Almost directly below her, a quaint village sprawls against the shore of a lake. Wooden houses intermingled with gardens and open spaces, all built along the beach of a cove. A road curves away through the woods, leading in the direction of outlying farms just visible through the hills.

Some boats — sail boats, with triangular sails — are making gentle progress around the lake. Several people are just visible as specks in the boats and in the village; they seem not to have spotted her yet.

Maenik smiles wider. It's a pretty looking place, she can start there. Hmm, what kind of show should she put on this time? Mysterious stranger wandering in on the road, flying woman, walking on water. They were all good options but perhaps not this time. With a thought she turns herself invisible then she let herself fall at a sedate pace down to the surface of the water before submerging and propelling herself through the water. With a bit of extra care she soothed away the evidence of her passage. Being invisible in the water is a bit trickier than being the same in air so there's some chance someone might notice something but there's no reason for them to guess the truth.

When she's close to the beach she drops the attempt at invisibility and the propulsion and swims the rest of the way into shore.

A young woman sits naked on the beach, her legs dandling in the water next to a pile of softening strips of willow-wood, a half-completed basket resting on her lap.

When she sees Maenik swim up, she lets out an exclamation of surprise and sets her basket aside.

She says something questioning in a foreign language.

She's close enough now that she can stand, so she does. The water seems to push itself out of her hair and her clothes leaving both dry even as droplets of water trickle down her face. She smiles with closed lips and then says gives a greeting in one of the languages she knows, just in case, coincidences are possible.

The woman on the beach gives her clothes a look of confusion, but rallies a moment later. She gathers her willow strips and sets them in the half-finished basket, and then stands and steps into a plain brown skirt set a few feet up the beach. She ties it closed with a cord, and then tries to indicate with gestures that Maenik should follow her in the direction of the center of the village.

She can follow. She's wearing a floral print blouse made of a thick but also very fine fabric and a pair of darker pants made of what looks to be the same material as well as a pair of thin black shoes that come up high enough that there's no skin visible around her ankles.

The woman leads her down a wide dirt street. She pauses when they reach the edge of a garden, and calls out to one of the people working there.

The man that heaves himself up from inspecting the stalks of one of the plants wears the same kind of skirt that the woman does. From their similar faces, Maenik might guess that they're related.

He says something back, and then turns to focus on Maenik. He says something — probably in three different languages, judging by the sound and the pauses he puts between them.

Ooh, multilingual. Always a good sign. She gives greetings in three languages of her own including the first one she used on the beach.

The man and the woman look at each other in confusion, and exchange a few more words.

Finally, the man places an open palm on his chest. "Genilha," he says. Then he points toward the woman. "Ðani."

That might be names... it could also be ranks or occupations but regardless it seems to be identifiers. She repeats the hand on chest gesture, "Maenik." Then she uses the pointing gesture while repeating what might be their names.

He smiles and makes a gesture. "Maenik," he repeats, pointing at her.

He turns back to Ðani and says "Gu dosak Genilha Ðani?".

Ðani rolls her eyes and replies "Dosak".

Genilha taps her on the nose.

"Gu dosak Genilha Ðani?" he repeats.

Ðani mimes offense. "Kado!"

Genilha folds his arms behind his back and does not tap her on the nose.

He turns to Maenik to see if she has a reaction to this.

She tilts her head a little. It seems like they're trying to teach her something. The statement, perhaps a question is repeated twice and what tentatively seems to be identifiers are included. Touching someone's face is generally something that requires special permission and the dramatic gestures support that guess so maybe they're trying to teach her terms for acceptance and refusal?

This is a bit public for her usual hovering in the air illusions so she'll kneel down and touch the ground. A patch of color hovers above the ground and then two animated characters move in from the edges of the frame.

She'll pause there for a moment to gauge their reaction.

Genilha's eyes widen, and then he digs his fingernails into his shoulder.

Ðani starts bouncing in place, and says a long, complicated utterance that Maenik has no hope of following.

Whatever Ðani said, it makes Genilha relax a little bit. He repeats one of the words she said.

She smiles at Maenik and then turns and runs for the center of the village.

She gives a small smile back then returns to a more neutral expression. They... probably want her to wait for someone or multiple someone's to be fetched. And probably more official people. That's always a bit of a grab bag.

She considers for a moment then stands back up, maintaining the illusion in it's current state.

Genilha seems to be out of things to say. He stands there awkwardly.

But not for too long. Ðani returns a few moments later, accompanied by another person — and trailed by a curious-looking blonde child.

The person she fetched is the first person to be wearing anything more than a skirt; they're wearing both a skirt and a breastband, with a sack of some kind slung over their shoulder. Depending on how Maenik parses local clothing norms, they might strike her as a man or a woman.

They press a palm to their collar. "Penþa." Then they point at Maenik. "Gu Maenik?"

Hmm, two gestures for indicating self. Is there an important difference between them? She'll use the new one and bring her hand to her collar, "Maenik," she agrees. "Gu Penþa?" She tries to match the trailing tone shift.

Penþa makes a gesture. "Banak."

They seem to realize that's probably not very helpful. "Banak Penþa pi."

Genilha puts his hand on their shoulder.

"Banak Genilha pi," he interjects, pointing at himself. "Banak Penþa do," he adds, pointing at the new person. "Banak Maenik do," he finishes, pointing at Maenik again.

Then he says a long aside to Penþa, who makes a gesture with their hand.

Oh, pronouns first and second person pronouns. Well either that or a verb conjugated by referent. How to test that... She kneels down again and points to the two figures in turn. "Banak Krae do. Banak Sia do. Jump Sia do," The Sia figure jumps, "Jump Krae do," The Krae figure jumps. She stands up, "Jump Maenik pi," She does a small jump.

The assembled villagers watch the display.

"Krae, Sia," Genilha responds, pointing to the appropriate figures. "Jump Genilha pi," he continues, doing a little hop.

Then he gestures Ðani over and lifts her into the air. "Gu jump Genilha Ðani?"

It's probably not worth trying to clarify the difference between jump and lift. She tries to use the word from earlier, "Dosak."

Now everybody is confused.

Genilha sets Ðani down and they look at each other for a moment.

Then he sets a hand on her shoulder. "Dosak Genilha Ðani," he explains. Then he removes his hand. "Gu dosak Genilha do?" he asks Ðani.

"Dosak," she agrees.

He taps her.

"Gu jump Genilha do?" he asks.

"Jump," she agrees.

He lifts her, and then sets her down a moment later.

He turns back to Maenik and pauses to see if this will solicit a response.

So dosak isn't an affirmative. Alright, she has a new guess for the relevant grammar. Since she hasn't learned a word for affirmative, she tries to use the hand gesture that seems to accompany the affirming responses.

The assembled villagers smile, and Penþa and Ðani make a quiet clicking sound.

Penþa points to her illusion. "Gu banak molh eg?"

Ðani crosses her arms.

So Banak doesn't mean name, maybe it means word? Gu seems to consistently appear in interrogative utterances. She doesn't think she's heard the other two words before at least not in the statements directed at her. So she's being asked a question but she doesn't understand it. She tries to replicate the sort of gestures they used when she misused dosek.

Ðani says something quick to Penþa, who clicks.

She points to Genilha. "Gu banak molh do?"

"Banak Genilha pi," he responds. He points at Ðani. "Gu banak molh do?"

"Banak Ðani pi," she answers. "Gu banak molh pi?"

"Banak Ðani do," he replies. "Gu banak molh eg?" he asks, picking up a stone from the ground and holding it in his hand.

"Banak þomegi eg," she answers.

She points at herself. "Ðani." She points at the stone. "Þomegi." She points at Maenik's illusion and looks questioning.

Alright so molh is maybe a placeholder value for questions. And eg is a pronoun for non-person or perhaps inanimate entities.

She gestures at the illusion, "Banak illusion eg. Banak magic eg." She takes a step into the air so she's unsupported by the ground. She gestures at her feet, "Banak floating eg. Banak magic eg." She steps back onto the ground.

There's a fast-paced discussion. Penþa steps back and leans against the fence around the garden, pulling some string from their sack and starting to tie knots in it.

Genilha points at the stone in his hand. "Gu banak þomegi eg? Banak."

Then he points at one of the houses. "Gu banak þomegi eg? Kaba." He points at his own foot. "Gu banak þomegi eg? Kaba."

He points at her illusion. "Banak magic eg." He points at the sun. "Gu banak magic eg?"

"Kaba." She points at the sun, "Banak star eg. Banak light eg." She points back at the illusion. "Banak light eg. She kneels down touches the illusion then makes the figures disappear from the illusion and replaces it with an animated campfire. She points at that, "Banak light eg."

They consider this for a moment.

Genilha makes a comment to Ðani, who shrugs.

Meanwhile, the child has gathered enough courage to creep forward and try poking the illusion.

"Manipulha eg!" he exclaims. "Esagremak sodre eg, pok manipulha eg."

Ðani clicks, and then gently pulls the child away from the illusion. She says something, and he settles down crosslegged, watching the illusion.

She smiles at the child but otherwise doesn't respond she doesn't know those words. There are a lot of words and bits of grammar floating around now though. She takes a few moments to form a memory bubble and store some associations and notes... she probably should have done this earlier because she isn't quite sure she's remembering everything right.

Genilha takes the moment of distraction to go pull some stalks from the garden. They're long, somewhat woody, with a dense green flower on the end.

"Omat pi," he comments, putting the end of one in his mouth and biting it off. After chewing for a moment, he holds out a stalk toward her and asks "Gu omat do?"

They're asking her if she'll eat the stalk? Or maybe they're asking if she eats in general? She uses a bit of magic invisible to the villagers to check if the stalk is an intoxicant or otherwise something that she might have reason not to eat.

It's not. It's an unfamiliar form of domestic brassica.

