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demon cam vs the clam planet
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Here is a demon. The demon is in his swimming pool.

He doesn't swim naked, so he takes the summon anyway.
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He arrives atop a perfectly round steel plate, perhaps two meters across, which is in the process of being engraved in precise rotationally symmetrical patterns by a short boy with a sleek-furred black tail. The plate is balanced on some sort of turntable not designed to take the weight of a demon; it clunks protestingly and tilts to one side when Cam settles onto it.

In a language that shares no discernible roots with any Cam has heard before, the short tailed boy exclaims, "Crash the sun!"
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Cam flares his wings when the surface tilts, but it's no good, he's slippery when wet, he topples over anyway and makes an undignified noise. ...He can make an undignified noise. They're letting him talk. These people have tails. What.

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Apart from Cam's summoner there are two other, identical short tailed boys in the room. In addition to tails, all three have short claws on their fingers, long pointed elflike ears with unusual mobility, and slit-pupiled eyes in an aesthetically pleasing shade of grey.

One of the others, too far away to help, moves as though to attempt a catch but gives up a moment later when the demon hits the floor.

"What did you do?" he asks his presumably-brother.
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"I didn't do anything!" he says. "I don't know where this guy came from!"

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Cam sits up and shakes water from his wings. "You weren't trying to summon a demon?" he asks. He renders it as 'maker'. If they have a word for demon he didn't get it in his vocabulary dump. Outside chance they do have one; but the engravings aren't actually in a language he got from the summoner.

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"I was trying to learn artificing. I've never heard of winged strangers appearing on top of anyone's fire shield prototype," says the probable summoner.

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"No one's made a fire shield this big before," says the third boy. "But even so."

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"Yeah, this looks like an accident. But it's a very confusing accident. Especially if you did not previously summon another demon or an angel" ("changer") "to outfit you with the cunning tails." He lashes his own tail.

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"...We were born with these." The speaker gives his own tail a slight sideways flick.

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"We're Aluvai," the summoner explains, sounding like he can't imagine anyone needing to have Aluvai explained to them.

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"And, er... what are you?" asks tail number two. "Because I'm less and less convinced that 'winged stranger' is the sum of it."

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"If you've got a word for me I didn't get it. 'Demon' in my native language, 'apsel' in a favorite later acquisition, I called myself a 'maker' which is basically what 'apsel' means. Where I'm from people are not born with tails."

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"In Aluvanna people are born with tails regularly and unremarkably," says tail number two. "Although never ones quite like yours. And there aren't common categories of people that I would think to call 'maker' and 'changer' and expect anyone to know what I meant. And people do not customarily appear out of thin air atop one's fire shield prototypes."

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"Well, you probably shouldn't re-use this fire shield prototype, because it appears that it summons makers in a complete absence of safety precautions! Generally inadvisable."

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"...What safety precautions are normally advisable when summoning a maker?" he inquires.

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"It's smart to have something laid down to prevent us from using our phenomenal cosmic power to hurt anyone, unless that's what you wanted the maker for in the first place anyhow, and also typical not to let us talk but that part's not necessary."

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"How lucky for everyone involved that you do not wish to use your phenomenal cosmic power to hurt anyone," says tail number two with perfect equanimity. "What sort of phenomenal cosmic power is it, exactly?"

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"I bet you can guess." Cam tilts his head back, creates a marshmallow, and catches it in his mouth. Chew chew.

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...

They
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all

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stare.

"Crash the sun," breathes the summoner. "Did I just save the world?"

A brilliant white glow collects in the air around him, reaching up and down to join floor to ceiling in a solid column of light. When the glare clears mere moments later, he has acquired a pair of wings, raven-black with silver-edged feathers, mantled in startlement. They somehow interact unproblematically with the shirt he was wearing.
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Cam opens his mouth slowly, points at the summoner, and says, "I did not do that."
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"What?"

He stretches the wings, folds them, and... they vanish. Cam sure didn't do that.
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"I did not appear wings on you? Normally if I were in a room with a bunch of people and somebody spontaneously acquired wings I would be the obvious person to blame. Where did they go. What is going on."

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"They're my wings," he says, as though the relevant implications of this statement are too obvious to make explicit. "...They're my wings. Crash the fucking sun, I just got my wings. Ha!" He laughs with amazement.

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"Before anyone else gets too excited, I feel the need to clarify: you can just conjure arbitrary objects?"

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"Yes. Why, does everybody else want wings too? I can't make them disappearable and the glow would be a bit tricky too but I find mine perfectly serviceable and I made 'em myself."

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"...Oh." He blinks at Cam with dawning realization. "You're not a winged stranger. You are in fact merely a... stranger, with wings. That makes perfect sense in retrospect."

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"...The distinction is somewhat lost on me. My name's Cam, if you would like to call me something more monosyllabic than 'stranger with wings'."

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"...I'm Ashras Kevarsin, and these are my brothers Inlaith," the quiet one, "and Elarron," the one with the recently acquired wings. "Well. You see, in Suranse, when someone feels that they have accomplished something substantial and magnificent and truly worth celebrating, they... get their wings. Not bestowed by a passing conjuror, but inherently, without outside intervention of any kind. And from that point forward the person is winged, and will never get old or sick, and has their own Sphere - which, before you ask, is a... place... that starts out house-sized and grows with time as long as its owner is alive. Winged ones can make portals to their own Spheres from anywhere they happen to be."

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"Sounds like a nice benefits package. I am immortal, don't have the sphere thing though. And made my own wings rather than having them bestowed by mysterious forces."

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"Yeah. That's going to confuse people," says Ashras. "There's no way to get wings without the mysterious forces, around here. Anyway, this has been a fascinating look at the differences between our respective worlds, but this world happens to be kind of urgently in need of saving, and if you can conjure arbitrary objects you and any handful of combat casters can win the war by tomorrow if we play it right. Interested?"

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"...I am wary of war as a general category. You seem very nice but I require more than an elevator pitch."

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"A hundred and fifty years ago, the population of this planet was around two billion. It's now half that, because a hundred and fifty years ago the Enemy arrived and started killing everyone. Every diplomatic effort ever made has failed. They're not interested in being bribed or appeased, they just want to wipe us out. They have superior technology and superior numbers - an apparently inexhaustible supply of them keeps showing up from somewhere outside the planet, past the range anyone could fly to even if they didn't have to dodge Enemy vehicles trying."

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"Well, as elevator pitches go that one's not bad. I would like more than your word to go on."

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"Few things in this planet are more reliable than Ashras's word," says Inlaith.

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"Which may or may not indicate that I have walked into a logic puzzle where one of the triplets always lies, one always tells the truth, and the last may do either, now figure out which way to go in this maze by asking only one question, but at any rate your corroboration is not independent."

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"If you're as immortal as all that, you can go to the edge of the planet and experience the attempted extermination for yourself," says Ashras. "I don't recommend it with less. What would you like? An audience with the king? We can get you one of those."

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"I'm very immortal - technical term is indestructible. An audience with a king you go and find me is more than sufficient if you want me to produce medical supplies and food but may, depending on king quality, fall short if what you want is munitions."

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"Dalvor's not bad, as kings go. Plenty of experience."

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"Circling back - edge of the planet? I am not accustomed to planets having such things. Tacky planes of gold, yes, planets no."

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"...What shape are you accustomed to planets having?"

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"Spherical. Slightly wonkier shapes if they are very small planets which don't collapse under their own gravity."

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"Well, Suranse is... planet-shaped. And not in a spherical way. Can you just conjure a scale model or something, or do I have to take you outside and show you the sky?"

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"Uh -" Cam holds out his hands and makes a scale model. The top half clatters off the bottom half. Islands skitter to the floor. "What."

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"Oh. I suppose if I'd thought ahead I might have realized you wouldn't necessarily supply it with all the right properties," laughs Ashras. He picks up the top half and holds it in place, rendering the whole a sort of jelly-donut shape, a thick round flat thing with a top circle and a bottom circle not-quite-meeting at a rounded edge; their jagged rims curve toward each other but don't extend far enough to touch, and the gaps between are where the floating islands fell from. "This is Suranse. We're currently in the interior, Aluvanna. The Enemy attacks from outside, but they concentrate on the edges ever since they figured out where all the angry fanged people are coming from."

The triplets do, indeed, have fangs, if you look closely.
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"I was trying to make an entirely faithful model. Which suggests that there is some kind of magical property keeping your... planetoid... floating in the way it does. And gravity can't be working normally either."

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"Gravity is working just fine," says Ashras. "It points toward the central layer of the planet's shell. If you're on the inside, down is out; if you're on the outside, down is in. If you're in the floating jungle between the halves of the planet, or at the central layer of the shell, down isn't."

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"And this is an extremely abnormal way for gravity to work! I mean, with a lot of engineering labor I might be able to rig something up with magnets... no, it wouldn't work that way either. This is not a thing that works. With gravity as normal. I can't make things in general with magical properties of any kind including abnormal gravity, so I hope you don't need that for your war effort."

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"We can test that. Does anybody have a fire pin?"

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"I'm going to be so pissed off if I didn't even save the world," says Elarron. He produces an engraved steel pin with blunt ends. "Here's a fire pin, see if you can make one that works."

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Cam looks at it, figures they already have at least one, shrugs, and replicates it.

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Inlaith takes the pin. A small tidy flame appears at the end he isn't holding it by.

"Success," he says. "Or at least proof of concept."
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"Hooray."

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"I wonder how quickly Dalvor can be persuaded to pass on the plans for the really interesting stuff," says Inlaith.

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"We'll see," says Ashras.

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"If this is a legitimate bottleneck in a war I decide I am prepared to take a side on I can just conjure up the complete written works of this Dalvor person."

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...

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...

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They all three crack up.

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"I am a hilarious infosec hazard!"

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"Yes."

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"Yes you are."

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Cam laughs.

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"Please don't do that just yet," says Ashras, "but we can definitely keep the possibility in mind if the king proves recalcitrant for whatever reason."

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"Sure. I don't even have anywhere really convenient to put his complete written works. I mean, I could put them in a compact format but then I'd have to teach you all to use computers before you could read it."

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"Anyway, the first step in getting you an audience with the king is likely to be telling our parents we found an otherworldly man with strange but highly useful magical powers who is less winged than he may appear."

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"I don't know what I'd even do with a second set of wings. I guess I could cut these ones off. I'd like the sphere, though."

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"I have no idea what would happen if you got your... if you got more wings," says Ashras. "Maybe it's impossible. Maybe you wouldn't get any more since you've got the one pair already. Maybe the ones you have would become retractable. I suppose we'll find out when you save the world."

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"That does seem like the sort of thing that might get it, if merely having summoned me without even formally acquiring my cooperation yet does the trick."

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"The exact criteria seem to vary from person to person, and each person only gets their wings once so it's not trivial to study," says Ashras. "But having brought about the imminent saving of the world even by accident, even without a guarantee, is a pretty solid accomplishment."

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"On the other hand, it's not a thing that happens where I am from and I am not even a member of your species, so maybe I can't get additional wings at all no matter what feats of heroism I perform. Oh well. A good deed is its own reward and all that."

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"Yes, yes it is."

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Wag wag wag.

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"Would one or both of you please go find Father?" says Ashras to his brothers.

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"I'll do it," Elarron says cheerfully. Off he goes.

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"I'm assuming you'd be slightly more urgent about the entire thing if attacks from the evil aliens were literally constant instead of periodic waves."

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"I'm sure someone is fighting at this very moment, but you wanted an audience with the king and we are proceeding with all haste to get you one."

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"I'm more likely to be convinced by flying out to meet some evil aliens and having them shoot at me and not respond to attempts at parley, but maybe the audience with the king is easier to get, I don't know that I want to try operating a shuttle in this magic clamshell planet... What diplomatic efforts were there exactly that failed?"

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"I don't have the histories on hand - how thoroughly would I need to specify one before you could conjure it? - but the gist is that anyone who tries to talk to the Enemy is shot at and anyone who surrenders to the Enemy is killed."

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"Title and author, sometimes I can make do with other amounts of information but 'topic' won't work unless I just produce everything published on this planet ever and narrow it down from there. Less impossible than it seems, still not a good use of an afternoon if you can improve on it."

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"Hm. Century of War, by Soroverai Akarian? If you feel like a little light reading while Elarron's—" He tilts his head slightly, ears adjusting to catch some distant sound. "Never mind, he's back already."

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"With Grandfather," Inlaith contributes.

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"...Is there somewhere I can dry off and change? It's getting to the point where I'm less willing to have these conversations damp and in my swim trunks."

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"There's a bathroom across the hall."

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Cam gets carefully to his feet, goes to the bathroom, and comes out quite dry and wearing jeans and shoes. Still no shirt. If nobody was complaining before they will have to use their words now.

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When he emerges, Elarron is approaching down the hall, trailing a man of some indeterminate adult age who doesn't give a strong impression of being old enough to be anyone's grandfather. He has a moderate family resemblance to the triplets and a pair of silver-accented dark brown bat wings.

"I hear you might be able to save the world," he says to Cam.
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"I hear this too! It is an exciting opportunity of which I will delightedly take advantage as soon as I'm sure that I happened to land among the good guys instead of just some guys."

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Possibly-Grandfather snorts slightly.

"My name is Faidre Kevarsin Tarnedrae. I can bring you to see the king."
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"Cool."

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He glances down at Elarron and adds, "I'm sure the boys will find a way to come along whether I like it or not."

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"Hey, a lot of people could get their wings on this one," says Elarron. Smugly.

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"No harm in taking you."

And he turns and leads the way out of the building. The triplets follow like ducklings.
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Cam looks around curiously as he accompanies them.

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The architecture is a bit odd in some hard-to-define way. Windows are tall and narrow; stairs wind in broad spirals around open central spaces; ceilings are high, lighting dim.

It doesn't get really weird until they exit the building, though.

The sky is green.

Well, debatably.

The majority of the visible area above the unsettlingly high and jagged horizon is taken up by a vast central tangle of unfamiliar vegetation, greyed by distance. Off to one side, a diagonal slash of brilliant golden light stretches across the gap between the two halves of the planet's shell, mirrored by an identical line precisely opposite it, although the latter is partly obscured by an outflung arm of the floating jungle. Near the first golden line stands a fainter vertical bar of silver light, less striking but still plainly visible; the place where its twin should be is more firmly obscured. Beyond the jungle, on the other half of the shell, faint patches of light may or may not indicate the presence of civilization.

Faidre Kevarsin takes no notice of any of this, only leads everyone away from the building and down a broad paved path. Outdoor lighting is sparse and dim. All the Aluvai seem totally at home in these conditions, but Cam might like some form of vision enhancement.
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"What are those lines in the - planetary gap?" Cam asks. "Also, how antisocial would it be to make myself a flashlight?"

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"You'll annoy the surface-dwellers if you insist on shining light around," says Faidre. "What lines? The sun-circle and moon-circle?"

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"Perhaps that is what those lines are; I did not know and therefore cannot confirm your suggestion." Cam produces a pair of goggles and thereafter navigates less haphazardly.

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"The sun and moon travel on circular paths around the planet; those lines mark their course," says Inlaith. "Do you not have a sun or moon where you're from?"

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"I reiterate that your physics are weird. Suns and moons are things! But they are not monorails."

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"What are they, then?"

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...Cam conjures up his computer. "Here is an animation of the solar system in which humans whom I was aware of this morning all live. It is to scale but sped way up. The sun is big. The planets are all spheres, these ones made of rock with air and water around the outside, these ones made of assorted nasty gaseous substances. Most of the planets have moons. Earth, the planet where humans are from, has one moon." He zooms in. "It's tidally locked, so one face of it is always facing the planet; and it gets all its light bounced off of it from the sun, it doesn't glow on its own. It, and the planets, and in the broader scheme of things the sun, all move principally according to a rule called law of gravity, which states in tidy mathematical form that things try to be near other things, especially when the things are big or close together. The moon is basically falling all the time and keeps missing the ground."
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"Are you sure that your physics are not the ones that are weird?" inquires Ashras.

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"I'm... not absolutely certain but I'm pretty confident. A feature I expect in non-weird physics is that it works mostly the same on things in general. A scale model of the Earth, well, the oceans would fall off because it would be small and therefore not exert more gravitational pull than wherever you were when you made it, but the rest of it wouldn't instantly collapse. Another feature I expect in non-weird physics is concise math, which I would love to hear produced to explain the presence of a 'sun circle' but I'm not optimistic."

