"I probably won't actually make a cake that size. Nobody but us to eat it. I will have to make the number-shaped kind of candles instead."

"Number-shaped candles. How clever."

"Maybe there will be balloons. A hundred and seventy three is an important birthday, you know. Prime number."

Giggle.

"If there's any kind of periodicals in your home world that you think would have lasted eight years I could call them up and figure out how long you've been gone, if you want to know, unless something stops me from conjuring stuff from your world and I don't see why it should."

"Um. Nothing springs to mind."

"Suit yourself. Just - I'm not from your home but I can supply a sort of one-way link to your home, if you want it."

"If I could remember anything you could use."

"I mean, if I can get far enough above the surface of Terraria - which is by no means guaranteed - it would take me a while but I could duplicate your entire planet less people and animals and malices. This would probably be overkill, but I could do it, given a large enough space in which to put a planet."

"...Are you very sure it would be less malices?"

"I suppose that depends on how they appear. I would be making all of the things that are not malices, but perhaps malices can arise out of things that are not, themselves, especially malice-related."

"And no one really knows where malices come from. I think you'd better not make my planet. If malices got loose here, they'd kill everyone who turns up, not just most of them like Terraria itself does."

"Sure. I'd be pretty surprised if space worked normally anyway, although I will want to go up and look around sometime."

"How does space normally work?"

"Truly ludicrous amounts of nothing-with-occasional-rocks. Behold a scale model of the solar system in which I grew up." Cam produces a picture. The sun is small. Jupiter is eensy. He points at nothing in particular. "Earth is here."

She giggles.

"The sun is big, but some other stars are bigger."

"What do you mean?"

"The sun - well, maybe not here, this is weird video game grid land - but the sun I am familiar with is a star, not the kind that falls from the sky, just a big ball of burning stuff in the middle of nothingness. There are other stars, which are much farther away from Earth than the Sun is and therefore look really tiny. Some of those are in fact bigger than the Sun."

"Oh. Huh."

"Yeah. I don't know to what extent your world is actually different and to what extent it was just behind on science."

"Me neither."

"But stuff I make still seems to work on the physics I'm used to. When I have room to make it, which may not be the case with anything as big as a planet or a sun."

"Planets and suns seem to be pretty big."

"Quite. Also even if space works like I'm used to it will take weeks for me to map the system and figure out where I could safely put something and then put it there. Probably not a priority."