The she'll smile take the stalk and say "Omat pi," before chewing on it herself. After a little chewing she'll swallow and then ask, "Gu banak molh eg?"

Genilha smiles back.

"Banak kalhornaðor eg," he replies.

He says something to the kid, who jumps up and runs into one of the buildings on the far side of the clear area next to the garden.

He returns a moment later with four rolls of bread in his hands, which he distributes to everyone. The bread has cheese, herbs, and vegetables — including a lot of kalhornaðor — mixed into the dough and baked, so even the relatively small rolls are filling.

While Daskal fetches that, Ðani fetches some clay cups and a bucket of water from the lake.

"Taneg pi," she explains, filling a cup and taking a sip. "Gu taneg do?" she asks, looking questioningly at Maenik.

That's more than a snack. Should she accept? It probably won't hurt, if this was a substantial commitment for them the food probably wouldn't have been available so quickly. She'll eat it slowly though. "Taneg pi." Water seems abundant and it's more of a hassle for her to operate without drinking than without eating.

She'll use a bit of magic to check what's in the water. How clean is it?

It's cleaner than she might fear. It's pre-industrial, no microplastics or similar pollution. And there's relatively little suspended particulate matter — the lake here is deep and clear. There is a noticeable amont of dissolved limestone, and a normal amount of bacteria for being scooped directly out of a lake.

Her body can handle that without issue, her protections will automatically sterilize the bacteria just as they sterilize any bacteria or viruses entering or exiting her body through the air.

Then the villagers can remain blissfully unenlightened about germ theory, and they can enjoy a shared light lunch.

Once things are fetched, the villagers mostly sit to eat. Penþa remains leaning against the fence.

Ðani eats her bread with one hand and sketches in the dirt with the other. With a bit of squinting, Maenik might recognize it as a rough map of the area. Ðani has to lean a bit to complete the whole lake, such is the scale. She marks one point on the bank that corresponds to the village, and then marks another point on the opposite bank.

When she's finished with the drawing, she leans back and briefly confers with Genilha.

Maenik will sit down to eat. When she notices the map she reaches over to touch her illusion and shifts it to an image she took while looking down from above. 

Ðani perks up at that.

"Osaktaniferamur," she remarks, pointing at the village in the illusion. Then she points all around them. "Osaktaniferamur."

She points out across the lake. "Besomurer."

"Rumasak pi Osaktaniferamur," she says. "Rumasak Genilha Osaktaniferamur," she continues, gesturing to Genilha. "Gu rumasak Genilha Besomurer? Karum. Rumasak Genilha Osaktaniferamur."

She turns back to Maenik. "Gu rumasak do molh?" she asks, gesturing at the illusion.

At first she thought Osaktaniferamur might be settlemt but now it seems fairly clear that it's this specific settlement. By context that suggests Besomurer is a specific body of water. The first use of Rumasak could just be where something is but give that she's being asked a question that suggests it's about where she came from. That isn't really something she can answer with their shared vocabulary. "Karum." She gestures at the whole illusion.

Then she'll draw a line of her path along the illusion from the beach where she met Ðani back into the middle of the lake where she entered and then moved her finger up, indicating she was in flying. Following from there she'll make a second illusion of her floating in the air before shifting to an approximation of where she was before. A small garden with unfamiliar plants and a few people.

Everyone reflects quietly on that for a moment. Then Ðani and the others confer.

Ðani and Daskal get into a brief contest of wills, before she rolls her eyes and leaves to fetch something else.

Daskal asks Genilha a question.

"Lhamak 'du-floating'," he responds, the foreign word sticking out. Then he continues with a longer utterance that Maenik can't follow.

"Floating Maenik do," Daskal says, addressing her. "Pav floating Maenik Daskal?" he asks, gesturing to himself.

Genilha interposes a hand between them.

"Daskal," he says, pointing at the boy. "Daskal, pav taneg."

He sips some water.

"Genilha, pav taneg."

Genilha sips some water as well.

Daskal turns back to Maenik and clasps his hands. "Maenik, pav floating do pi?"

Hmm, she's heard three words that might be negations now the very first one seemed like it might be an objection that was Kobi maybe? She wasn't taking notes at the very beginning because she wasn't expecting to do quite this much field linguistics at the start, Kaba was used as a disagreement perhaps and Karum was used similarly. Kobi might be the best word for refusing a request. It might also convey offense but it should be possible to clarify if there's too much strength to it.

"Kobi." She picks up a stone from the ground and floats it in the air for a few seconds. "Floating Maenik eg." She repeats her demonstration of stepping into midair "Floating pi pi." "Kobi floating pi do." She offers the stone to the child. "Give pi do þomegi. Gu banak molh Give?"

He looks uncertain, bites his lip, and takes the rock.

"Sarav? Sarav do þomegi a pi."

He hands the rock to Genilha. "Sarav pi þomegi a Genilha."

"Gu ... gu kobi?"

"Sarav do þomegi a Genilha," she confirms.

The question is one she doesn't understand. Maybe it's a question about why?

"Jump do þomegi." "Kobi Jump do eg." She points at the nearest house.

Daskal turns to Genilha in confusion.

Genilha thinks for a moment.

"Jump pi eg," he agrees, lifting the stone up above his head. "Ka-jump pi eg," he says, pointing at the fence. He walks over and wrestles with the fence, failing to lift it. "Ka-jump pi eg," he repeats.

"Daskal, gu jump do þomegi?"

He flaps his hand, and lifts another small stone demonstratively. "Jump."

"Gu jump do pi?" Genilha continues.

Daskal wraps his arms around Genilha's legs and heaves. Genilha doesn't move.

"Ka-jum," Daskal replies.

"Floating Maenik þomegi. Ka-floating Maenik Daskal."

He pauses and looks to her for confirmation.

"Ka-floating Maenik Daskal," she confirms.

Daskal slumps, the very picture of despondency.

Then he perks up, runs around to the fence, climbs on top of one of the posts and then scrambles up Genilha's back, saying something long and complicated.

"Kamo, Daskal," he replies, staggering but remaining upright.

Kids being happy and doing kid things is always nice to see. She smiles. 

Genilha seems busy so she turns to Penþa. Pav seems to maybe be a word for asking permission. Gu seemed to be used for that earlier but it seems less specific. She picks up another rock from the ground and holds it out. "Penþa, pav sarav pi ga a do?"

They blink and set their string aside. While everyone has been talking, it has transformed into a compact hand-woven net, covered with several different kinds of knots.

"Sarav," they agree, reaching out to take the rock.

Is that perhaps a woven language? It's probably just an art project weaving for artistic purposes is statistically much more common but she still smiles at the notion that she's hit on the rarer case. She hands over the stone.

Is it time to ask the important question? Is Penþa the right person to ask? She hasn't really formed strong opinions about anyone she's met but she thinks she'll wait for Ðani. She seems to be most comfortable around Maenik of everyone she's met.

With that decided is there a good way to solicit vocabulary about time and prerequisites while she waits?

She'll go back to her illusion and make an image of a figure picking one of the stalks from the ground.

"Harvest Krae ga. Gu banak molh harvest?"

"Aðorak," Penþa responds. "Aðorak Krae Kalhornaðor. Aðorak Krae eg."

Daskal rests his chin on Genilha's head for a moment, before pouting and climbing down.

He sits on the fence and watches Maenik intently.

"Aðorak Krae eg," she repeats. Then she has Krae do a rough approximation of making the rolls they were eating earlier. The figure rolls out dough and wraps it around some stalks and vegetables before putting it over the fire.

"Cooks Krae eg." Krae takes the roll off the fire and bites into it. "Omat Krae eg. Gu banak molh cooks?"

"Sodrek," Penþa supplies, getting a little more into the swing of things. "Aðorak Krae eg. Sodrek Krae eg. Aðorak gas sodrek gas omat Krae eg."

Ðani comes around the corner of one of the houses closest to the beach, an older woman holding onto her arm for balance. They slowly make their way towards the impromptu language-learning gathering.

"Aðorak gas sodrek gas omat Krae eg." She confirms. That might also answer her next question.

She turns towards Ðani and the older person and waits for them to arrive.

As they approach, Ðani's companion peers closely at Maenik's illusion.

Ðani waves hi. Penþa and Genilha click.

She points at Maenik. "Banak Maenik as, regumovavan" she comments to her companion. Then she looks at Maenik and points at her companion. "Oskeli gas Bardamma. Banak Oskeli gas Bardamma asasan."

Her companion makes a complicated, fond-sounding utterance.

Maenik waves back. That's a bunch of new words. One of them might be the new person's name but she doesn't want to guess which one. "Gu Banak molh do?" She gestures toward the newest arrival.

"Oskeli," they respond, putting a hand on their chest. Then they tap their forehead. "... gas Bardamma".

So there's two types of words for people? She's seen gestures to three accompanying someone naming themselves actually: chest, collar and forehead. Do they all mean different things or are chest and collar interchangeable? She... doesn't feel like she has the vocabulary to ask. She's also not sure about asasan. Is that a generic third person pronoun or is it more specific. That at least she can maybe test. She gestures towards Genilha while keeping her face towards Osekli "Gu Banak Genilha asasan?"

Oskeli holds a hand in front of them, their elbow bent, and leans to either side. "Banak Genilha as," they reply.

They point at Daskal and Genilha, circling their finger to include both of them. "Banak Genilha gas Daskal asasan." Then they point to each in turn. "Banak Genilha as. Banak Daskal as."

Okay, that confirms that gas is probably not a conjunction which conveys temporal ordering.

And the use of asasan seems specific to groups. So the person in front of her sees themselves as a group? She's met people like that before. 

Does the order matter then? "Gu Banak Bardamma gas Oskeli do?"

They make the affirmative hand gesture. "Banak."

Ðani and Penþa take the moment to have an aside, perhaps catching her up on the language learning progress, or perhaps discussing something else.

