They are what allows humans to be able to live on a planet as inhospitable as Gunsmoke (which is arid desert and wasteland everywhere, there is not a single lake or river on the face of this planet).

With him so far? Any questions?

...huh. Maybe wagonloads of water at a time wouldn't be so bad after all, unless that much water started messing up other things about the planet, or something. Anyway he's good, go on.

This planet would absolutely benefit from wagonloads of water.

Anyway.

So, plants... well... they're really hard to explain without meeting one in person, but... they love everyone. Everyone. They want everyone to have everything that brings them joy, to live their best happiest most fulfilled lives, to do everything they can so that others can thrive. And they are very very bad at self-care, and there is actually a limit to how much and how often they can use their gates before it starts being tiring, and then painful, and then injurious. And humans will... occasionally just use them to death, suck them dry until they become dust.

And they die happy knowing that their life was put to good use and they've made humans thrive more than they otherwise would.

The place Zash is going to is in fact a town he visited five years ago to heal one of their plants, to check on them.

...that seems... sad? But sad in a complicated way, like—it's good that they get to do what they want and accomplish what they care about even though it kills them, but it's still sad that it kills them. He thinks. He's not used to being sad about people dying.

—also, if the plants are the only source of water on a whole world without it, isn't killing them also... very... stupid...???

Oh yes it is. It is very, very stupid. But...

...well, most qualified plant engineers died on the Fall, and the remaining ones had to rebuild their technological base from scratch. And dealing with plants is very complicated, the automated systems are good as far as they go but if you just rely on them and don't optimise your usage of plants' outputs you end up inevitably hurting them like this. And while in many big cities they're learning how to reduce the rate of that happening, they're not really... doing so in a very sustainable way.

Humans are not very good at consuming their resources in a sustainable way. That's how they fucked up their original planet.

The most forward-thinking humans are hoping they can rebuild enough of their technological base to be able to create (or fetch) new plants before they run out of the existing ones but most people aren't really hopeful; with the rate of population growth and plant usage, most realistic projections do not end with humanity surviving.

...okay. So. His first impulse, obviously, is: fuck that, he'll make this world livable.

That's a stupid impulse; if he tries to just make it work with a wave of his hand and all the magic he can bring to bear, the world will probably turn out livable but it'll also be inside-out and backwards and filled with people turned to stone or struck by eternal slumber and monsters that sneak up on you and devour you or ask you strange riddles and turn you into a worm if you can't solve them and odd floating bits of magic that make you dance for a hundred years at a stretch or lose all your memories or explode.

But... with time and care and effort, lots of it... he's pretty sure he can make a difference without wrecking everything? He might have to bend the project of his anti-sword toward the cause, but... it wouldn't be so bad, he thinks, to design his anti-sword with this sort of thing in mind. Hard to think of anything that's more the opposite of destruction than taking a whole world full of people doomed to die and giving them life instead. And it'll help the plants, too, if people aren't relying on them quite so desperately. Maybe he could even help the people by helping the plants. Less fragile, more powerful plants seem like they will just make everything better for everyone.

Eheheheheheh so about that ahahahah.

Zash (and his twin, Nai, whom Zash hasn't been explicitly thinking about until this point but whose existence has been sort of colouring everything else) have been termed "independent plants". They were created by plants aboard one of the generation ships a century and a half ago, appeared fully formed as infants in the plants' room, and then they aged very rapidly to adulthood (they looked the way humans look when they're seven at one year of age, and when they were seven they looked sixteenish) and haven't aged since. They are extremely thoroughly immortal as far as Zash can tell; he tried to, um, kill himself, because of reasons, very very hard aboard the ship, and failed. They also have better-than-plants ability to generate matter with as far as they can tell no noticeable drain or injury, they have very thorough telekinesis, and their telepathy is not as good as plants' but with some effort Zash has managed to get superficial thoughts and emotions from a distance and somewhat-less superficial ones when touching plus project (which Nai can't do at all, but on the other hand Nai can completely hide from psychic senses which no one else can).

(Aaaand there's another related bit there where Zash can no longer do TK or matter generation because of mumble mumble mumble but anyway it's doable in principle.)

So, "less fragile, more powerful plants" is actually a known reachable target! But it's only been reached via creating them from scratch, he is not sure it's possible to do so to existing plants.

A whole lot of things are possible with magic that aren't otherwise, in Siran's experience. But, also in Siran's experience, if you want to solve a problem instead of creating several more you have to go slow and know what you're doing and not bite off more than you can chew.

