A second ago Rafiik had been free climbing up a cliff face, looking forward to the view from the top; now he tumbles in midair to land more lightly than he ought to in a crouch.

He stands back up and bounces from foot to foot as he takes in his surroundings, looking confused. When no explanation presents itself, though, he heads for the shed.

The air is full of kites in the distance all around, but not right in this area.

The shed is actually a giant periscope reflecting light from the sunset down a shaft. There's no visible mechanism to change where it's pointing.

The wall of the shaft has an inset ladder... but before he can get any closer, a large bald humanoid with tusks dashes out of a nearby hole in the ground and yells at him.

He puts his hands up placatingly. "I'm sorry, I'm lost." Everyone knows Basic, right?

Either they don't know Basic, or they're a linguistic chauvinist who doesn't care that he's sorry, because they keep yelling unintelligibly and attempt to tackle him.

He bounces out of the way, and considers leaping to the roof of the shed but decides that might be too much of a provocation and turns to jog away instead - he'll head for some of the kites.

The person with tusks follows him but doesn't attack again.

Another humanoid emerges - smaller, with a thick square snout - and walks next to him, asking a question in the same language.

The kites are large and each have multiple ropes which pass through holes into the ground. A few winged humanoids and a giant moth fly amidst the kites.

Man, he should have paid better attention in class, he doesn't recognize any of these species. "I'm sorry, I'm lost. Do you speak Basic?"

Square snout person smiles at him and tries another language. 

One of the winged humanoids dives for the ground, not slowing down at all, and plunges out of view. 

Meanwhile, underground, the guard dispatcher decides not to flood the Imperial shrine with exhalation gas. He sounds the alarm to dismiss the supplicants and call in the standby Emperors... and one of them recalls that the ground was ten feet higher here before the land was flattened. If the intruder is from the distant past, that explains why he doesn't speak Elvish.

A large canine humanoid takes the place of the square snout person and kneels before Rafiik. She says something softly, in yet another language this time!

Yeah he doesn't recognize that language either. He shoots a worried look over his shoulder at the tusky person, for show - maybe she can get him to stop following them and he can stop to talk.

She recites a code-phrase to the tusky person, who looks uncomfortable but stops following. 

Another canine offers Rafiik a stone cup of water and a green latke with yellow berries embedded in it?

That's much better.

He gives the new person a smile, carefully not showing his teeth, but raises a finger in a 'one moment' gesture and closes his eyes to inquire in the Force as to whether the offered food and water are safe for humans.

The refreshments are safe!

But the new person looks startled, bows, and takes the tray away.

Oops?

Well, he's not actually hungry yet, it's not a big deal. But he does need to explain that he might do that... he checks his pockets, takes out a shiny pebble he picked up earlier, and telekinetically holds it a few inches above his open palm, checking to see what kind of reaction this gets.

Everyone is familiar with the gesture of demonstrating one's magic so one's species can be identified. Or, more commonly, pretending to do so in theater. So, good news, they're not alarmed by the floating rock. It's bad news if he was trying to communicate anything other than "I am the species that makes pebbles float".

The guard dispatcher, watching the scene from underground through eight multi-jointed periscopes (one for each eye), studies exactly how the pebble moves and what material it's made out of.

The visitor isn't a harpy or an aasimar. Types of magic don't overlap, so what is he doing that's different from harpy magic (slow floaty bulk telekinesis) or aasimar magic (freezing an object in location and state)? Perhaps he's making the pebble not have weight, or gain a repulsive force, or actually he's making an empty patch of air look shiny...

The effect that brought him here is different from the effect he's doing now. Does that make it more likely that he's here by accident, if he couldn't choose the destination himself? Unclear.

The Emperor said that he might be a forgotten species, sent from the past - by another forgotten species...

Why here? It must be deliberate. If he came from a time after the Imperial shrine was created, why doesn't the shrine contain memories of his species, or of him personally departing for the future? Was the information concealed for some reason? Is there a reason this place is important that predates the Imperial shrine?

In any case, a lavish welcome is in order. Which the werewolf butler is already handling, perfect.

If he doesn't speak Elvish, High Elvish, or even Ancient Felic, they'll need a way to communicate. Drawings? Linguists? An undine? The decision is not the guard dispatcher's job, but the security consequences will be, especially if there's going to be an undine slithering about stealing all the procedures and code-phrases.

(Yes, he thought all of that in the last few seconds. He thinks very fast.)

The floating rock is just the first part of the demonstration. When she's not alarmed - and it's honestly kind of weird that she's not, he doesn't fail to notice - he closes his eyes and sends the rock looping around his hand.

She still doesn't recognize his species but thinks that's neat. 

The guard dispatcher does not think it's neat. He thinks that whatever it is, it needs to be farther away from the Imperial shrine. Somehow without angering their ally/enemy/god.

...he's not sure he got his point across but he's not sure how to make it clearer, either. Maybe he'll think of something later.

He looks around again - where are all these people coming from, anyway, can he tell? - but if he doesn't see anything else obvious to do he'll try telling her his name, putting his hand indicatively on his chest while he does so, and then ask for hers with a gesture and a querying noise. (The kneeling is weird, and he hopes he's not being as rude as he feels by not reciprocating, or indicating she should get up, or something. But there's no good way of dealing with alien body language, and trying to interface with it is more likely to backfire than ignoring it while clearly establishing that you're an alien and have no idea what's going on, per his diplomacy classes.)

They're climbing out a hole in the ground. It's just barely wide enough to fit one of the largest people, and there's grass growing right up to the edge. There are other holes like it a hundred feet away in each direction.

She nods. "Rafiik." She gives him an odd look, then indicates herself. "Werewolf."

Weird and slightly concerning that he didn't notice the holes before. Not that there's much normal about this situation.

He gestures at the plain around them and makes another querying noise, looking concerned.

"This is the Imperial shrine, for elves, it keeps the memories of the Lei Emperors." If he doesn't recognize werewolves there's no way he knows what an elph is but she makes a droopy-nose gesture anyway. Also she doesn't expect him to understand any of what she's saying, but maybe it's helpful to him anyway somehow? "If you're looking for something that used to be here, they'll know what happened to it. Probably it's still here, underground." She takes a stone cup off her belt, holds it up... and it slowly flattens into a plate. "Saiel, can you bring something to draw with?" she asks the other butler, as he returns with a small chair made of curving wooden strips.

He looks very concerned and bewildered at her reshaping the cup, and looks around again - the hole situation means he can't tell how many people there are or how surrounded he is, and that's making him nervous, especially with unknown... whatever that was... in the mix. (She's not Force sensitive, at this range it's fairly obvious, but then what was that?)

He's increasingly tempted to run, find somewhere to sit and meditate and see if the Force has any idea what's happening here, but between the rudeness of that option and the lack of anywhere to go, he's staying put for the moment. It's not exactly hard to tell that he wants to, though.

That scared him? Why?

Werewolves bring a stone folding table (and use werewolf magic to lock it), a bowl of curly vegetables and meat, a set of ten tiny pitchers, a dish of roasted nuts and berries, a strip of bark, and a knife and spork. Saiel returns with a stick of red wax, which the kneeling wolf offers to Rafiik along with the ex-cup.

He takes the ex-cup, slightly reluctantly, and the wax; he's guessed that they mean for him to communicate by drawing. He doesn't sit - in fact, what happens if he gestures for Werewolf to take the chair?

She smiles and sits, stretching her legs.

Better!

He makes a few test marks with the wax before sketching himself climbing the cliff, and then shows it to her, makes a confused and startled noise, and gestures into the air, mimicking a falling tumble with his hand before going 'oof' and miming dusting himself off.

He came here by accident? Huh. She smiles and nods and gestures at the food.

Maybe that's just what he wants them to think.

If he's a metahuman - the metahuman? - checking up on his progeny...

"How quickly can a human be obtained? One who can carry out a complicated, prolonged deception? ...A male one?"

    The butler asks a kitsune who asks a tengu who asks a spymaster on the border... "One cycle, sire. Cheap, low-risk."

"Do it."

Another canine and a smaller feline bring out harps and start up a gentle duet.

He never has much of an appetite when he's stressed, but accepting diplomatic gestures is important; he'll take a handful of the nuts and berries and consult the Force again before eating any of them.

He'll also hand the slate and wax back to Werewolf and make a questioning sound-and-gesture about the musicians.

He's still upset? What does he want, a massage? (This is a rhetorical question. She will not attempt to groom him uninvited.)

The Force thinks the nuts and berries are safe.

Is he doing magic before eating? Is he afraid they're going to poison him?

She eats a nut and a berry and a vegetable and a piece of meat.

He must be able to tell that the werewolf harpist is the same species as her, right? Is he asking their names? Their... status in the world? Their relationship to each other, or to her? Uh... point at werewolf, "Eilha", hand comes from far to near, one fist goes around the other three times, point at catfolk, "Asrek", far-to-near, fist goes around once... Two hands go away and back separately with a shrug. Indicate herself, one hand goes away and back with a shrug.

Yeah he has no idea what all those hand motions are. He's increasingly sure that her other body language is human-standard, though, which is on one hand somewhat weird but on the other hand pretty convenient if so.

He gestures at each of them in turn, giving their names - Werewolf, Eilha, Asrek, Rafiik - and then briefly mimics the far-to-near hand motion without directing it at any of them and makes a querying sound.

(The calming music is helping, though he is still nervous of the situation.)

Ah! Ah. "Mirana, Eilha, Asrek, Rafiik; Werewolf, werewolf, catfolk..." She points to the other people around: "werewolf, stetcap, boark." Off in the distance: "...harpy, tengu."

Hmm. "Saiel, would you go downstairs and come back?" Near-to-far... far-to-near!

