"I mean — talking about specifics of an existing sex act is different than talking about specifics of a hypothetical — no, I'm making assumptions again. Sorry."

Ðani sighs.

"... this is why there are customs about not having sex with foreigners until you've gotten to know them, probably. You travel around to see a bunch of different cultures, but what is this whole topic," she waves a hand vaguely, "like in your native culture? Do you talk about sex? Do you marry for love? Do you even have marriages, actually?"

"It wouldn't be inaccurate to say it depends. When you have enough people living together they disagree about a lot of things. Among wanderers like myself some of us travel together with people we care about and some of us travel alone like I do. Being an active wanderer isn't compatible with raising children but some people take breaks to do that. As for marriage, that means many different things to many different people. For me personally, I don't have any plans to bond tightly to a single specific person or even a small group."

Ðani is tempted to say that it sounds lonely, but it's not exactly her place to judge.

"How many wanderers like you do you think there are?" she asks instead. "Were you born to other wanderers, or did you choose it?"

"There are a lot of wanderers. Your language doesn't have words that make it easy to express how many. In my language I would say there's a few million. In yours that's like a number with six and two sixes. Most of us choose the path of a wanderer after being raised by people outside the tradition and I'm not one of the exceptions."

"Yikes! That's a lot of people. I guess it makes sense if you have a lot of different spaces to draw from."

She's silent for a moment.

"How many worlds have you visited? If you don't keep ties with anyone, and you've been wandering for a while ... how far away must we be from your home?"

"I've visited two and six sixes and another three spaces. As for distance, I don't think the concept quite works. I could go back to my static anchor whenever I wanted and be there in a couple minutes. I visit every couple years. I also keep in touch with the others in my weave, we can talk to each other wherever we are."

'If you can talk to them from anywhere, how does it make sense not to become attached to anyone' is definitely an indelicate question.

'Is the long-distance-talking template one you intend to share' would be work.

Ðani struggles to think of how to reply.

"If all of your people can return to their anchors so quickly, do you mostly think of your location as being more about where your anchor is than where you are?" Anþasta asks. "Like, do you think of yourself as basically still being a few minutes away from your house?"

"I don't really think so. It's like I said distance is weird. If I went elsewhere now it would probably be months at least before I could come back. The magic I use for travel can go to a small set of specific places or random places and neither of those would let me come back here. I'd need to use other means."

"Hmm. That sound difficult to work with. Being able to go to places, but not go back to them, I mean."

She drums her fingers on her arm.

"How random is 'random'? Like, are the places you go any nearer ... I'm not sure how to put it."

She sets aside her plate, and then crouches to draw a box in the dirt. Then she grabs a handful of stones and arranges them in the box roughly uniformly.

"Random like this, like raindrops hitting the ground?"

She rearranges the stones to follow an approximate Gaussian distribution.

"Or like this, like how tall people are?"

"Sometimes a space has enough people to justify a bridge, I've gone back to spaces like that a few times. I've also used a bubble once, I had to run away from some very dangerous circumstances and I travelled with the group I convinced to help the people there in ways I wasn't able to. As to how random that aspect of my travel is, we don't really have something to measure that against. There isn't a good way to measure distance in the Maelstrom."

Anþasta puffs out her cheeks in a wordless huff of frustration.

"Hey — it doesn't have to be figured out right now," Ðani points out. "I'm not sure what you're trying to get at, but we have time to look into it later."

She pats Anþasta on the arm.

"So, yes, this isn't exactly urgent," she agrees. "But it's ... its about whether the transportation is doing something more like aiming badly, or something weirder. Have you ever randomly gone to a world that has already made contact with your people?"

"Oh sorry, it is aiming; it's actually aiming very precisely. It takes me to places where people made like I am can exist and in fact where people like me do exist with very high reliability. It's just that there's so many of those places that we don't have a good way to pick between them. If the magic is using distance as the criteria for picking between the those options we don't have the right data to tell."

That only raises more questions.

Ðani hasn't taken her hand away.

Anþasta sighs, and leans back against the bench.

"Why only go to places that have people like you?" Ðani asks instead. "Wouldn't you get a more varied experience if you didn't aim it like that?"

"There's people who do that, you need to be a lot more careful though. You can't rely on having any common ground and you have to translate everything from scratch with almost no basis for communicating. It's a lot easier to have tragic misunderstandings. Usually, when people do it there's at least three sixes of sixes travelling together."

"That makes sense; so you aim for people who are enough like you that you can manage to safely travel alone."

Ðani does not see the appeal of traveling alone when you can apparently travel together in a whole village of people at once. But ... she knows she's kind of unusual in that way. Probably there are plenty of people in the village who would want to do it Maenik's way.

"What are the least-similar people that you've ended up meeting?"

Anþasta thinks that it sounds like a life out of a story — going out on adventures to strange and distant lands, relying on nothing but your own wits and abilities to survive off the land, single-handedly saving people from perilous fates.

Not all stories are good to live in ... but it does sound tempting. It's not hard to see why Maenik would wander the way she does.

"Safely enough anyway. There's always risks." If someone wants to become a wanderer she'll talk about that more but death is another thing it's better to be circumspect about. "Hmm, the most unusual people would have to be the," she pauses a moment to search for the right words, "the people who were very much like a multi-bodied prophet that encompassed every body on their world."

"... wow. Yeah, that would have been pretty strange," Ðani agrees. "If it was everyone ... were they startled, when you arrived and they weren't able to ... visit you, I guess? Assuming that you're not a prophet yourself, anyway."

"They weren't initially, they don't all keep track of all of their bodies but when they realized they couldn't visit me they were very confused. The language magic didn't work right either so we spent a long time learning how to talk to each other. As for your other question, I'm not a prophet. I don't think they were quite like your prophets either. You're the first people I've met where everyone with multiple people sharing a body has such a consistent external origin."

"Hmm."

Ðani thinks for a moment about what that could imply.

"Wait!"

Anþasta sits bolt upright.

"How precisely can your magic target different conditions?" she asks. "For example, if you got a thorough enough description from my grandmothers, would you be able to actually go to the other place?"