...also he's surprised how many feelings he has about Zash attempting suicide. That's sad??? That's sad and he's sad about it??? He's glad that it didn't work but also that's complicated because presumably past Zash had good reasons, but also that's complicated because Siran certainly remembers wandering despairingly into a cursed city and 'reasons' were not so much a feature of his decisionmaking process at the time.

...nah, he didn't really... have very good reasons, and he's... mostly... glad that he survived, too. He was just a kid. He was extremely traumatised and self-loathing and felt like the world would be better without him.

(He is not, entirely, certain that it wouldn't be. Most of the time he thinks it wouldn't, but in his darkest moments... well.)

Consider: without Zash, Siran would not have gotten hugged today. Siran thinks this is a pretty solid argument in favour of Zash's existence.

Zash grins and... nuzzles him, a little bit. Look, hugs are nice, okay, and Siran is cute.

Anyway, Zash just meant that, like, there exists already a potential target for "making plants stronger" so if Siran wanted to aim for that it would be a remarkably solid choice. But there are probably other targets to aim for that Zash isn't thinking of because he's too used to thinking of independent plants.

(But what if Zash is cute, what then. What then.)

The example of independent plants is definitely a helpful one to have in mind! But probably he's going to start by just trying to find ways to make plants more resilient, harder to hurt, better able to live in this world, better able to use their own powers to sustain themselves, that sort of thing. And he's going to try to be really cautious about it.

Fair enough, Siran is the expert here.

So one last thing about plants is that, like Zash mentioned, humans don't really know they're more than machines and the majority of them think they were created by humans so they often act pretty... well, callous. And then when you point out that plants are actually sapient they by and large tend to rationalise it away as either lying or justified because if they didn't abuse plants they'd die anyway and if it's between them and plants, well.

And the plants themselves see this and so mostly prefer that humans therefore not be made aware of the facts because they're... very bad at long-term planning and strategy and getting them to cooperate with sustainable usage is very difficult. A single plant can sustain dozens of humans for decades if left alone with the automated systems and over a century if minimally cared for and they mostly see this as a worthwhile tradeoff. Trying to swap to a sustainable system would involve lots of deaths in the short term and they're horrified by the idea.

Well, maybe they'll feel better about it if Siran can bridge that gap by helping them keep people alive.

Yeah, they honestly probably would. Zash is having slight feelings that Siran might be the best thing that's happened to this planet.

That is not really what he would've expected before landing here. And he still might fuck everything up! Never discount the possibility of Siran fucking everything up! But... he really hopes he can help? It seems like a better thing to do with his life than lie in the sand feeling bad about his terrible decisions.

Yeah, speaking from experience here lying in the sand feeling bad about one's terrible decisions loses its charm very quickly. If nothing else it's horribly boring.

So boring! Very few hugs! All in all not a good time.

Zash hadn't really thought about the lack of hugs as a noteworthy feature of lying in the sand feeling sorry for himself but—

[—put me down.]

(And the colour of his thoughts is one of alarm. He noticed something urgent that needs his full mobility to be dealt with.)

He sets Zash down neatly and quickly on his feet and stops, looking around to see what the problem could be.

The problem might be... those dots over there in the distance? Hard to make out what they are.

"Shit. Okay, I need somewhere to hide—"

Desert in all directions. Couple indistinct landmarks that way and that other way but definitely not close enough.

"Shit."

"...how badly do you need somewhere to hide, because I could probably dig a hole to bury you in very fast if that would actually work, and if it was worth doing magic about."

"...there's a bounty on my head—I don't know how well that translated—" He'll touch Siran to mentally convey the concept. "And those people are likely to know about it and want to collect, if they are who I think they are. ...they won't be able to, I'm not capturable if I don't want to be, but I don't want to hurt them."

Since they're touching, he can convey much faster than he could use words out loud that: he wants to dig a hole to hide Zash in. He thinks probably the side effects would be fine or at least manageable, even if he lost control of the spell, which he probably wouldn't. And... he thinks that whole decision process is highly suspect and the new shape of who he's trying to be says not to do it just on that basis, not unless Zash thinks a lot of people would get hurt in this fight, enough to be worth the small but non-negligible risk of Siran fucking up wildly and making a bottomless pit or something. He is kind of upset about this but that's just how it goes sometimes, when you're trying to be a person who doesn't make reckless decisions under pressure even when the pressure feels very important.

"It's probably not worth it," he sighs. "Uh, fair warning, they might try to shoot you. They won't succeed, I'll stop them, but they might try."