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"I'd be fascinated to hear about what kind of concise math produces an eternally falling moon, but I'm not sure we have time. Where's Dalvor? For that matter where's Father?"

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Faidre doesn't turn around, but his tail flicks sideways in a way that looks plausibly meaningful.

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"Ah, no wonder you couldn't find him," says Ashras to Elarron; then, "What are they meeting about?"

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"Mediation. Nothing that can't wait."

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"My extremely convenient language acquisition mechanism did not include tail gestures."

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"'Amused shrug'," glosses Ashras.

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"Anything I should be avoiding doing with my tail lest I offend people who assume I am familiar with tail gestures, or is the fact that it's not furry sufficient to mark me as clueless?"

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"You're pretty visibly not Aluvai, and your tail pretty visibly isn't either. You should be fine. Uh, avoid short fast repetitive side-to-side flicking, and if you see someone doing it, be warned; it's a strong anger signal, usually not consciously controlled."

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"All right. Slow wagging is okay?"

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"Yeah."

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"Good, I have a bit of a habit."

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"It seems to be coming across in the intended spirit, as far as I can tell from other cues."

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"Good."

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"That's our destination up ahead," Ashras mentions, since Faidre seems disinclined to play tour guide.

Their destination is a stone building set imposingly atop a slow-rising hill. Winged guards patrol its terraces and balconies. It's not quite a castle, but definitely in that genre.
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"How common is wing-getting?"

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"I don't know the numbers," says Ashras. He glances at Inlaith.

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"Somewhat more than one in a thousand people," he says.

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"Huh. Do most people not try, or do most who try not succeed, or both?"

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"'Try'?"

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"To do sufficiently monumental things? I mean, I'm used to people in general having disappointingly small ambitions but I'm also used to there being no extremities and pocket dimensions awarded as prizes for accomplishing stuff."

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"Oh. No. Setting out to accomplish something because you want your wings is notoriously tricky - something about the mindset. Plenty of people do try it, but the ones who succeed tend to be the ones who focus on the immediate goal and not on the prospective reward."

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"Mindset seems to go into a lot of it," says Ashras. "Sometimes I think the reason so few people get their wings is because they're not thinking of themselves as the sort of person who could, so they never think about their own accomplishments the right way."

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"And in case you get the wrong idea, it's not all stuff like saving the world," says Elarron. "If you're really into writing books and you write a really good book, there you go. At least some of the time."

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"If writing books counts I'm even more surprised it's not more common. Although if there's a fiddly mindset thing I suppose that could filter out arbitrary numbers of people."

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"There's a mindset thing, it's at least somewhat fiddly, and I don't think it's the same for everybody," says Elarron. "Mine was pretty classic, except for the part where the thing I did that probably saved the world was a complete accident."

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"I'm a very fortunate accident! On multiple levels."

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"Well, at least you're with the Kevarsins," says Inlaith, to the amusement of both his brothers.

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"Are you collectors of fortunate accidents?"

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"Oh, was that not meant to imply that you could have been much less fortunate?"

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"My go-to remark here would be that it would be pretty trivial to destroy the planet but I actually have no idea how hard it would be because your physics are weird."

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"Most people try to be tactful around Dalvor. Members of our family are infamously willing to air remarks like 'that's a stupid idea' and 'you look like shit today' to his face. 'By the way, I could trivially destroy the planet' seems in the same genre."

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"Well, I don't know if I could, for all I know your weird bivalve planet eats black holes for breakfast! But that's roughly the scale I could operate on were I bad news."

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"Bivalve?"

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Cam hands him a clam.

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Elarron looks at the clam.

"Okay, I guess I can see the resemblance. ...What am I supposed to do with this?"
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"I usually do think about that before I casually make things," says Cam. "Oops. If you don't think it's decorative I can just turn it into sand."

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He snorts. "It's pretty enough, I guess." After a moment's reflection, he hands it to Inlaith. "Deal with this."

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Inlaith pockets the clam.

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Cam laughs.

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Inlaith grins.

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And then they are up the hill and through the gate and past the guards and on the first left they find a room containing two bat-winged men engaged in conversation. It's much larger than it needs to be for two people to have a conversation in it.

One of the pair is clearly a Kevarsin, with a Kevarsin face, Kevarsin wings - they match Faidre's almost exactly - and a Kevarsin tail. He is in the middle of making some sort of wry commentary not audible at this distance.
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The other is cast in a somewhat different mold. Leaner, taller, seemingly tailless, although still clawed and fanged and elf-eared. His wings are plain black, his hair brown. He looks up when the five of them walk in.

"Faidre. Troublemakers," he greets, with the faintest hint of a smile. Then he looks at Cam, noting the rounded ears and the goggles and the unusual tail. "Who's this?"
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"A false-winged visitor from another world," says Faidre. "Elarron produced him somehow. He can make arbitrary objects out of nothing." He glances at Cam and makes a go-on-then gesture perhaps intended to elicit the conjuration of an object.

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"...Does anybody actually need any arbitrary objects right now or should I just make another clam...?"

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"You could get right to the point and conjure a force cannon, but it would be hard to fit out the door," the man with the black wings says dryly. "For demonstrative purposes, perhaps a light-wand."

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"I don't know what those things are because I am from a completely different world with an unrelated magic system and dissimilar physics!" chirps Cam. "Also I haven't decided if I want to make you weapons yet and cannot, given the aforementioned, guarantee that a light-wand isn't one. Who wants a donut hole? They're delicious." He holds out a donut hole, chocolate glazed.

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"A light-wand is a solid gold cylinder, usually approximately six inches long, optionally engraved in useful patterns. It projects a beam of light when activated," says Inlaith. "Harmless unless you shine it in someone's eyes unexpectedly." He sniffs the donut hole but does not move to take it.

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The king's full attention settles on Cam the moment the food item appears.

"Let's suppose for the moment that you can make us weapons," he says. "How might I convince you to do it?"
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"I am told that you are under attack by evil aliens who don't believe in diplomacy," says Cam. "If this is true I am happy to either load you up on miscellaneous cylinders or just go blow them all up myself, whichever seems more expedient. But I have been told this by people who were selected for drawing what turn out to be really dangerous patterns on the floor, have no cultural or social context or way to verify anything I'm told, etcetera, it concerns me. I am genuinely concerned about your halved population and so on but I would feel really bad about it if your evil aliens are just misguided insectoids or something and then they were all dead."

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"You're welcome to go look at them yourself. I can spare the forces to guard you so you don't get yourself killed and deprive me of my chance at miscellaneous cylinders."

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"I'm indestructible," says Cam. "...Although I'm not actually sure I'm rated for legitimately magical damage. If the evil aliens deploy magical damage, or possibly Weird Physics Damage, I might have a problem, so maybe somebody should try to blow a hole in my wing or something first as a test."

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"That, too, can be arranged," says the king. "Now?"

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"Give me four seconds' warning so I can anesthetize myself, but sure, I have nowhere else to be."

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"Which wing would you like someone to blow a hole in?" he inquires.

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Cam stretches out one at random.

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He glances between Faidre and the not-yet-introduced Kevarsin and gives a small shrug.

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Faidre sighs. "I'll do it. Ready?"

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Four seconds pass. "Go for it."

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He extends a hand toward Cam and produces an intensely concentrated fire blast which strikes the outstretched wing.

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Cam's wing membrane darkens slightly.

No hole appears.

"Excellent!" says Cam as the minimal damage heals. "Does it come in other flavors, if that's just a flamethrower but you also have Magic Missile I don't know if this is conclusive."
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"Force, fire, light, energy, lightning, freeze, stun, corrosion," Faidre recites. "Those are the basic flavours. They can be combined for interesting results. I could try a mind-killer wand on you but, as the name suggests, they're not safe to play with."

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"Yeah, because trying to blast his wing off was perfectly safe," snorts Elarron.

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"He could've made a new one, I assume," says Faidre. "Harder to make a new brain."

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"Yeah, I picked the wing because these have no nerves at the base and if it were somehow irreparably mangled I could just slice it off and make a new one. What pray tell is," airquotes, "'energy'."

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Faidre flicks his fingers downward, producing a blip of yellowish light that makes a small mark on the floor. "Differs from fire mostly in aesthetics."

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"Anyway, stun might just plain work on me, and there's nothing stopping force from flinging me around, so if the evil aliens use comparable this-and-that it would probably be a little silly for me to just fly over to them and say hello, but I don't want to put anyone else at risk for what must seem to you all like deeply misplaced curiosity..."

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"The Enemy's weapons are not substantially different," says Faidre.

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"If satisfying your curiosity gets us an arbitrarily large supply of weapons - with arbitrarily precise manufacture? - it's worth not just risk but lives," says the king.

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"Although of course it would be preferable to minimize that risk," says the unintroduced Kevarsin.

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"My manufacture is indeed arbitrarily precise, if for some reason you need all the molecules lined up in a certain way or something. If they hit me with a stun - which honestly is not even a particularly damning response from an army receiving an uninvited guest - I may well be stunned and then my fact-finding is cut a bit short. The thing that summoned me was a 'fire shield'? Are there other shields? Do they have to be enormous unwieldy metal disks?"

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"The fact that they have to be unwieldy metal disks is why they are deeply impractical to use."

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"Okay, is it known why they have to be unwieldy metal disks? What happens if you try to make them on metal foil? What happens if you make them very small?"

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"The 'flavour' of a magical weapon or shield is controlled by the metal or metals that compose it; the strength of its effect is controlled by its size; other details depend on its exact shape," says Inlaith. "Weapons are cylinders, and shields are disks. Various engravings alter things such as the shape of the effect."

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"What if I made a suit of a few layers of cute tiny shields?"

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"Try it," he says. "The metal for stun is silver. You need perfect solid circles that won't bend out of shape. It doesn't need to be perfectly pure, but some alloys lose their magical resonance."

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"Can I plate 'em in diamond?"

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"That would help them keep their shape, certainly."

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"And it wouldn't do anything else or impurify them? I have no idea how this works, help me out."

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"As long as whatever you encase them in is not also a magically resonant metal, which diamond isn't, it should have no effect."

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"Okay. What does stun do when applied to regular people, exactly?"

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"A direct hit to the head or body causes them to fall unconscious; anywhere else, and the affected area may become temporarily numb and unresponsive."

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"Unconscious for how long?"

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"Depends on the strength of the stun bolt. Anywhere from a few minutes to several days, more normally an hour or two."

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"All right, can I get a few-minutes version for a baseline test before I start prototyping shields? Please do not draw on me while I am asleep."

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Faidre obliges him. The bolt makes a tiny 'fwm' sound.

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And Cam falls over.

And sits up after a few seconds. "That was weird!" he observes. "How long was I out?"
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"A few seconds," says Inlaith.

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"Okay. I might just be condensing the allotted time or a few seconds might be my maximum stunned duration, hit me with a bigger one?"

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Fwm.

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Flomp.

Sixty seconds, and he's up.

"Well, you're all still standing in more or less the same places." Blink. "Agh, I dropped the donut hole, I should have eaten it when it was clear nobody else wanted it."
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Faidre chuckles.

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"You were out for a minute that time. How long should it have been?" says Inlaith, glancing at his grandfather.

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"An hour."

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"Okay, so maybe I just cut it down by a factor of sixty but I could still be severely inconvenienced by heavy-duty stun bolts flying around. Silver for the shields? Should they have little designs on them?"

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"Ideally, yes. Do you need more information than 'normal stun shield engravings' to generate those designs?"

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"If there's a normal I should be able to use that, I didn't know how standardized it was. Are they usually defined with math that'll scale really nicely or just sort of drawn on?"

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"They scale perfectly well."

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"Lovely." Cam makes one, peers at it, says, "Unfortunately it's really hard to get any sort of outfit that interacts well with wings which are, in fact, persistently attached to one's body," and then makes more of them, all attached, in two layers to cover one another's gaps and plated in clear diamondlike carbon substance. He drapes it over his shoulders, wings folded. "Give it a spin."

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Faidre flicks a stun bolt at it. The stun bolt dissipates on contact with the silver. He flicks a somewhat larger stun bolt at it. That, too, is caught by the shield-net.

"I might be able to get past it if I had a stun cannon, but those are normally a waste of silver."
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"Would it go around and hit me in the head or would it go through, and if the latter would it wreck my shield cloak?"

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"Through, and no."

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"Huh. I mean, I could make it more layers but that would make it really bulky and I was imagining the end version would have all of the kinds of shields there are... Maybe I could keep it to two layers, or three or four, and have them be really really thin and in stacks a few molecules thick? Anything the matter with having a fire shield directly on top of a stun shield et cetera?"

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"The thinner the shield, the less effective it is," says Inlaith. "A strong enough stun bolt will pass through your cloak not because there are gaps but because it won't care about shields that small."

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"Interesting. Even if the surface is wholly tiled with them? Why is that?"

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"It's one of the most basic principles of magical weapon and shield design. Strength is proportional to size. It's possible that with your ability to completely ignore the practical necessities of manufacturing and materials costs, you could help us develop a shield cloak that matches your ideals, but no one has tried to layer together hundreds of tiny shield-circles coated in diamond before so no one currently knows how to do that effectively."

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"You probably don't know if it's proportional to volume or to mass..."
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"Hollow wands exist. It's the weight rather than strictly the size that holds in that case."

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"Okay. But there is a limit to how dense I can make a specific kind of metal while it retains the various features of the metal that might be important. So I don't know how far that gets me."

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"Well, which would you prefer: taking days or weeks to develop the perfect shield-cloak, or venturing out with the one you have?" inquires Dalvor.

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"Does it seem likely that if the evil aliens discover that they can't kill me they will keep me stunned indefinitely?"

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"It's possible," he says. "They haven't yet been observed to capture anyone they couldn't kill. But we can send an escort."

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"I mean, I might have a way around that sans escort if someone would like to help me test it out. I have no idea why I'm here and presumably you don't want to be rid of me as long as I am open to helping you with your evil aliens, but if summoning is working as normal, I can be dismissed at arbitrary range and re-summoned. Unfortunately, if summoning is not working as normal - if I am here now for some reason other than 'nobody else made that kind of shield flat on the ground in sufficient size before' - I have no way to predict accurately in what respects it's different. So testing would involve risking stranding another daeva here indefinitely."

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"I am very interested to know how you can be dismissed at arbitrary range and re-summoned," says Dalvor. "I don't wish to strand another daeva here indefinitely, but if it would help win the war without significant risk of the stranded person causing more trouble than they solved, I'm not opposed to trying."

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"I'm opposed to trying. Daeva are in general very dangerous, I don't object to the use of bindings for temporary summons but it's a hell of a thing to do to a person who's going to be around forever, and the first thing they'll try if it turns out they object to being stranded is killing their summoner on the assumption that the summoner must not be really trying to dismiss them."

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"I'm sure I will have no trouble finding a prospective summoner who would willingly assume that risk, if the reward is potentially being permanently rid of the Enemy. What exactly do you propose to test, and what exactly are your objections to it?"

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"...I was thinking that someone could summon and dismiss another daeva and demonstrate that summonings and dismissals are both working the way that I expect them to, if they are, without risking sending me home and not being able to get me back. But. Daeva are really really immortal. If something goes wrong they will either be bound, forever, which is not all right as a permanent condition, or they will be loose and likely pissed off. I guess you could keep stunning one around the clock forever but that's not something I want to do to an innocent bystander either. I can think of one angel who might be okay with being stranded if nothing significant has changed in the last hundred fifty years, and I think they'd be okay with it specifically because they've always wanted to meet aliens."

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"I don't know what precisely you mean by bound; I concede that it may very well not be all right as a permanent condition. However, neither is death. I am deeply, deeply tired of the rate at which my friends and subjects keep dying. My goal is to end this war, and in that I beg your assistance." He glances aside for a moment at some subtle signal. "Yes, Faidre?"

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"Cam claims to be able to trivially destroy the planet. I judge it not unlikely," he says.

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"Yours is a blessed line," he says dryly. "Thank you."

Returning his attention to Cam, he continues, "So perhaps the risks of a test are too great; very well. What can be done to make progress toward saving the world safely and expediently?"
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"I don't know if I could trivially destroy this planet because it's a weird planet and I'm not about to try it and see. I'm... still uncomfortable with bringing a non-immortal escort along but I suppose the situation is in fact lethally urgent for exactly the sort of person you'd be drawing the escort from. I can at least give them shield suits, I guess. I'll want to try using my computer to try to decipher their language if they have one and you don't already have someone who can translate."