Now we're getting somewhere! "Mirana, Eilha, Asrek, Rafiik; Werewolf, werewolf, catfolk, human." He repeats the far to near gesture and nods, with an approving hum; repeats it a second time with the circling gesture and a questioning sound.

"Human," she repeats, carefully pronouncing the foreign word.

...does he not know that Ansaf goes around the sun? Huh. She thought it was obvious, but maybe it's only obvious once you have catfolk and they try to predict the motion of the other planets and develop a theory that requires the entire heliocentric system to be rotating at the same rate as the stars, backward to the motion of the planets, and then it's obvious that actually Ansaf is looping around the sun forwards and the sun and stars don't move at all.

She points to the brightest star in the sky, The Plumber's Cursor, and slowly moves her arm down (away from the sunset)... and faster through the rest of the circle back to the Cursor's current position. Fist circles once. Pointing finger in a quick circle again once.

She's pointing at something in the sky but he has no idea what, or rather too many ideas of what - with this many species it's near-guaranteed that they're spacefaring (unless something weird is going on, and something weird is definitely going on, but he's leaving that aside for a moment) so it could be a ship or station just as easily as a star or planet if not more so, and that's assuming it is something in the sky and she's not just indicating the direction or something weirder. In short, he doesn't get it. He can maybe ask, though; he picks the slate and wax back up and uses part of the other side to sketch a diagram of a solar system to show her, indicating by gesture that the sun is the sun and the vaguely-appropriately-distanced planet he's drawn is the one they're on. Then he points in the same general direction as she did and gestures to the drawing with a querying noise: where is that on this?

She draws a straight line that starts at the planet they're on, and goes, roughly tangent to the orbit, all the way off the edge of the slate.

A star? ...that... could be a timekeeping thing? Primitive cultures often use the stars to keep track of seasons, there is a yearly cycle there. Eilha's been here three years and Asrek's been here one, maybe after originally starting out here and leaving for a while? He can't confirm it and doesn't know why they'd bother telling him that but cultures do vary, maybe it matters here. It's good news that they know what the solar system is, at least.

Let's see if we can expand on that, actually. He takes another section of the slate and sketches the rough shape of the galaxy and peppers it with dots, then mimes scooping the entire solar system diagram into one of this hands and points between the imaginary scooped solar system and several of the dots, making questioning noises at each.

Yes to all of them?

...okay yes any given star probably has a solar system. He tries again, pointing at the ground to indicate that he means this one.

Um... In the middle?

Oh good!

"Jedi?" he tries.

Huh?

That's probably his word for [the Ansaf species which has been translated as 'human' in the text so far but now needs to be disambiguated]. "Say yes," he tells the whisshopper, who projects the illusion of a voice murmuring that in Mirana's ear.

Nod!

Definitely good! Now he just needs to figure out where to go to meet up with them. He gestures at the horizon to the left and right. "Jedi? Jedi?"

"In one cycle."

She mimes nodding off... waking up with a yawn. Far-to-near, then: "Jedi."

Okay! Do they have somewhere he can spend the night, that shouldn't be too hard to ask through mime.

Of course! She gets up. (Whew, now they can stop trampling the Imperial sweetgrass.)

"Where are the distinguished visitor Rafiik's rooms?"

"The diplomat's suite with the games. A sand-table has been installed."

"Perfect."

She bows and reaches a hand to Rafiik. Can she lead him down the ladder of the nearest hole? It's not very far down, and the area below is spacious and well lit by firelight.

He'll follow her, sure!

Great, she was worried he'd get scared again for some reason. 

She leads him along a broad stone hallway. Other pedestrians pass by, glancing at him curiously. At each of the frequent intersections, a catfolk sits in a niche.

The walls are intricately engraved with people of many sorts, weaving, farming, mining, fighting, riding bicycles and things that look like cable cars, watching children, carrying stuff, eating, playing music... Most of the people are humanoid and sculpted with an exaggerated feature diverging from the basic human form. The most common species are recognizable as werewolves and catfolk, but with larger claws and pointier ears, respectively. There are also figures with tusks or hooves or horns or big round ears or square snouts or buck teeth or long droopy noses or antennae or wing-arms or big nostrils or big eyes or lots of eyes or breasts or turtle shells or webbing under their arms. A few are not humanoid: a moth and some birds.

There is a ledge along the walls at shoulder-height, holding a continuous band of flame. The activities depicted below the ledge, in shadow, are underground, with the excavated structure appearing to go many levels down.

He's paying more attention to the path they're taking than to the art, but still enough attention to notice the lack of interplanetary tech, and the absolutely bizarre number of species for both the tech level and the apparent population density. Not that he can be sure of either; maybe they just haven't chosen to depict spaceships or hovercars and they do have them, and who knows what the rest of this compound is like, or what's over the horizon.

After a few hundred feet of walking and a couple of turns, they reach a room containing:

• A bed heaped with blankets and pillows.
• A stone table painted to look like a landscape.
• A wide, shallow basin filled with white sand, with tools hanging from hooks on the outer edge.
• A table with a bowl of fruit, a potted plant, a cup, a pitcher of water, a bar of soap, and a towel.
• A chamber pot.
• Yet another table, covered in dark brown fur. Patches, not a full pelt, but neatly fitted together.
• A wooden chair like the one earlier, but larger.

It’s lit by colorful glass sconces on the walls. The rest of the wall space is covered in shelves, holding:

• Miniature houses, trees, and walls in an art style matching the landscape table, and models of people in stone or wicker.
• Sealed jars.
• Bowls of round pebbles: gray, black, white, and malachite.
• Bowls, each holding a wooden stick.
• Loose squares of leather.
• Books.
• A pair of folding fans.
• A pom-pom.
• A magnifying glass.
• Crystals.
• Wooden cubes.
• An extensive set of hairbrushes.
• A hookah.
• Dice.
• Colored cords.
• A crate of beanbags.

There is a gentle draft.

Eilha and Asrek follow them in. Eilha (the werewolf) sits on the floor and resumes playing. Asrek (the catfolk) sticks his finger into the flames in each of the sconces, showing no pain, and then sits beside Eilha and joins in with the music.

He's too distracted checking out the various objects on the shelves to notice Asrek putting his fingers in the flames at first, but when he notices he yelps and takes a step toward him to stop him before realizing that he's fine.

Oops.

Here's the sand table! She demonstrates drawing with her claw and then grabs a stylus for him. Here's a floppy squeegee thing for erasing, and a shading fork and a compass and a straightedge.

Rafiik is still pretty concerned about Asrek but sure, Mirana can distract him with the sand table. It's clever, for a very low tech datapad alternative. And convenient; he wants the words 'not' and 'more', and the first one is easy to ask for with his existing vocabulary - Mirana is a werewolf, Eilhs is a werewolf, Asrek is not a werewolf, what's the word for that - but he'll have a much easier time of getting the concept of 'more' across if he can draw a couple of differently sized collections of dots.

And then once he has those, he can comment that he is a Jedi but Mirana and Asrek are not and ask through mime how Asrek, not being a Jedi, wasn't hurt by the fire. Even Rafiik would be hurt if he stuck his finger in a fire, you need to be more Jedi than he is to do that.

Mirana draws a stick figure, and then a picture of a table with a stick figure drawn on it and a stick figure with claws standing next to the table doing the drawing. The latter is "Mirana", see her claws? 

And then here's a stick figure with pointy ears playing the harp - "Asrek" - and some wavy lines in the air; she points and them and hums along with the music. 

So, "Mirana created" the drawing and "Asrek created" more humming and...

Rafiik is himself a "Jedi"?! He's clearly not a typical male, though.

Did the males of that species, in the past, have Jedi magic, which they sacrificed to give the females [Ansaf-]human magic? That's bizarre but there are lots of bizarre creation myths.

Or maybe he's misunderstood the word "Jedi." Maybe Rafiik was asking if there are any metahumans around, expecting them to be around, and he's going to be upset that they're gone. (Also, if something bad happened to the metahumans, it could happen again... But that's not split-second urgent; that's a problem for the wise elph and cunning catfolk minds of his superiors.)

So, Mirana is about to say that the Jedi created catfolk. Is that okay? What's the worst that could happen? ...Rafiik was not part of the metahuman project; upon learning of it, he finds it abhorrent and slaughters them all, which he is somehow capable of doing.

They need to learn more about Rafiik. They need to delay.

"Say" a different word that Rafiik hasn't heard yet "breeders."

"Breeders created catfolk."

Breeders: stick figure with breasts.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (he can fit a luxurious amount of mental screaming)

Okay actually that's brilliant, presumably metahuman females look like that too; it's arguably the defining species feature so they could even pass it off as an artistic mistake later, if they need to claim that Mirana's stick figure was intended to represent a male. It's possible Mirana might genuinely not even know what male humans look like.

Anyway. "I humbly suggest that the [Ansaf-]human train with a whisshopper to mimic Rafiik's abilities. Also, what happened to the metahumans? Prepare for a repeat."

...okay? That doesn't answer his question though.

...are Breeders Sith? Inquiring Rafiiks want to know. Since she recognized the word Jedi and all.

She furrows her brow...

Oh illthrift, a third word they don't know.

Jedi: Rafiik; the people Rafiik wants to meet. If you have 'enough' Jedi-ness, you become resistant to fire.

[The Basic word for 'human']: Also Rafiik.

Sith: Not Rafiik? Metahumans? Someone's got to be the metahumans.

The theory that he thinks is most likely to be true is that [Basic] humans are various powerful beings, divided into two major groups: Sith, who created breeders, and Jedi, who didn't. Jedi hoard magic over time, somehow. Sith give other people magic. If you had to call one of those 'good' and one 'evil', it's obvious which is which.