When they've finished conversing in low voices, Ðani returns to Oskeli and Bardamma's side.

"Maenik, gu rumasak do molh?" she interjects. "Pav illusion do eg?"

That's actually not an easy question to answer. If that's asking about her home she isn't quite sure she has one. She's been itinerant for a long time. It's been at least three cycles since she visited any hubs and she doesn't feel particularly attached to the one she visited those few cycles back.

Trying to explain that would be hard though. If she has to pick one... should she pick somewhere planetside or show them a glimpse of just how strange her life can be?

In the interests of sincerity she'll go for where she was got joined to her Weave. That was planetside but it did have a large orbital ring.

"Rumasak pi Levicoleur." She makes an illusion of the ritual grove. There's a garden with an exotic variety of flowers and plants taken from many different worlds and supported by magic so they can coexist. Heavily engraved pillars of stone surround the space and past that there are some short trees. The sky shows stars they would be unfamiliar with and a reflective band cast across the sky. Some of the 'stars' are moving unusually fast.

Oskeli peers intently at the illusion for a moment, and then says something. The others make clicking sounds.

They say something to Daskal, who hops off the fence and goes to fetch a chair from one of the houses.

Ðani looks at Maenik's face, and seems to come to some kind of conclusion. "Mat."

She and Oskeli stand back from the illusion, and look toward Maenik instead of at it. Penþa has gone back to tying knots.

A moment later Daskal returns with a chair, and Oskeli sits down in it.

"Mat?" she tries to ask. She doesn't actually have a way to ask what a word mens. Maybe "Banak molh Mat?"

Ðani makes an apologetic face.

"Daskal, pav jump do do."

Daskal hops.

"Mat," Ðani says afterward.

"Ðani, pav dosak do þomegi," Genilha interjects.

Ðani reaches down to poke a rock.

"Mat," Genilha says.

Okay so Mat is either an acknowledgement or an expression of gratitude. She makes the hand sign to indicate she understands and then says "Mat."

This gets her general smiles. The adults glance at each other, perhaps trying to think what to say next.

Daskal makes a deep thinking face, then he pivots to point at the wooden fence around the garden. "Sorna. Sornak eg."

He points at a house. "Sorna."

He leans in to point at the illusory trees. "Ka-sornak eg. Esagremak sorna illusion, pok ka-sornak eg."

Finally he turns to Maenik and clasps his hands again. "Ka-floating do Daskal — pav illusion? Pav esagremak floating?"

That is a lot of new words. She's not really sure what they might mean but he is using the words flying and illusion. She can make a couple attempts. She makes an illusion of Daskal flying through the air. It's photorealistic.

Daskal looks conflicted. He opens his mouth a few times, visibly struggling as he tries to figure out what to say.

After a moment, he turns and says a long string of words to Genilha.

Genilha looks thoughtful for a moment.

He says something back to Daskal, who straightens up and gains a look of determination.

Genilha gathers a handful of stones, and then places one on the ground between them.

"Tor þomegi," he explains. He places another one. "Sat þomegi." He places a third "Ben þomegi. Tor, sat, ben."

He looks up to see if Maenik is following.

Seems like numbers. She makes an illusion of three of the stalks. "Ben kalhornaðor."

He makes an affirmative hand gesture and smiles.

Then he picks up two rocks and shows them to Daskal. "Daskal, gu kavlhat eg molh?"

"Sat," he answers. "Kavlhat þomegi sat."

Genilha adds another rock to his hand.

"Gu kavlhat eg molh?"

"Ben," he replies.

Genilha moves his hand behind his back — hidden from Daskal but visible to Maenik. Then he quietly sets down two stones, leaving just one in his hand.

"Gu kavlhat eg molh?" he asks for a third time.

Daskal shrugs.

"Keðremitat pi," he replies.

Genilha makes an affirmative gesture. "Keðremitat do," he agrees.

He holds out his hand, showing Daskal the stone. "Ðoremitat do."

"Ðoremitat pi," Daskal agrees. "Tor þomegi."

Genilha shuffles some rocks behind his back, and then holds out a closed hand to Maenik. "Gu kavlhat þomegi molh?"

So kavlhat represents quantity, Keðremitat conveys uncertainty and Ðoremitat conveys knowledge or certainty.

She could check how many stones are in his hand but that's not the point here. "Keðremitat pi."

He opens his hand to reveal two stones.

"Ðoremitat pi. Kavlhat þomegi sat."

Genilha smiles.

"Ðoremitat do," he agrees. "Keðremitev do. Keðremitev, regu Ðoremitat do."

He places the two stones down on the ground.

"Kavlhat þomegi sat," he begins. Then he adds a third stone. "Kavlhat eg ben. Kavlhev eg sat, regu kavlhat eg ben."

Aha, conjugations. And if she isn't wrong tense conjugations. She takes a moment to dip into her memory she doesn't see the pattern with the other words she's learned omat seems to fit the tense pattern but not taneg or Sodrak or Aðorak.

She takes a step over and moving slow enough someone could easily object picks one of the stalks then chews on it a bit.

"Omat pi kalhornaðor regu Aðorak pi eg."

Daskal crosses his arms.

"Aðoreh pi kalhornaðor, regu omat pi eg," he corrects.

Okay that makes sense, she lost track of the numbers for a second. Also more tense. She doesn't quite understand the pattern yet.

She makes the affirmative gesture and then to see test another guess, "Ðoremitat pi."

Daskal looks confused, but Genilha waves it off and clicks at her.

He considers for a moment, and then plucks his own stalk and takes a bite from it.

"Daskal, gu molhat pi?"

"Omat," he answers.

He scrambles up and gives a little hop. "Gu molhat pi?"

"Jump," Genilha replies.

He turns back to Maenik. "Gu ðoremitat pi?"

She thinks she understands at least. She's going to attempt something a bit more ambitious. She speaks slowly checking each word before she says it.

"Keðremiteh pi regu sarav banak do a pi. Ðoremitat pi."

Genilha gives her a wide smile and makes the affirmative gesture. The others click.

Ðani asks Genilha a question of some sort.

Genilha taps his chin pensively.

She still doesn't have a word for an entire language or numbers greater than three but she thinks she has enough to ask her big question.

"Ðani, pav sarav pi Magic a do? Ka-Sareh pi ben ben ben Banak a do regu sarav pi Magic a do. Sareh pi Magic a do regu sarav ben ben ben Banak a do."

Ðani looks surprised, for a moment, and then considering.

She says something to Genilha, and they both stand. Genilha mimes punching her, and Ðani staggers back dramatically, clutching her nose.

"Demireg Genilha pi," she says. Then she straightens up and mimes kneeing him in the crotch. He hops in imaginary pain. "Demireg pi Genilha."

She turns back to Maenik. "Gu demireg Magic pi?"

An understandable question. "Ka-demireg Magic pi." She makes a new illusion in this one Maenik and Ðani are standing an arms length apart and Maenik holds out her hand then Ðani reaches out and takes it. Maenik's face takes on a focused expression and Ðani smiles but also has wide eyes for a few seconds and then she gasps for breath. The illusion repeats a couple times.

Ðani watches the illusion, and then straightens and moves to stand the indicated distance from Maenik. Her face is serious — but underneath, she's visibly excited and a little nervous.

"Sarav. Pav sarav do Magic a pi," she requests, holding out her hand.

Alright they're doing this then. Maenik takes Ðani's hand and channels her magic through the point of contact. 

A sensation of something a bit like warmth spreads through Ðani's body starting in her hand. Little bits of discomfort that she hadn’t even noticed flee before the gentle ebb of magic filling something that isn't quite her body but is certainly connected to it.

The sensation builds a little as it spreads carrying her attention with it to every finger, every toe and everywhere else. Once it encompasses her whole self it deepens somehow, or perhaps ignites? There's no perfect word for it but she knows instinctively that something important has happened; she knows the magic inside her isn't Maenik's anymore it's Ðani's. The sensation is more than a little overwhelming.

Ðani staggers a little, but catches herself. She holds her hand in front of her face and turns it, feeling the movement with her new sense. The sense of magic inside her.

She tries moving it, experimentally, sort of mounding it up in her hand and then letting it drain back again. It feels good — like jumping into the lake at the end of a long day.

Experimentally, she tries standing on one foot and placing the other in the air, trying to see if she can step up into the air like Maenik did earlier.

That would require a trick she doesn't know. Maenik makes it look easy but that's because she was using hidden tools.

Maenik smiles and picks up a stone from the ground and Ðani feels that Maenik is doing something with her new sense. Then Maenik holds out the stone. "Sarav pi eg a do."

"Mat."

Ðani takes it and turns it over in her hands, trying to see if she can tell what Maenik did to it.

Daskal watches intently.

There's a feeling of absence inside the rock that's almost an inverse of the new sense she has that her magic is there.

... huh.

Ðani tries pooling some of her new magic in her fingertip, and then pushing it into the rock. Just a little.

Maenik watches on.

The rock seems to pull on the magic she gives it, not enough that she couldn't pull it back but enough to be noticable. There's some sort of network of passages inside the rock.

Ðani is not immune to the common þereminian condition of being utterly distracted by something interesting.

She tries pulling her magic back, and then seeing if she can guide it through specific channels and thereby see the structure inside the rock.

If she has her magic follow the pathways they seem to shape her magic and push it out of the rock and into the air around her. It's almost like the air around her becomes part of her body as far as her magic is concerned. She can tell the magic is doing something out there in the air but it's not immediately clear what.

Hmm. But if the air is like her body ...

She tries to see if she can put another finger next to the air and push magic into it directly, and then whether she can wiggle the air around, or feel where it touches things.

Channeling magic into the air near her finger interacts with the magic already there. She can feel the magic from the stone congeal around her finger and form a path from her finger down to and into the ground. Her finger is stuck in place.