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"No one has ever made much progress learning the language of the Enemy from the fragments we hear," says the king. "Azair?"

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He nods. "I can have a small force ready shortly. The best."

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"Thank you."

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"If they do seem to have a language and you don't know how it works it might be worth sending a drone - that's a little flying non-person device that can sort-of-kind-of-think - to listen in on them and see where I can get with that. I mean, they might just blow it up but a drone will be less inconvenienced than a person by extra weight from shields."

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"Reasonable," says the king. "Then if we're decided on sending you to the edge now, the last question before you leave is: how will we dismiss and resummon you if you appear to have been captured irretrievably by the Enemy?"

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"Summoner concentrates on wanting rid of me for about a minute. Here is a circle that will get me, personally, unbound, if drawn on the floor with room for me in the middle of it. Don't fuck with the design." He produces a paper. "You may want to give me a few minutes before panicking in case you happen to finish the circle while I'm in the shower or something."

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Ashras takes the paper.

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"Thank you," says the king. "I leave you in Azair's hands. Faidre, take charge of your grandchildren; none of them may go along."

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"I should warn you all before anybody draws that. And because one of you has already performed a summoning. Under the system I am familiar with - which does not include strange physics or evil aliens or anything like that - people who summon daeva become, on their deaths, daeva themselves. The alternative - again under the system I'm familiar with - is worse, but I don't know how any of this interacts with whatever you've got going on."

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"Normally what people become on their deaths is dead," says Dalvor. "Indestructibility and world-shaking powers seem preferable."

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"Dead people look pretty dead to outside observation where I'm from too. They just also, simultaneously, appear in one of the daeva realms or Limbo. Limboites get to be indestructible but have no powers and the world is really boring, and I'm absolutely certain that if my Limboite pen pals had ever met anyone with a tail I would have heard of it, so I don't know that you'll land in daeva realms any more than you do in Limbo."

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"Thank you for the warning, in any case. Is there anything else before you leave?"

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"I don't think so."

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"Go, then, and good luck."

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"This way," says Azair, motioning to Cam.

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Cam follows him.

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Out they go. Azair collects a few other winged Aluvai with nods and gestures, then leads them all out of the building and takes to the air.

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Flying! Flying is nice. Cam can do flying.

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Along the way he tells the collected winged ones, "This is Cam. He proposes to spy on the Enemy. We're here to make sure he isn't captured in the attempt."

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"Please nobody attempt to take a lethal hit or even seriously injurious hit for me, I'm indestructible, the main issue is that I could be stunned and carried off," Cam clarifies.

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"Faidre tried to blast one of his wings off and the result was as you see," Azair confirms, to mildly impressed looks from the team.

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"About how far from where we're going do the Enemy hang out?"

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"They keep most of their forces beyond the celestial circles," says Azair. "As far from the edge of the planet as the edge is from the center."

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"...And how far is that."

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"Fifteen hundred miles."

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"Wow, that's really close, I was imagining astronomical distances. Okay. ... Are the celestial circles the same distance from the planet? Do the sun and moon just happen to be in a pattern where they don't hit each other?"

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"The moon is closer by just enough that they comfortably pass by one another every eclipse."

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"Anybody ever go land on the moon?"

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"...No. The celestial bodies and their associated circles are too hot to comfortably approach, although the moon and moon-circle are much less so than the sun."

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"Huh. I am accustomed to chilly moons."

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"How strange."

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"Well, most moons have a wider berth from their suns than 'comfortable' and do not travel on a celestial circle, so it's probably one of those things doing it."

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"I suppose."

Flight continues. They're already high enough that the pull of gravity is noticeably lessened; the Aluvai adjust seamlessly to the change.
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Cam's pretty used to flying in low gravity. It is something of a novelty not to have to make the air to do it with though.

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And on and on...

The edge of the planet approaches. Jagged teeth of landscape curve inward from the two halves of the shell. There are various installations visible at the edges - cables strung from one surface to the other across the vast cliff in between, allowing vehicles to be hauled in either direction. The planetary shell is pretty thick - but is it twice as thick as the Earth's crust? Hard to judge by eye.
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Well, Cam doesn't have an eyeball understanding of how deep the Earth's crust is either, but this does seem to be a lot of shell.

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Everyone pauses, drifting slowly out through the wide gap between the halves of the planet, to check and redistribute their weapons. At the end of this they are each carrying a minimum of one long staff and four wands. There is nothing in sight that looks particularly Enemy-like.

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Ah-huh... "Question. If you guys get hit in the wings, do they just sort of magically shrug it off or... what? I can't make full-coverage shield suits that let you fly but maybe your wings just don't - count? Because they're magic?"

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"It's unpleasant, but yes, we can easily and quickly replace injured wings," says Azair.

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"Right, who wants shield suits and what sorts of shields would they like them to be made of?"

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"Force shields - brass," says Azair.

"I'll take the same, if you're offering," says one member of the team.

"None for me, thanks," says another. This seems to be the majority opinion.
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"You want to put them on or just have them appear on you?"

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"Appearing seems faster," says Azair. The other fellow agrees.

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And now they are wearing brass shieldsuits.

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"You mentioned something about sending a scout ahead?" prompts Azair, as they take flight again and approach the outer edge.

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"Yeah, I'm going to make a drone, but I need to tell it where to go and ideally have open air-or-vacuum between me and it so I can keep an eye on it."

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"Well, here's plenty of open air," he says.

There is indeed a lot of that available, outside the planet. The arcs of the sun-circle and moon-circle are visible off to one side, and there is distant movement almost straight ahead. Another member of the escort points at it; Azair nods acknowledgingly.

"And there is the Enemy."
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"Okay..."

Cam pulls out his computer and designs a drone, boxed in on six sides with shields... "I never did get an answer about stacked shields. What-all kinds of cylinders have you guys got on hand so I can test that?"
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"Plenty. What exactly do you want to test?"

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"I want to see if I can make shields all in a stack, one on top of another on top of etcetera, and have them all still work."

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"They'll work fine unless the outer layers are damaged by something they don't shield against. So if you have steel on the outside and it's hit with a corrosion blast, there goes your fire shield; but if your corrosion shield is outermost, fire can melt it."

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"Yeah, that would be the obvious drawback, but if it otherwise works I might as well load up the drone on shield stacks and cross my fingers about the diamond plating..." Design design. "List me shields."

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"Brass, force. Steel, fire. Gold, light, if you care to shield from that. Bronze, energy. Copper, lightning. Platinum, freeze. Silver, stun. Nickel or nickel-iron alloy, corrosion."

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Cam makes a Roomba. "Somebody try stunning that and see if anything happens."

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Azair throws a stun bolt, wandlessly, at the Roomba.

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The Roomba continues to whir around. "Great, somebody can take that home and it'll vacuum their floor." Cam designs up his drone with all the relevant shields, and then he makes it, about two feet cubed. It flies into the air and towards the Enemy.

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His escort waits.

The drone perceives:

Flying vehicles of an unfamiliar design, made primarily of metal. Humanoid figures in and around these vehicles, operating them. Flashes of light that seem to encode transmissions between vehicles.

And, as soon as the Enemy notices, a barrage of force and fire and energy.
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Cam's been tracking it as it goes and patches it as it takes damage.

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When the Enemy discovers that they failed to destroy the mystery object the first time, they shoot at it a bunch more and chatter about it on their flashing-light comm systems.

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The drone records and relays all the flashing light. It attempts to approach a ship.

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That and other nearby ships assault it with truly obnoxious amounts of firepower. Something eventually manages to get through the layered shields and crisp some circuitry.

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Well, that's not very nice of them. Between being able to see the mass of ships with the naked eye and the recent drone picture, Cam thinks he can just put a drone in a ship. There.

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Then he'll get a nice close look at the Enemy as they yell at and assault the new drone.

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The yelling is the important part.

Maybe they won't notice if he puts an unshielded mic and camera in the corner over there.
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Nobody seems to notice the unshielded mic and camera.

But when their handheld weaponry is insufficient to damage the new drone, they panic and abandon that ship completely. It self-destructs shortly afterward. Lights flash frantically, coordinating the rest of that group as they pick up the evacuated crew.
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"Oh dear, I seem to have scared them."

(The feeds are projected from Cam's computer. He's not trying to stop anybody looking over his shoulder.)
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Azair laughs.

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"Let's try this again..." He makes another drone outside the ships to get a good enough view of another ship that he can put the unobtrusive listening stuff inside.

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The unobtrusive listening stuff doesn't attract anyone's attention. They're all much too busy killing the heck out of the new drone.

When all visible drones are good and slagged, the group splits up, travelling in three different directions.
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All directions get unobtrusive listening equipment.

"Computer's analyzing what it's got of their language, but I'm going to be kind of stymied if I can't get them to talk to me later. Ever take any of them prisoner, what happens if you do that?"
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"They escape the first chance they get, by whatever means. Suicide, if nothing else works. But it's rare to get the chance."

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"You don't have a way to keep them from committing suicide? They have some kind of self-destruct on their persons too?"

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"The last capture was before my time. I don't remember what the prisoner did specifically."

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"Mmmhm." The devices report their distance, direction, and speed so Cam has a decent shot of making more things on the ship. The software takes the data and tries to separate out words and attach meanings to things.

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The escort team watches.

When the feed shows each of the scattered ships contacting another group, Azair says, "Warn the local garrisons." A team member starts firing wands in presumably-coded patterns.

Meanwhile, the software learns all about Enemy profanity.
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It will actually have a really hard time identifying profanity confidently on its own, although Cam submits it as a guess after frowning at the data and it doesn't throw an inconsistency.

New groups of ships get spied on too! More data! (Cam's computer sprouts an extra processor insert.)
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In all of the Enemy ships currently being spied on, the main topic of discussion is the sudden inexplicable ability of the [likely profane collective noun] to make things appear out of thin air, how worrying this is, and how the [likely profane collective noun] must be destroyed as expeditiously as possible before they escape this [location not fully clear from context].

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"I think I pissed them off."
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"I think so too," Azair says dryly. "And here I thought it would be hard for them to get much more aggressive than they already were..."

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"Yeah. How long do I have to try to get more language and try talking to them before they can launch Genocide Attempt Of The Day, what's their scramble capacity?"

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"I wouldn't give it more than a few hours."

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"Well, that's not nothing." Process faster, li'l computer. "Unfortunately they're not giving me really good samples and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to try anything more sophisticated than 'stop or be destroyed', which was not what I was going for here."

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"Seems better than nothing..."

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"Yes, but I was hoping for something along the lines of 'your opponents have recently befriended superior firepower, reconsider diplomacy'. If they utter the word for diplomacy in the next few hours I will eat that Roomba."

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Azair laughs. "Somehow I'm not surprised by your assessment."

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"Yeah. The good news is that they are literally close enough to see, as opposed to millions of miles away, and I can just disintegrate them at once when I'm ready to give up on them. I'm holding out a sliver of hope that they just really wanted to harvest the shell of your weird clam planet and could be appeased with weird clam planet bits made by yours truly, though."

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"It seems unlikely, but I can understand why you might be reluctant to skip to the disintegration."

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"Yeah." Cam looks at accumulating language data. "How sure are you that nobody provoked them?"

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"They came down out of the sky and started killing people. It's hard to imagine a commensurate provocation, or how someone might have delivered one before they made themselves known."

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"Even non-commensurate. I'm not saying they're reasonable, I'm wondering if they could maybe be made to go away with an apology instead of a disintegration. You weren't sending messages into space, they definitely didn't send visitors who were treated rudely by random people who thought they were ugly, there didn't use to be an extra layer of planet that somebody wrecked thereby leaving them homeless, anything?"

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"It stretches credibility to think something like that could have happened. It's hard to say for sure that it didn't - well, I expect someone would know if there had been an extra layer of planet within anything like recent history. But if there was a peaceful first visit, or any communication whatsoever, I've never heard tell of it."

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Nod.

Cam looks at his vocabulary. What high-confidence words can he assemble, how close can he get to the diplomacy thing? Does he even have "talk" or "communicate"?
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He could assemble "stop or be destroyed" with reasonably high confidence. He has "escape" and "kill" and the vocabulary they're using to talk about his conjuration and a whole lot of almost-certainly-swear-words, and... yes, there it goes, they've discussed communicating with each other often enough now that the software is reasonably confident about "speak".

Depending on what tradeoffs he wants to make about certainty and exact semantic content, he has several options, but one of the most high-confidence strings he can put together is "Speak to me; I am frighteningly powerful."
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"I can assemble what is probably 'speak to me, I am frighteningly powerful'."

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"Seems in the right area. And accurate," says Azair.

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"Why thank you."

He follows a transponder in one of the little mics to make a speaker.

It utters this sentence.
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...

Everyone present near that mic freaks the fuck out.

"The [profane noun] can speak! The object-creating [profane noun] has followed us! DESTROY IT! DESTROY IT!"

They don't even bother evacuating this ship; it self-destructs with the full crew still aboard, waiting only long enough to flash lights at its neighbours and communicate the problem. They scatter further.
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"...You know what, I have very few reservations about prompting them to self-destruct ships that they themselves choose not to evacuate," Cam remarks.

More speakers. More utterances.
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More flashing lights. More self-destructing ships.

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"I have this extremely immature urge to see if I can get all of them to blow themselves up. Is there air up there? Or, rather, weird physics - does sound work up there outside of the ships?"

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"Yes, there is air, and yes, sound works."

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Okay, then Cam can be less precise with his speakers! He can just pepper the entire area of Enemy ships with them and have them YELL.

"I AM FRIGHTENINGLY POWERFUL. SPEAK TO ME."
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The ships fire wildly at everywhere the sound seems like it might potentially be coming from. There is some friendly fire, but fewer self-destructions.

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Well, the sound's coming from the speakers.

Cam makes little transponder cameras and plants more mics in ships with them. All the ships he can find.

He repeats himself.
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By far the commonest reaction is to destroy themselves in a panic. Some try to flee instead, but there is nowhere to flee to - or is there? They have to have come from somewhere.

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Well, he's tracking them as they go. "...Do you happen to know where they go when they're not here?"

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"Away. We've never been able to follow them that far."

Some of the fleeing ships are shot down by their panicking allies, but not all.
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"I am tempted to follow them."

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"We won't be able to follow you, but you don't seem to have needed us so far... how long should we wait before trying to dismiss and resummon you?"

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Cam hands him a thing. "This will eventually - depending on weird physics - have a delay of several minutes, depending on how far I chase 'em. But you can talk to it and it'll talk to me. Like so," he says to his computer, and his voice echoes out of the thing. "If I don't answer and there's not an obvious reason and the delay hasn't crept up high enough to explain it and I didn't tell you I'd be out of touch, then you unsummon and resummon."

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"Understood. Good luck."

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"Thanks!"

And Cam flaps for some distance and makes a high-speed atmosphere-friendly shuttle around himself and zooms away, chasing after scared evil aliens.
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The evil aliens are headed away from the planet, toward the distant lights that resemble stars.

Eventually, though - after many, many planet-lengths, a distance that approaches the legitimately astronomical - it becomes clear that there is an edge to this universe. And hovering in midair, very close to that edge, there is a portal no bigger than an ordinary doorframe.

The aliens stationed at the portal are frantically shooting down all their own ships that make it this far, flashing emphatic lights to warn them away.
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"Hey, did you know that the universe has an edge. With a fucking door in it. WHY IS YOUR WORLD THIS WAY."
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"...What does the edge look like?"

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Cam takes a picture and sends it. "It looks like an EDGE! With a DOOR in it! Why!"

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There is a short silence.

Then: "...It looks like the edge of a Sphere. A very large Sphere, to be sure... but that's certainly a portal."
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"What the fuck!"

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"It's... not impossible, I suppose. But I can't imagine how old this person must have been when they died, for their Sphere to be this enormous."

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"And why do you all just live in it! And not know it's a Sphere!"

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"I have no idea."

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"Well, your universe has a door and that's how the evil aliens are getting in. Any guesses what I'll find if I rush it?"

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"Another Sphere and portals to more, I expect. And more of the Enemy. Until you track them all the way back to where they came from, wherever that is."

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"Can I just, you know, close it, or is it permanent?"