"Sure," he says agreeably. "Don't try too hard?" (The meaning underlying the words, far clearer than he managed to articulate out loud: if he gets shot, he will have a really uncomfortable time. If the people attacking them get hurt, that's a much bigger deal. If Zash ends up having to trade off Siran's safety against the safety of their attackers, probably it's a better idea to prioritize their attackers. He's not thrilled about it or anything but as a person who doesn't die when killed in a world with a real shortage of those he kind of feels like it'd be a dick move not to volunteer to be the first one dropped from the priority list if it comes up.)

...Zash has the oddest impulse to kiss Siran. Which he was incredibly not braced for and which he might accidentally leak/project even when he tries to clamp down on it. Uh, whoops. Sorry about that, Siran.

He smiles sheepishly. "Don't worry. It takes rather a lot more than three humans to really be a problem."

...cute?? Cute. Cute. Zash is cute.

"Fair enough," he says cheerfully.

"Alright, then." And he'll use this moment to detach his holster from his bare thigh—he'd reattached it there after giving Siran his pants sort of without stopping to think about it—and attach it to his mechanical arm. And then... they gotta wait.

Siran takes a few steps in the general direction they were heading and then looks back questioningly; can they wait in a more walkingish sort of way, or does Zash want to stay put?

No, let's wait, it's more aesthetic that way.

(Gunslinger aesthetic, Wild West style duels and whatnot. Not that it'll be a duel, but. Aesthetic.)

All right, all right, if he insists. Siran traipses back to stand by Zash, off to the side a little behind him and out of his way.

The people Zash has spotted take much longer to spot them, lacking the superhuman senses, but when they do they make a beeline for them.

It turns out to be three people, all covered head-to-toe in desert gear with face masks and goggles, riding horse-sized blue flightless bipedal birds. And once they're close enough to properly get a look on who exactly it is that they're seeing they speed up.

"Zash the Stampede!" calls the one in the center once they're close enough, before he makes his bird stop. "You are under arrest by the Julai Military Police. There needn't be any violence if you come quietly."

"There needn't be any violence anyway," he argues.

Siran is just gonna... stand back and let Zash handle this. He doesn't know this place or these people and would probably just make things worse if he tried to say something.

The man that spoke first seems to have a different idea. He turns to look at Siran (and takes in the fact that Siran is apparently barefood with... some confusion and concern) then says, "You! Do you know this man is Zash the Stampede, notorious criminal charged with multiple counts of murder, theft, and destruction of property, with a $$6,000,000 bounty on his head?" Then he reaches into his jacket pocket to show Siran a "Wanted" poster with Zash's picture on it.

Wanted Poster

"Damn I look good in that picture."

He examines it, ignoring the man who showed it to him. "Huh. Yeah, you really do."

"—did you not hear me?? He's a dangerous criminal!" the man nearly shrieks.

"Am not!"

He shrugs and smiles. "Dangerous criminal or no, he helped me out when he didn't have to."

"...well, you're both coming with us, then!!" he says, unholstering his gun—

Whoops suddenly the police officer's gun has been shot out of his hand. "Oh, wow, how did that happen?" he says, gasping and looking at his own right hand which is now holding his gun.

"—shoot him!!"

The other two grab their guns—

No they don't. "Oh, my. Apologies, I don't know what's happening."

Pfffff. Adorable.

The officers have one more gun each but those suffer the same fates, at which point Zash has to reload his own gun. He lazily pops its barrel open and grabs some more bullets from a pocket as he starts walking past the variously spluttering or shocked police. "Anyway, it's been a pleasure but my friend and I really should get going! Hope you have a nice day." To Siran: "Shall we?"

"Let's!"

He strolls cheerfully after Zash.

"H-hold on! You're under arrest! You can't just leave!"

"Well, I'm leaving. I guess you guys could try to stop me but, you know." He keeps a healthy safe distance from the three of them as he walks around them. "I don't want to hurt your birds. They did nothing to deserve it."

"W-we'll come back with reinforcements!"

"I would expect nothing less. I hope you manage to find me when you do, I wouldn't want you guys to go through all this trouble for nothing. Anyway, good luck!"

...they don't know how to respond to that. They kind of feel like they've just been hit by a typhoon and somehow survived with no injuries.

Usually trying to shoot people works a lot better than that.

(They're still close enough to the officers that with some guesswork on Zash's part he can lossily transmit their feelings telepathically to Siran. So that he won't be the only one here appreciating them.)

Siran tries, with mixed success, to hold in his giggles until they're out of earshot.

(Before they're out of earshot the officers try to recover their guns and shoot at them again. This fails, again.)

(And because Zash wanted to show off he did not even look over his shoulder to make them fail. There are very few things more terrifying than someone shooting something out of your hand with unerring accuracy without even looking at you to do it.)