Uh.

She gently tugs her finger, trying to feel how solidly the magic will resist.

This is too many moving parts; she doesn't understand what's happening here. Clearly the patterns in the rock are doing something, but why do they change how her magic behaves in the air, compared to just sending it out of her fingers?

She tries to see if she can feel the difference between magic that has been expressed through the rock, and magic that hasn't.

She could support her whole weight on that finger. Probably not comfortably though.

The magic that passed through the rock has a different texture to it an intricate texture at that. It's not immediately obvious how she could make her magic match that without the help of the rock. Maybe she could make a simpler texture but she doesn't have a good way of knowing what a different texture would do.

Hmm.

Ðani considers her options. She knows that she can pull her magic back through the rock — which would, presumably, remove the texture and free her finger. Maenik probably wouldn't have handed her something that would change her magic permanently. Or she could pull the ... unstructured ... magic back, and that would presumably free it too.

Actually, that's easy to check.

She pulls the non-rock magic back into her finger, and checks that this lets her move it again. Then she puts it back, because she has a better idea:

Even if the texture is too complex for her to produce, can she reach out and ... smooth it out? Maybe if she can turn it back into normal magic that will free her finger as well. And if she can't, that's certainly worth knowing.

If her normal magic is dry sand the magic that's passed through the rock is wet. It wants to retain its texture but it's still hers she can smooth it out with enough focus and that does free her finger.

Hmm.

Ðani sits crosslegged in the street, having more or less forgotten that there are other people here watching her poke a rock.

So she has seen magic be: mounded up, spread out, dry, wet, smooth, and textured. None of those words are exactly right, but they capture the feeling of the thing. Maybe those are sufficient to describing all the ways magic can be, but she suspects that they aren't — this thing feels complex, like there's more waiting to be discovered. And the magic is hers; once she gets the feeling of it, she can manipulate it easily.

She tries to see if she can make magic be other ways. Can she make it cold, or loud, or jagged? Or do those not feel like the right kind of thing?

Focusing on the temperature of her magic it feels like it matches the density of it or maybe it's warmer where it's doing things whether supporting her body or holding her finger in place.

If she tries to think of her magic as being a sound it seems like it's a different way of perceiving the same information. The magic inside her body sounds a bit like her heartbeat, the free magic in the outside is like the sound of a breeze, and the structured magic is like an instrument or a voice singing a song. The loudness matches to the feel of density in the substance frame.

Jaggedness or smoothness is most naturally a different way to perceive texture. She can try some simple textures but unless she's very lucky none of them do anything immediately obvious.

She plays around with the different perspectives. Thinking of it like sand seems most natural, but the textures are almost more like yarn, or perhaps wood ...

When Ðani has been experimenting with her magic for a reasonable amount of time (read: entirely too long, in Daskal's opinion), he interjects with a question.

She startles, and looks up from where she's been repeatedly poking the rock in slightly different ways.

"Vuuu ... Maenik, guregu saravi mena—" she starts to say, and then catches herself and rephrases. "Maenik, gu regu sarav banak a pi? Sareh do Magic, regu sarav banak?"

"Sarav banak." She agrees. She takes a slim block of metal from a pocket in her pants and holds it out. "Magic pi gas do eg."

She doesn't really have enough of a grasp on what Magic is to guess what that entails, or how this is going to communicate anything to her, but Maenik is clearly the expert here.

She reaches out and gently grasps the block.

There's a similar feeling of emptiness or perhaps vaccum if she has that concept to the rock but she can also feel some of Maenik's magic in the metal.

Well, the obvious thing to do is feed some of her own magic in — presumably Maenik has embedded more 'channels' in the metal that will ... teach her words, somehow.

She carefully lets a measured portion of magic pour through her fingers and into the block.

Maenik smiles for a moment then adopts a more focused expression and channels more of her magic into the block.

The magic from the block rather than flowing out into the air reaches back through her body and up to her head. It doesn't seem to change anything there rather it's looking at or feeling something there and forming itself into a complicated structure perhaps a bit like arranging sand to look like something you've seen only with absurd levels of detail.

Ðani gives a sort of full-body shudder at the sensation; the feeling of magic flowing into her — even if it's just her own magic, restructured somehow by the block — feels invasive, now that she has magic of her own.

But ... if it's just looking, she doesn't see the harm in letting it continue. And it is still hers. She takes a deep breath to steady herself.

Once her magic has finished it's sculpting it carries the sculpture back down to the block. Maenik's magic has brought down a similar sculpture and their respective magics take some time to copy what the other has created. Then these new copies make their way back towards each woman's respective head. The packet settles inside Ðani's head doing something subtle there.

"Hello, if everything worked correctly you should be able to understand me." Maenik's words are in a language Ðani didn't know until just now but somehow she understands them perfectly.

And then in her village's native language. "Thank you all for your help teaching me your language. I should be able to understand you now."

Understanding a language that she previously didn't is deeply unsettling. She twitches, and then realizes that she doesn't want to be impolite, and it is genuinely much more useful than trying to learn each others' languages from scratch, so she schools her expression.

And then belatedly lets go of the block.

"Ah, yes. I can understand you," Ðani replies. "Welcome to Southern Fishing Village; your visit is exciting."

Maenik absolutely notices the flinch. "Thank you. I'm glad my presence is welcome. If the language magic is uncomfortable you can take it apart and we can just use your language, the only real downside is that there's some things it might be harder to explain in your language."

"I don't object to speaking your language," Ðani hastens to reassure her. "It's just an unsettling sensation when one isn't prepared, is all."

"So you can't float me, but what if I climbed on your back? Or you put an illusion around me so I could see it?" Daskal interjects, unbound by vocabulary-related limitations. "Uh, please. Or can Ðani float too now that she has Magic?"

Genilha sighs. "Manners, Daskal. We should at least ask our guest if she needs anything, now that we can."

"I know you already know our names, but this is Genilha, my father, and Penþa, the village organizer. And Daskal, my intended's mother's fishing-partner's son," Ðani introduces. "And yes — is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?"

"People with magic don't need much. Even with just the instinctive grasp you have now you could swim for as long as you wanted without coming up for breathe. Knowing what I know I could go months without eating or drinking. I would appreciate somewhere to sleep though when the time comes."

She turns to Daskal, "Floating other people is quite hard. I can take you with me though if whoever is responsible for you is okay with it. I could also surround you with an illusion I'm not sure what you want an illusion of though, just being high in the sky? Sometimes seeing the ground very far below makes people uncomfortable. As for Ðani Floating she could learn but she doesn't know how to yet and if you make a mistake falling from a great height can hurt a lot so it's something to be careful about."

Daskal spins to address Oskeli, who has been quietly watching from the chair.

"Grandmothers, may I?" he asks.

Oskeli quirks an eyebrow. "I thought Okanel was supposed to look out for you while your mother is out on the lake."

"Yeah, but you're closer! And definitely responsible," Daskal protests.

"Go find Okanel and ask. Worst case, we can ask your mother when she gets in; it doesn't sound like our guest is going anywhere," Oskeli advises.

Daskal disappears into the village at extraordinary speed.

Penþa coughs. If the linguistic packet captured words for common objects directly, instead of just correspondences of words, Maenik might notice that the net they're holding in their offhand is indeed writing, not just artwork.

"We can certainly offer you a place to sleep. I have a guest bed in my house for unexpected travelers," they assure Maenik. "Although sunset won't be for a few hours. Would you mind if we asked some questions about Magic?"

"Not at all... Oh, so that is a form of writing. I wondered." The language magic doesn't operate at an object recognition level but she can tell there's a separate word for writing nets from fishing nets.

Penþa blinks, and then holds it up for inspection.

"Yes, I was just taking some notes, because it seems likely that this will become part of a song one day," they explain. "The written form is a little different from the spoken form of the language; I don't know whether you would have picked it up. Actually, that's related to my first question — you asked to 'give' Magic to Ðani, which makes perfect sense since that's the word we taught you. It's the easiest related word to illustrate, really. But there are actually several words that could conceivably apply: 'give', 'share', 'trade', and 'provide access to'*. Which one of those is most appropriate?"

* Translator's note: This forms a quartet of related words; there are two orthogonal distinctions being made — whether something is given with or without the expectation of being compensated, and whether giving something deprives the giver of it or not.

"I got as much as Ðani knows and that doesn't seem to be a lot. As for your second question the best word is 'share.' In my culture, it's taboo to accept compensation for sharing magic. It's not hard to figure out how and it doesn't take anything but time and some magic in the moment."

"That's wonderful," Penþa replies.

Ðani shakes her head, dismissing an errant thought.

"Oh good. Thank you," she says as well. "Does that mean that I should be able to share it as well? It felt like it might be as simple as sort of ... pressing the magic into the other person?"

Actually, does Maenik's language have better words for all of the odd qualia associated with magic? She mentally pokes at the language.

"It's about that simple. You should be able to pick it up after a couple tries at most and you can't hurt people while trying. I think the hardest part is just how much magic you need to use for it. Most things people use magic for take a lot less. Magic being so easy to share means that the people who believe magic is a gift from a spirit usually think that Spirit wants magic to be shared."

The language magic won't directly list out all the words associated with magical qualia but it will give her more specific words for what she's already found approximations for in her own language. With some persistence she can work her way out from there. That effort will yield quite a few words but also some clues that suggest there's a rather different way to perceive magic which is more precise.

"Oh! I guess that makes sense, that it would ultimately have come from one of the fair ones," Ðani responds. "But Oskeli, you didn't think that where she was from looked like the other place?"

Oskeli shakes their head. "No, not really — too defined. But it could just be that one of the members of my sister's court came through elsewhere, perhaps. But ... Maenik, do you know where the place you came from is from here?"

