"Fertilizer, like livestock droppings, is low-tech. Hydroponics? That lets you stack things, is basically growing plants directly in water. I know some soil science, a pretty good amount about farming - crop rotation is a big thing, replenishes nutrients in the soil, nitrogen fixers and all. I don't know your plants but chemistry can't be that different. Genetics might make breeding better plants easier, too, but I only half remember that."

"We grow plants directly in water already but I take it you mean something besides farming seaweed. How do you rotate crops?"

"Okay, so, plants need food and water same as animals, and part of their food they get from the soil. There's a bunch of different types of plant foods in the soil, and different plants eat different things. Like, corn, corn's hungry and eats up nitrogen - one of the soil-things - and if the soil runs out of nitrogen the corn won't do so well, and eventually the field goes barren. But beans have germs on their roots that make nitrogen for them, and they make more'n they use so when they die a whole bunch is put in the soil. So if you plant corn in the field one year, then beans the next, and keep rotating them, the soil won't run out of nitrogen. If you don't know what eats what and what produces what, you can also leave a field fallow for a year, with the useless stuff from last year's harvest still on it so it'll compost. Rotating stuff also makes for less root disease. I think a four-field system was a big part of the agricultural revolution? You got, like, something like corn, something like beans, a fodder crop, and something for grazing, so you're putting livestock on one or two of the fields too, which's helping the soil. If you've only got a coupl'a fields, you can companion plant, like beans and corn and squash all together, that's does a decent job, too."

"I don't know what livestock is and most of what we grow on land lives for more than a year, it's mostly trees and bushes. And by Forth's kindness we rarely need to replant everything at once. What sort of companion planting would you do for our woods?"

"Uh. Okay. Livestock is animals used for meat, eggs, milk, wool - like, chickens are great, goats are great, lotsa people have cows. Chickens are a ground bird, you could probably catch some wild ones and just keep them penned up, breed them to lay more eggs over time. I - do not know how to get from wild herd animals to cows and goats, most wild herd animals will probably not put up with being milked. And orchard planting - at home there's magic music, makes the apple trees better, but here... Forest farming's a thing, there's extra stuff you can put in the shade to supplement a diet, but trees don't usually strip the soil the same way grains do. Irrigation might help, though, especially if you have drought years, that's ways of getting water from where it is to where you need it without just picking it up in buckets."

"Uh. If you wanna feed a lot of people, annual crops are really the way to go, you want grasses that have easily-accessed edible seeds, then you breed them to have better seeds and plant them somewhere it's easy to get to them for harvest. Or find a plant with an edible root, breed that to be a bigger root over time, that's how we got potatoes I think."

"With the water - do y'all do water husbandry? Like, penning up a whole bunch of fish and feeding them so you have fish all the time, I think I know how to make a fish trap that a fish can swim in but have trouble swimming back out of."

"There are people who farm seeds like that, but they trade with us for what they don't grow, I'm not sure we'd be better off copying them. But we could definitely use a fish trap. How does it work?"

"You might could trade them the information I have, but yeah." And they explain the fish trap, which mostly relies on fish being dumb - you have a bottle or a basket or even just a giant fenced off area, with an opening like a funnel, so the part facing the water's wide and the part facing the trap's narrow, and then the fish goes in and can't figure out how to get back out. There's fancy things you can do with - probably reeds here - where you angle them so the fish can push through, but they snap back together and are closed from the other side. Baiting the trap makes it more likely the fish will enter.

"We'll certainly try that. Thank you."

It's not long before she calls a halt to the clam-digging.

"You don't have to help cook," she tells Blair. "Carel is probably ready for you, she tends to overestimate how long anything will take her."

"Alright, thanks."

And on to recite everything she can dredge up or half-remember about science and technology, drawings included. (They are pretty good at drawing, and their geometric style lends itself well to diagrams. Their drawings seem to be more - it's intuitively obvious what they mean, as if they're ready to leap off the page, and you barely need to read the labels and accompanying text to figure them out).

"Is your art magic?"

"Things I make are, unless I make a point of - not putting myself in them."

"Is that true of everyone in Appalachia?"

"Kinda? Some people ain't much good at it, but yeah, it's a thing in my world. Magic's usually just, like, durability, though."

"I appreciate the information you've given us. If all this is accurate we should welcome you any time."

There's a distant, and growing, sound of singing and footsteps and wheels.

"...And you should wash up if you're going to, we'll be eating soon."

"Food sounds good."

"I'm glad."

She heads off to talk to Leora in the couple minutes they have. The sounds get louder. People spread blankets for a very big picnic.

Food! And hopefully something to drink, they're thirsty.

Is that grits? On closer inspection no it isn't, it's some kind of nut meal. Whatever it is is serving as a porridge and loaded with seaweed and clam meat. There's plain water and some sort of berry wine.

The traders have brought wagons of stuff with them, but no one seems to be inspecting it yet. Carel is hugging one of them. Everyone else is sitting down. No one is eating yet, maybe waiting for everyone to be ready.

Ugh. Waiting to eat. The worst part about manners.

They're gonna try some of that wine. They probably shouldn't, but, hey, life's an adventure.

Does anyone seem like they want to talk to Blair? (Blair doesn't particularly feel like talking to anyone, they've been interrogated enough thank you very much, but it beats sitting around.)

The guy Carel's hugging breaks off the hug and goes looking for them.

"You're lost too, I hear."

"Yeah. Freak magic accident. You ain't from these parts either?"

"Sort of. Parents moved north and west to get away from a war between gods, now we probably have to move again. Could Appalachia hold any more people?"

" - Lots, it's pretty empty. The planet as a whole - uh, population before the apocalypse was getting pretty near overshooting comfort levels, after yeah planet's basically empty. Could fit a couple billion more and still have lotsa room to grow, long as people ain't growing too fast. We'd probably wanna kill the apocalypse beast before any major immigration effort, though."

"When you say 'billions' I assume that's a figure of speech, how many people exactly do you mean?"

"...Actual literal billions, like I don't know, two? Maybe three. Assuming people ain't gonna have a ton of kids. World had about eight billion before the apocalypse, no clue how many after but I reckon a lot of the people in cities died. Which was like half the population. For how many the planet can hold long term, I've heard everything from 'ten billion' to way, way more, I reckon depending on our future farming tech. Though some people argue the 'comfortable' level's lower, most people weren't living awfully comfortably when we had eight billion."