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"If the owners of both connected Spheres are dead, the portal is permanent. The owner of this Sphere must be dead, or we'd all need their permission to create portals out of it; I find it hard to imagine that the owner of the connecting Sphere might be alive, given that their Sphere has presumably been totally overrun by the Enemy."

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"Well, that's inconvenient, I guess I have to follow them home. If you would like to check the inter-sphere-ability of these communication devices by stepping briefly into your own Sphere that would probably help, although my bet is that they don't work between spheres."

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"I'll try it."

Lengthy pause.

"You seem to be right."
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"Yeah. Probably applies to drones trying to talk to my computer too. So I'll go through and if I don't come back and say something in... two hours... assume something's gone awry?"

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"Agreed."

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"Here goes."

Cam wraps himself in stun shield and guns the engine for the portal. He may or may not briefly turn off the communication devices so that he can produce a ridiculous war cry in the process without being overheard.
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The Enemy spots him in short order and starts trying very, very hard to shoot him down.

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Well, the ship's unprotected, he was mostly using it for momentum. Does momentum work in this weird physics sphere? WHEEEEEE.

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Momentum works fine.

His ship is obliterated fairly quickly, though, and the concentrated force blasts put a serious dent in his momentum. The heat of all that fire also melts his shield-suit. Cam himself is of course as indestructible as ever.
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He replaces suit bits as necessary. Adds a layer of force shields. Adds a jetpack. Zoom.

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Successive layers of shielding are melted, shattered, or otherwise wrecked. Cam approaches the portal in an expanding cloud of diamond shards and molten metal.

But approach it he does.

The Enemy retreats, eventually.
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Once he's close enough to get a good look at what they're shooting at him with he shreds it, interpolating it with air.

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Some of the weapons thusly treated just fall apart; others violently explode, taking out what's left of the rearguard.

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Whoops. Maybe next time he'll bubble them in something first.

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Well, regardless of how it happened, the portal is now unguarded and he can cross it unopposed.

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Lovely.

Rather Truman Show, this.

Hop.
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On the other side is... a very recently-abandoned industrial complex of some kind, situated in an open field under an unnervingly low sky. If he cares to look, it's reasonably obvious how the aliens were constructing their ships here to be passed through the portal in pieces and then assembled on the other side. The portal itself was extremely well-guarded until just now, but there are no aliens left.

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Huh.

Cam takes to the air, takes pictures, disintegrates industrial complex bits, and looks for where the aliens may have scurried off to.
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It's a good thing he took pictures, because as soon as he gets the wrong industrial-complex bit, it violently explodes, and this causes other parts of the complex to violently explode, and a few minutes later when everything is done violently exploding, the dust settles and the entire interior of this smallish Sphere has been almost completely scoured of objects. There's just a layer of bedrock left at the very bottom.

Luckily, Cam can fly, and the lack of anything else whatsoever makes it really easy to spot the two other portals available. Presumably the aliens went through one of those.
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Presumably! Cam picks one and sticks his head through.

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Someone shoots at it.

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Of course someone does! That's promising. Cam hauls the rest of the way through, takes a few pictures, disintegrates weapons.

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This Sphere is larger and differently decorated, full of weird stringy sculptures that hold up surprisingly well when things start violently exploding.

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Cam wonders if they're made of Real Physics or Actual Substances, but doesn't let this wondering distract him too much from indirectly blowing shit up. These aliens are really fond of their self-destruct mechanisms.

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Aren't they just.

Soon this Sphere is empty of everything but weird art and portals. There are five, this time, counting the one he came in through.
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Cam is going to need to make a map. He starts a map. He goes back and sticks his head through the other fork out of Ex-Industrial-Park.

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He gets shot at some more for his trouble.

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Of course he does.

Do these aliens want to talk if he makes a speaker and yells at them?
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No. Instead they self-destruct the entire contents of this Sphere, themselves included.

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They're really not making this much of a fight. Seriously, guys.

How many portals out of here?
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Six!

It's going to be a bit of a maze. But not nearly as bad as it could be, if the aliens keep helpfully destroying all the obstacles every time he gets near them.
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It is very helpful of them!

He thinks he's cleared enough of a buffer zone to go back and notify the clam planet people though.

He makes a new comm. "Hey there!"
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Immediately: "Yes?"

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"Hi! So the aliens really, really don't want to talk. They want to shoot ineffectually at me and then blow themselves up. A lot. There's a maze of spheres past the next one - it forks into two, and then one side's got five and one's got six, haven't gone farther than that yet. Do you have anything resembling a guess of how long it would take me to convince all these aliens to self-destruct?"

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"That's likely to depend on how many there are, and we've never been able to determine that beyond 'always more'," says Azair.

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"I mean more like how long would it take me to navigate the entire infested maze of Spheres. How many portals is it customary to have."

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"Anywhere from a handful to hundreds. It's a very individual thing. And I have no idea what state these Spheres were in when the Enemy got to them - it's possible their owners tried to close as many portals as they could... it's also possible they didn't get the chance."

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"Well, isn't that grand. I'm going to see if I can get a physical comm connection to hold across a portal, then we won't be cut off while I'm ferreting them out and you won't have to wonder how I'm doing. Stand by."

Cam makes a wired hookup between a thing and another thing on each side of this near portal and goes to the far side and says, "Testing."
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"I can hear you."

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"Okay, I'll just leave a trail of these relays as I go. You will probably hear explosions. It turns out when their weapons and industrial parks disintegrate they often blow up. Deplorable workplace safety standards."

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"I'm glad you're having fun," the voice of the king puts in.

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"It'll get really tedious eventually but I do like being helpful and these aliens are really emphatic about being unwilling to entertain the possibility of receiving help, so it's all you guys."

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"Suits me."

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"I thought so!"

Cam places more relays and ventures on into the maze, mapping as he goes, periodically shouting at the aliens (he composes a couple novel variants on the phrase with what little vocab he has).
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The pattern continues.

The structure of this maze is really haphazard. As he progresses, though, it's fairly consistent that Spheres which contain aliens lead to more Spheres which contain aliens. (Some contain no aliens and very little alien infrastructure. Those ones are still, however, rigged to violently explode.)
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Cam lays relays - after each sphere is safely exploded - and reports in on his progress regularly and updates his map.

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The aliens get increasingly frantic as he goes on; he catches fragments of their terrified yelling.

There is enough context, eventually, to piece together the fact that they're talking about evacuating an inhabited planet.

At least they're not talking about blowing it up?
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That's nice!

Of course, they wouldn't have to evacuate their planet if they would talk to him, but aside from occasionally yelling at them about that Cam's fresh out of ideas.
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In fairness to the aliens, if Cam was not indestructible, their maze of self-destructing outposts and industrial complexes would be a really effective way to cover a retreat.

Time passes. He covers more and more of the maze. Someone manages to sneak around him and blow up some of his relays.
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Well, that's inconvenient. He'll have to go back and hunt down whoever did that and replace the relays and apologize for the interruption in service.

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The people who blew up his relays throw themselves at him and set off the self-destructs on their weapons, mildly inconveniencing him.

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That's mildly inconveient!

Onward.
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Onward and onward. Maze maze maze maze.



This looks like an unusually large Sphere.

Actually, it kind of looks like a planet.

Actually, it kind of looks like a familiar planet.

Also, once he gets clear of the giant crater where the complex housing the portal used to be, no one is shooting at him and nothing is blowing up. There are no more portals in sight.
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"Oh, that makes so much more sense," says Cam.
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"What?"

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"I found a planet. I found a real planet. I found the planet humans come from in my world. You don't have weird physics, you just have a weird magic system which allows pocket dimensions with weird physics. This planet looks perfectly normal if somewhat the worse for wear."

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"Well, that's... strangely plausible," says Azair.

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"Yep. And it's overrun by aliens. I will... wander around watching bits of the Earth self-destruct, I guess."

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"I guess you will."

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And Cam flies around, looking for aliens, possibly evacuating in something he'd like to get a tracking device on.

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It took him long enough to get here that an astonishing number of aliens have already left. Huge sprawling cities cover much of the planet, uncharacteristically failing to explode as he passes over them, largely empty of life.

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This place is just depressing. Poor Earth.

Come out come out wherever you are, aliens.
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No aliens here. No aliens there. No, no aliens anywh—

Aliens!

Cowering terrified aliens, attempting to hide from him, absolutely not shooting at him or blowing themselves up at all whatsoever!
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Yeah you better be cowering and terrified. Just look what you did to the Earth. Cam likes the Earth.

Cam lands.
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These particular aliens are using some unfamiliar words, but it's possible to decipher their yelling as far as, "DO NOT KILL US! DO NOT BEFOUL US!"

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Cam wonders vaguely how his program figured out "befoul", decides this is really not the time to go look at its inference backchain, and fumbles around with his vocabulary until he has his best approximation of "talk to me so I can talk to you".

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Well, he can have lots more frightened yelling, if that's what he's after.

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Does he have the word for 'words'. Is that a thing he has.

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Not yet, no. Although he can tell that the aliens are saying things like "You are frighteningly powerful!" and, again, "Please do not destroy us!" and, for a little variation, "We want to live!"

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Can he say 'I do not intend to kill you unless -'. Or 'you can live if you cooperate'. Or something.

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He doesn't currently have that vocabulary, but the panicked yelling of these aliens is teaching him some new words.

Sentences such as the following begin to come clear:

"The others will destroy us!"

"They will destroy the planet!"

"We are befouled already!"

"I am frightened!"

"We are unclean!"

"I don't want to die!"
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"I don't want you to die," Cam asserts through his translator. He is pretty sure the promises police will not come after him for not incorporating the conditional.

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"You are unclean!"

"Do not [untranslated] the filth creature!"

"The filth creature will kill us!"

"Please do not kill us!"
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"I do not want to kill you," Cam continues.

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"We are unclean! The filth creature has befouled us! We should all die!"

"I don't want to die!"

"What does the filth creature want?"

"How would I know? It's a filth creature!"

"Terrifying filth creature, what do you want?"
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"I want you to talk." He pats his computer. "This can talk to me and it can talk to you. Talk to me."

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More panicked babbling, then one alien says: "I was part of the [untranslated phrase]. I will talk to the filth creature."

It tentatively peers out of the building where it and the others are cowering.

"Terrifying filth creature, I am [untranslated phrase, probably a name]. [More untranslated speech]. Please do not kill us. We don't know what you want. We are very afraid."
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They really don't have any other words they've used for non-evil-alien-people besides "filth creature", do they.

"I want you all to stop killing filth creatures," he says.
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"We are all [untranslated adjective]!" wails one of the more hidden aliens. "The filth creatures will overrun us all and befoul all the inhabited planets and everyone will catch the filth contagion and be killed by the [untranslated plural noun]!"

"Please do not befoul us," says the spokes-alien. "Although the [same untranslated plural noun] will likely kill us anyway."

"[Untranslated adjective]! [Untranslated adjective]! We're [untranslated adjective]!"

"Shut up [profane intensifier]!" says another alien to the one who thinks they're all [untranslated adjective]. The adjective-wailer subsides.
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"What is filth contagion?" Cam inquires.

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"Those who have associated with filth creatures or crossed the filth doors catch the filth contagion," says the spokes-alien. "They [untranslated phrase] like filth creatures, and the [same untranslated plural noun] must kill them before the contagion can spread. This is why everyone in the armies that attack the filth creatures must [untranslated modifier] die before they enter the world-maze. If they returned and spread the contagion across the planet, the [same untranslated plural noun] would have to kill us all!"

"The end of the world!"

"Shut up [profane intensifier], [probably a name]!"
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"Why attack filth creatures? Why not not attack filth creatures?"

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"...They are filth creatures," says the spokes-alien. "I'm not an [untranslated noun]."

"If you were, you wouldn't be talking to a filth creature!" yells yet another alien.

"I would rather talk to a filth creature than die!" exclaims the spokes-alien. "Any who disagree are free to kill themselves!"
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"Filth creatures would rather," (thank you spokesalien) "not be attacked."

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"So would we!"

"We did attack them first."

"No we didn't! That was the army! I've never attacked a filth creature in my life!"

"We here have never attacked any filth creatures," says the spokesalien.
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"And I am not killing you," Cam points out.

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"We're going to die anyway!" wails the one who wails a lot. "The [same untranslated plural noun] will destroy the planet to stop the spread of filth!"

"Shut up [profane intensifier], [name]!"

"Nothing else has stopped this filth creature, why would destroying the planet even help?" someone wonders.

"Tell that to the [same untranslated plural noun]!"

"You tell them!"

The spokesalien has nothing more to add at this time.
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"Who are the [untranslated plural noun]?"

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"[Untranslated] is the opposite of filth," explains the spokesalien. After a bit of digital hemming and hawing, the computer renders its next sentence as: "The purity-keepers maintain purity so that no one is contaminated by filth. This is the most frightening colony planet, because of the filth contagion, but until today there had not been an incident in many thousands of years!"

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"An incident?"

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"A contamination. An incident where someone [verb phrase] from the filth contagion and needed to be killed."

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"[Verb phrase?]"

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"[Untranslated sound]..." says the spokesalien, gesturing vaguely at Cam. It tries a few more phrasings, and the computer finally pieces together: "Grew wings. They had no wings, and then they grew them. Wings are a limb only filth creatures have. People have four limbs, but the filth creatures of this planet sometimes have six..."

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Cam resists the temptation to wave his wings at them. "Why is it filthy to have wings?"

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"Because only filth creatures and those with the filth contagion have them!" says the spokesalien.

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Cam does not have the word for 'circular argument'. He makes a butterfly. "Is this a filth creature, too?"

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"I don't know what that is!"

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"It lived here when filth creatures did. It has wings." The butterfly bats them.

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"I don't know what you mean," says the spokesalien.

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Did they just kill all the butterflies? He didn't get a really close look at the vegetation, maybe it's all alien stuff, maybe they killed the whole biosphere. He flicks the butterfly away. It flies.

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The spokesalien tries again: "It's filthy to have wings because wings are a sign of the contagion. People never had wings until they went near the filth creatures of this planet. People only grow wings because of the filth contagion."

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Cam says into his comm, "Any input on that assertion?"

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"I've never seen an Enemy get their wings. I didn't know it was possible," says Azair.

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"Well, apparently they avoid it literally like the plague. Is there any known wing-related contagion effect among you lot, though?"

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"It is more likely to get your wings if you know someone who already has... I've never heard anyone speculate that it was literally contagious. Anyone can get their wings."

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The voice of a triplet puts in, "If I heard them right earlier, they said they can get the contagion from entering the Spheres. Suranse is a Sphere. If there is a contagion, we all have it."

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"Hmm." Cam translates this as best he can for the spokesalien.

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"I don't understand," says the spokesalien. "Of course the filth contagion comes from the filth creatures. If it didn't, it would not be filth."

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"But not all filth creatures have wings," Cam says.

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"That is known! Wings are not what make filth creatures filthy! Being filth creatures is!"

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"Could a filth creature stop being a filth creature?" Cam wonders.

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"No!"

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"Why?"

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"Because they are filth creatures!"

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"Is there someone smarter I can talk to?"

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The computer finally figures out that that one alien is always wailing, "Doomed! We're doomed!"

"Shut up [several profane intensifiers], [further profanity]!" says the one who always tells that one alien to shut up.

"I - I don't know," says the spokesalien. "Please don't kill me."
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"I don't want to kill you. I don't like killing people. But..." The aliens just call themselves "people", fucking typical. "...wingless people killed a lot of filth creatures - filth creatures," he adds, "are 'humans', and the humans don't want to die. If the humans don't want to die, and they can't stop being filth creatures, they have to kill the wingless people. Wingless people should stop trying to kill humans."

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"I'm not a purity-keeper! I'm a communications equipment repair technician!" says the spokesalien. "I don't have anything to do with whether anyone tries to kill anyone!"

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"Maybe you should repair some communications equipment and find me someone to talk to who does."

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"All the communications equipment here is working, but if you communicate directly with an evacuation ship, the purity-keepers will destroy it to prevent the spread of your filth!"

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"I have noticed that. How much do I have to chase them before they'll talk to me?"

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"They're purity-keepers and you're a filth creature. They won't talk to you. If you talk to them, they will kill everyone present and then themselves."

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"So then all the wingless people left will be..." He gestures at this small terrified group. "You? Who don't want to try to kill anyone?"