"My people use the word Space to refer to the sum total of all the places you could get to if you could fly forever. We know there's an extremely large number of these spaces and we can travel between them. That's what I did when I came here from where I was before."

"... huh."

The villagers look at each other for a moment.

"... maybe some kind of improved technique?" Oskeli ventures.

"You mentioned, ah, spirits," Ðani says, forcing herself not to use a circumlocution in case those didn't come across in the language packet. "We know about spirits because sometimes people are sent visions or premonitions from their world ­— or, rarely, because an entire spirit manages to cross the divide between worlds. But the technique is hard, or dangerous, or the barrier is just really thick because in order to come across they have to shed their bodies. Even their minds are often stressed by the crossing, and they need to be nursed back to health."

"But we know they want to help, because they frequently come when people are most distressed, and they bring something that will help — a skill, or a piece of knowledge, or just comfort and understanding. If someone developed an improved world-hopping technique, that lets you venture bodily between worlds, that would be ... huge."

"If your people don't know exactly where magic comes from, you must have had it for a long time, yes?" Penþa asks. "Because that means it's probably just a matter of there being so many spaces."

"Sometimes very rarely, and by very rarely I mean maybe once across six sixes of generations and many more worlds than that, someone gets my sort of magic for no clear reason. As far as anyone I've spoken to knows, there have been very few cases where we're certain it's happened. One of those cases was the foundation for a lot of what we've built together. We're reasonably certain that magic gets its power from something we call the Maelstrom, which is for lack of a better way to describe it the space which contains all the other spaces. That doesn't suffice to explain why magic works the way it does though or why people sometimes come to have it.

"I used your word for Spirits but different spaces have different rules. In many spaces people believe in something like your Spirits and we've found that common pattern is explained by many different things."

Penþa scratches their head. "It sounds like we have a lot to learn. Do people ... travel between spaces a lot, once they're able?"

Ðani frowns. "That could still match what we know — if one of the other people has figured out how to send packets of magic across, but they can't aim it, they could still be trying to help by spreading it around," she suggests, but she doesn't sound very sure.

"There are many different ways to travel. The way I use is only used by people who do it a lot. I'm bound to the other people in my group and a few specific places and I can either travel specifically to one of the people or places I'm bound to or as I did to come here trust in my magic to take me somewhere new somewhere I've never been before.

"Generally most people don't like my form of travel because you can't bring very much with you. The most common way to travel, at least measured by volume is to build something of a bridge between two spaces or even two places within the same space and then travel across it. The next most common after that involves crafting a small space and moving that space around the Maelstrom to get between larger spaces."

"So you go out exploring and sharing magic a lot?" Ðani asks. "That sounds really important."

"I do, and yes I agree that it's important. Magic is an incredible thing and I want everyone to have it. I also like meeting new people and learning about their lives."

"We don't exactly get many new people around here, but I can certainly see the appeal!" she agrees. "Do you know roughly how long you'd like to stay? We have the fall festival in ... six sixes and five days, I think, which is probably our biggest celebration. But of course we wouldn't want to delay you."

"Yes, six sixes and five," Penþa confirms. "And this year it's two days, because of the shifting sun."

"I'll be on your world at least that long. I don't know if I'll be in your village that whole time but I can absolutely come back for it if I've travelled somewhere else."

"A lot of places celebrate the fall festival on the same day, so unless you travel through the eastern mountains, or south past the warm sea, you'll probably be able to enjoy the festivities wherever you are at the time," Penþa notes. "But, of course, we'd be happy to have you here."

"If you're going to stay here at least a few days though, do you think you'd be able to spend some more time teaching me?" Ðani asks. "I feel like there must be some basic things about how to ... texture the magic that would be easier to learn instead of recreating. Maybe tonight I could try to share magic with more people while you get to know everyone, and tomorrow you could teach several of us, for efficiency?"

"I'd be happy to. To get you started though, I think the most important trick is to learn to see the Fractal." She switches languages. "You focus some of your magic in your eyes and then pull the world in to meet your magic."

Ðani isn't quite sure what to make of that instruction, but it can't hurt to try. Focusing magic in her eyes is relatively easy. Then she gropes around, trying to figure out how to pull the world in.

After a moment, she realizes that there's a natural way to pull the world in: to breathe. So she tries to ... breathe in magic with her eyes.

It's not as easy as it sounds.

But after a few moments concentration, she manages to pull in something.

Before her eyes unfamiliar symbols unfold across the whole of her vision. They don't obscure so much as intermingle like suddenly seeing the colors of daylight after spending a long time in the low light of the stars and a crescent moon. The language she got from Maenik lets her understand many of the symbols but not all of them. Among the ones she can interpret, she see the composition of the air (made of things she might not have had words for before), the temperature of the ground, and the frequencies of the light bouncing off of Osekli. And there's much more to see, the symbols only get more detailed wherever she focuses; she can feel small bits of her magic reaching out to get a better look when she does. Those bits of magic have their own symbols explaining that they're observing the world and translating what they see into these symbols.

Looking at Maenik she can see the bits of magic that are set to kill anything below a certain size (smaller than a grain of sand) that touches her skin and other bits meant to slow anything that approaches her at speeds above how fast an arrow flies and still other bits she can't entirely understand.

Her first thought is "aaargh". Her second thought is that Anþasta needs to see this.

She can see why Maenik calls it 'the Fractal', though. It feels like she could look closer and closer forever, falling into a pit of infinite detail.

She closes her eyelids, and when this just results in information about their internal surface, she pulls the magic away from her eyes.

She takes a deep breath.

"Why do you have magic to kill small things that touch you?" she asks, because having an anti-arrow protection makes perfect sense if you might suddenly appear in the path of a hunting party while exploring. "... very tiny monsters?" she guesses.

"It's a precaution to stop sickness from spreading. Many illnesses are caused by such tiny things. It's actually why people get feverish when they're sick, their body is trying to get hot enough to kill the small things inside it that are hurting it."

"... huh. Does that mean that antipyretics, like willow bark, are actually harmful?" Ðani asks. "Or ... maybe you wouldn't know, if your people do everything with magic. Or just don't get sick in the first place, I suppose."

Penþa leans forward, looking interested in the answer as well.

"It depends, bodies are smart but they aren't always correct; fevers hurt your body as well as the things it's trying to kill and sometimes your body's attempt to heal itself just hurts it more. My people do just use magic for the most part but we talk to people without magic quite a lot and they've generally found that medicine designed to kill the small life that's hurting the person works better than trying to address the fever. We still use medicines like that sometimes when people are badly hurt and their magic is focused on other things."

Ðani nods. "I guess that makes sense," she agrees. Medicine is certainly complicated enough, and it sounds like there's a lot more to learn about it, so it probably only gets more complicated.

She feels as though she's led them a bit off-topic, though.

"So ... the fractal. Is there anything more I should ... do with it? Practice, maybe? Or is it just useful for seeing magic, so it's important to be able to see it before learning other things?"

"The Fractal is a way of seeing not just magic but also the world as magic sees it. Structured magic, what I did with the stone and a great many people working together did for the language magic, is sculpting the world using that language. You can also shape your magic directly to do simple things. Just start off small until you're sure you know what you're doing. A little magic can do a lot. One part in six sixes of six sixes of your magic could light a house better than a lantern."

Ðani is conflicted — on the one hand, everything Maenik says raises additional interesting questions about the nature of magic and what she can do with it. And on the other hand, it will be so much more efficient if a few people can learn from her at once, and maybe take different things away from the explanations or at least remember everything she says better than one person can alone.

"What is the difference between structured and unstructured magic? Is it just whether you're ... using the right language?" she asks, before she can catch herself. "Or — no, wait, please only answer that if it's not the kind of answer that would more usefully be given to a group of students; I definitely don't want to waste your time explaining things several times."

"I don't see saying things twice as wasting my time. I can see the argument if it's an hours long conversation but a few questions aren't a big deal. The difference between structured and unstructured magic isn't a firm line. People can learn to form simple arrangements in magic without thinking about the corresponding symbols and magic inside your body will default to healing you. In theory, with enough practice you could teach yourself to form more complicated structures the same way but most people use templates for any structured magic."

"Oh! So you don't do structured magic directly, you use the insight from the Fractal to make objects like your metal block or that stone that guide the magic into a particular pattern?" Ðani clarifies.

"Exactly, you can also store templates in your magic or inside your body."

She makes an affirmative gesture and thoughtfully stares out toward the lake.

"So how do you actually make a template? I don't think you could just push magic into it, because it feels like they sort of ... have areas with less magic in them, and that ... pulls on the magic? But I don't know how I'd do that, exactly, since if I put more magic in it wouldn't ... I don't know if I'm explaining this well."

"You're explaining fine, making templates is a little counterintuitive. Templates don't actually have magic in them. You can't store magic to use it later, well not directly anyway. As far as we can tell, what happens when you're making a template is telling magic to pay attention to an object so that when someone channels magic into it in the future the magic does what you told it to. As for making templates, doing it manually is really hard. There's templates you can use to make it easier."

Ðani groans.

"It's another tongs problem; Lhemur will be delighted," she replies. "He's the smith — he's fascinated by things like that. Tongs, yoghurt, and so on."

She thinks for a moment more to see if there are any obvious follow-up questions.

"If templates are hard to make, does making them become a dedicated profession, like being a smith or a potter? People don't just make their own?"

"It is for the complicated ones. The template I used for sharing languages with you is the result of more than six sixes of six sixes people working together for more than two sixes years. For the simple ones like the the rock I made designing it took me a couple hours a year or two ago."

Ðani raises her eyebrows at the description of that much effort.

"Wow. That's like, as big a project as the Archive, maybe bigger. Even if it's not continuous. And your people must have made more than just one template like that ..."

She frowns.

"... do they break down? Over time, or with use? Build up inaccuracies from copying?" she asks. Her tone of voice is tense, as though she suspects she has found the downside to the whole practice.