There's a chance that if Rafiik learns that Sith created breeders, everyone dies. Or at least all the breeders die, plus anyone who gets in the way.

So, should Mirana recognize the word? No. Someone else can recognize the word later, once they know more, but there's no going back. "Don't know."

Shrug.

"...hm."

He considers asking some clarifying questions, but it seems like Mirana hasn't personally met whoever that is, so she's unlikely to know, say, what color her lightsaber is. And as weird as it'd be for this to be a Jedi project, it does seem just as likely that someone went rogue at some point than that a Sith pulled it off in Republic space.

Anyway.

"Asrek?"

What about him? "Catfolk, catfolk, catfolk" - she draws a flame in the sand, touches it, and scoops up the sand and holds it. "Catfolk created" flame...she points at the real flame too since the drawing didn't survive getting scooped.

Yeah. It's not going to be possible to hide the entire phenomenon of species magic. 

He finds this mildly bewildering at first but then shrugs and nods - sure, if someone figured out how to give an effect like that to a species they'd made (how) they'd want to make it safe for them if they could.

He wants to ask how the people here relate to the Jedi aside from maybe being made by a particular one, but that seems tough to ask. He'll start working on getting more broadly-useful vocabulary instead.

The more he can communicate, the more they can learn about him and the safer they'll be. But also he can ask tougher questions.

..."Go ahead, just don't say anything about the origin of people other than that breeders made us; you've never met one and don't know anything else. Avoid mentioning species magic if you can. It might be better if most species don't have any magic."

She enthusiastically helps with vocabulary.

He's pretty quick with languages, luckily. After a while he asks for paper to take notes on, he wants more space for that than the sand table gives them and the ability to refer to them later.

Sure. She steps out for a moment to ask a passing underbutler.

He did not predict that request, so it will take a few minutes to fulfill. He did eight thoughtsprints in an hour and he's tired, okay? Actually it's better this way: they don't want Rafiik to know they're listening. And they don't want him to think that his requests can be filled instantly because there might be a future request that they need to delay. They should delay this one a little, too.

Several minutes later, a catfolk brings in a folio of rough paper, a pot of ink, and a dip pen made of stone with a wooden nib.

.... yeah he's never seen a dip pen before, he's going to need someone to show him how to use it.

You dip it into the ink and write with it like this? She's maybe not the best teacher since she usually writes by werewolfing stone plates. 

She doesn't want to waste paper demonstrating squiggles, so she writes the traditional alphabetic-order pangram in common Elvish at the very top edge.

Rafiik's handwriting is considerably worse - it's lucky he's used a stylus before at all - but he manages to produce the aurebesh under her alphabet and is satisfied enough with that that he can take notes on the rest of the page, albeit rather awkwardly.

He also, after a while, wants lunch. He explains while they're waiting for it that he's been checking to see if the food is safe for (foreign-)humans, since he expects that to vary by species and they don't seem familiar with his.

She thought he was going to sleep soon. It's convenient that they'll be on the same sleep cycle, but she was hoping to fit in some refresher training on deceiving diplomats while he slept. (She ended up as his primary contact because she speaks Ancient Felic and was the first butler on the scene who had anything useful to try, not because she's the best trained at deception.)

She bows apologetically in response to his comment.

Illthrift. Send in the food now now now

Lunch! Butlers bring in three tables spread with nuts, fruits, greens, mashed vegetables, meat slices, crispy skin, a small whole fish, pickled worms, fruit juices in various stages of fermentation, chopped liver, chopped brain, green sludge, cornbread, and an array of sauces.

Pickled worms, okay. He might skip that one even if the Force says it's all right. Does it?

Yes but some of the fruit juices are alcoholic.

This is also a lot of food for one person, even if that person is a teenage boy - maybe they're trying to figure out what he likes? He watches Mirana's reaction as he fills a plate with cornbread, meat, mashed vegetables with a little bit of promising-smelling sauce, and a small portion of fruit.

She watches his choices carefully.

If she doesn't seem bothered by him not trying everything, he'll stick to what he has, and swap the mashed vegetables out for greens and take a little bit of the crispy skin with his second plate.

If he's settled with that, she'll make sure none of the other meat goes to waste. Especially not the delicious pickled worms.

Hm, maybe she can nudge him to sleep earlier. Yawwwn. My what sharp teeth she has.

...oh right the sun was setting, wasn't it. He looks sheepish about it and lets her know - still partly via mime - that she can go if she wants to.

"Sleep well." She bows, snags one more worm, and leaves.

Asrek gradually dims the light.

Time to practice smoothly following directions?

Yes but only for an hour and then early to bed, so she's ready whenever Rafiik is. There will be no sleep deprivation here.

Glory to the Empire! Zzzz

Rafiik isn't tired yet, his internal clock thinks it's early afternoon, but he can catch up on his meditation and practice katas for a few hours until it feels like he could at least nap.

Asrek and Eilha keep playing.

(He'll shoo them out before he starts on the katas, actually, the music is nice but he needs the space, and needs quiet to focus on what he's doing.)

Asrek stays outside (silently) to keep the flames going, dimly.

He can tell that there are people outside, but he can't tell the difference between Asrek and passerby, and doesn't think anything of the lights.

He'll spend a few hours on katas, being careful not to get too sweaty even though that means skipping his favorites, and then he'll move most of the blankets to the foot of the bed and get comfy under the remaining one. It'll take him a while to get to sleep, still, but he'll manage it eventually.

The Emperors search the shrine and can't remember anything noteworthy that used to be at the location.

There is a deep network of tunnels, regularly patrolled and examined. The main concern, up to now, has been preventing attackers coming in that way, not archeology. They call in a vampire to examine the area.

She's not an archeologist but she once found a fossil while prospecting?

Meanwhile, a equartier runs towards the capital carrying a tengu and a human man.

By the time he learned that his employer was the Lei Empire, he knew too much. An alien with powers beyond the understanding of science. Con-men preaching the Exploratory heresy. Danger to the whole world.

Well, he's certainly practiced at appeasing people stronger than him.

And with luck, he can steer this towards the Lei and the Democrats destroying each other. That's not treason at all! He should get a barony from that!

Ah, to be the first human ["breeder"] baron... he'll have an elph as his top butler and some good human girls and he'll have as many sons as daughters - no, twice as many sons! - and he'll raise them up right, to be strong and wise and kind. Kind to every species, even the ones that don't deserve it.

Eventually they arrive at the Lei capital. Presumably. It's not like he'd recognize the place, and they've been underground the whole time.

"Welcome, sir. We'd like to adjust your coloring and give you stamina and toughness and pain-tolerance, and maybe other things that we'll figure out while you get some rest. Would you please allow these lieflings to target you?"

They called him sir and not as part of the performance!

"Of course. Very clever." He touches each liefling's green bumpy hand. Boop, boop, boop, boop...

They'll let Rafiik sleep in as long as he likes.

It's about twelve hours after Mirana left when he wakes; after an extremely awkward interaction in which he learns what chamberpots are for he props the door slightly open and begins going over his language notes while he waits for them to notice that he's up.

They "notice" soon enough and bring cornbread and fried vegetable stems and fried meat for breakfast.

"What food do you like to eat the most? Is this food similar?"

"I like most things! But in my home some things aren't used as food -" and he points out bugs and organ meats as two of those things, with the help of the sand table. "This is good, thank you."

"What do you use bugs for?" Turning the organ meats into fertilizer, she thinks, but guessing out loud is a chance to be dangerously wrong.

"Mostly nothing. Some kinds make things - do you have bugs that make a food that tastes like fruit?"

"Oh yeah!" And they generate a species of people, too.

Rafiik's people can afford to keep bugs that they don't use for anything. 

Hm, not sure of a useful direction from there, move on. "What is your music like?"

"Do you want to hear some?" He has a tiny music player and headphones in one of his pockets. "But I only have a few kinds, we have lots - my home knows lots of other planets, we get music and things from them."

He sets up the music player and demonstrates how to use the earbuds before offering them to her; the first song is a bouncy, fast-paced pop piece.

!

!

!

The whisshopper is also astonished and eager to try making sounds like that later.

This is ordinary for him which means it has to be ordinary for her. "Huh, nice and loud." She nods with the beat and points at the music player. "Who made this?"

"People on one of the other planets, I don't know much about it. My home planet is only Jedi, mostly."

"Do you like being a Jedi?"

"Mm," he offers thoughtfully. "I like being a Jedi."

He likes... the status, compared to... 'humans' who aren't Jedi, but doesn't like... what

Being a Jedi as opposed to: 

Being dead?

Doing something in particular that Jedi have to do? 

Talking about being a Jedi? 

Not being a Jedi, because sometimes he isn't?

They might simply not have enough information to understand this remark.

"Why?"

"There's lots of good things about it. The Force powers," he bobbles his pebble demonstratively. "And the work is - it's different, a lot, it's good. People think Jedi are good." He shrugs. "I want... I don't know how to say it. In my language I don't know how to say it."

"What Jedi work do you like the most?"

"I like different parts of different kinds. I like getting to see new planets and talk to new people." He gives her a wry grin at this.

This has not been very informative.

This has been worse than uninformative. They have another word, 'Force'. It's related to 'Jedi' and 'human'. To be precise, it's related to all 'Jedi' but not all 'humans', or all 'humans' but not all people-of-some-class-that-includes-'humans'.

If it's a thing that Jedi-and-others have, an obvious possibility is that Jedi and Sith have it. Is there something they can do to attract the attention of a Sith to come save them? A particular sensory ability they can try to be visible to? 

"Ask about the Force."

"What does the Force..." She frowns...

She once asked a liefling what targeting feels like, how they know what effect their leaves will have on an organism. He pointedly asked her what shaping rock feels like. She feels embarrassed just thinking about it.

