"I don't know what words you need. Words about magic, words about species, words about something else?"

"Yes! All those!"

She giggles. "Magic! Besides death tolls and geneses, there's species magic. Every species has their own unique magic, although they can be similar. People sometimes try grouping them in artificial categories but they don't come with inherent divisions like that. Elves have elf magic, to make healthy babies, orcs have orc magic, to make food grow, frost giants have ice magic, etcetera. Hybrids can end up with varying levels of the magic of their component species. I'm half-elf half-frost giant, but I have all the elf magic and and less than all of the frost giant magic so I say I'm an elf who is also half frost giant." As if reminded by her mentioning he elfness, she looks down at the blood-soaked glove on her left hand. "...With elves, it's indecent to go around with your left hand bare, because elves have weird biology. Do you happen to have a pair of gloves lying around that might fit?"

"...Ah... that might fit, yes," he says, and goes back up to the main room and hoists one of the boxy backpacks off the wall and pulls out a pair of heavy leather gloves, brown with a silvery sheen.

"Thank you so much. Uh, I'm just gonna step out of the room to change, alright? ...Is there anywhere I could wash the blood off my hands?"

"Yes—" and back down the stairs to a room next to the dormitory with, among other things, a magical self-filling washbasin.

"Thank you so much," she repeats, and waits for him to leave the room before taking her glove off.

Yep, off he goes.

Oh it's good to feel clean.

She comes back in a few minutes later wearing the left half of the glove pair and with the right half dangling from her belt.

He waves hello when she emerges back into the main room of the underground complex. "So: magic! I don't know what death tolls or geneses are."

"...I guess if you've only got two species wherever you are you probably haven't had a genesis in long enough that you'd necessarily still have cultural consciousness of it. A genesis is when a new species starts. Death tolls are...that thing that happens when someone dies? Like when Dakker--my friend--died."

"That doesn't happen when someone dies wherever-I-am!"

"...Uh."

"Crap."

"My species does not have magic."

"Okay, I believe you. But I think that's less important right now than the possibility that my friend just died on virgin soil. Death tolls, on land that's never seen one before, cause geneses."

"..."

"Some period of time--I think a few days, maybe a week--after the death toll rings, the nearest population center--I don't know if we count, we wouldn't if there was a city nearby but I really doubt there is--starts seeing babies of the new species just suddenly appear. Not out of proportion to the number of adults available to take care of them--if we do count we'd probably not get an average of more than one a year, I think, at least to start with--but it doesn't stop until there's enough of them to form a stable gene pool."

"Uh," says Tiro. "...uh."

"I mean, this is assuming this is virgin soil--or was--which we don't know yet, but..."

"There's no city nearby," he says. "There's no... anything nearby."

"We can't just leave. If someone else comes by someday the genesis will resume and if they have no idea what's going on..."

Tiro nods.

"I'm sorry."

"I couldn't leave anyway," he says. "I don't know how."

"...How did you get here?"