It's just a kit for doing cheek swabs, and they can get assistance. (The turnaround time is short, so Cean feels it's better to risk the first round of sampling not producing viable samples than to make people deal with potentially unnecessary procedures.)

Fib's dealt with cheek swabs back before he Awoke, so this should be manageable without help. If there's multiple swabs, the two of them consider whether having Sniper give a sample might be good as well, but even if the option is there they decide against for now. Neither of them are entirely that sosei-shita even have DNA in the first place. They haven't had the opportunity to check, and it'd be best to test that with some prior awareness rather than jumping on Ceanothus with no warning.

Once that sample-taking is done, they'll package it up and send it back with the delivery drone and get back to waiting.

There's kits for the entire party. Someone must have done a head count at some point.

Fair enough, but also Blue and Autumn are still back at the ATV anyway, and he's the only one they've talked about bargaining over an additional immortality for, so it's still just Fib's sample for now. If this works out and it seems like they have enough to offer to get all four of them set up (and the sosei-shita can benefit from this at all, since having them able to benefit from his Bondworks once he gave them some colorflame already seemed like a remarkable coincidence) then they can talk with Ceanothus about hashing out a bigger deal.

He can put his kit back in the robot when he's done and it will head off to the fortress.

The mirror he was handed earlier chimes like a small gong.

Ooh, he managed to forget that they do that ever since he started using them mostly as the backbone for the sosei-shita's internet. That's a nice sound.

He'll go ahead and take the mirror out of the pocket he slipped it into and see what's up.

The mirror ripples before showing an unfamiliar face.

“Your sample took. I have a clone growing for you, but it’s not going to be ready right away.”

Fib nods. "Fair enough. Any idea how long it takes? Also, there were four sample kits. Should I ask if Sniper, Autumn, and Blue want to see if it works for them as well? And, what kind of debt are we in for, whether it's just me or the four of us?"

“I can flush the tanks if I want to, there’s no debt. If we come to a deal I could imagine you being glad we started on this early. I sent kits for your party for similar reasons.”

It's a little concerning that even after a deal is struck, these back-ups could get dropped at any time with no warning, if Ceanothus feels like it. They'll need to keep looking for more alternatives.

"Fair enough. Would you be willing to send the drone back with the other kits then? And I or Sniper will need to head back to the ATV to get the kits to Autumn and Blue."

"Yes, absolutely. One moment, please."

Fib can go back to seeing his own face for a moment while Cean sends the robot back.

"The kits are on their way. Thank you for holding."

"Thank you!" he replies, "Anyway, I suppose while the drone makes it way back out here and the sosei-shita takes their samples, we should discuss what we can offer you for this, and what of it that you'd like."

"The things I think of Literate Elfland as needing aside from immortality or lesser forms of life extension are industrial equipment and expertise. Given that other conduits still live, we may also be interested in defense agreements. If you have the capacity to liberate the elves that would also be of interest, though it's a more complicated issue. In practice I suspect you can do strange things I wouldn't think of, though."

"In terms of what I can offer personally as a Conduit:

"I'm pretty fast with jumps, at least compared to the one other Conduit I've met, and I can jump without needing to be right at the bridge. I can jump with a bike or a car or other stuff of similar size, and if I'm leading a group of vehicle I can bring up to four others with me too. That's how I've been doing the interdimensional commerce stuff so far. My jumps are a bit, uh...wild, though, so I generally try and make sure there's nobody around, and nothing important and fragile nearby either, since sometimes wild animals will pop up when I come through, usually either from here or Mu.

"I've got my Stone Library, which I've made mostly into an internet hub, though it's also where my preferred immortality is based, and some of the sosei-shita live there instead of at Revival Base since it's a touch safer, and they offer to help keep my server racks clean, keep the software updated, that sort of thing.

"Other than that, I've got orichalcum and desert glass, and I can survive in space without a suit, which was stressful to find out. Also I'm connected to a bunch of world, thirteen now that I've connected to a new one just recently."

Sniper gestures, and takes the mirror next. "As for Revival Base," they begin. They go on to explain the numerous details they're comfortable sharing as one of Revival Base's informal leaders, such as their relatively strength of engineering knowledge thanks to having studied many pirated engineering textbooks, manufacturing specifications, etc., as well as having dis- and re-assembled around a dozen different vehicles currently stored in the base's garage, as well as intimate familiarity with what sort of mechanical parts can be safely fabricated from either orichalcum or desert glass, and which need to be sourced elsewhere. They'll also go over Rim-local resource extraction projects, including the current state of their agriculture and animal husbandry, as well as extant trade partnerships with sosei-shita communities on a handful of different Earths, the Pink Desert, the Æther (who are also additionally allied with a local faction of ishim and ængelim), Crucible, and Rorch.