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"My [untranslated noun] evacuated already! You'll get them all killed!" says a hiding alien.

"Doomed! Doooomed!"

"Shut up!"

"I don't want the evacuated people of this planet to die," says the spokesalien. "Most of them never killed any filth creatures either."
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"Well, then tell me how to get what I want without them dying."

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"I don't know how to get what you want!"

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"Then," says Cam, "we have a problem."

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"Even if you kill everyone from this planet, the purity-keepers of the other inhabited planets will know. Will you go to all the planets and have the purity-keepers kill everyone until only a handful of befouled cowards are left?"

"Doomed!"

"Shut up!"

"Doomed! Doooooooomed!"

"Shut up [profane intensifier]!"
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"I don't want to. But I will not let anyone who is going to attack humans do that."

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"Are you a human?" wonders the spokesalien.

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"No."

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"Why do you want to [untranslated] them, then? Aren't all the other kinds of filth creature just as foul to you as you are to us?"

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"No. That's a specific problem only you have."

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"But..."

The spokesalien seems to have trouble processing this.

Meanwhile, behind the spokesalien, a scuffle breaks out between the doom-wailer and the doom-wailer-shutter-upper. It continues for a few seconds and then ends in an alien shoving past the spokesalien and barreling out onto the street, yelling about doom.
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Eh. Cam lets it go. It wasn't contributing anything to the conversation.

"Humans don't think you're filthy, or that I'm filthy. I don't think you're filthy, or that humans are filthy. This is a you problem."
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The doom-wailer flees. The spokesalien stutters perplexedly. "But... but..."

And then, from behind Cam: fwm
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Flomp.

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When Cam wakes up:

It is slightly more than twenty minutes later.

All identifiable technological objects on his person have been smashed, and someone has piled miscellaneous heavy trash on top of him, but someone has also put a pillow under his head.

All of the aliens who were cowering here have run away.

His comm relay network is down.
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Damn it.

He wriggles out from under the trash, accompanied by blasts of hot air to push it out of the way, and makes for the portal to go get a string of relays in place and find whoever wrecked them.
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The section of the maze closest to this portal is just as he left it, but three steps in along the fastest route to Suranse, some clever soul has started slathering the ground with some sort of burning goo that produces intense heat and noxious fumes. There are dead aliens near many of the goo puddles, charred and corroded.

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These aliens have terrible workplace saftey standards. Cam overflies it and makes himself air en route for comfort and replaces relays.

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In places where the ground and the portal are close enough together, the goo interferes with relay placement. It melts most things that touch it. He might have to find an alternate route once or twice. And time is ticking.

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Ugh. It's probably faster to just keep layering stuff onto the goo until he finds something it doesn't melt or it runs out of melting capacity than it is to expect alternate routes to be any better. It probably doesn't melt literally every element on the periodic table.

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It melts this and that and this other thing and when this substance touches it, it causes an explosion that spatters the vicinity with noxious burning goo. Also, some layers that aren't melted by the heat are corroded by the fumes. It takes a while to hit on a functioning insulator.

One of the smaller Spheres a little farther along the route is filled with goo. It's oozing slowly out of the portal, but he'd still have to wade through chest-deep goo to cross this one. Odds of successfully bridging it with relays seem low. On the other hand, maybe restoring the network in the maze isn't as important as getting back in contact with Suranse so the Aluvai don't panic.
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Yeah. He just makes air around himself as he wades. It won't kill him or anything but he's not fond of this stuff. Is this napalm? Maybe, he can make some to compare later, whatever, wade wade.

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After that it's all puddles for a few minutes, and then the next Sphere small enough to fill with something has been filled with oily black sand, and the sand then lit on fire.

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Fuck this. Cam is just making a tunnel with air in it and crawling through that.
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The sand is heavy and threatens to collapse his tunnel once or twice, but is ultimately no match for his magic powers.

On the other side: more puddles of napalm-like substance.

Also, it has now been two hours since he was stunned.
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Well maybe they don't have really accurate clocks onward.

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Goo, goo, puddles of goo, another Sphereful of goo, a big heap of burning sand piled up over one of the portals on his route, more goo. Two hours and ten minutes. Two hours and fifteen minutes. Two and a half hours.

At two hours and thirty-six minutes, Cam is dismissed.
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Cam hopes that the one triplet did that on purpose and the aliens aren't just filling the clam planet with napalm.

He's not in particularly tidy shape. Quickest possible shower while they draw his new circle. If they draw his new circle.
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His summoner this time is... a triplet. Looks like the one who's full of artificing trivia, if he's gotten that good at distinguishing triplets.

"Oh good, it worked," he says when Cam appears.
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"Inlaith, for fuck's sake!" exclaims a different triplet from across the room.

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The third triplet is...

...oh.

Well, it does look like he did it on purpose.
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"Oh for fuck's sake, I was stunned for twenty minutes and trying to get past an obstacle course of wrecked relays to get back in touch -" Cam says. "Okay. Who wants to try summoning him."
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"Father went to check his Sphere. We should tell Dalvor we have you back, before anything else."

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"Okay. Fine. Does he have the other end of the comm?"

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"Yes."

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Cam makes a new one. "I'm back. Maze of spheres between here and Earth is full of various nasty stuff, slowed me down, wrecked the relays. Should probably have given me more than two hours the first time relays were wrecked and I was that far away. Anything interesting going on here besides the obvious and creepy?"

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"Mostly politics," says the king. "With you back, I at least won't have to organize a planetwide evacuation into the Spheres, for which I'm very grateful."

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"Yeah, we know how well that worked last time. Any nearby alien activity of any kind?"

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"Not that we've seen. But if they were preparing another assault from the portal, we wouldn't be likely to hear about it until it arrived."

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"Yeah. I'll go check it out. ...First though, you, whichever one you are, try dismissing and resummoning me, there's the circle for you to finish," he makes a new one, "I assume he tried but maybe there's some specific reason it didn't work, the wings or something."

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The indicated triplet nods.

Dismiss dismiss dismiss.
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Pop.

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Resummon!

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"Okay. So if your brother doesn't make it back please hold off on the suicide, I'm going to feel very awkward about that later when I'm not in such a desperate hurry to singlehandedly fend off an alien invasion, where the fuck are we." He looks around.

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"In the palace. Where do you want to be?"

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"At the portal. Which way did I go when I went?"

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"You went from the edge. I think it would be faster to leave through a chasm," says Inlaith. "I could show you the way. Faster than stopping for directions."

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"Okay." Which way out of this building?

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Inlaith leads him toward the door of the room they are currently in.

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And behind them, Ashras says, "Inlaith for fuck's sake...!"

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Inlaith ignores this brotherly advice. He glows brightly and sprouts wings, black-feathered with a silvery sheen, still making for the nearest exit with all speed.

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"What the - couldn't you have just not? For all we know that's why your brother couldn't dismiss me!"

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"Getting one's wings is not traditionally a voluntary action," he says. "As well ask me not to think of a blue giant bat. Ashras was upset when he saw it coming, that's all."

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"You could've avoided it if you'd tried!"

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"I couldn't have tried. Stop wasting time."

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"Ugh," says Cam, but he continues out of the building.

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Inlaith leads him onto an upper-level balcony.

"Anyway, Elarron's right there," he says, pointing at a couple of distant flying figures that might plausibly be Elarron and Azair.
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"Oh good. ...Portal to a daeva realm, that'll be fun." His companion has wings now so Cam just glides to the ground and makes a shuttle that's all done by the time he lands near it. "Hop in."

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In he hops.

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"Do you want to leave a portal here so you can get home?"

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"I opened and closed one on the balcony. It awaits me in my Sphere."

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"Oh. Okay then. Off we go."

And Cam takes off.
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"That way," says Inlaith. "There is a chasm beyond those hills which has room for this vehicle."

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Zoom.

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"I wonder if you are able to get your wings," says Inlaith. "Have you experienced strong feelings of accomplishment since you were first summoned here?"

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"I haven't been dwelling on it. I was pretty pleased when I got a handful of aliens talking to me but I was more impressed with them getting around their psychological barriers for it, I haven't actually performed any tricky feats of diplomacy."

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"This may be an opportunity to find out if past accomplishments qualify, if you have any of those."

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"I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago I Jesus fucking Christ on a stick," Cam suddenly reverts to English as he glows.

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"Congratulations," says Inlaith.

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Cam recovers control of the vehicle. "That was weird!"

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"Was it?"

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"Yes!"

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"I suppose you do lack the cultural context."

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"Yes I do. My wings seem to still be attached to me..." Woggle.

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"What happens if you try putting them away?"

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"What a weird -" There they go. "Well, I need them to balance, so." Out they come. "Please double-check for me they're still indestructible." He holds one out in Inlaith's direction.

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Inlaith grabs the edge of the wing and attempts to put his claws through it. It's actually more indestructible than usual - much harder to injure.

"Is that a sufficient test? I'm not a combat caster, if you want me to throw fire at it I'll need a wand."
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"That does it. Actually, I seem improved on the indestructibility front, lower threshold or something. Nice."

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"Winged ones are hard to hurt."

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"I'm glad that cooperated with rather than replacing my indestructibility or something."

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Shrug.

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"I wonder what your brother wound up being. There's three options."

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"What are they?"

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"Demon like me, angel - they change stuff - and fairy - they move stuff."

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"What governs the selection?"

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"No way to be sure. My suspicion is personal suitedness to the philosophy underlying the magic."

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"Hm. We'll see."

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"...Actually. If he's an angel he'd be really helpful for navigating the horrible obstacle course. I'll mop up whatever force is at the portal and then you can portal back and see."

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"Sure."

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Fly fly.

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Now that they are well clear of the celestial circles, they can see for a long way in the approximate direction of the portal.

Something is glowing over there.

"That looks ominous," says Inlaith.
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"Yes. Yes it does."

Telescope powers activate.
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The portal is wholly obscured by a slowly expanding blob of burning goo. Noxious fumes billow this way and that in the lack of gravity.

"...Should I fetch Elarron?"
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"Yeah, that goo is nasty stuff. You might not want to be around it yourself at all, just send him through."

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"Sure."

He opens a portal, steps through, and closes it behind him.
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A minute later, it opens-and-shuts again, disgorging a differently-winged triplet.

"Something about nasty goo?"
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"Nasty goo! What kinda daeva are you?"

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"How do I tell?"

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"What did it look like when you woke up in the daeva realm?"

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"Bright. Stupidly bright. It didn't even have the excuse of being daytime, the walls were glowing."

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"Okay good you're an angel turn that goo into water!"

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"...Okay?"

He squints at the goo.
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"...It was explained to me as being like parlor tricks only quicker and easier but you probably don't have parlor tricks. It... should be pretty easy once you've figured it out...?"

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"Thanks," he snorts.



Enormous clouds of steam billow from the site of the goo. "Okay, I got some of it..."
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"Yeah, you're not going to be able to handle the same volumes I can as quickly. But however they're generating it they had to haul all their materials through a heck of a maze, I bet you can outpace them. You could turn it into air too but it'll be slower, densities are farther off. You can also outright shrink it and then turn it into water."

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"I can't even really see where it is anymore." He squints at the expanding cloud of combined steam and noxiousness. It clears up until he can see the goo again; then another big chunk of goo turns into water and explodes immediately into steam. Repeat.

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"Here, I'll blow the steam out of your way." Air to the rescue.

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Eventually there is a big blob of water surrounding the portal and no more goo in sight.

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"You wanna shrink that or go for a swim?"

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"Swimming is fun."

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"All right then. I'm expecting more goop and other unpleasantness in the maze, I hacked my way through a lot of it but the aliens have likely re-unpleasanted it by now. You'll get a little quicker with practice anyway."

And he lets the both of them out of the shuttle and leads the way through the blob of water into the portal.
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And Elarron turns unpleasantness into water. And fumes into air.

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Which makes this trip much pleasanter than the one Cam took the other way!

"They got around me while I was on Earth," he says. "So there must be multiple routes through the maze between clam planet and Earth. I didn't check the whole maze. Want to, as long as their current strategy seems to have been 'plug the hole and run like hell'?"
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"Yeah, sounds like a plan."

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So Cam goes down avenues of maze he hasn't visited yet. And drops relays on portals.

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And Elarron ensures that the relays are untroubled by goo. Or burning sand. Why is all this stuff so horrible.

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It's pretty horrible! But Elarron is an angel and things do not have to be allowed to horrible around him.

Map map map.
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Water water water. Some of these Spheres are getting pretty drowned. Whatever, it's not a big problem.

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Yeah, Elarron can go back and shrink the water if anybody wants to use them for any non-aquatic purposes.

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There aren't any live aliens around, anyway, just lots and lots of noxious substances.

It turns out there are multiple portals from the maze to Earth. Five in total. They are all abandoned, and three of them are full of burning goo. Elarron waters it.
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Well. Here they are on Earth.

"Welcome to Earth. I am afraid the aliens killed all the cool wildlife. Didn't know what a butterfly was. But it's still Earth."
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"What's the deal with Earth?"

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"Humans come from Earth. Well, humans come from the Earth I know about, anyway, and since your clam planet turns out to be a Sphere with a maze leading to Earth it seems like a reasonable bet that your lot did too."

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"Huh. I like my planet better," says Elarron, looking around.

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"Well, you're not really seeing Earth at its best," Cam objects, producing his computer and a little slideshow of landscapes and pictures taken from orbit.

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"Eh. You're not going to win me over; it doesn't have an Aluvanna. But it's pretty."

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"Anyway. The place is probably evacuated by now. Lacking the technology for a Star Trek tricorder I can't be positive we're the only people on the planet, but it's my best guess. I wonder," he says, looking skyward, "which way they went. Let's find out."

He makes another shuttle.
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"Sure."

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In the shuttle they get!

Cam gets into space and notes the locations and quantities of space debris (all of alien manufacture) and adds telescopes and has a look.
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His passenger examines the interior of the shuttle and the various displays curiously.

Telescopes show... a perplexing lack of fleeing alien ships.
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"Do they fucking have FTL? How the fuck am I supposed to deal if they have fucking FTL," mutters Cam.
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"What?" says Elarron.

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"They're not in the system. They haven't had time to get to Jupiter, let alone out of the system, if they were limited by the usual speed limit in Normal Physics World, so either they have a method of crossing vast distances instantly that is like but not identical to Spheres because they can't stand having wings, or they have a sort of spaceship that can travel faster than light. Which I want. And can make! But it will be an alien design I won't know how to pilot and I don't know which way they went!"

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"Sounds inconvenient," says Elarron.

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"Rather." Cam aims the ship down at the ground again. "I'm going to play Hilarious Infosec Hazard, you want to stay or go home?"

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"Conjuring everything the aliens said about leaving Earth?" he guesses. "Sounds like fun, but maybe I should go home, there are still members of my family who haven't yelled at me yet."

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"Okay. Relays look to be going undisturbed, but just portal back and have a look if I'm incommunicado, please, don't have your brother commit suicide. You're as indestructible as I am now, you'll be fine if you have to be a one-person search party."

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"Yeah, sure. Do you want to link your Sphere to mine? Makes it easier to find each other, I'd just have to go through the Cam portal and see if you were there."

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"I haven't even looked at my Sphere yet, that's a good idea. How do I... Sphere."

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"It should be pretty easy once you've figured it out," he says dryly, and then laughs. "Sorry. Just - make a portal, it's obvious once you try it."

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"I'm not an angel, all I had on angel powers was hearsay!" defends Cam. But he attempts to portal. Does it happen to be anything like making a thing? Cam knows how to make things...

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It's not all that much like making a thing. But when he thinks about it he can get an unobtrusive mental preview of the size, shape, and location of a prospective portal, and he can alter this preview to his liking and make it a reality. Easy.



Except that there appears to be a pressure differential. Elarron yelps with surprise as air and loose objects, Elarron included, are drawn toward the portal.
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Cam gets slurped off his feet too.

He is familiar with this sensation! He knows what to do about it. Now there's air.

"Oh, that's hilarious," he snorts, once there is enough air to snort in.
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"What," says Elarron.

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"My Sphere was a vacuum! ...Context: Heaven is where angels live and without angelic intervention it's lots of solid glowy fluff like you saw. Fairyland is flat and infinite and has plants and stuff. But Hell, until demons make stuff in it, is nothing."

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"Wow. Okay," says Elarron. "Have fun with your demon Sphere, I guess."