"I'm curious about the Archive project you mentioned but to answer your question not as far as we know. If you destroy a rock with a template in it then the template is gone but it's fairly easy to make exact copies of templates so I don't think we've lost any that people really cared about."

The villagers are quiet for a moment, in the face of that declaration.

Ðani makes eye contact with Penþa.

Penþa takes a moment to collect their thoughts.

"The Archive is ... our civilization's great triumph against the forces of decay. A single repository of nearly every written work the world has produced. It is enormously expensive to maintain — both the organization that supports it, and just the simple work of copying and recopying books, often in dead languages, without letting errors creep in," they explain. "We pay a yearly tithe, to support it. Not much, but ..."

"If you have a truly durable way to record information — or, well, as durable as stone is. And so dense that the work of so many people can fit in a single block of metal ... you must visit the Archive and teach them the technique, before you go. Please. Even if there's some reason it can't be used for general writing, and can only store magical techniques, the Archive would still want to safeguard any templates you're willing to share, for future generations."

"I think in general my culture's approach to preservation is redundancy. Any physical object no matter how durable can be destroyed. That said, you can use templates to store generic information with a bit of creativity and I'll be happy to explain how that works.

"You can also use magic to write information into physical objects in ways that you can subsequently read from. We've found that there are substantial tradeoffs between information density and reliability but there are formats we think strike a good balance that are probably denser than anything you have access to. I have with me means of storing information that contain more than a writing-net the size of the whole lake's surface."

Penþa is speechless for a moment.

"That— wow. Um. Yes, of course redundancy is necessary for anything to be preserved in the long-term," they agree. "But it's not actually sufficient — you need to have some kind of organization dedicated to maintaining that redundancy, because otherwise you might not realize something was the sole remaining copy ..."

They shake their head.

"That's not important. The Archivists can explain their methods far better than I can, anyway. ... Assuming you wish to make the trip. It is a quite long way. Months of travel on horseback. I suppose we should really make preparations to send someone with the spring caravans, anyway ..."

Ðani stares out toward the surface of the lake, trying to imagine how much you could write across it.

She turns the en-templated rock over in her hand, feeling it with her magic senses, and trying to imagine that the channels within it are the threads of a net.

"That's amazing," she notes when Penþa trails off. "That you can just ... walk around with a library in your pocket."

"It really is. That's part of what I like about visiting people like yours who aren't accustomed to the wonders I am. It reminds me over and over again just how amazing they are. As to travel, I can sustain much faster speeds than horses unless the ones you know are a lot faster than mine. I think even getting to the other side of the planet is something I could do in a week at most though I couldn't easily bring anyone who doesn't know the right magic with me."

Penþa blinks.

"Well, in that case ... let me see. The world is supposedly six sets of six sixes kilostadia* in circumference. A horse can go perhaps two sixes of sixes miles* in a day, in best conditions, or half that for sustained travel on a single horse. Which is about one and a half sixes of six sixes stadia, or a quarter of a kilostadia. So in about four months ..."

As they speak, they count on their fingers, to avoid losing track.

"I think you could probably fly to the Archive in less than a day, then," they venture. "Which ... well, if you're planning to range that far afield, you probably will need to pick up some additional languages. That's well outside Marnesi. Although they will have translators in the City on the Mouth of the River, the closest city to the Archive, almost certainly."

* Translator's note: units are approximations of Marnesi customary units, and should not be taken to be particularly accurate. Also, Penþa is mistaken about the size of the planet by approximately a third, relying as they are on estimations made from the length of shadows by a civilization that does not have pocketwatches.

"It doesn't quite factor like that but I think I might be able to. The week figure works for getting anywhere by going above where the air is so it doesn't slow me down. It's helpful to know that I'll probably need more languages to talk with everyone. Do you have suggestions of where I can meet people who might be open to an exchange like that?"

"As it happens, I know a bit of Cold Sea Trade Language that I'd be happy to share," Oskeli volunteers. "Since we used to be accountants up there in our youth."

Oskeli says 'accountants' in approximately the same tone that someone from a more fantastic setting might say 'adventurers'.

"But if you're traveling south, that's not too much help."

"We do have a few people who have settled down here after traveling," Penþa continues. "I can introduce you at dinner. I'm not sure how many speak something useful, exactly, but it doesn't hurt to ask."

"Certainly. I assume that means the Archive is to the south? Also, what does it mean to be an accountant in your society. I understand that it means being someone who works with finances but that leaves a lot of possibilities."

"Yes — the Archive is south of here, beyond the warm sea, on the northern coast of the desert, in the lands that never grow cold," Oskeli agrees.

"As for your other question ... well, there are different kinds of accountants. When we were young, we worked as a messenger between two large banks — primarily, we did sometimes have a trip to a smaller bank as well — carrying receipts and orders. So a lot of travel, lots of time spent on a ship, punctuated by exchanges with our counterparts at other banks. Mostly they were pretty routine, but sometimes the numbers wouldn't match up, and we would have to investigate the discrepancy," they recount, with the cadence of someone dragging up old, fond memories.

"I quite liked the investigations, really. Bardamma had to get us out of some tight scrapes, but we were usually able to reach an agreement with the parties involved. And, of course, it was our investigative work that dropped the Island Without Trees Bank's loss rate enough for them to qualify as a safe trading partner with the Cold Sea Trade Alliance. I got a nice woolen jumper from their organizer as thanks, actually. It wore out a few years ago, but it was really the best for long winter nights ..."

"Accountancy isn't all heroics, though — we also spent a good deal of time as a circuit-accountant with one of the trading caravans. That was a lot slower. We spent a lot of time teaching math, actually, and the rest helping audit the caravan records to make sure everything balanced. And then one year, on circulation, we realized that we were a little too pregnant to keep traveling through the winter. We wanted to make it to the next city, but there was a bad storm, and we ended up staying here long enough that it made sense to winter. And we met the most gallant man, so we stayed a bit longer ... and then our accounting days were behind us."

Ðani, recognizing the signs of a ramble, slips away early, and returns just as Oskeli finishes with another girl in tow. They have a conversation in hushed voices.

"How interesting. Am I understanding correctly that loss rate is a comparison between how much an organization expects to have and how much it actually does?" It also says interesting things about their mating customs but that tends to be a more sensitive topic so she'll avoid it for the moment.

"Right! Well, nearly — so the problem is really to do with moving money. You can't just assume that any given message will make it between two banks. So imagine that you have a large merchant company, with accounts in multiple cities. And they want to move funds between one bank and the other, to make up for a temporary trade shortfall. So the messenger goes to one bank, and gets a traveling check, to present at the other bank. If the messenger runs aground, or loses it, or is waylaid, the money would be lost. Therefore it's a risky way for the company to move value — although not necessarily much riskier or less convenient than trying to move an equivalent amount of cargo — and the company would really like to be able to get the bank to re-issue a lost traveling check."

"And, of course, banks want to attract big ventures like merchant companies, because they make money by having active customers like that. So banks want to be able to offer that service. But it massively complicates accounting — the receiving bank needs to keep a log of incoming checks, in order to ensure that someone doesn't attempt to present a duplicate, among other concerns — and anyway they need to agree with the destination bank on standards for checks, agree on credit limits for just-deposited checks before they can get confirmation, etc. So it only makes sense for a bank to offer the service for sufficiently safe and populous trade routes, usually by charging an additional fee that depends on the frequency and security of the trade route."

"Oh— but you wouldn't know the geography. So, Island Without Trees is tiny, as regions go. They have perhaps three sixes times as many people as this village does, but spread out over a good number of islands. Despite the name. There's one main island, but many scattered smaller ones. And the sea there is difficult to navigate at the best of times, let alone when there are storms. They don't have much to trade. But 'not much' is still some. And it would be potentially attractive to a few small-time merchants, except that moving money out of the Island Without Trees was so difficult, you see."

Penþa coughs. It sounds suspiciously like "loss rate".

"Right, right. So yes — the loss rate is the amount of money per year operating a credit service with another bank is expected to lose the bank, and therefore the amount that decides whether or not it's worth it," Oskeli concludes. "Merchants also calculate loss rates, of course, but banks make a big difference, because being connected to the main group of banks is one of the things that makes a trade route more profitable."

"That all makes sense. My people have somewhat similar issues on a larger scale. Groups like my weave can talk wherever we are but there's limits on how big a weave can be so a lot of communication between spaces or over long distances within a space needs work from intermediaries. We usually have enough abundance that money isn't the focus of those messages though. Within a space we have ways of sending messages that are very fast and reliable with the right infrastructure."

Oskeli gives her a weird look.

"Normally, more abundance means that people need to move money more," they point out. "It's the poorest people, who are just barely scratching out what they need to live, who have less surplus to trade with others. The easier it is to get enough food, the more time people have to do non-farming things, and therefore the more trade goods they can produce, and the more use they have for money."

"You gave me food without asking for money because you have enough food that giving me some doesn't mean you have much less relative to how much you have. When you have more abundance more and more things are like that. The people who made the translation magic didn't do that because they were being paid but because it was a project they were interested in working on. Most of the things that are meaningfully limited are very local like land on the shore of a particular lake and money doesn't always work very well for things like that."

"... and they don't need the money for food, or to pay for tools, because those are so cheap they can just have them," Oskeli extrapolates, growing wonder entering their voice. "We can afford to host a guest for a short time without worry, but if you were going to stay for two years, we'd need to incorporate it into the budget. But if two years of food is cheap enough for people to give away ..."

They lean back in their chair, thinking through the implications.

"I have no idea how that must work in practice. You probably don't even ... Are there things that are still expensive enough in one place that it's worth transporting them?"