A question that everyone asks Jedi is probably safe, yeah?

"...What does it feel like?"

"Can I have the music back first? It's going to stop working if we use it too much."

"Oh, of course." She was supposed to know it's limited, oh dear. "Sorry. That music is like nothing I've heard before."

"Yeah. It's too bad we don't have the things so it doesn't stop working." He turns it off and repockets it.

"The Force is different for every person but I feel it in my body, mostly, and using it is a little bit like singing, it moves in me the way air moves when you sing." He puffs out a breath demonstratively and then sings a quick scale, holding his hand in front of his mouth to feel his exhalations.

That's so specific! And he actually has an answer, not just 'it feels like Force'. She wants to ask if skill at singing helps him do Force things but that seems risky. Instead, prompted via whisshopper: "What does it feel like when you look at the food to check if it's safe?"

"Captain, I request that you ask twenty butlers what it feels like to do their species magic. And the guards on shift." He doubts that boarks and stetcaps will have anything to say but it might be interesting to compare exactly how little they have to say.

    "Aye, dispatcher."

(Of course he has an answer, it's humanizing, and that's important if you ever want to work with the public as a Jedi.)

"That's hard to say to someone who doesn't use the Force - if you've sung together with other people it's a little bit like that, singing with the food, but only a little bit. And then I feel bad or good, but - if you look at someone who feels bad you feel bad but it's not the same as feeling bad yourself, it's like that."

"Do you like to sing with other people?"

'someone who doesn't use the Force' - that's an odd phrasing. Why not 'someone who doesn't have the Force'? Rafiik should be able to say it both ways in Elvish, so that was a choice. Is the 'Force' something that all 'humans' have the potential for? And Jedi and Sith and possibly other smaller factions are made of 'humans' who have an active Force. There's a natural conflict in that system between people who take other humans' dormant Force to grow personally stronger, and people who activate other humans' Force to gain numerous weak followers. And then the metahuman sacrificed their own Force to create breeders? Or they simply were the first breeder themself.

Meanwhile, the guard captain delegates to three underlings and they all run to talk to the nearby guards and butlers and underbutlers and other staff. There are werewolves standing by with stones 'warmed up' to take notes on; the stones already have interlocking edges so they can be assembled into a tablet that one person can hold for the dispatcher to read.

Results:

Werewolf (10): Most (8) say it just happens, or doesn't feel like anything else they have words for. Two compare it with other physical sensations ("licking out the inside of a custardnut", "slowly getting an erection").

Catfolk (9): Flames, in general, feel warm and windy to the touch. Creating a flame doesn't feel like anything more than wanting the flame and then feeling or seeing the flame. Maintaining a flame requires mental effort that feels like any other concentration (7), or like repeating instructions over and over to remember them (2). There is no sensory feedback on how close one is to the limit, but some (4) catfolk say that they "have an intuition for it." Unexpectedly reaching the limit feels like something to all (9), but the catfolk were split between describing it as a "mental twitch" (3), or a brief "itchiness" (2) or other discomfort on the skin (4), strongest where the flame was supposed to sit, or on the body part that had touched the object that was supposed to hold the flame. (The catfolk then started an argument about whether it's possible to mount a flame on an object without actually producing a flame, which is ongoing.)

Boark (10): Unanimous agreement that magic doesn't feel like anything. One then said "when I stick my hand in a false-silver acid froth, it feels like something and it doesn't hurt me like it would hurt you" which inspired similar comments with no clear conclusions.

Stetcap (4): Incredulous silence.

Liefling (1): "It feels like so much! There are no words for it. I could only talk about it with another liefling who has targeted the same creature, at close to the same time, with a similar purpose." But she then was able to say that "it takes at least half a second and at most a few seconds" and feels more like "exploring a daydream" than "doing arithmetic". In response asking if she could make me, a werewolf, feel like a boark touching acid: "No, because that would require targeting two creatures at once." In response to asking if she could make me feel like a liefling, she became incoherent.

Wroth (1): "It's similar to touching something normally, just the ...shape is different."

Whisshopper (1): Illusions seem like they're real.

Elph [number redacted]: "I can tell that it's not my memory but it's pretty similar. What shrines feel like is a state secret."

Kitsune (1): "I have to think about it but it doesn't feel like anything..."

Other: A runner has been dispatched to ask other species, including a mouseling, a vampire, a drider, and an equartier.

"Cancel the runner to the drider." Because the only other driders nearby are off-duty guard dispatchers who need their rest. And he already knows how a thoughtsprint feels: like holding his breath, complete with all the physical sensations of holding his breath and the actual shortness of breath afterwards.

In summary, Rafiik's Force does not feel like a species magic.

"I like to sing with people! It doesn't help me use the Force better, though, it's different from that."

Aha! "Who do you sing with most often?"

"Other Jedi my... hm." They haven't covered age yet, he'll sketch a series of stick figures growing up and eventually pairing up and having a kid on the sand table and indicate that he's a teenager. "There's an adult singing group, too, but I'm in the teenager one - teenage Jedi are called Padawans."

"Jedi is a faction not a species" confirmed? No, it's common to have a special word for children (pups, kits, taddies, kids, chicks, calves, eggs, flits, flecks...).

"What does help you use the Force better?", which is safe now that it's clear that Force requires skill.

"Meditating - sitting still and watching the Force and letting it sing with me. And katas, moving in certain ways, those help a little bit. And practice, I'll get better as I do it more. And I can maybe figure out how to do new things by watching other Jedi or by trying to."

She wants to know if watching Sith helps. "What is the Force doing right now?"

"Just here, nothing strange - or, nothing strange for a Jedi being here. I can see with the Force that you're here, and the fire a little bit, and I can see that there are people outside." He gestures indicatively at the door to the hallway.

He can see fire, or catfire? He already knows that catfolk have a species magic, so it might be safe to ask.

"What does the fire look like?

Also, how can the Force tell you about places where there are no Jedi? Are there places where you can use the Force to see, but nothing reacts to you being there? So if you were not there, it would look the same?"

She calls out the door, "Yes?"

Eilha and a new werewolf come in, with a different harp and a large, coiled-up flute.

He blinks in surprise at Eilha and the new werewolf - were they waiting out there? Why?

Hey Force, general vibe check here?

Vibes: worried.

Except, if he has the precision to tell, the musicians. They're chill.

He does have the precision to tell!

"Is everything okay?" he asks Mirana. "You don't need to..." he gestures at the musicians and then at the door.

"Hm? Don't need what?"

Does the catfire have some Sith nature to it that Rafiik hadn't noticed because he hadn't looked closely enough? He exhales, getting ready for a thoughtsprint that might be his last.

"I didn't see them because I can't see that well with the Force, but I think they were there when you said to come? And they didn't come before you said. I don't know why you think you need to do that for me." He doesn't especially approve, either, from his tone.

"I didn't realize they were waiting until you mentioned that you could tell there were people outside, and once I acknowledged them they came in. They didn't want to disturb you by coming in at a bad time."

Eilha nods.

He's going to be one of those people who gets weird about luxury, isn't he? He didn't seem the type before...

He doesn't seem to think that that's a good answer. "It's okay to knock," he tells Eilha, with a demonstration, "next time." And he'll have to pay more attention to his surroundings from now on.

She smiles slightly. "Understood, thank you."

"What's wrong?"

"Probably someone said to you, be good to Jedi, they're..." can he explain 'important' with the help of the sand table without losing the thread of the conversation, no he probably can't; he shakes his head instead. "That's not... you don't need to. Nothing bad is going to happen to you if I'm unhappy."

That's very sweet and also she doesn't believe him.

Mostly.

What does he mean? Is he a person she can believe?

Coming from her housechief, er, coming from the chief of a new household that she was marrying into, yeah, she'd believe it. 

Coming from a town councilor, no, they'd just be saying words. 

Coming from the head butler of a shrine she just transferred to...hm, she'd have to ask around. There's no one she can ask about Rafiik.

Coming from a visiting ambassador, illthrift no, that's not just a lie but a command to lie in return, force herself to relax, and still arrange to please them. 

Coming from an elph, yes, absolutely. Elves, at least titled Lei elves, do not lie. The Lei empire has lasted a thousand years. They have burnt the trust of their friends and servants and allies and enemies, made every mistake, wasted every kind of opportunity - and they learn from their experience. Their word is precious.

Which of those is Rafiik?

She kind of likes him.

She kind of wants to ask, even if she's a creation of the Sith, raised to destroy the Jedi like a swarm of ravenous pests whose name she's forgetting, her very nature offensive to him? (There hasn't been a swarm of ravenous pests in Lei for decades, but she's heard stories. Locusts, that was one of them.)

And then he'd kill her, but not because she made him unhappy. Because of being a creation of the Sith, etc.

Oh, there is something she can ask.

If it goes badly, well, her friends will have learned something from her sacrifice.

She holds back a nervous giggle.

"Why should I believe you?" 

"I'm not..." He pauses, sighs, relaxes the tension in his shoulders. "I'm sorry. You've been good to me and if you want to keep doing that," he shrugs. "But no Jedi is supposed to ask for this. I think you haven't seen a Jedi before and you're doing what somebody told you. If your Jedi asked for this, that's bad, and I will try to fix it."

Dangerous words, if the other Jedi existed, overheard, and objected to being 'fixed'. She smiles at him.

Huh. And that, class of cadets who he is never actually going to teach but it's nice to imagine, that's why we don't just have driders handle everything.

Okay, back up and think this through. What they ultimately need is safety. One way to be safe is to get rid of Rafiik. That might require attracting the Sith. They need to learn more about Jedi.

When they planned to use an actor, they were thinking that Jedi were ['breeders'] humans, and that Rafiik expected one to be in charge. That's all wrong. Jedi are secretive, not ostentatious.