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"It does have gravity, which is... weird but convenient, because I don't have nearly enough room to make something that would generate gravity. Anyway. Do you make the portal to yours or do I?"

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"I do, you just have to let me."

It becomes apparent that Elarron is trying to make a portal, right over there near the edge of Cam's Sphere.
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Cam lets him.

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And on the other side there is: a dimly lit field of grass, with a cute stone house visible close by.

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"Aww, you got a house."

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"I like my house."

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"It's cute. Anyway. I will figure out where the aliens went and how to follow them but it might take me a while."

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"Sure. Keep in touch, I'll come check on you if we lose contact. Off I go to get yelled at by Mom and Ashras."

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"Enjoy."

And Cam steps back onto Earth.

And he starts playing Hilarious Infosec Hazard.

The conversation he had with the aliens was not written but it was recorded. Transcript. (Mostly) known plaintext attack. From there, bootstrap with a computer tower full of the complete written works in that language; it's bulky but he doesn't have to take it anywhere. Process that. He needs to be able to read a spaceship manual.
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There are a lot of written works in that language. The computer gobbles them up and gains a refined understanding of grammar and vocabulary.

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Hooray! This should help it with some of its audio sample, too, he'll be able to utter conditionals and explain to the smartest aliens how shit their game theory is and such!

Right. Any of this look like a faster than light engine plan?
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Yes, some of it does!

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Lovely. And how the fuck do their FTL engines work.

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You point it in a direction and tell it a distance and accelerate for a bit, and then you disappear and reappear having gone that distance in that direction and needing to decelerate again. Not suitable for trips shorter than a couple of light-hours.

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Okay cool. And they hook up to the other bits of a ship like - so. Okay, he can rig up a control mechanism to handle that.

And now he wants a star map of where-all these aliens have gone. And if there's any other sorts of filth creatures who might need defending.
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There are three known species of filth creatures. Two are extinct as is right and proper, and the third is humans.

There are thirty-four inhabited systems in the galaxy, with a population totalling upwards of one hundred billion in all. Evacuation plans indicate that the ships departing Earth mainly went for the dozen or so closest planets.
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Cam pauses for a moment to mourn the extinct species. He makes a note-to-self to go over their written history, sometime.

Is there some way to identify the purity police by looking?
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Purity-keepers wear a very distinctive uniform.

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Great. Cam's tentative plan is to make sure anyone wearing that uniform sprouts wings in a haze of magnesium sparks. They probably don't have a clue lately what a real wing-getting looks or feels like.

He makes sure he knows how to operate the Earth gate into his Sphere, then gets into space and makes a prototype FTL ship and attempts to book it to Saturn to make sure it won't fall apart and strand him outside the galaxy or something.
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It takes some tricksy math to get lined up right for even so short a hop, but: hop. Saturn.

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Hi, Saturn. You're just as pretty as your Hell replica, Saturn.

Okay. He picks a planet the evacuees are likely to have fled to. He sets his computer to tricksy math.

Zoom.
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When he appears near the other planet, nearby alien ships immediately start shooting at him.

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Of course they do. Their weapons disintegrate.

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There is widespread panic. This planet is not nearly as evacuation-ready as Earth was, but they try to evacuate it anyway.

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Cam has lots of language now. He can talk about things like negotiation and so on. He can broadcast it all over the place. "I will keep chasing you until I am satisfied that you will leave humans alone. Running away cannot convince me of that."

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Someone flashing-light-codes "YOU ARE FILTH!" at him; several more ships ineffectually attack.

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Weapons disintegrate. "You cannot kill me, you cannot escape me, you can do what I want or destroy yourselves trying to get away."

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Now they are less with the attacking and more with the fleeing, but nobody is talking to him.

Someone does try to ram his ship, though.
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Ship's disposable. He ejects shortly before impact and makes another one around himself.

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For some reason they take this as encouragement. Anyone not principally engaged in transporting evacuees offplanet tries to ram his new ship.

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That's weird. Well, apart from the FTL engine this is just a little shuttle he can pilot around with video-game precision; he swoops around to avoid them and if he can't he repeats the ejection process.

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Someone makes a skilled and daring substellar FTL hop and materializes almost directly on top of him, obliterating his latest shuttle as well as their own ship.

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Gosh. He will have to fly slightly to get clear of the wreckage and make a new one.

"You really, really can't kill me," he broadcasts.
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A bunch of ships flash FILTH FILTH FILTH at him. There is further panic.



And then...

They do not appear to have accepted their inability to kill him.

Cam, this planet, and rather a large number of ships that couldn't get away in time are all sucked into a black hole.
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Fucking fuck, these fucking aliens!

He can't even save them -

He's just sort of hanging out here on this black hole, feeling like he had way too many cheeseburgers and deprived of his non-indestructible pants, what a day.

Ugh.

He does, however, know a way out of this. He has it prepared in advance.

He surrounds the orbital of the black hole where he's stopped with toenail.

And then he rises up from it on a pedestal of the same.
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This works. Now he is free. What will he do with his freedom?

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Cut his toenails.

Re-acquire pants.

Take pictures of the black hole once the pedestal has crumpled into it.

And make drones aimed at every alien-inhabited planet in the galaxy with FTL engines and a picture of the black hole and a message.
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This alarms the hell out of the aliens, probably. They have FTL communicators but no one is aiming their FTL communicators at him.

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Yeah, of course they're not.

He gives them a little while to talk to each other and confirms that he can find them, yes, all of them, and that the black hole trick won't fucking work. And then he picks one and flies to it.
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This particular planet appears to have had an outbreak of civil war in the last few hours. Lots of aliens are shooting at each other.

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That's interesting. What can Cam determine about who the sides are and which one should suddenly have various problems with all of its everything?

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There is general agreement that the end of the world has come and nothing will ever be the same again. Factions include:

(1) The end of the world means we should all kill ourselves. You first.

(2) The end of the world means we are no longer governed by moral law, so we can do whatever we want...
(2a) ...and I want to go out in a blaze of hedonistic glory.
(2b) ...and I want to have one last [walk in the park/meal with my family/rollercoaster ride/favourite dessert].
(2c) ...and I can't think of anything I want so I'm going to protect the harmless pleasure-seekers from the kill-everyone faction.
(2d) ...and I want to blow stuff up.
(2e) [etc.]

(3) The end of the world is no excuse to give up on moral law, so we should do our best to destroy the all-powerful filth creature even though our efforts are totally futile. Does anyone know how that other planet created its black hole? No?

(4) If everyone would stop trying to kill each other maybe we could figure out something remotely useful to do about the end of the world.

(5) PANIC!
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Cam does not know anything about their metabolisms or he could try overflying the biggest cities and sending them to sleep. At least they don't know how to fucking set off the fucking black fucking HOLE. ARGH.

Hm.

Is anyone particularly sane-looking and useful, based on the communications available to eavesdrop on? Possibly so sane that he could send them a little autopiloted ship and bring them up and have a goddamn conversation?
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Well, there's a few people from faction (4) who seem to be discussing what the all-powerful world-destroying filth creature might want, whether it would be useful to know, and how they might find that out...

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Lovely. Cam would like to be involved in that discussion. He finds out where they are and drops a comm on them.

"Hello."
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There is a little bit of screaming.

But one alien has the presence of mind to ask: "...Are you the all-powerful world-destroying filth creature?"
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"I am the person you're talking about."

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"...What do you want?"

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"I don't want anyone to die. I am really annoyed that you people keep killing yourselves and each other instead of finding out if there is another way to make me leave you alone. However, in addition to not wanting you to die, I don't want the people who live in the weird physics place to die. They're called 'humans'. I want to be sure that you are all done attacking them."

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"Oh, I wish I'd gone into filth studies like I planned to when I was younger," the alien complains. "Do you mean that you don't think of us as inherently disgusting and wrong?"

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"That's right! I don't! The extremely small number of you I have managed to exchange actual words with seem very personable! This is a you thing that other species do not have."

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"Don't you see," this alien says to the others in their little group, "this means filth creatures can cooperate with each other!"

There is a general chorus of "What?" "How?"

"This filth creature almost seems like it wants to cooperate with us," says another alien.

"If we can't even manage to cooperate with other people I don't see how we can expect to get along with a filth creature," says a third.

"Well, which is better: a world with both people and filth creatures, or a world with only filth creatures? Because I think those are our choices," says the first alien.

"An impure life is no life at all..." says the second alien, slowly.

"Come on, if you believed that you'd be out there rioting with the rest of them."
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"That phrase you use for describing people not of your species is really kind of impolite," Cam remarks.

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"What?" says someone.

"Filth creatures are people to themselves and other filth creatures!" says the first alien.

"This isn't the time for your bizarre hypotheticals!"

"It's not hypothetical when the world is ending over it!"
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"I mean, you don't have to learn new words today, this is not nearly as important as the civil war or the identical civil wars probably going on on all your other planets, but it's really hard not to comment on. Do you have any clever ideas for how an indestructible individual with a matter-creation power could get everyone to stop fighting and ideally not commit mass suicide either?"

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"If we knew how to get people to stop having civil wars we'd be doing that instead of arguing about it!" says the third alien.

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"Well, you don't have matter creation powers and aren't indestructible," says Cam. "I've considered just causing all the purity police to grow wings, but I doubt this would actually contain the damage..."

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This proposal gets distressed noises from all the aliens.

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"...and it would offend everyone, yeah."

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"I don't understand how your concept of purity works," says the first alien, "but making the purity-keepers grow wings would not make there be less war."

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"I was thinking it might make there be fewer purity-keepers. I am irritated by the concept of purity-keepers, whose job seems to consist entirely of murder. But it might well do more harm than good."

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"If you want to kill all the purity-keepers, just kill them!" says the third alien. "Don't psychologically torture them into suicide!"

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"The idea was that it would discourage anyone else from attempting to purity-keep. But you do have a point."

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"Panicking purity-keepers are the last thing we need more of, anyway," says the first alien.

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"Yes, you do seem to have too many."

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"It's inconvenient. At this rate I'll never get my paper finished."

"Only you would think of academic publications at the end of the world."

"I'm making some really interesting discoveries about mineral formations!"

"It's a pity the planet isn't being attacked by talking rocks, then you'd be just the expert we needed!"
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"I'm not actually attacking you. I'm just sitting here," Cam points out. "I haven't directly killed anybody."

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"You must have figured out by now that when you do things at people they panic and kill themselves," says the third alien.

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"Yes. But if I don't do things at people, then it seems pretty likely that eventually they'd come back to the weird physics place and kill humans. I'm trying to permanently solve that problem and it's really, really hard to do it when practically nobody will talk to me, let alone open treaty negotiations."

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"I don't know if we can help you," says the first alien.

"I'm pretty sure we can't," says the third alien.
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"Okay. Would you like to be evacuated from the planet while it has its civil war?"

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"...yes," says the first alien, hesitantly.

"Sure, why not," says the third alien.

There is a general consensus on this point from the six people having this conversation. Two of them also want to bring family members.
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"Are the family members going to try to kill me? I'm getting kind of tired of people trying to kill me."

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"My children aren't idiots!" says one of the family-having aliens.

"Neither are my siblings!" says the other.
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"...So either you're calling basically the entire army idiots or you didn't answer my question."

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"A whole lot of people have been acting like idiots today," says the third alien. "Nobody's relatives are going to try to kill you. They're not soldiers or purity-keepers."

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"Okay. Round 'em up and I'll make you a shuttle."

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Everyone collects up their relatives and whatever sentimentally significant objects they can grab. The first alien has what appears to be a bag of rocks.

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Of course.

The ship autopilots up. Cam monitors it to keep it out of the smallish amount of orbital fighting going on.
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The aliens on board argue with each other about the philosophical implications of Cam's existence.

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Of course they do.

"Is there somewhere out of the way you'd like to be stashed or should I make a bigger ship to hold all of us and bring you to the next planet?"
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"It would be absolutely insane to go with you to the next planet!" exclaims the third alien.

"But I don't know where else we would be safe..." says the first alien. "I don't know that anywhere is safe."
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"I could also bring you to Earth, which seems thoroughly evacuated but doesn't have any humans on it to bother you right now."

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"I don't want to go to the filth pit!" exclaims one of the children.

"Hush, dear, it'll be fine," says their parent.

"I'm not enthusiastic about going to the filth pit either, but everyone is probably too busy having civil wars to show up and blast it to ruin," says the third alien. "It might be our best option."

"I'm all in favour of the filth pit, personally," says the first alien.

"You're insane and morally degenerate," says the third alien. "But then, who among us isn't?"
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"There were people of your species living on Earth for years," says Cam. "As far as I know none of them grew wings or anything. If you want to avoid that you should avoid accomplishing things of personal significance, that's the trigger."

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"Oh, there's nothing wrong with Earth as such, if you stay out of the Maze of the Dead," says the first alien.

"It's just that, well... who would want to live that close to something that horrifying if they had another option?" says the third alien.

"Plenty of people. Earth's population was small, but they weren't on the verge of collapse or anything," says the first alien. "And they did have evacuation plans in case something went wrong."

"Yes, and look how well that worked out for them," says the third alien.
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"I could put you in a space station above Earth if you prefer." Cam docks with the shuttle and opens up the doors.

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"It's no different from the surface, really. The contagion only strikes if you enter the maze or associate closely with someone who has," says the first alien.

"Does that mean we're all about to catch it from this filth creature who came out of the maze to destroy civilization?" inquires the third alien.

"Um..." says the first alien.
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"I don't actually originate from the maze," Cam remarks. "I did have to come through it to get here but I don't live in it when I'm at home. Do any of you have names, by the way?"

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"Yes," says the first alien. "I'm Tyastir."

"Soto," says the third alien. "Not particularly enriched by your acquaintance, especially not if you've been in the filth maze of Earth."
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"Well, it is nice to meet you in comparison to most of the other people I have encountered today anyway," says Cam. "Will you need anything in particular to hang out on Earth for a while, or would you rather scavenge from what was left behind in the evacuation than give me a grocery list, or what?"

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"I don't know..." says Tyastir.

"What are you willing to give us?" says Soto.
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"I feel like it would be deeply foolish to arm you and it will take more time than I'm willing to spend at this moment to build you any sort of large complex architectural park. If you want a heap of food, and books to pass the time, I can oblige you as long as I know what you want specifically." To Earth.

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"Food and books seem like a good start..." says Tyastir.

"Who wants to come up with a list?" says Soto.

They start discussing what food and books they want in particular. It comes out that most of these people are really fond of books. Also, one of Tyastir's favourites is out of print.

"And is that going to stop the all-powerful filth creature?" asks Soto.

"I don't know, is it?" says Tyastir.
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"No, I can get you out of print books as long as I have title and author. Also, I have a name too. It's Cam."

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"On second thought, I am enriched by your acquaintance, since I'm probably going to catch the filth contagion and die," says Soto.

"The contagion doesn't kill you by itself," says Tyastir.

"No, it just makes you wish you were dead," says Soto.
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"The extent to which you are bothered by the prospect of having wings you can put away and a pocket dimension you don't have to interact with and a resistance to injury is really puzzling to me," Cam remarks. He decelerates towards Earth.

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"Of course it is, you're already filth, what do you care? It probably looks like a great idea from your perspective. And I note that whenever the subject of you having the contagion comes up, you say things that are sort of reassuring as long as you don't think about them for five seconds," says Soto.

"Stop catastrophizing in front of the children, please," says the parent.

"I'm not catastrophizing!" says Soto.
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"Well, I don't know how to be more persistently reassuring because your applicable concepts don't make sense to me," Cam says. "Sorry about that."

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"So you do have the contagion, and we're all going to catch it and Earth will be a filth pit after all," says Soto.

"I don't know why you're obsessing over this when there's nothing we can do about it anyway," says the parent.

"Personal amusement," says Soto.

"Well, stop," says the parent.

"Besides, if the all-powerful filth creature named Cam cared, they could probably avoid associating with us closely enough to spread the contagion."
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"I've already told you what I know about how to avoid it. I definitely don't know how much exposure is enough to risk it; it's not a thing that happens where I'm from and I only learned about it at all recently."

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"You said we won't grow wings until we accomplish something personally fulfilling, or something like that," says Soto. "Not only will that not help us avoid catching the contagion in the first place, it also sounds tremendously boring."

"Who's insane and morally denegerate now?" says one of the ones who haven't introduced themselves.

