"I can see it just fine. There you are being all solid and living and personish and stuff. You do seem a little odd. Maybe that's the indestructibility. I don't know. I've never met an indestructible person before; how would I know whether I can mess with your ground or not?"

"I've never seen the ruins, I don't know what-all's there besides them being ruins and big and weird and mostly under a lake," says Sable. "I don't know what the reasons are for people thinking they had magic. Well, except that malices have to have come from somewhere, because they sure couldn't have built cities like that with malices popping up underfoot everywhere no matter how magic they were. And people think the first malices came from something the mage-lords did, although nobody's exactly sure what."

"Sure, the malices sound definitely magic to me. The roads just don't."

"These days the people with groundsense and the people with cities aren't hardly any of the same people," she says. "People with groundsense - we call ourselves Lakewalkers, and we call the people without it 'farmers', although plenty of them do things other than farm - well, we're the only people who can kill malices. And there aren't many of us. And as best we can figure, if there's ever a malice that nobody kills, it'll just keep making horrible monsters and mind-slaving people to do its bidding and eating everything in sight until the whole world is grey dust and there's nothing left alive."

"Why are you guys the only ones who can kill malices? Do you have to do ground things to them?"

"Um. Sort of broadly yes."

"...Sort of broadly yes?"

"...it's another thing that's hard to explain right," she says. "But, um. Malices by themselves are immortal. You can kill their body but it's not them really, they'll just make another one. The way you kill a malice is with a sharing knife, and only Lakewalkers can make them. Three different ways. You need a Lakewalker bone to make the knife out of, and really good ground-shaping to make it work properly, and then you need a Lakewalker to kill themselves with the knife and put their death in it, and then you don't need anybody special to stab the knife into a malice and share the death with them so they die, except Lakewalkers are better at it because malices can't mind-slave us like they can farmers."

"...How in the world was this discovered before the first malices turned the whole world into gray dust? What a specific execution procedure!"

"I sure don't know, I wasn't there! Maybe there was another way first. From what I know of knife-making theory, I wouldn't be surprised if people used to have to kill themselves at the malice somehow and then later on someone figured out how to store the death ahead of time so there wouldn't be as many ways to mess it up in the middle of battle."

"Kill themselves at the malice. Wow."

"If I had to kill a malice and I was very desperate and the only Lakewalker in the entire world, that's what I'd try. The only other option would be to cut off my own leg, make a knife out of the bone, and kill myself with it, and then I'd still need one other person around to pick it up and stick it in the malice. But if I had other people around and I could get away from the malice for long enough, it might be more important to have Lakewalker children so somebody would be able to kill the next malice."

"...Well, you haven't found any here, right? Just weird spontaneously generated monsters."

"Yeah. It's been eight years and I have not found one malice. There probably aren't any. Unless one of them just shows up sometime, the way people like you and me and all the dead folks from the other islands keep just showing up."

"Okay." Cam decides not to start a conversation about the feasibility of having Lakewalker children, under the circumstances.

"Anyway. So that's my world."

"Which does include spontaneous monsters, but different ones, and none of the blatant unphysics apart from your sort of proper magic done by proper persons. Huh."

"Yeah. And we don't know if malices spontaneously appear or just sort of... bubble up. I've caught Terraria monsters actually appearing out of nowhere, every so often; they do it out of sight when they can, but they don't seem to know about groundsense."

"...Weird."

"Yep."

"...I have got to show you video games, I'm just not sure where to start."

"Well, we could start with going to a different room that's less cluttered," she suggests, getting up and gathering up the chlorophyte armour.

"Sure." He follows her.

There is a hallway, and then there is a room. The room has a bed inexplicably shoved against one wall, and the opposite wall is lined with ornate chests-of-drawers, and in between there is a table with no chairs.