The fake Jedi is not likely to convince Rafiik to move on, and might provoke him. They should delay that meeting.

What do they do with the time? Learn everything they can. Prepare to fight.

With that in mind, Mirana should keep asking questions.

"'Fix' it? What does the Force do when you fix things?"

"I didn't mean I'd use the Force. When I go back to my planet I will tell the Jedi who tell all the Jedi what to do, and if the Jedi here is doing something bad they'll tell them to stop, or make them stop."

"How do the Jedi who tell all the Jedi what to do... How do they know what they should do? When a Jedi says something about another Jedi?"

"The Jedi who tell all the Jedi what to do are the council. I don't know all of how they know? They talk about it together and they ask the Force, and maybe they send a few Jedi to go learn things and tell them. If they don't already know about this they'll send Jedi to see it. If you want to make sure they know something you can tell me and I'll tell them."

"What does the Force say? Like... this is good or bad, this Jedi is good or bad, this Jedi's words are good or bad, or correct or not, the Jedi 'council' is good or bad...?

And how does the Force know what to say?"

"It can say all of those," he nods. "The Force knows because that's the kind of thing the Force is."

She wants to ask about the Sith - does the Force talk to them too, or about them - but that's too dangerous.

"Does the Force ever say something that isn't correct?"

"No, the same way I can look at these stones," a couple of the game pieces left on the table after they were used in yesterday's explanations, "and see, this one is white, this one is black. The Force is like a person a little bit, but it's not like a person that way."

"Hm, like a person who has seen everything. If you show me a leaf and ask what it is, I might know or I might not. I might ask myself, have I seen a drawing of that leaf? Did I eat one for lunch? I might think, it's some sort of squash - round vegetable - and go ask someone else who works with squash. And again, maybe they know, maybe they don't, maybe they ask themself questions. But if you show a person who has seen everything, they know. They don't ask questions. They just know..."

"Yeah, like that."

The metahuman has returned! And he's working with the Lei. That's all Tolesi knows, and that's enough.

He won't be able to get close to the metahuman. He doesn't even know the location. But a diplomat's suite was prepared in a hurry half a cycle ago, and it's almost time to exchange its decorative plant.

He selects a new plant, one with a wide pot. It's not pretty enough for a diplomat, but even if someone notices hopefully they'll just think there was a mix-up. He removes the soil, which damages the roots, but it doesn't need to survive long.

The bottom of the pot has a hole for drainage. When a plant goes on duty, normally he screws a stone plug into the hole. He needs something different here: a plug that fits loosely and is a little too long, so that when the pot is placed on a flat surface, the plug will slip upwards into the pot and open a gap. He's not a werewolf and can't ask anyone for help, but he has some gravel and eventually finds a chunk that works.

He surrounds the loose plug with the biggest pieces of rock, then fills the rest of the pot with gravel that gets gradually finer towards the top, ending with a thin layer of soil. 

Two kinds of soil, which look the same when soaking wet, but distinct otherwise, which he can use to write a simple message.

Earlier, he tried to check with his handler via the usual rendezvous with a kitsune in the deep tunnels under the shrine, but there was a vampire wandering around. He'll have to decide by himself.

He writes a single word, fills the pot with water, double checks the mechanism, fills the pot again, and hands it off to an underbutler.

A butler knocks on the door.

Rafiik goes to open it. (They all know to knock now! He'll have to ask Mirana later how they're communicating without him noticing, that's pretty neat that they can pull it off without electricity.)

There's a whole line of butlers here to clean up breakfast, refill the fruit basket, deliver more paper and a greater variety of ink and pens, take away the old potted plant, refill the water pitcher, exchange the towel, switch in a new chamber pot, bring a new potted plant, bring a small bowl of cornbread sticks - oh no the new plant is leaking - grab the new paper away from the puddle, clean up the mess, call out for another fresh towel -

Get rid of that plant! Subtly!

- and calmly pick up the new plant to take it away...

The soil in the pot now clearly shows an Elvish word written phonetically.

Unfortunately, Rafiik has been prioritizing learning vocabulary rather than the local system of writing. He does have a pretty good memory, though, and can use the Force to improve his recall of this in particular. First, though: "What word is that?" he asks Mirana.

"It says 'apple', which means" are they lying about it?

One problem is that Rafiik might leave and ask people outside of their control. 

The bigger problem is that the message is mostly not the word itself, but the whole situation where someone dramatically communicated something to him.

Oh good, lying is exhausting. "A kind of fruit."

"Huh." That doesn't sound very plausible.

"Is this a good time for me to go for a walk? And I want to..." he uses the sand table to explain the concept of cleaning... "I want to go for a walk and clean myself. And maybe do katas first."

"Sure..." The water and towel are right there; she points at them and licks her shoulder demonstratively. "There's a room with a very big bowl of water if you want to get very wet and stay wet for a while? We could walk there and then you clean yourself there? If you touched something that is going to hurt you and might hurt other people, there's a room for cleaning that. It's a long walk but we can help you go there faster than walking."

"No, I'm fine - I can do a Force thing for that if it happens but it didn't happen. I want to be clean when I meet the other Jedi. The room with the big bowl sounds good."

The butler who delivered the plant is innocent and was observing the plant the whole time. He got it from an underbutler whose first meeting with an Emperor is a bit intimidating, but she's innocent too. She got it from the gardener, whom she describes as a catfolk with black fur, pale yellow eyes, large ears, a wide chin and nose - yeah, that's either the gardener Tolesli Ratkeeper or a very good imposter. And he (whoever he is) is gone now. Guards! After him!

The 'other Jedi' just finished changing out of a colorful multilayered costume with more jewelry than he's seen in his life, total, and into a simple robe with a very tricky braided belt, and now he needs to hold still some more so the belt can be worked loose again and his new clothes removed. Time for scrubbing! And a soak, apparently that's important.

The room with the big bowl isn't far. The hallway art does not depict any breeders.

Here's the room. Underground, of course, but there are three catfolk keeping it bright and warm. The pool is about twenty feet across and three feet deep.

The musicians follow behind, sit by the wall, and resume playing.

(Eilha's harp is made of stone. The strings will go slack with the humidity but she can adjust the shape of the nut to compensate.)

Huh, fancy. Also less private than he was expecting; he's not shy, exactly, but he will ask about nudity taboos before he strips - some planets have them, he explains, without expanding on whether his does.

"Nah, go ahead." There are shelves for clothes on the wall.

Some species care about it, including the breeders he resembles, but none of them are here... Is he worried about a cross-species nudity taboo? Does that happen? Does his home have multiple species? If they don't have breeders and species magics, how?

She can ask later if she wants, right now he's taking a bath. He's reasonably efficient about it, though he does spend a little time examining the pool and sneaks a moment of meditation in while she isn't looking to cement the memory of the text from earlier in his mind.

"Are there different clothes I can use?" he asks, as he's starting to finish up. He's been careful not to get too sweaty since he's been here but he wasn't planning on this when he hiked out to the cliff face yesterday. "The ones I have are okay if not."

The pool is set most of the way into the floor and made of even dark blue stone with a slightly rough texture. Away from the entrance, the floor is wavy, with tiny holes in the low spots. There are two spigots, a large one capped off with solid stone and a small one that continuously trickles hot water.

The ledge for holding flame is higher up than in the hallway and curves irregularly. The walls have the same rough texture as the floor, in various dark colors. Near the floor, there are small patches of writing and pictures.

An attendant takes a bundle out of a box near the hot water spigot. It's a towel and a long tunic, loose and soft but not stretchy, colored an undyed beige. Both are warm.

(Everyone else has been wearing similar tunics, in light green, plus darker green sashes with various white embroidery.)

Perfect.

"Do you know when the other Jedi will be here?" he asks Mirana, when he's done figuring out how it goes on.

They're going to have to tell Rafiik about the war, so how does the 'other Jedi' fit into that? Obviously, he can't be supporting the Freedom Democracy. He also can't be supporting the Lei, because then why haven't they won already. They want to set an example of staying out of other people's business, but with the possibility of recruiting Rafiik later, so the 'other Jedi' should also not be passionately committed to neutrality or working with the Allheart Alliance.

So he's a wanderer of some sort. Who doesn't do very much, just observes. Doesn't really care what's going on.

Which means that the prepared lie that now makes its way to Mirana is:

"After lunch. He is coming here from far away."

"What time is it, anyway? I haven't seen a thing for telling the time yet."

"It's about 25? There are 30 hours in a cycle. When the time is 0 and 10 and 20 hours, someone walks by the rooms where people sleep and plays music really loud." She mimes playing some sort of glockenspiel. "They don't do that where your room is, but they could do it if you want that? Oh, and I think they know when to play music because a bowl of water fills up from a small spigot."

"Huh. When is zero, I guess it's when the sun is highest?"

"Huh? Oh, at home your planet spins? This planet doesn't." If he's from the past, which she's not at all sure of, it must be the really distant past! 

"A cycle is the amount of time where it feels good to sleep once each cycle."

"Yeah, most species like to live on planets that spin." Several points in the 'someone's secret project' bucket, why would you pick a tidally locked planet if you weren't hiding from absolutely everyone. "That's probably the same as the cycles at home, the species here look similar to [foreign-]humans in the Force and my home planet has a [foreign-]human type cycle."

Oup, dangerous subject. "That must make things complicated. Do you want to walk more? Do you want to go up to the surface?"

'most species'!? So what else besides 'humans' then? And they don't have species magic? What... are they for then?

"I might want to do that later, I want to go back to the room and talk to you about something right now. Alone," he adds, directing it at the musicians, "but thank you, the music has been very good."

That's kinda concerning.

On the upside, he's probably only upset with her in particular, not anyone else.