"So that went better than expected. Was kind of worried they might have something more than guns but apparently whoever outfitted them didn't want to splurge."

"That was amazing. You're amazing."

"Aw, shucks, you're gonna make me blush." And he walks over to Siran to touch him and mentally add, [So now that you've seen it in action, is that a kind of power you think you'd enjoy having? I find it pretty fun, personally.]

He can see where Zash is coming from there, for sure. It's a... whimsical, almost childish, sort of power... but, to look at it another way, it's the power to be whimsical and childish at people who are trying to kill you, and leave them spluttering in hopeless confusion in your wake. There's definitely an appeal to that.

He recognises that a lot of this is his, you know, specific personality in how he expresses it, but...

...did Siran see their faces?? They were priceless, it's always hilarious when this happens. And he's sure they meant it when they said that they'd be bringing reinforcements but hopefully he'll be long gone by then.

They made such faces! It was so good!!

Anyway uh can Zash maybe perhaps um have a resumption of hugs?

Of course.

And then they can go that-a-way! They aren't riding birds so it'll take them a few hours to get to their destination, which turns out to be...

...barely a town, really. The village of Jeneora Rock owes its name to the huge rock it was built around and it was made from the remains of one of the colony ships that mostly didn't make it a hundred and forty eight years ago. Most of its useful technology has been scavenged and brought to the bigger cities, but it somehow managed to retain enough that people can live there anyway. Not that most people with a choice would, but then again, many people don't have a choice, do they?

Jeneora Rock

"...'s that gonna fall down?"

"Probably not! It's been like that since always—well, since humanity arrived here—and it's pretty stable. Just don't push it too hard."

"Wasn't planning on it, but you never know."

He wants to reinforce it by magic, but he shouldn't.

"Still extremely curious to see your magic but not in a way where I think it'd be a great idea for you to use it if you don't think you should. The rock really is very stable, it looks precarious from this distance but there's a lot of surface contact."

Thoughtful nod. If Zash is pretty sure it's all right, then he'll leave it. He should generally not try doing any magic larger than really tiny things until he's settled on a design for his anti-sword and figured out how to safely build it.

Yeah valid.

Anyway, uh... actually they should maybe think of what to tell the townspeople about Siran. And his. Shoelessness. They know and like Zash but they'll definitely be curious about Siran.

Well. Siran could sit out here in the desert while Zash enacts some sort of bizarre complicated plan to get Siran a pair of shoes without anyone in town knowing that Siran arrived without them. Or they could just proceed as-is and Siran could shrug off questions. Second thing seems simpler.

Yeah sure they can wing it he's right it's not like the townies are gonna have anything to do with their curiosity if it doesn't get satisfied.

He does expect it would be a great bizarre complicated plan. But if they just brazen it out and ignore the questions, Siran probably gets shoes faster.

Zash is a fast talker but if he's not allowed to directly mislead that curtails their options greatly (and also removes a lot of the fun of it) (he's sometimes a little shit, sue him).

Speaking of shoes how, uh, is Siran holding up, there?

Eh, it's tolerable. His healing is keeping on top of it.

Good. Soon he'll have proper shoes.

He's looking forward to it!

Jeneora Rock is the kind of small town that has one diner which is also a pub and that's it. It does have proper walls and a proper gate, though.

When they walk into the diner everyone stops talking to stare at them, but the click of recognition of Zash happens a moment later for everyone, causing most of them to soften and return to what they had been doing or wave at him. One person in particular, the pregnant and severe-looking brunette tending to the bar, immediately leaves said bar to greet them personally. "ZASH! We didn't think we'd see you again, welcome back! Come on in, sit down."

"Rosa! A second one, is it?" he says, walking up to her and giving her pregnant belly a huge grin. "And how's the husband?"

"Goodness me, looks like! And I threw his lazy ass out," she says, with a smug little grin.

"Did you! Good on you. And where's the first one? I haven't met them yet! —ah, sorry, I shouldn't be so impolite." He takes a step back to gesture at Siran. "This is Siran. Siran, this is Rosa, a good friend."

Zash is so cute with his friends.

"Nice to meet you," he says, surprised to find that it's true.

"Oh, Tonis is our resident worm-catcher, I'm sure he'll show up sooner or later. And hello, Siran, it's nice to meet you, too. Sit, sit, what can I get you?"

He looks to Zash to see what a normal - well, at least as normal as Zash - response to this prompt looks like.

"How about some—"

He stops, and the shadow that crosses his face only stays there for a moment but it does spend a moment there.

"—whisky?"

Siran decides not to call him on whatever that was, and instead nods agreeably.

"Two whiskies coming right up!" And off she goes.