"Exactly. There are things that meet that bar in some spaces but they're usually related to what make those spaces unique and trying to move them to other spaces can be hazardous. Sometimes spaces react badly to having people try to bring in impossibilities. There's also some trade among people who care a lot about having the original version of a piece of art rather than a reproduction."

"Well. That's quite a thing."

"So how does your society produce so much food?" Penþa asks. "If you're willing to share, that is. Or does magic reduce the amount that someone needs to eat by so large a fraction that you can provide for everyone out of a relatively small portion of farmers?"

They look conflicted for a moment.

"... also, I'm not sure how to say this politely, if your culture doesn't have money. But I would feel terribly rude if I left it unsaid at all. One of my main jobs as the village organizer is tracking exchanges between people, and if you were from another village in the region, I would want you to know that I am paying attention to how valuable your knowledge is, and that we will certainly pay you back if there is anything you need or want from us — besides simple hospitality, of course. I do apologize if it seems ... uncivilized, from your perspective, to be explicit about that."

"For people like me, who spend a lot of time away from the rest of our people, it's mostly the thing where we don't need to eat. I can also transform water and rocks into edible food if I have a craving for something. It's not really efficient but it's possible.

"In denser areas, there's a lot of different answers. Some people do things to make transforming unappealing matter into appealing food easier, other people use machines to allow one person to do the work of many people. Still other places have machines that can do the work of transforming material themselves without magic. And many places use a combination of all of these."

"I don't think you're uncivilized for valuing my contributions to your village or trying to assign a number to that value. People still make agreements without money and many people still use money within certain spaces to mediate agreements around things that still take substantial effort. It's not a part of how I live my life but my life is centered around spending time with people who live differently than how I do."

Penþa nods.

"That does make sense. Would you be willing to share the templates for turning rock and water into edible food? Once we have a few more people with magic, that will be very useful. We're all prepared for this winter, but we could do a sort of trial run, to see how much of our stores we have to use with magic available, and use that to do agricultural planning for next year."

Ðani does something that makes the other girl's hair stand on end. She waits for a moment, and then the other girl crosses her arms, and Ðani goes back to holding her hand and concentrating.

"It's among the templates I'm planning to share. It's actually a general template for transforming materials, it works better the more similar what you start with is to what you want to end up with. There's a related template for storing patterns you can use to tell the template what you want to make based on things you have around you."

"Oh! Hmm. That's pretty general-purpose," Penþa remarks. "Although if you hadn't said it was usable, I wouldn't have assumed that 'rocks' and 'food' were close enough to be converted."

They glance around at the village, mentally tallying how many objects could be produced using a template, instead of by hand.

"... I think that template is probably the single most valuable thing in the history of the village. Um. Do you have any interest in being made into a — well, actually, the word is a hold-over from Orthodox North-Eastern Marnesi Trade Language, so it has grammatical gender. The neutral version is 'Loka' — into a Loka?" they ask, before realizing Maenik certainly lacks context. "Ah, Loka is the most honorable title the village can grant, given to people who have done something that fundamentally transforms our way of life, to an extent that cannot be repaid. Granting it requires a full vote at a village meeting, if I remember correctly, so I can't promise anything, but if that is something you would like I can call a meeting for tomorrow. We probably need one to discuss magic anyway, actually."

"I don't do what I do in search of recognition or honors. If it would make your people feel better to give me the title I would be happy to accept it. What's important to me is that I've met you, helped make your lives better and learned about you in the process."

Penþa nods. "I think if you've achieved your own aims by giving these things to us, that people will find that sufficient. But just to be sure, I'll ask around at dinner and see how everyone feels about it."

There's a distant dinging sound.

"Oh! Which it is apparently time for already. How time passes."

The villagers push themselves to their feet. Genilha gives Oskeli his arm.

Ðani sighs, but clumps up with the others as people throughout the village slowly make their way towards the large clear space in the center.

"Maenik, I didn't quite manage to share magic with Anþasta, and I was wondering— No, actually, sorry. Maenik, may I introduce my intended, Anþasta?"

The girl who Ðani had been attempting to empower waves.

"Hello!"

"Hello, it's nice to meet you."

"I was mostly just trying to see if I could saturate her with my magic, sort of," Ðani explains. "Only there was this ... pressure, I guess, that made it harder to keep smoothed evenly. And I wanted to check if that was the right general approach and I should just keep trying, of if there's a different trick to it."

As she finishes speaking, the group emerges from between a house and the garden into the central square. The area is dotted with wooden benches, some tucked under the eaves of the houses, and some scattered about the central area.

There's a large building on the far side, against which is a large table filled with food. Villagers are queuing at one end of it, picking up plates, and serving themselves. Afterward they fan out and find benches in twos or threes, having quiet conversations while they eat.

She moves in concert with Ðani.

"The important thing is to make sure the magic goes everywhere rather than focusing on keeping the concentrations even. If you think it would help I could awaken someone else and let you try to sense what it's like. It's also possible to collaborate on awakening someone but that's not always the best way to teach the skill."

"Everywhere, not necessarily evenly ..." Ðani muses. "Alright. Thanks. I'll give it a try after dinner, and we can go from there? Oh — no working during dinner, that's the custom. Not that it's likely to come up, I suppose."

Ðani and Anþasta both take a large plate and begin serving themselves. The order of the day seems to be lots of vegetables, perhaps because it's harvest time. The first food item on the table is a large bowl of salad, already mixed with a dressing that smells slightly of vinegar. The salad has mushrooms, kalhornaðor, cubes of soft cheese, and thin slices of something cucumber-ish.

Next to it is a tray of steaming rolls, made of a dark, dense bread. After that, there's a thick vegetable stew (and a stack of bowls), that smells strongly of garlic. Its primary ingredient seems to be squash, with beans a close follow-up.

Beside the stew is a stack of cups, a kettle containing weak herbal tea, and a kettle containing plain water. Not everyone takes a cup.

The last item on the table is a stack of thin eggy pastries; people fold them into a little pocket, and then scoop a mixture of berries, honey, and cream into them in small portions. While everyone is serving relatively large portions of the salad and stew, the rolls and deserts seem to be one-to-a-person.

"Sorry we don't have any meat today," Ðani remarks. "It's just that it makes most sense to eat the vegetables while they're fresh, since fish is easier to smoke and preserve."

"Sounds good. I think that custom makes some sense. Does it also include some conversation topics? As to not having meat, I don't mind at all. I've visited cultures that never have it for practical or ethical reasons." She serves herself small portions of the the salad and the stew and follows suit on the roll and the dessert. She'll take a small cup of the tea.

Ðani pauses for a moment, trying to think how to word it.

"It's ... not that there are particular topics that are forbidden, it's that you shouldn't do things that feel like work. So if you want to talk about something, go right ahead. But if talking about something would be work, it's fine to refuse to discuss it during dinner," she explains. "Dinner is a time to rest, and catch up with the people you didn't see during the day."

"That makes sense thanks for explaining. Would talking about how the two of you came to be each other's intended feel like work to you?"

Ðani grins.

"Oh no, not at all! It's a funny story."

"It's an embarrassing story!" Anþasta protests. "... but yes, I don't mind telling it."

She leads them over to a pair of benches that are not yet occupied.

"So Anþasta is probably the most capable and wonderful person in the village," Ðani explains, ripping her roll into pieces and dipping it in her soup. "And I started noticing that ... sometime around the spring festival, I think. Only — she is also, in some cases, extraordinarily dense."

"Because three sixes days before the solstice, or so, Ðani asks me up the hill after dinner to go stargazing," Anþasta explains. She wiggles her eyebrows on the word 'stargazing'.

"... oh, that one's probably as lost on you as it was on her, isn't it?" Ðani remarks. "It's a custom to invite people up to stargaze on the hill for a bit of privacy, because, well ... sound carries on the lake, doesn't it? So inviting someone stargazing is usually a pretense for having some private sex. Only, it would hardly be the pretense of choice if it were not also a perfectly normal activity. So if someone asks you stargazing, you need to know whether they mean stargazing or stargazing. And I thought I had been pretty clear, because, you know, I was not subtle about appreciating Anþasta's beauty."

"But I thought she just meant stargazing. So we go up the hill, and we stretch out on our blanket and wait to spot the first stars. And I'm just about to point out the Scorpian, when Ðani rolls onto her side and asks to kiss me," Anþasta narrates. "And I suddenly realize what's going on, and I have a momentary internal freakout."

"Not that you could have told by looking at her — she just sits bolt upright, narrowly missing my nose, says 'Oh, stargazing,' and then stares at the treeline for a handful of heartbeats," Ðani concludes. "Anyway, that's how she figured out that I was into her. Then we cuddled and talked and did some actual stargazing, and she told me that she wasn't sure whether she felt the same way — which was perfectly fine, but I arranged that we should get to spend some more time together that summer, so that she could figure it out."

"So we synchronized our chores to be fetching wood at about the same time, tending the garden on the same days, and so on, and we spent most of the summer talking. And ... I'm still not totally sure I want to have sex — with Ðani or with anyone — but I really can't imagine spending my life without her," Anþasta finishes, gazing adoringly. "So she's going to try living at my house this winter, to see if we can still stand each other when we're snowed inside. And then if it works out, we'll be married in the spring."

Ðani finishes her roll.

"How much of that was comprehensible? I know that they do things pretty differently on the Warm Sea, let alone where you come from."

"I think I followed all of that. It fits the pattern for cultures that bond based on personal compatibility. And I did guess you were using stargazing as a euphemism based on your face and your tone shift. Sex is something people are often euphemistic about. Many cultures make it entirely taboo to discuss it openly with strangers."

Ðani looks a bit confused. "... why? I'm not flirting with you."

Anþasta takes a thoughtful bite out of her desert.