He's not in a hurry, on the way back, and carefully keeps his concern out of his body language.

When they're back in the room, he sits crosslegged on the bed and gestures for Mirana to sit as well. "How much do you know about your Jedi? Do you know why they're here? Do you know how many there are, or if they have other people working with them?"

She bounces on the chair nervously. 

"I don't know much. He's been here for a long time, at least twelve years. He walks around and sometimes sings or tells stories. He's probably walked all the way around the planet several times, but I don't know for certain and I don't think anyone does - he's hard to find. 

I think there's only one, but I guess there could be more than one and I might not know? I don't know what he looks like, other than kind of like you.

Probably lots of musicians would like to follow him around, but I've never heard of that happening."

Lots of... musicians? ...oh, because she thinks the Force is music-related. And/or the guy has a coincidental hobby. That's not the weirdest part, though. "He walks?"

"That's what people say, since he doesn't have a bicycle or anything? But I suppose he might use the Force..."

"No, the Force isn't good for that." It's not surprising that she doesn't know much, with most likely only one Jedi on the planet, but what she's saying doesn't add up at all. "Do you know anything else about him? Anything at all - something strange is going on here and I'm trying to figure out what."

"Well, we found him in the town of em-rrdet-bon in the Valley of Shadow. He was singing while people hammered metal. He didn't know you were here but was excited to meet you when we told him.

Hmm... I heard that once he told everyone in a town to leave because there was going to be a lot of water soon."

That's plausible, at least. Weird, taking an interest in primitive crafts, but plausible - maybe the guy also appeared here out of nowhere and is trying to build the tech base up? But why singing, then?

Well, he has a different angle to try, maybe it'll turn up something more useful. "How did you find him to tell him?"

A realistic answer here would be that they sent messengers to all the towns in Lei, but unfortunately the timeline doesn't work out, so the story has to rely on a bit of luck. "One of my friends had heard from her sister that he had been seen in another town in the Valley of Shadow, so when you asked, I knew that he was near there, and that we could find him by sending messengers to check all the possible towns."

It's not at all implausible that the Force is arranging for them to meet up, and it's most likely a good sign - if their Jedi is a Sith, or fallen, or something, the Force wouldn't steer them right into each other like this. "The Force might do that," he nods. "That tells me something good, if it did. Do you know if your Jedi has anything like my music, or used to? - do you know where he started, as a baby?"

"The Force might do what?

They say he sings very well. Maybe he has music like you, or used to, but if you don't know about music like that, the story sounds like it can't be correct, so people who heard the one story later said only that he sings very well.

I don't know where he was born."

"The Force might have brought him there, and made your friend's sister hear about him. It wouldn't do that if it was bad for me to see him, I think. People who can see the Force are... I don't have the word..." He gets a handful of dice and demonstrates that if he wants high rolls he'll tend to get them, not every time or even often enough to be obvious but more often than chance, if you're paying attention, even if Mirana is the one rolling.

He literally has luck on his side? They're doomed.

Less-plausible lies are actually better? "Neat!"

..."What if two people who can both see the Force are playing a dice game?"

"The one who feels more about it might do better, or the one who's stronger in the Force. Or the one who uses the Force better, maybe, if the first two are about the same."

Ah, so people who can see the Force are the same as people who can use the Force; that's what she thought but it's good to have confirmation.

"What does it mean to use the Force 'better'? Like a werewolf moving the least amount of stone, in the fastest path - taking the stone from a place near to where it needs to go?"

"I mean using the Force better the way you can play an instrument better, to make better music even if it's the same music. I don't know if that matters for dice but it might."

"Ohh, 'singing with' the Force to make better music!"

He nods. "It's not exactly that but it's a good way to think about it."

"Mm. ...So. You probably want to know more about the plant. So. On this planet, there is is more than one big group of people who work together, more than one country. Sometimes countries try to hurt each other. That is currently happening. The group here is the Lei and there is another big group trying to hurt us called the FD."

She refers to the Freedom Democracy by a common Elvish nickname akin to an acronym, and so avoids explaining the full name, which includes the words 'freedom' (sounds good but it's actually bad) and 'democracy' (sounds bad but he might think it's a tool for the Force, like a divination game). "Someone from the FD wanted to get your attention."

"...ah. I'll need to talk to your Jedi about that. And we will probably want to talk to the person, so if you get them, please don't do anything bad to them."

Nod. "I will tell that to everyone." Presumably the spy has already been executed...

"So, sometimes people go into the drybright and look at old stone things. There's a story about a hero who did that a long time ago. People like her a lot. Sometimes people go look in the drybright themselves hoping that they will find something useful or interesting. They really want to find something good, so if they don't, they might say they found something good, because if they say they didn't find anything they'll feel bad.

A few years ago, someone in the FD went into the drybright and found an old stone saying that somebody was bad because the apples they grew - the next part isn't readable but presumably they tasted bad or something. The person who found this told everyone about it, and told everyone that a good person in the past said not to eat apples.

And people in FD stopped eating apples. Okay, they can eat what they like.

Then they tried to hurt us, tried to hurt people who were growing apples here."

He's really glad he paid attention in diplomacy class because otherwise this would sound absurd. "Do you have people who are talking to the FD about it?"

"Diplomats from FD visit. Sometimes they sleep in this exact room! And messengers go between here and there.

What are you thinking they would talk about? If they only wanted us to stop eating apples, we would stop if they gave us seeds of another fruit to grow instead, plus, say, use of the Sunuul aqueduct for ten years.

But now, they have done lots of bad things. They hurt people first, they hurt people" with disiniuria which is mostly about species magic so not mentioning that "in particular bad ways first, they say they will do something and then do something else. That's why they visit here, but we can't visit there. We do what we say.

So we talk, but how does that do anything good? When they say something, who cares? And they did bad things that we need to fix, but they don't want us to fix them."

He nods. "But if you don't talk to them at all you have no way to make them stop. Jedi do diplomacy sometimes, I was learning it at home, and I might be able to help with it a little, but I need to talk to your Jedi first."

Well if he's a reasonable person who isn't going to kill them all for being made by the Sith, and doesn't end up deciding that the FD are correct and killing them all for being Lei, that sounds great. "Thank you!"

Also that's the second time he asked in the last minute and she gets the point. "Is there more you want to talk with me about, or shall I check on the status of the other Jedi?"

"I think that was everything. If he's not here yet I'd like to go see an apple plant next. - oh, and I'm curious how you were telling people things without going to them earlier."

So he did notice when the butler knocked. "I wasn't? Oh, people listen through holes so they know when you need things. When you asked to talk with me alone, the musicians would have told them not to listen. It's normal to want privacy sometimes.

I don't know of any apple trees nearby but I'll ask..."

She pops out the door for a minute.

....."Is there anything else like that, with people doing things about me that I can't see?" It does make some sense as a way of doing things if you don't have droids, but it's still creepy.

"No one is watching you or smelling you or anything? But doing things about you, yes... Getting food when it's time, thinking about foods based on what you liked before. Finding an undyed tunic and putting it in the soakroom so you would have something appropriate to wear. Thinking about how your clothes should be washed if you ask for that. Getting transportation ready for you - speaking of which: The other Jedi is almost here. If you want to meet him as soon as possible, there's a place to wait outside near the station and we should leave now. Also, the nearest apple trees will take a few hours to get to."

"Those are fine; I'll know after I meet your Jedi whether I'm going to want my clothes to be washed." If he's going to be leaving the planet in a few days anyway he'll wait rather than risk the fabric to whatever pre-electric process they have. "It's better to him to wait for him to get here and do any small things he wants to do before meeting me."

"It is? Do you want anything before you meet him?" She was told to try to get him to go to the station but she doesn't know why.

(The reason, which she is not cleared to know, is that: undines are real; an undine is going to be necessary to survive Rafiik meeting the 'other Jedi'; and getting an undine in range of Rafiik's room is going to be a pain. To start with, undines are aquatic. Worse, the undine in their employ is not loyal to the Lei Empire and can't be allowed near anyone who might think about anything important. The shrine itself is out of range, but many of the guards would need to be moved, which means more guards than usual would be necessary, and they'd be following a procedure that they're less familiar with.)

"I could learn more words or go for a walk, or something else, it doesn't matter very much to me."

Words then! Communication is important and learning languages is mentally tiring; it's a win-win.

The weight of the undine's tank should be minor compared to all the rock, but a collapse would be disastrous. A set of loyal, dependable, and ignorant werewolves add temporary supports through the six storeys below and stand by with the rock 'warmed up'. The vampire monitors the shifting stress as the tank is rolled in.

Knock knock. More music?

Sure, thank you.

Another knock. It's the Jedi! He's wearing a simple robe, a wide braided belt, a friendly smile, and a relaxed, balanced posture.

He is not the slightest bit Force-sensitive.

He knows it's not the Jedi even before he opens the door, though he's not thinking specifically about why; presumably it's someone coming to get him to take him to where the other Jedi is waiting for him. That it's another human behind the door is a bit surprising but not very much so; humans are incredibly common, after all, and the locals have to have gotten their human heritage somewhere.

"...can I help you?"

"No, I'm so sorry, sir, I must have gotten turned around." He bows and walks away.

...weird. Probably not Force-related, or he would have stuck around for a minute, though it could be setup for something. Alternately, maybe another FDer trying to talk to him about the war? He'll have to arrange to be alone in the room for a while at some point and maybe he'll show up again then. This isn't a good time for it at all, though, so it's no big loss. For now: more vocabulary?

More vocabulary, and then a butler brings snacks.

"...where is the Songful Jedi?"