This is embarrassing but she needs to say it.

"I’d be very interested in basic landscaping around the fortress, as well as a better delivery system. I haven't figured out how to get the fortress defenses to accept elf citizens and my time is scarce."

On a state level she's interested in various agricultural goods that she couldn't have reasonably bought for a home garden. She would also recommend that Fib simply sell orichalcum and glass on the local market as he desires.

Finally, she would appreciate having a teleporter contact available in the event that the sky lands get stuck again, but it's not currently urgent.

Huh. The nature preserve situation around her base isn't intentional then, maybe?

"I'll spread the word that you're looking for that sort of work," Sniper replies. They don't have any actively growing plots of non-Rim native crops, and don't have special access to any particularly obscure varietals from the Earth, but they do have access to a fairly wide swathe of Earths, some of which might have crops that are locally common but are rare on most other Earths, and Fib could additionally be tasked with searching for viable crops in other other worlds.

"The frustrating thing is that unless people are okay with just having great big blocks of orichalcum, I kind of need to make it myself, since it's a major pain in the ass to work for anyone else. Desert glass is a bit more reasonable, but its mechanical properties won't change unless I'm there to change them, since I'd need to make different stocks of different kinds of glass, which might be confusing since they're all going to look pretty much identical otherwise."

Fib also unfortunately might not be great as teleporter contact? He's figured out, over the last subjective decade-and-change, that if he absolutely needs to move as fast as possible, he can blip back and forth between whatever world he's in and his Bevin, very fast, teleporting 5-ish miles every time. This, however, causes severe world-aura contamination in his Bevin, and to a lesser degree whatever world he's teleport-hopping across, so it's best avoided, and he'd only be willing to using it if it's Ceanothus's last resort for keeping her people fed and warm during a long-night.

"It's fine if you're uninterested in selling orichalcum or glass goods, I just don't have any real comparative advantage in assessing our need for them and I wanted to make that clear. We're not actually in dire need of metal, independent elves don't mine and in the next decades I want to learn to sing new mineral deposits into existence. I will keep the issues with your teleportation in mind."

"Fair enough. I'll let the ones living in my Bevin know and hopefully they can set up some kind of safe-room to run to if it comes to that. Regardless, it's looking like I might not have a lot to trade on my own, materially at least. I don't know if you find much value in info on other worlds I've been to? Or access to them, I guess, but you mentioned you're short on time so that might not mean much."

"I'm very interested."

"Nice!"

And he will subsequently describe what he's seen of all the worlds he's visiting, including a handful of Earths, the infinite expanse of invulnerable marble covered in weird statues, Basically Hell (this is where kagemono come from, before he revives them into sosei-shita), an endless pink desert (this is where he gets the sand for desert glass from), the Aether (which has vaguely heaven vibes but is actually kind of wartorn between a bunch of factions of angels arguing about what to do now that their God is dead), Crucible (a city where it's perpetually night-time and perpetually raining and there's monsters and zombies and other horror-y bullshit, and with magical campfires that make you immortal at the expense of your will to live), Mu (a big ocean with cities underwater, populated by Basically Mind-Flayers and Basically Aboleths, and with psychic colors in the sky), an endless void of space with living psychic asteroids (this is where he found out he can survive in space), Rorch (another ocean with cities, but this time they're at the surface, and they're populated by reasonably polite robots and stone golems), another desert but this one has white, red, and black sand and has weird metal plants and animals instead of normal kinds, and he also recently connected to a thirteenth world that seems like might be some kind of massive college campus (which is also the world where he encountered the other Conduit).

He'll also mention that his whole crazy rainbow fire thing is because his Azoth, his Color, and his Breath (or, well, the Breath he has from Basically Hell, he has a different Breath from the pink desert which is unrelated) are weirdly mixed together, which also relats to how he's able to revive sosei-shita, and which in his very first year he was able to sort of infuse into the furnace room in his Bevin, which is what made it into the Bondworks, which in turn is what lets the revival be permanent and makes the sosei-shita immortal to approximately the same degree as himself.

"That's … problematic. I'm going to check your claims about Yomi against my own records. If you're telling the truth, we really should offer humanitarian aid and you shouldn't worry about compensation for using the tanks."

"Yomi--"/"Yomi--" Fib and Sniper both begin simultaneously, before Fib inclines his head and Sniper continues, "Yomi is indeed in need of humanitarian aid, and we've done our best up to this point to free as many kagemono as we can. However, it's likely that if a large force is mobilized to this effort that the oninushi will notice something other than simple poaching is going on and form some kind of coalition or other coordinated action to stop us. Oni are normally loath to interact with one another except in some form of violence or competition, but there have been rumors of a Daimyo, or maybe even multiple, arising among them in recent years, which bodes ill for any projects which rely on them remaining disorganized indefinitely."