"I think it could make sense — it's a generalization, right? Like, it would be rude to let someone know that you were currently having sex, except during a festival. And it would be ... not rude, exactly, but kind of ... you'd be acting very self-confident if you asked someone to have sex without flirting with them first," she muses. "And of course you wouldn't talk about sex at all with an unrelated child. So if a bunch of people just saw those norms, but forgot the reasoning behind deciding on them, they might over-generalize to not discussing sex at all."

"Cultures vary a lot. In some cases, taboos around sex are built around inheritance as strange as that might sound. While in others they're built on the fact that the same body parts usually involved with sex are used for excretion. In at least one culture as far as I could discern, the taboo was based on the fact that some very dangerous illnesses were spread almost exclusively through sex. The root of a lot of the taboos is the fact that certain types of sex can lead to pregnancy. And pretty much every culture has strong feelings about children."

"... huh, okay. Those all make sense for having taboos around the act itself — but how do those turn into taboos around talking about it? Not talking about sex sounds like a way to end up with less clean sex, if not everybody knows that it's something to be concerned about."

"For the record," Ðani interjects, "we do know that sex can cause pregnancy, and there are customs for not spreading lice."

"I would have been surprised if you didn't know the causes of pregnancy. I'm just falling back on habits to be delicate around the topic. I'll try to be more direct going forward. I have to admit to a bit of surprise about your confusion regarding the progression from a taboo around doing something leading to a taboo around discussing it. Let me see if I can try to unpack it." She pauses for a few moments. "I think the core is that in a lot of cases people suggest that wanting to talk about a thing is adjacent to wanting to do it and wanting to do something is adjacent to doing it. Relatedly, if doing something is taboo then talking about it makes people think about it and thinking about taboo activities is uncomfortable for many people if the taboo is strong enough."

Ðani looks thoughtfully out over the square.

"I mean, if I were to walk up to someone and start explaining how to have sex to them, I can see how that would be misinterpreted," Ðani agrees. "But, like, there's a fundamental difference between just referencing the fact that sex exists—"

"Not if there's already strong taboos around it," Anþasta cuts her off. "If there's already a strong taboo, then you can't assume that people would necessarily know sex exists, could you? So talking about it might be the prelude to an explanation, and it could be misinterpreted the same way. It's self-reinforcing."

Ðani bits her lip. "That sounds a little too neat to really describe how people actually work," she protests.

"Maybe people in other spaces are more likely to be attracted to everyone, and so there's fewer people who you could discuss sex with without it unambiguously not being something you want to actually do with them?" she speculates, but she doesn't sound terribly confident.

"That sentence deserves to be slow-roasted."

"You get what I mean, though, right? I mean, look at her!" Ðani explains, gesturing in Maenik's direction.

"... not that I'm flirting with you," she adds, turning back to their guest. "Just — you are sort of supernaturally beautiful. So if everyone is like that ..."

"I appreciate the compliment. With magic people mostly look how they want to look and people's aesthetics can have a lot of overlap. Going back to the topic of taboos, there's a sliding scale of where the line around discussion is drawn. Sometimes it's as extreme as mentioning sex at all but you didn't just mention that it existed you said you wanted to have sex with a specific person. There's cultures where the line is drawn there and cultures where that would be fine but talking about specifics would be taboo.

"I don't think I've encountered a society extreme enough that any substantial portion of adults don't know that sex exists but how much people know about sex can vary a lot. Taboos are self-reinforcing though; minor taboos can grow into more substantial taboos and spread to related matters. In some societies it's taboo to use the words for vagina and penis so people use euphemisms instead in most contexts."

She pauses for a moment, "Sorry that was a lot, am I missing something... oh right attractions, that's a complicated topic I'd be happy to get into it but let's put it to the side for now."

"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?"

"I don't actually know. Designing the targeting criteria was a big project. Not quite as big as the language magic but a lot more than I could do myself and I don't understand how it all works. I know that the members of the weave being spread out is important for it to function though. If we gather too closely the random selection part of our travel magic stops working."

"... what does 'closely' mean, if you don't have a way to represent distance between spaces?" Anþasta asks.

"That was poor phrasing on my part, I meant if too many of us gather together in the same place or places."

"I have so many questions."

She resumes her previous leaning.

"I guess those are probably best addressed to the people who worked on the project, though. Are other parts of your magic ... contingent like that? They depend on the existing network of people?"

"Anything that operates between spaces, except maybe artificial spaces if you think those count, requires some kind of pre-existing connection as a basis. Within a space connections can make things easier and faster, they're also the only way do do magic that directly touches things a long way away. What exactly a long way away is depends on what you're trying to do."

"What's the shortest distance that is a long way for some purpose?" Anþasta asks after a moment of thought. "Are we talking about the difference between across-the-lake and across-the-planet, or about the difference between across-the-room and across-the-planet?"

"Also, do remember that you can stop answering Anþasta if you'd rather not talk about magic details while everyone's finishing their dinner," Ðani says, her voice fond.

Maenik has in fact finished eating what she took so it's good to have the clarity that it's about the time period rather than if the specific people talking are still eating. "I'm happy to talk about magic.

"As for your question, it's a little fuzzy. I'm sure there's people who have measured it precisely but I haven't ever needed to. Things get harder to do as you stretch your magic further away from you and the more complicated what you're doing is the faster that tends to happen.

"When I'm flying seriously I'm stretching my magic a bit farther than the distance between those houses in all directions." She gestures at a couple of houses. But that's not using all my magic. If I focused magic in a single direction, I could do things at about four or five times that distance comfortably. And there's some types of magic where you can throw a bit of magic disconnected from the rest of your magic that might be able to reach distances closer to getting across the lake but it only works for things that happen quickly."

"Hmm. That's an interesting size to work with," Anþasta remarks. "Can you do magic through walls?"

"You can, magic can interact with matter but it doesn't have to. Relatedly you can learn to see through walls with magic. It's a bit tricky though so most people don't. It's also rude to look through things people are using for privacy and you don't always know which things are being used that way. "

"Do people build their houses quite far apart, then?" she asks. "If everyone can fly, it wouldn't be any harder to get between them, and then you'd have more privacy, if you were beyond the range of everyone's magic."

"Some people do, but land is one of the things you can't easily make more of. It's possible to build new worlds but even with magic it's a massive undertaking and the easiest ways to find new spaces tend to find worlds where there are already people. So most people live at least as close together as you do in this village."

"... and you can't aim away from worlds with people in them, only toward them? How does that—" she begins, before catching herself. "I'm sorry. You've already said that you can't explain the full workings of the template. I guess I'll just have a lot to see, in the future. I can hardly picture what it must be like."

By this point, most people have finished their dinner. People start collecting dishes in ones and twos, taking them inside the building with the table against it. But there's no rush to disperse — people linger on the benches, talking about their days.

Penþa comes over just as Anþasta finishes.

"Maenik, I just wanted to let you know that I've prepared my guest bed, so you're welcome to retire for the evening whenever you'd like," they say. "My house is that one just there, with the carvings over the door. If you are up for a bit more discussion, though, there are a few people who'd like to meet you."

"Worlds and spaces are different. It's easy enough to find dead worlds, places where life has never touched. That's where people get the raw material for building worlds from scratch. Finding places that have life but not people is like threading a needle. Magic cares about people and that's part of how my travel magic does its filtering. Maybe, in time, someone will find a way to filter for life without people but nobody's managed it yet, at least as far as I know."

She turns to Penþa. "Thank you, I'm willing to keep talking for a while yet." She turns back to Anþasta. "Maybe we can continue this topic another day. We're getting close to the limits of my knowledge."

Anþasta makes the affirmative hand gesture.

"Yes, thank you very much for answering my questions," she agrees.

Ðani gathers their dishes.

"And that gives me a chance to try to share magic again."

"I think you'll probably get it without too many more tries. And you're welcome, thanks for sharing your own story and giving me some more insights into how your people live."

"It was our pleasure."

Ðani flashes her a smile, and they vanish with the dishes.

"Well, I don't know if it was the kind of insight you had in mind, but Lhemur, Gornet, and I were hoping to get your insight into how our legal system and plans for winter will need to change with magic in the mix," Penþa says, gesturing back toward a pair of people seated on a bench by their house. One is younger, and very broad, with developed shoulder muscles. The other is older, wearing an elaborate shawl and sipping from a mug of tea held with both hands. "Which will certainly provide you with some stories of how we do that normally."

"I would be happy to help as best as I can."

"Lovely!"

Penþa leads the way back over.

"Maenik, these are Gornet, our most medicine-knowledgeable person," they say, gesturing to the tea-sipper. "And Lhemur, our blacksmith — who also handles a lot of non-food supplies, like clay and salt."

"It's good to meet you," Lhemur says. At the same time, Gornet clicks.

"It's good to meet you too. I think the simplest starting point is to tell you that people with magic can't starve to death. They can be uncomfortable but even just having water available will let them get by even without learning how to do anything with magic."

Lhemur's eyebrows jump up.

"Oh! Well, that's something different. So really we just need to worry about water, and that's not so bad."

"The lake freezes over," Penþa tells her for context. "But we can either get water from the river — which also freezes, but not as much, because it's moving — or by cutting holes through the ice. Some years it gets pretty thick, but we can manage. We harvest a lot of ice for food preservation anyway."

"Can people with magic still get sick without learning your magical anti-disease technique?" Gornet asks. "Because being hungry makes people without magic more vulnerable to disease."

"The organisms that makes people sick can still get inside you but your magic will stop them from doing substantial harm. The barrier magic is something I do because I spend a lot of time around people without magic; it prevents me from passing bits of disease from one group of vulnerable people to another."

"Hmm. So we should worry about passing disease, but we don't necessarily need to plan for a wave of illness if we run out of food," Gornet summarizes. "That's good. Still, I expect people would rather have food, and we do have plenty stored already."

"I'm sure a few people will stop eating," Penþa counters. "Naterta, at least."

The other two click soberly.