Good question; it is a little weird that the other Jedi is taking this long. It's probably bad news if he takes much longer - if he was fallen and hostile he most likely would have come and killed Rafiik right away (which there's not really anything he can do about, so it's not worth dwelling on; give it to the Force) but another possibility is that he's hostile and preparing a battleground. Possibly it's worth trying to run, if it looks like that's what's going on? He'll ask the Force about it later rather than miss the message here.

"Hm? He isn't here yet."

"He should be..." Saiel puts down the tray and hurries out.

A minute later, he's back. "He was on this hallway a few minutes ago, eager to meet you and confident that he could get to your room by himself. And then he was seen climbing up to the surface in a rush. We should hear back from the kite workers soon what he did after that."

...what. He would have noticed him if he was that close, almost certainly. And that 'almost' is 'if he was purposely hiding his Force signature', which doesn't square with him being eager about the meeting. "Something strange is going on. I want to talk to him as soon as you find him."

Rafiik hasn't said aloud that the other Jedi is an imposter, or commanded they apprehend him, so he's going to 'get away'. That means the hastily-assembled 'interrogation room' will go to waste, and they can't use it as an excuse to bring Rafiik farther from the shrine, but this way is still safer than the conversation with the fake Jedi would be.

The next update: "He stole a bicycle and is riding bright - towards the sun - faster than we can follow."

Rafiik has concluded by now that the most obvious explanation is that the guy is an impostor, and it's occurred to him that Mirana and the rest of them might be lying to him, though it's still possible that there were Jedi here at one point to inspire imitators. He's probably going to need to Force Trick somebody, getting this sorted out, but it's less skeevy to start with the person he knows is lying to him. "Do you have another bicycle I can use, I can probably catch him."

"Yes, just a minute, sir. Mirana, take him to the surface?"

Why are they doing this. Doesn't the Emperor understand they're already doomed?

Well.

He'll do his job to the end.

An equartier can go fast enough but will leave an obvious trail of destruction through the farmland.

Maybe there's a cat thing with steam that would work? But they don't have it, and how would they get rid of it, and it would take minutes at least to build it. 

Ah! Two equartiers! Plus a very very very long rope, a mouseling, and a flock of harpies.

It's just up the ladder here and then Saiel will bring the bicycle in a moment ah here he is

(The bicycle is actually a velocipede with solid stone wheels shaped like two cones glued base to base. There is no clear path through the grass.)

Rafiik has never so much as seen a velocipede before, but he's a Jedi, he'll figure it out.

First, though, he needs to figure out where he's even going; a moment's meditation to sharpen his eyesight and then he crouches and leaps into the air, rather higher than you'd expect a creature with the form factor of a human to be able to.

There's an awful lot of movement on the horizon, some kind of flapping or reciprocating motion being done by a lot of people. And a trail of crushed plants leading straight towards a frantically-bouncing and wobbling humanoid figure.

Very weird for the guy to have accomplices, and probably complicating. He'll sort it out when he gets there, though; onto the bicycle, now, making liberal use of telekinesis, and away he goes, somewhat awkwardly at first but quickly getting up to a speed that makes it obvious why he thought he could catch him.

"Crash now!"

The two equartiers charge through the fields holding the rope strung between them, with it passing through the frame of the bike to pull it forward. The harpies fly low, keeping the rope just above the crops.

The mouseling holds onto the rope on left side and saws through it farther to the left. For a moment, the rope on the right is still pulling on the bike, throwing it into a roll. Then the cursor is pulled through the gap between the wheel and the frame and smashed. (The mouseling is still perfectly safe back at the shrine complex.)

The harpies keep flying, the equartiers keep running, and all that's left is Tomas, a crashed bike, and some fragments of wicker in the middle of a field of squash.

He tumbles over twice and lands in an area of seedlings, avoiding the hard full-grown squashes.

It doesn't take long for Rafiik to catch up; he jumps off the bike and lets it crash rather than try to figure out how it's supposed to be dismounted, rolling to a stop next to Tomas and grabbing his wrist, gently but firmly enough that he's not going to be able to run away. "You don't want to lie to me," he asserts with a brief wave of his free hand, and it's just obviously true, Tomas doesn't. "Are you hurt? Are we in danger?"

That's right! He's going to show them all by telling this asshole the truth! "Well, I sprained my wrist and I'm bruised all over and my vision is blurry but I guess I'm not hurt in any way you'd care about. I have no idea what they're going to do now but I'm sure you'll be fine, super Jedi man."

Blurry vision might be a detached retina or something, better not to let that wait. "If I let go of you are you going to run away? I can heal you, but I need to catch my breath first."

"No, there's no point running."

"Is there any other reason you know of why I might not want to do that right now? Are your people going to come back or anything?"

"It's a stupid waste of effort. I'll be fine.

What do you mean, my people? The Lei? They're not my people, but they'll catch up in a minute."

Indeed, Mirana and Saiel are climbing out of a hole about a hundred feet away and running towards them.

He lets go of Tomas and gets to his feet. "If your vision gets worse tell me, if you hit your head you could be going blind and I can't fix that if I don't catch it early. It's fine, I've got him," he shouts to Mirana and the others.

"Wow. Are you okay?"

Hey Rafiik is away from the shrine, get the undine over there!

...Which will take like fifteen minutes.

"Yeah, I'm okay!" He meets them partway, checking back every few steps to make sure Tomas doesn't get too much of a headstart if he tries to run off. "I did a Force thing to him so he can't easily lie to me; if he notices that I did it it might stop working, though, so don't act surprised when he tells me things." He's watching Mirana's emotions in particular very closely as he says it.

Incredulous. Afraid. Despairing. Overwhelmed. "Huh, okay." A brief flash of hope, followed by more despair.

Well, if she interferes with his information-gathering that'll also be information. He hopes he can resolve this with everyone safe and reasonably satisfied, and he's fairly confident he can if they're willing to work with him on it - he absolutely doesn't want to fight his way out but if he has to he should be all right, a thought which is accompanied by memories of past lightsaber training - but he's going to wait to tell her that until he sees what she does.

"He's injured, too," he adds, turning to head back. "I have some healing, I'll take care of it before we leave or sooner if he asks me to."

Healing too? He probably has every magic that could ever exist, or at least that's the upper bound for a Jedi. Maybe he personally has every kind, if he already knew about about catfolk magic - er, it would just be called 'fire magic' wouldn't it - and knew that Asrek was going to touch the flame and pretended to be surprised.

(The guard dispatcher is getting reports at a several-second delay but can't give guidance until the equartiers who carried the butlers come back and carry him and the whisshopper closer to the site.)

Rafiik tromps back to Tomas. "Are your eyes any worse?"

"No."

"Good." He offers him a hand up; he's not sure which wrist is sprained so he just positions it so Tomas can grab it with either hand. "So what were you doing, earlier?"

He takes the hand suspiciously. "Clinging to a bicycle while some equartiers pulled me over the surface faster than bicycles are supposed to go." ...but it would be funnier to lift his cup to the ceiling and totally screw up the Lei job: "Because they botched my Jedi clothes and you wanted to be a big hero and go bike riding through food."

"Ah-ha." Rafiik chuckles, briefly, as he pulls Tomas to his feet. "It wasn't the clothes, actually. Sorry about that, though; I didn't know what you were doing or if you'd be dangerous to anyone. Mirana, do you want to say anything about this?"

"People are going to starve because of you."

No, Lei is not so desperate as to have people go hungry because of a single incident that does damage equal to a couple of crashing kites. The importance of 'slack' is one of their many hard-won lessons. (Pride... Regret.) But she's not going to disclose that to enemies.

"It's true that we wanted you to think there was a Jedi here, who would tell you that this is not your job... just walk around singing and telling stories. I lied to you about... a lot of things. The species here, Jedi and Sith, the apple story... But it's true that FD wants to destroy us. That was all true. And I was telling the truth about you having privacy when the musicians were away!" She's feeling awful, probably about to cry... yeah there she goes.

Calm, calm; the possibility that people might go hungry because of him is upsetting but that isn't going to help anything right now. "I'm not upset at you," he says to Mirana, gently. "People do things like this when they think they're in danger. Why were you doing it?" The last question is directed at the whole group.

She shouldn't have mentioned Sith. But she had to, lying more isn't going to help. But - argh. And how could she possibly explain her terror at the turbulent, malignant ideas that people have when they reject the guidance of elves, to someone who has never had that guidance and is already infected, was born infected? She shakes her head wildly, eyes clenched shut and ears back.

Wait. Oh no.

"If you - I don't know, but if you tried -" she looks at Tomas "then it broke, for me. I was - and I realized..."

He's not sure if she's trying to break the Mind Trick or what, and he can't ask without risking breaking it himself. "Can you take Mirana over there and sit with her until she calms down?" he asks Saiel. (There's nothing special about the bit of field he's pointing to, it's just better to avoid asking people to make decisions in high-stress situations.)

Yes, away from Tomas! No, not away from Rafiik!

"Talk to Asrek! He's still asleep!" And now she will go cry on Saiel's shoulder, fine.

"it's okay, you did well." Lick lick lick...

It seems like a bad idea to take suggestions from her if she was trying to break the Trick. Back to Tomas, then; fortunately he's pretty sure it's not going to be subtle if the Trick is broken. "So why were you doing it? Or, you said they're not your people, do you know why they wanted you to?"

Noooo she's trying to help! Wait, should she be helping him? Maybe??

"Because if you knew they're evil you'd kill them! FD is evil too. Everyone on this whole planet is evil!"

"I don't know the words evil or kill, yet." Fortunately it doesn't seem like the Trick has broken.

"Hurt, break them! Clean the whole planet and put better people here instead, because they're bad - gross, like bugs! - like the Sith."

Mirana clings to Saiel and wails.

...did he even mention the Sith? ...once, yes, back when he was first trying to figure out what was up with this place, with no detail. "Nobody here is like the Sith," he sighs. "And I'm not going to kill anyone. Why did you think I might?"