"Me, apparently," says Soto.
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"I don't think anybody in this ship knows enough to assume that the contagion works in any particular way."

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"Do you know enough to know whether you have it?" says Soto.

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Sigh. "I have the pocket dimension thing as of recently. I already had the wings before, though."

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"So we might as well embrace insanity now before we start sprouting wings," says Soto. "Tyastir loves filth almost as much as they love rocks, I'm sure they won't have a problem."

"Excuse me," huffs Tyastir.
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Aaaaand here is the Earth. Cam lands and lets the aliens out. "Have you got a list for me?"

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"Yes." Tyastir waves a sheet of paper.

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Cam glances at it, makes an electronic copy for his computer to process, reads over the translation, and makes the things.

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Now they are supplied with food, books, a standard shipping container filled entirely with someone's favourite brand of pillow without which they cannot sleep at night, reputable wilderness survival kits, and other miscellaneous useful and non-weaponlike items.

"Thank you!" says Tyastir.

"I hope you haven't befouled us all and doomed us to the torment of the filth contagion!" says Soto. "But apart from that, you've been very helpful."
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"Well, one does what one can. I will hopefully be back with similar batches of evacuees from other planets. Please don't start murdering each other if one of you accomplishes something."

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"I'd hope we'd all have more sense than that," says Soto.

"Don't be silly, you're far too cynical to hope," says Tyastir.

"True," says Soto.
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"I hope you have more sense than that too. Bye," says Cam, and he's off to another planet which is probably having a civil war.

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The first other planet he tries has actually already stopped having its civil war, on account of someone managed to replicate the black hole trick.

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God damn it.

Next?
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Civil war! The responses to the end of the world here are approximately in line with what was happening on Soto and Tyastir's planet, but there are fewer people having productive discussions and more people defending the rollercoaster rides and romantic dinners from the rioters and omnicidal fanatics.

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That's good of them. Cam... does not think he can productively assist. Do they have any black hole equipment here that he can wreck?

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No. There are multiple competing theories about how the other planets managed the black hole trick in the first place, and much to some people's disgust, this planet doesn't have the facilities to pull off three of them and someone has already wrecked the particle accelerator that would be necessary to try either of the other two.

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Good for somebody.

Next.
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More civil war! On this planet, the "everyone please shut up and let us think" faction is actually winning, partly by loudly reminding everyone else that they are a galactically renowned centre of culture and learning and all this violence is beneath them.

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Oh good! Does he dare contact them... hmmm...

...yeah. He finds where whoever's leading the faction is and drops a comm.

"Hello."
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"What?"

"Who's that?"

"It's the filth!"

"Well, tell it to stop ending the world!"

"I don't think it's going to listen!"
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"I'm not setting out to end the world," Cam says. "If there's something more specific you'd like me to do we can discuss that."

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"Where's that Earth refugee who was studying filth? Someone find the filth student!"

"I think they went to the bathroom..."

"There's a joke in there somewhere."

"Now is not the time, Pyeki."
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"I would love to talk to the Earth refugee who may know more than zero things about the subject," says Cam.

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"Well, you'll have to wait twenty minutes," says Pyeki.

"That was a joke. That person was joking," someone else clarifies.
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"Well, I'll wait whatever amount of time it actually takes your species to go to the bathroom."

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"Fine. Someone please tell me how many planets are still responding," says an administrative type. Someone else starts reading off a list of planets and how recently they have been heard from via FTL communication. It's not looking good overall.

The filth student emerges from the bathroom. "Hey, whatever your name is! We need your expertise!" says Pyeki.

"What?"

"The destroyer of worlds wants to talk to you!"

"What?"
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"Hello!" says Cam. "I really am not destroying these worlds! They destroy themselves and it's actually pissing me off very badly!"

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"Are you... are you from the maze?" asks the filth student.

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"No. I'm from somewhere else. But I came through the maze to get here and I'm working with the maze people."

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"I'm - I'm not prepared for this!" says the filth student, agitated. "We don't know how much contact is required for the contagion to spread! I don't want to talk to you and then spend the rest of my life in quarantine!"

"If that's all it takes..." says the administrative type, glancing uneasily at the comm.

"We don't know!"

"Perhaps we should refuse to speak to the filth until we can find a volunteer."
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"That's all right too but I must insist that you refrain from murdering anyone for having interacted with me even if they do sprout wings."

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"I'm sure it won't come to that. We request no further contact for a period of eight local days while we prepare to interact with you through properly quarantined volunteers," says the administrative type.

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"I can go investigate how the other planets are doing first but it probably won't take me eight local days and I'm not an especially patient sort."

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"Is it threatening us?" the administrative type asks the student.

"I have no idea! My primary focus was architecture!"
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"I'm not going to attack you, but I very badly want to get this entire mess over with and that means having a conversation."

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"Filth creature, by communicating with us against our wishes you are risking contaminating us with a contagion that causes extreme distress often to the point of suicide," says the administrative type. "If it broke loose on this planet, it could destroy what little stability we have been able to maintain. We ask that you stop and give us eight days to construct proper quarantine protocols."

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"I don't think that would really take eight days. You could just find a volunteer and launch them into space for me to rendezvous with. I wonder if you're thinking of doing something else."

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"Eight days is a generous margin but it's not at all an unreasonable estimate for how long it would take to replicate the quarantine system from Earth," says the filth student. "And the quarantine system from Earth is the only method we know must be effective."

"Not to mention we are still being routinely attacked by rioters and degenerates," says the administrative type. "Filth creature, if you truly wish to avoid destroying any more planets, go away and come back in eight days."
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Sigh.

Cam finds out how long the local day is and tries another planet.
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The local day is twenty-two point three hours by Cam's reckoning.

The next planet has been thoroughly overrun by rioting. The amount of communication he can intercept is not enough to give him a clear picture of anything other than lots of people engaged in lots of violence.
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These fucking aliens.

Next?
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On the next planet, nobody figured out the black hole trick but someone got their hands on enough powerful explosive weapons to blast every population center down to bedrock, their own included. No survivors are evident.

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Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Cam continues going through planets.
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Destroyed, destroyed, fallen to rioting and chaos, destroyed, destroyed, figured out the black hole device and waited until he actually showed up before they set it off...

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And now Cam has to pedestal out of another black hole, great.

This would be an unqualified disaster if the only players involved were him and this species of alien. But they were mid-third-genocide when he got here. There probably are not exactly four sapient species in this universe. They have to cope or - not cope. If they're not coping now at least they didn't generate another dozen planets' worth of - of art and history and small children to blow up first.

Next -
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The next one has only been half bombed out, and it's clear that there are survivors, but they're not using communications equipment he can spy on easily.

The one after that, apparently, is the ancient home of a secret cult who have taken the opportunity to seize power and start ritually sacrificing purity-keepers in gruesome ways. Apart from the ritual sacrifice problem, this is actually one of the most stable planets he's seen so far.
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...Okay. He says hello to the cult.

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The cult says:

"It's the Destroyer! The Destroyer has come!"
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"I'd rather be called Cam."

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"What are we to do now?"

"Do we dare communicate with it?"

"I'm not talking to it."

"Let's wait and see what it says."
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"It says it would be nice if you could stop murdering people."

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"Heresy!"

"That doesn't sound like the Destroyer at all. Maybe it's a trick."
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"The whole destruction thing is a big misunderstanding," Cam says. "If there is something - not a person, please - which you would like me to destroy as a demonstration that can be arranged, though."

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"Well, something just brought about the end of civilization as we know it."

"If the voice didn't do it, I say we ignore the voice."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"Agreed."

"So be it. Let us all ignore the strange voice."
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"Your civilization is really stupid and ended itself as soon as another person it couldn't kill came along."

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The cultists, having decided to ignore him, proceed unanimously with this plan.

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"If you don't want a filth creature to land among you, I recommend chatting."

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This does not seem to provide them with sufficient incentive to abandon their plan.

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"Right, here I come."

Here he comes.
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Atmospheric traffic directors warn him in flashing-light code that he is making an unauthorized approach which is disruptive to local vehicles.

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Cam can't actually read flashing light code, but he will do his best to avoid traffic.

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He is met on the ground by an extremely disgruntled traffic control employee escorted by two armed guards.

"You!" the disgruntled officer yells at the exterior of his shuttle. "Can you not read flashcode at all? Today of all days! I'm confiscating your vehicle for unsafe maneuvers!"
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Cam hops out. "It's all yours," he says. "I can just make another."

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"That is not the point! You're behaving disruptively!"

One of the guards says, "Um, Officer Eitamek..."

"Yes, I can tell they're filth! I have eyes!" snaps Officer Eitamek. "Filth or not, I require them to obey all traffic regulations in this jurisdiction!"
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"Well, I would have been happy to file a flight path, Officer, but the people I was talking to decided to ignore me," says Cam, "so I didn't know how, and I didn't know to expect to have lights flashed at me so I didn't have computer translation set up for it. Please feel entirely free to impound the vehicle."

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"If I impound the vehicle and you make another one and fly off in it, I have not solved the problem of your disruptive behaviour!" says Officer Eitamek.

"Um," the guard repeats.

"If someone else wants to make war on the filth creature, they can wait in line. I am an atmospheric traffic control officer and my concern is ensuring that they do not continue disrupting my airspace with their unauthorized flight paths!"
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"...So, I'm not allowed to leave the planet?" clarifies Cam.

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"You are not allowed to operate a vehicle in my airspace until you have demonstrated a satisfactory understanding of the relevant rules!"

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"So if I leave the planet I have to do it with my own two wings," Cam re-clarifies.

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The atmospheric traffic control officer makes a gesture that probably conveys immense frustration.

"Do you understand the purpose of my directives?"
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"I assume you're trying to prevent midair collisions?"

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Officer Eitamek makes alien facial expressions. "Only as an absolute minimum. When the system is functioning well, there are no midair collisions and no one fears that there might be. All vehicles in my airspace proceed to their destinations in comfort and security. Tell me, do you believe that comfort and security will be the feelings experienced by a local pilot who sees a winged filth creature flapping past their viewport?"

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"No, probably not. ...So I'm not allowed to leave the planet? Until, what, you personally have taught me local airspace regulations?"

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"Can your filth magic not provide you with the relevant handbooks and manuals? And if you wish to leave the planet while you are still unable to obey flight regulations in my airspace, I will fly you to orbit myself."

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"That's very kind of you!" says Cam. "I appreciate that. I can produce handbooks and manuals too but it's easier if I have title and author."

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Officer Eitamek names the most recent edition of the local flight regulations handbook.

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"Thank you," says Cam, producing a copy and tucking it into his computer. "I'll read that before I attempt to fly away."

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"Good," says Officer Eitamek. "As long as that's understood."

They turn to leave. Their guards sidle nervously after them.
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And Cam proceeds to the cultists.

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The building containing the ruling council he was bothering earlier is heavily guarded! The guards do not look inclined to allow filth visitations at this time.

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"Hi!" says Cam to the guards. "I hear you're supposed to ignore me. That means that if you react to me trying to enter this building you'll be disobeying the consensus. I'm not sure what sort of consequences that has but I bet they're not designed for your comfort!"

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The guards confer briefly with one another and with their communication devices; then someone says, "A representative has been summoned! Do not approach!"

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Ooh, a representative! Cam stops and waits politely. He's in a good mood. That Officer Eitamek only made two and a half racist remarks over an entire conversation! And was angry at Cam over air traffic control regulations!

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A few minutes go by. Someone dressed like an Important Cult Member emerges from the building.

"Filth creature! What is your business here?"
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"You were ignoring my calls so I thought I'd come down in person."

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"That does not answer my question!"

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"Oh. In a broader sense, my business here is that your civilization is collapsing and I would like to see if any of it is salvageable and compatible with people other than your species continuing to be alive, and do my best to help salvageable parts survive."

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"In that case, go away, we have everything under control."

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"I also want you to stop murdering people, which you seemed to be doing when I looked."

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"What?"

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Cam pulls up some of the video he took of the ritual sacrifice. "Ring a bell?" he asks, displaying it.

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"Oh, the sacrifices. Those are necessary. They'll all be over with in a few hours."

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"Why are they necessary?"

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"Because that is what the prophecies dictate."

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Can Cam find these prophecies in his corpus of information?

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He cannot.

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"And what are the prophecies?"

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"Not your business."

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"Then I see no reason not to interfere with with carrying them out," says Cam.

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"Ugh," says the Important Cultist. "Why?"

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"Because a lot of people have died today, entirely too many, and while if you absolutely have to kill people your choice of targets is not bad, I doubt very much that you absolutely have to kill people."

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"...Are you or are you not the same entity who brought about the collapse of our civilization in the first place?"

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"Yes," sighs Cam. "Yes, I am. Your civilization was rigged to explode as soon as it met someone it couldn't kill, and it can't kill me."

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"Well," says the cultist, "if you want to promote a new order that isn't interested in exterminating filth creatures, go away and leave us alone. If you want to destroy us too, I suppose I can't stop you."

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"I don't want to destroy you but under the circumstances I can't trust you, so leaving you alone will have to wait until I know more about what you're up to."

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"What do you propose to do, then?"

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"I want to learn more about what you want to do, if it's not 'destroy filth creatures'. And I would like you to stop killing people. Maybe they're all so obsessed with purity that they'll kill themselves, but if you help them that seems like it risks bycatch of some who do not in fact want to die."

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"Many who demonstrated the ability to function in the new system were spared," says the cultist. "If you will not accept reasoning on theological grounds, consider the practical. Who's to say that if the purity-keepers were all spared, they would not conspire to arrange a counter-revolution?"

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"So you don't think you can hold order under conditions where organized dissent exists?"

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"Perhaps you can't tell, but we are holding order!"

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"Of course you are. This planet compares very favorably to the black holes. But you don't seem to think you could keep doing it if you didn't kill the purity-keepers?"

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"Eliminating them reduces the risk of instability."

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"Are you going to keep killing people if they don't like how you run things?"

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"Of course not! The prophecies only call for sacrifices in the initial transition."

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"Please just tell me what the prophecies say. This conversation will go faster that way."

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"In the realm of public action the prophecies direct that we must sacrifice the purity-keepers on the first day. After that, their former functions will be taken over by related institutions or abandoned as unimportant. Their contribution to maintaining public health was more ceremonial than practical anyway."

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"Okay, and how do you know that this is the first day? What is it the first day of?"
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"...It's the first day of our rule, which we know because we observe that we have taken over the planet?"

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"So you were just being opportunistic and your prophecies don't mention me at all?"

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"I am uninterested in discussing theology with you."

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"Then why are you the representative?"

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"Why do you expect to discuss theology with the representative?"

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"Well, a theological interest group seems to have taken over the planet," Cam points out.

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"Do you want to discuss theology or do you want to discuss policy? The two are different."

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"Most things about the way your species is motivated are very strange to me. We could potentially discuss policy without touching on theology but I won't know why I should expect you're not telling me blatant lies. Incorporating the details of your apparently theological motivation would make telling me blatant lies harder."

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"I am not telling you lies. Anything I say about our policy is knowledge available to the public."

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"Okay. Tell me about your policy then."

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The representative makes alien facial expressions. "What about our policy?"

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"What is it? Where can I read all this publicly available information? I've been informed that I have to comply with local air traffic control; does any of the other policy apply to me?"

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"You have no place in our society and no understanding of our system, so the same information that is available to everyone else would do you little good," says the representative. "Traffic regulations are an example of the sort of thing that has not changed at all, and also an example of a rule you are required to follow. Besides that, and because you in particular are a filth creature, for public peace of mind you are encouraged not to bother anyone who does not willingly approach you."

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"Okay, but I didn't just want examples, I wanted a more comprehensive list. I am also especially interested in your dispositions towards other sapient species you might encounter who are more vulnerable than I am."

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"This is a very frustrating conversation," says the representative.

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"Yes, I noticed that," says Cam.

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"I will fetch a replacement representative who is more difficult to frustrate," says the cultist. They go back into the building.

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Cam waits.

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A different alien in less fancy clothes emerges a minute later.

"Hello!" they say. "I am Assistant Coordinator Sikyal Tegati. Could you please explain the difficulty you had in communicating with the previous representative?"
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"They didn't want to explain to me the things I wanted explained and seemed to find me personally irritating in addition to the standard amount of disgust I have become accustomed to."

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"Which things did you want explained?"