"How do you know you'd be able to tell? If they made the first of us, a long time ago - the first of us, who made catfolk and werewolves and elves and all the other species, would you be able to tell? Ohhh! I bet the female breeders look like the Sith more! So that's why it's impossible to control them!"

"I don't know if they made you. That's different from whether you're like them, I can see with the Force that you're not corrupted, you're just people."

"Liar!" He swings at Rafiik.

Rafiik smoothly steps out of the way; either his reaction time is superhuman or he saw the punch coming before Tomas properly threw it. He gestures for Mirana and Saiel to stay behind him.

Tomas curls up on the ground and trembles.

"I'm not going to hurt you." It might be kinder to make a Trick of it but misuse of power is a bad road to go down. "Just wait here."

He goes over to Mirana and Saiel, circling around to keep Tomas in sight. "How are you doing? I meant it, that even if the Sith made you you obviously aren't like them."

Mirana and Saiel look shaky but thoroughly groomed.

Well that's one problem down, one to go, right?

"What are you going to do now?"

"I don't know. I don't think I should stay here. Are you going to be in trouble because of that?"

"Why would we be in trouble? We didn't do anything wrong... Wait are you going to the FD?! That's exactly the sort of thing they'll tell you - that Lei kills people who don't do anything wrong. And they -" she pauses and adds quietly: "There are so many lies there that sometimes people are wrong but they think they're right."

"You could easily have killed him, with the bicycle," he says, inclining his head to indicate Thomas. "I'm going to need to look for lies no matter where I go." He sounds tired.

"Yeah, and he knew it was a dangerous job. That's not what I mean. I mean people in the FD will say, the Lei will kill you even if you were trying hard but made a mistake, or the Lei will kill you if someone important is unhappy, or the Lei make you work all the time, or no one in Lei likes anyone else, and all sorts of things that are just wrong, things that can't possibly be true."

He'd buy that more easily if they hadn't been scared of displeasing him. "I know countries lie about each other sometimes. I'm not going to do anything to the Lei without making sure I know what's true. I don't want to hurt people." He's sixteen, for kriff's sake, he doesn't want to get into the middle of a war, no matter how curious he is about the diplomatic details. "I just wanted to know if I should think about taking you with me. But if you'll be safe here, I don't think we have anything else to talk about."

He heads back over to Tomas - has he calmed down at all?

"So you're going to hear everything they say, but you heard hardly anything from us!" she calls after him.

Here's some lies for that liar, that's only fair. "I would like to come with you, sir. They'll kill me now that I'm not useful to them anymore. I speak five languages and I'm trained as a mediator."

...Annoyingly, that was mostly true. He would not actually 'like' to go with Rafiik, but it's better than the alternative. The Lei will probably keep him prisoner, not kill him. He speaks two languages well, one haltingly, can ask for and understand directions to the Sota embassy in one, and swear obscenely in one more. He did actually train to be a mediator, although he failed his certification.

Rafiik wouldn't give stellar odds of the Mind Trick still being in place at this point anyway, the advantage and the disadvantage of placing a want like that is that wants are often temporary. "If you try to hurt me again I might hurt you very badly, I don't know how to fight people who aren't Jedi or Sith. But if you'd rather come with me than go by yourself, sure. I'll heal you, anyway." He lowers himself to the ground and closes his eyes to meditate.

Apparently he heals people by being nearby and concentrating, like a 'doctor' in a violent RPG. Okay then. 

She moves a bit closer, still giving them both space.

He ignores her. After half a minute his hand starts to glow a watery blue. "I'll need to touch you," he tells Tomas as he opens his eyes.

Blue light? Not that she doubts he can make blue light if he wants, but why is that part of healing; it's like if werewolves glowed whenever they reached into stone...

Tomas reaches out, palm up.

Rafiik puts his hand on Tomas's. The healing makes him feel warm and cool all over, not unpleasantly; his pain eases, not immediately but at a decent pace, and his vision clears up.

Huh! "Thank you, sir."

Mirana steps forward. "I think you should bring me too, or at least someone from Lei. I suggested Asrek because he's someone you've met, who has no knowledge of anything that has happened in the last hour, or anything you've said, if that's useful to you. He's just a musician, not a butler, if you prefer that?

I also speak five languages" frown at Tomas "but if there is something in particular you want we can probably find you someone who can do it."

"The problem with that is that I don't trust you. But if" subtle handwave "you're done with lying to me, you can come with us a little way while I think about it." It's not the least sketchy thing he's ever done, but he has an intuition.

(Mirana does not recognize the hand gesture.)

"Well I don't trust you either! But I think it will be good for both of us, at least assuming you care to some slight degree about truth and justice!" Oops she didn't mean to say that part out loud. Her post-cry wobbliness must really be hitting her. "Uh so if you want to go to the FD, there's a small piece of it to the north*, 15 hours by equartier, and just beyond it is most of the Allheart Alliance, which is most of the countries that support neither Lei nor FD. Most of the FD is to the south*, 3 cycles from here by equartier, or more like 6 by sled, and some distance farther to wherever their capital is currently." She raises her voice - "But we will go by equartier because it would just be petty to refuse that to him now, yeah?"

* 'north' and 'south' are the directions perpendicular to the ecliptic.

The guard dispatcher is finally on the scene. "Answer so everyone can hear. Yes - "

And an Emperor, via tengu, takes over: "and we'll give you a letter, in less than a minute, granting you free travel throughout Lei, second degree of priority use of all transportation, room and board at any shrine, and the power to question anyone, one person at a time, for up to one hour, no matter what important work they're doing."

A disembodied voice repeats that.

Tomas wants to go north so his communication isn't limited to swearing, but he stays quiet about it.

North sounds like the better bet to Rafiik, too; it gets them out of the Lei sooner and if he turns out not to want to get involved in the war he'll be better positioned to do that. "Explain equartiers?"

"A species that runs very fast, especially in long straight lines. We'll need one to carry each of us, unless you can somehow make yourself small or easy to carry. They're also good at smashing buildings. We'll probably stop so the equartiers who have been running can rest and new ones start carrying us."

"I can stay on things a nonJedi couldn't be on safely, but I wouldn't want to do it for fifteen hours. I want my clothes back, too, and a bag to carry them and the papers in. Tomas, do you know of any reason not to go north?"

The capital is probably south, like the furball of evil just said, dummy. "No, sir."

A catfolk butler scrambles out of the nearest hole carrying a large piece of stiff leather with ornate writing in multiple glittery colors.

Another one will come in a few minutes with a bag and Rafiik's clothes.

Presumably (or, well, hopefully) if Tomas had any objections to going north he would have taken the opportunity to voice them, and that's what Rafiik was trying to get at in the absence of the word 'objection'.

He's not thrilled about being carried, the idea of his route being under Lei control doesn't appeal. On reflection he'd give pretty good odds of the whole trip being below ground, though, in which case it hardly matters, if something seems wrong he'll need to abandon his ride and get topside to walk either way. "Are there places for sleds to go up here?"

"There are sleds on the surface, but not here."

The disembodied voice speaks again. "Please wait one moment..."

(A kitsune relays the query to a lesser shrine focused on logistics and brings back the answer...)

"If you want to stay above the surface, there are two main routes: darkward by ship, then north along the Alhekte cargo sled, through the Pes orogeny, and then the Sient Road cargo sled, which will take 59 hours; or, brightward by ship and then north by the Great Sled, which will take 48 hours. If you want to be on the surface entirely, not below or above, the durations of the two routes will be 103 hours and 168 hours, respectively, or approximately 3½ cycles and 6 cycles, assuming a typical walking speed and rest time."

The idea is to be able to see that they aren't bringing him somewhere they shouldn't be, and with a complicated route he can't check that by watching the horizon. He'll have to see if he can get ahold of a map at some point, so he doesn't have this problem again as easily, but he doesn't trust them not to give him a doctored one. He is really starting to regret not going back to Tython, as unclear as it is that that would have saved him from this mess. "The equartiers are fine. Tomas, Mirana, do you need anything for the trip?"

"I'm ready."

"No, sir."

"All right. Where do we go for the equartiers?"

Down a hole, along the hallway, past an opportunity to use a chamberpot (recommended), into an elevator which clunks and whooshes its way down seven storeys, and here are three cheerful equartiers. They look fairly human except for their wide nostrils, manes, and hooves the size of their thighs. They're wearing the typical Lei uniform; their sashes have small bags at the shoulder.

Would the distinguished passengers prefer bridal carry, piggy-back, or sack-of-potatoes-over-the-shoulder?

"If there's a problem, pull on my mane. Hard. Don't worry about hurting me. And remember, I won't be able to see or hear you when we're going fast, and it takes time to slow down. Don't try to jump off before I put you down."

The journey starts with a few minutes of jogging through hallways like those above, just more cramped and sporadically lit. Then, one by one, several minutes apart, they go down a ramp into utter darkness and pick up the pace. 

clomp clomp clomp CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP

Rafiik keeps close track of his heading through the journey, to make sure they're headed north. He'll take piggyback and warns his equartier that he might, in fact, jump; it's safe for him to do so. (Or at least if it isn't he'll recognize that before making the mistake.)

They are indeed heading north. 

Each minute or so, the equartier grabs a small object from the side and puts it into the sash bag, and sometimes adjusts the pace afterwards. 

After about six hours, they slow down and emerge into a lit area. A butler offers them refreshments and shows them a view of a landscape below them. The ground is in shadow; a line of towers cuts across, their tops lit by the sun in sharp contrast to the ground.

(Mirana and Tomas are quiet, other than a brief conversation between Mirana and the local butler. Tomas stares out the window the whole time he eats.)