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"My fundamental problem here is that your species seems generally disposed to kill anyone else it meets, has done it twice and was working on doing it a third time when I showed up, and absolutely has to stop. While I very much wish that the prospect of having to stop wasn't so distressing that several planetsful of you have sucked themselves into black holes, it still has to stop. I am more than happy to leave any of you who can exist in the same multiverse as other sapient species alive and, even, eventually, alone, but it's very hard - considering your collective track record - to trust that you're going to build a stable culture which doesn't hold as a central value killing everybody it runs across. So I'm trying to figure out the moving parts of the culture this planet's recent revolution is trying to implement, so I know if it's safe to leave alone or if in a little while it will construct a war machine and kill some innocent people, the sort in the sphere maze or some new species you haven't encountered yet."

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"...I think I understand," says Assistant Coordinator Sikyal Tegati. "And I think I understand why the previous representative was having so much trouble. The previous culture is something that every person in the world understands, so every explanation of the new culture relies on that understanding. But I don't think you have that understanding. Do you?"

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"Right. I mean, I have a lot of documents but I've been running around trying to intercept people before they suck their planets into black holes so I haven't stopped to read them all."

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"So, I will do my best to answer any questions you have, but it might be difficult, and we will both need to be patient. I apologize for being unprepared to explain society to an outsider."

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"That's okay, there wasn't a lot of warning beforehand. So. To what extent should I believe that this planet, at least, is not going to launch any further attempts at xenocide, and why should I believe that?"

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"The destruction of the previous civilization came about because they were unable to cope with an outsider they could not eradicate," the assistant coordinator says earnestly. "But there is no rational basis for the eradication of outsiders! The existence of any thinking beings other than ourselves is supposed to be a fundamental moral wrong, but that is the mindset that led to planetsful of people sucking themselves into black holes. We don't have to think that way anymore, and if we do, we'll die."

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"That's very rational of you!" remarks Cam. "And how did you seemingly alone of your species in general come to this conclusion?"

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They make an alien facial expression.

"It's... very hard to secretly go against societal consensus," they explain. "Even if you know you're doing the right thing. I can't imagine how hard it must have been for the first of us, before there was a whole second society to take part in."
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"Why is it so hard?"

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"Even when you know better, it often feels at least a little like you're, I don't know, breaking quarantine... I suppose maybe you don't have the same reactions we do, so perhaps you don't understand."

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"I've got a loose picture, but breaking quarantine is not a paradigmatic taboo among my people."

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"Oh. ...Are you all unable to get sick or die?"

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"My species is, some people who I consider part of my culture do though."

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This renders the alien temporarily speechless.

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"Which part of that is surprising?"

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"How can a species survive any length of time without proper respect for public health...?"

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"...Maybe they have better immune systems than you, or fewer infectious diseases, or they reproduce faster."

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"We have eradicated the majority of diseases - the ones we've encountered, I mean. But before modern medicine... I really can't imagine it."

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"Well we have modern medicine now, too, but still managed without killing unfamiliar tribes literally every time they ran into each other before that. I mean, we had wars, but not that thoroughly."

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"We didn't go around killing strangers of our own species in primitive times! Not if they looked healthy. And sick people often went somewhere isolated to kill themselves even before someone else could do it."

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"Kin selection," speculates Cam, "for suicidality on sickness, which extends for some reason to suicidality on meeting other species... even though it would have to be one heck of a disease to jump the biosphere barrier."

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"I'm not personally acquainted with the theories, but I think something like that is the explanation for why people kill themselves when they feel like they've been irretrievably befouled," says the assistant coordinator. "But the categorization of other sapient species as automatically filth is a separate thing. Ideological rather than biological."

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"That's promising. How'd it get so widespread?"

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"...It's very hard to go against societal consensus. The purity-keepers of thousands of years ago made a decision, and their decision became the standard for all of civilization."

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"Why is it so hard to go against societal consensus?"

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"Societal consensus is important. It's how quarantine procedures are decided. If people habitually rebelled against established rules, we would have all died before we ever got around to inventing vaccines."

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"Okay... but why does your entire civilization pretty much have just one societal consensus?"

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"I'm not a historian; I don't know how it came about. But once it was true, of course very few people were going to do what we did. We might even be the only planet where something like this happened."

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"Only one I've found, though I haven't checked them all and one of them wanted eight days to set up a quarantine before talking to me."

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"I expect they're worried about catching the contagion."

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"Yes, I expect so. Is worrying about sprouting wings, which is not a disease, also ideological?"

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"It's known that the wing contagion comes from the - Earth maze people, so treating it that way is an extension of treating outsiders as automatically unclean. But even if it weren't... I think unexpectedly growing new limbs would be very upsetting for most people."

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"Well, I'd suggest doing it expectedly instead but somehow I don't think it'd help. Congratulations on not calling them filth creatures!"

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Assistant Coordinator Sikyal Tegati makes an alien facial expression. "Thank you. If we understood how it worked, and if people were used to thinking of growing wings as normal, then maybe... but we don't and we aren't."

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"There's the planet that wanted eight days... and the ongoing civil wars... and a handful of people who I extracted from a civil war to wait it out on Earth... and you guys. And the places I haven't checked. Do you suppose that from this starting point your society could learn to live with the idea? Because otherwise it's going to be very hard to humanely supervise you and I don't think leaving you unsupervised is the best plan for the next while as things settle out."

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"This planet will be fine," they assert. "We succeeded in establishing a new consensus. Even if the wing contagion got loose here... we would have a hard time, but I don't think there would be many deaths. I don't know anything about how the rest of the planets are doing."

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"Haven't been talking to them?"

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"Someone might be checking the interplanetary communication devices, but it isn't me and I don't know what they're hearing."

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...Cam produces transcripts of recorded conversations between this planet and other planets since the end of the world.

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Nope.

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"Well, if they have been they weren't recording. How do you anticipate that going? What if your societal consensus is outnumbered?"

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"I've heard enough to believe we have by far the most stable and functioning society," they say. "If we're lucky, maybe more planets will decide to join our consensus."

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"And if they don't?"

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"Then I don't know what will happen."

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"Well, I suppose it would be unreasonable to expect you to be an oracle. About all those purity-keepers you're prophesied to kill..."

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"What about them?"

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"Is it really necessary to kill them?"

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"...It would be really disruptive to stop. And there's only another hour or so left in the ritual sacrifice period."

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"The amount of time it is taking you to accomplish this is not the thing that's bothering me."

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"There probably isn't enough time to convince the right people to stop sacrificing purity-keepers in time to save any purity-keepers from being sacrificed, and if you somehow did anyway, it would still be really disruptive. It would... it's... the point of sacrificing the purity-keepers, and doing it in this way... it's that now the time of purity-keepers is over for good and we don't have to go around killing people anymore. And the message is being successfully communicated. Suddenly deciding at the very last minute not to kill the purity-keepers after all... well, people might get the idea that we weren't taking the 'not killing people anymore' part seriously. It would damage the consensus. And it's a good consensus."

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"Are you cognizant of the irony of announcing that it's time to stop killing people by killing a bunch of people?"

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The alien makes an alien facial expression.

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"I can't actually read your body language at all."

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"It's hard to explain things to you and I don't think I'm doing a very good job but I don't think there's anyone else who could do better."

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"Look, if you think killing all the purity keepers is definitely the only next step that will do the trick I don't have nearly enough information to contradict you, billions of people have already died today and these ones aren't special to me in any positive way, but you seem like the least pro-death faction of your species I have run into and I'm just wondering if it seems weird to you that this project of minimized death kicks off with lots of ritual murder."

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"I don't understand what else you think we could have done. I'm not happy that we're killing the purity-keepers, but it's working, and that's important. So unless you have the power to go back in time and destroy civilization over again until it works out in a way you like, I don't know what good it will do to analyze the aesthetic characteristics of the choice."

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"I don't consider death in general an aesthetic matter, unless my computer translating is glitching."
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"Is 'irony' not an aesthetic characteristic?"

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"Yes, but I didn't remark on it because I wanted to share my literary appreciation with you. I remark on it because I don't understand what principled distinction your faction draws between purity-keepers and other potentially appealing targets of violence. Do you want to kill any surviving purity-keepers on other planets? If their elsewhere employed loved ones try to save them or get revenge what's the stance on that?"

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"The ritual sacrifice of purity-keepers as laid out in the prophecies is a very specific and limited thing. Any purity-keepers found here after the sacrifice period will be rehabilitated, or allowed to commit suicide or leave. Anyone who tries to interfere with the sacrifices is an ordinary person committing an ordinary crime, and the same with someone who tries to harm the people who carried out the sacrifices after they're done."

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"Well, nobody told me what the contents of the prophecies were," Cam points out. "What's the rehabilitation process like? How do you handle ordinary crimes?"

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"I don't know a lot about those things, but the biggest change we've made is that killing people for crimes or purity violations isn't a part of the system anymore."

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"Can you tell me more about the prophecies?"

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"The prophecies themselves are secret, but their policy effects aren't. They dictate that during the first quarter-day of the new order we must ritually sacrifice the purity-keepers, and then afterward all the things the purity-keepers used to do are either someone else's job or not done at all. And the killing-people parts are one of the things that now aren't done at all."

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"Why are the prophecies secret?"

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"That's theological. Secrets are ritually important. But the idea is that there's supposed to be a clear separation between theological things and governmental things; no one is supposed to need to know the contents of the prophecies in order for the new society to work."

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"I suppose that's reasonable as religions go. I'm about set to leave you guys to it until I've checked out the other planets and talked to the maze people. Anything I should know before I go?"

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"I don't think so. Good luck!"

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"I can either make a portal or I can try to figure out Officer Eitamek's flight regulations so I can leave without disrupting air traffic. I'm not actually sure whether it's preferable to have me around for another hour or so to avoid having a portal here."

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"I think having a portal here would probably be disruptive. But I could have a vehicle summoned to take you safely to orbit, if that's all right with you."

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"That's fine by me too."

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"I'll do that, then."

After a brief interaction with a communication device, they report, "A shuttle and pilot will be here in just a minute."
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"Thank you, Sikyal."

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"You're welcome."

The shuttle and pilot arrive. The pilot is disinclined to chat, but perfectly functional at getting Cam into orbit and past the planetary traffic zone.
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That is all Cam asks.

He gets politely away from Cult Planet and portals into his Sphere and tries to open the portal to Elarron's.
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It works!

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Nobody's home, but is that portal back to Suranse open?

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It is. Here he is just a short distance downslope of the palace on its hill.

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Cam flies palaceward to look for triplets/king/other.

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The first palace guard he encounters is happy to direct him to the current location of the king, which seems to be: doing paperwork at a desk.

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"Hey, thought you might like a status report. A lot of aliens have self-destructed but others are having civil wars and one planetful has been taken over by a cult theologically opposed to killing other species."

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"That seems like an acceptable outcome."

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"I haven't checked all of their planets yet. And one of them wants eight days to set up quarantine procedures before they'll voluntarily talk to me. Unless you have any questions I can go look in on the rest of them now."

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"I think my curiosity can wait until you're finished with the initial survey, but thank you for the update, I appreciate it."

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"No problem."

Back through the Spheres and on to the next planet.
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Widespread rioting!

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Any voices of sanity?

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Not that he can detect.

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...Does anything productive happen if he drops a speaker on a smallish riot and suggests that they calm down?

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They freak out harder and assault it vigorously.

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Oh well.

Next planet?
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Next planet! ...is devoid of life because it bombed itself to death.

There are a few more of those - rioting, civil wars that don't look like they would benefit from intervention, planets destroyed by various means. He's getting toward the end of the list now.

The third-to-last planet seems to have reached some kind of functioning equilibrium. There are no riots currently going on, and when he arrives they send him a message using flashcode instead of attacking on sight. Granted, the message they send is "Filth! Leave us in peace!", but it's not accompanied by violence!
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...Cam goes back to Cult Planet and asks if they have any diplomats/missionaries handy.

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Assistant Coordinator Sikyal Tegati is happy to scare up a small diplomatic team. Where would he like them sent?

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That planet he was just at! It's stable-looking but doesn't care to talk to him and he has alternatives now!

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The diplomats go forth.

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Cam checks on the last couple planets while they get underway.

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The second-last planet is doing the rioting thing, and the very last planet of all traps him in a black hole again.

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Does the cult have any ideas for handling riots and wars?

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Sikyal, having become more informed since last he talked to them, explains that outreach is their planet's second priority after securing their own stability, and their planet will be communicating with the other planets and sending out more teams in a couple of days when things have settled down slightly.

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Fair enough. He'll go back to Earth and pick up the evacuees if they'd like to go to Cult Planet.

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The evacuees have found some non-evacuated Earth locals and set themselves up pretty comfortably, but they're very willing to move to Cult Planet rather than take their chances on no one else happening to remember that Earth exists and deciding to go bomb the shit out of it.

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To Cult Planet with them! Can Sikyal send up a shuttle?

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Yes! Here is a shuttle to collect the assorted refugees.

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Thank you, shuttle. Thank you, Sikyal.

How long until the eight days that one planet wanted are up?
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Sikyal is happy to help.

There are seven days to go! Cam has been pretty quick about all this.
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...Cam asks Sikyal if the cult could benefit from conjured ships or equipment or anything in their attempt to spread.

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Yes, certainly. Just wait ten minutes or so and they can have a nice tidy itemized list for him.

Here is a nice tidy itemized list. There is a clearly marked separate section for weapons and weapon-containing things, in case he is reluctant to provide those and would rather skip the whole section.
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How polite! He likes the cultish aliens enough that he will give them any weapon-containing things large enough to contain a tracking device!

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Everything on the list is large enough to contain a tracking device in theory; most of them are large enough for him to be able to stick the tracking device somewhere they probably won't find it immediately, if he prefers to hide said devices.

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Yeah, that seems like the right balance of trust on this occasion.

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Well then. The cult planet will happily take receipt of their conjured goods, and Sikyal will thank Cam for his help.

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"You're welcome."

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"Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with! We are interested in cooperating."

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"I think right now the thing to do is try to calm the unstable planets down and send envoys who aren't me to that one that wanted eight days, which you seem to have in hand. At some point I will ask the humans if they want Earth back, but I don't know if they will, they don't remember it."

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"Okay," says Sikyal. "Well, I'll be here whenever you want to speak to us again."

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"I appreciate that."

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"I'm glad I can help!"

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Cam goes back to Suranse again and updates the king.

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"I think I approve of this cult."

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"I do too!"

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"Well, thank you for destroying the Enemy."

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"If that's what you want to call it."

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"The problem seems to be pretty thoroughly solved. What are you planning to do now?"

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"Keep an eye on the cult's attempts to stabilize their society. Probably conjure up the previous genocides' various records so they can be memorialized and studied. Do you want Earth back?"

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"I can't imagine what I'd do with it. The Ceirene might feel differently, of course."

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"I suppose at some point I should meet them too."

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"You might find them harder to deal with. They change their system of government every several centuries, I can hardly keep up."

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"The entire system or just the head of state?"

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"Oh, they don't currently have a head of state. The rulers of each province jointly form a council that oversees matters affecting the exterior of the planet as a whole, and decide their policies by vote. I'm expecting them to notice how inefficient this is sometime in the next few decades and come up with a new, even less efficient system a few decades after that." He pauses. "That was me mocking them for personal amusement; they do seem to be mostly floundering in the direction of a robust and functional government, with a few steps backward every now and then."

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"Voting-based systems are very popular where I'm from."

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He shrugs. "It's not a bad idea in principle, but you have to watch out for the details."

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"I suppose you get around a lot of the traditional monarchy pitfalls with the immortality thing."

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"Yes. I've been king of Aluvanna longer than any of my subjects has been alive. I fancy I've improved with practice."

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"One hopes. Anyway. The cult aliens seem downright friendly. I don't know if they'll want to have extensive diplomatic/academic/etcetera contact with you lot but if they do can you put something together, and how should I go about meeting some Ceirene?"

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"That depends. You could just fly out of the planet and say boo, but that might turn out to be a slow and frustrating path. On the other hand, if you allow me to introduce you, you suffer the association of having been introduced by an Aluvai. Perhaps I should have Kyralaine pass you along. Have you met her? You've met her boys, that much I do know."

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"I have not met her, as it happens."

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"She's a Ceirene woman with an utterly brilliant mind who, happily for the future of my country, got it into her head to marry Azair Kevarsin and have brilliant babies together."

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"I'd be delighted to be introduced."