"I can bring all the reds and then go explain myself. Wait. Maybe I can't, because - did you just not know how to use magic, or did you not build power?"

"Building power's new!"

"Okay, in that case I don't see any reason to explain anything to the cleans, and assuming we're rescuing the reds I want most of the explanation to them to happen somewhere other than your world so we can get power from it. And you should probably be the one to do it because you don't have to pay for translation to talk to them."

"This all assumes anybody can do magic on Amenta at all to bring people back and forth."

"Yeah. And you don't want to go back there if you can't guarantee you can leave again because they're consistently horrible to you, right? I do wonder if we can set you up with nice stuff that isn't magical itself and would help you stay safe if you can't get back, but if you don't want to risk it you don't have to."

"I mean, I might want to go back. If we can't get anybody else here then I never get to have a baby. I can't think of stuff I could bring back that would help much though. If it was normal stuff it wouldn't help and if it wasn't normal stuff it'd attract a lot of attention."

"What kinds of things would attract attention and why and what exactly would the attention result in?"

"I'm not the government so I'd be guessing! They'd want more space, if you could just make more space by having a blog they'd be all over that. They'd probably want to be real nice to an alien, except if they knew you were more sympathetic to reds than cleans."

"I would be happy for them to live in a normal place where they can make all the space they want. It doesn't sound like I get anything from announcing myself, which is really annoying because it'd be such a big deal and so many people would care about it and it would have been great if it had been useful. I wonder if we could somehow bring everyone somewhere normal first all at once with all their stuff and then explain but that's probably impossible and anyway there isn't anywhere I know of that's big enough yet. Well, I guess for now we can just work on getting you set up here."

"Yeah, it sounds like I need a - bubble?"

"Oh, man. You don't have your own. Right. I didn't really think through the implications of that in terms of where you can sleep and how you can travel - it doesn't cost anything to get into your own home, but something you make later takes power to travel to. I don't know if the first thing you make will be yours, because it's your first, or not yours in that way, because it didn't start existing with you. I... can make you a bed to sleep on in the library basement while you're gaining power."

"Oh, thank you!"

"The basement is downstairs!" Derri says, gesturing for Peka to follow her as she starts walking toward the stairs down. "I should stop saying things like that because it's not a very informative thing to say and not worth the power it takes to make you understand but it feels weird to be super sparing with my words and I want to have a normal conversation with you instead of having a weird one where we don't tell each other things just because they're not very likely to be very new."

"I could start trying to learn your language? Then you could tell me lots of stuff about that."

"Okay! Would you like a notebook so you can take notes on that and draw how you want your bed?"

"I'm not much of an artist but I guess I can try to draw what I expect a bed to look like! And it'll be good to have language notes yeah."

"It'd be good to have a sense of what the minimum amount of material I need to conjure is and, like, any color or design you want is equally easy."

The downstairs is a lot like the upstairs, except unfurnished, full of boxes, and with a ceiling that isn't mysterious colorful void. There are load-bearing pillars holding up the upstairs floor. The floor here is an abstract mosaic in yellow and green set into concrete, except at the edges where it's just concrete.

"What's in all the boxes?"

"A lot of them have books that aren't on display yet because lots of people want to donate books and fewer people want to donate space. The library's getting space faster than it gets books right now, though, so I think we can probably get all of those books onto the shelves eventually. And also..." Derri takes a box off a stack, then takes the lid off the box. It contains an assortment of pencils, pens, highlighters, and notepads. "You can take some of these. I stick them on tables sometimes for people to take notes. People sometimes visit libraries because they want to learn things and it's not usually a realistic goal to memorize everything they want to know in one sitting."

"Thanks!" She tests two pens and a pencil on a notepad and settles on one.

"Let me know if you want colorful ones!"

"Maybe once I have more complicated stuff than, like, 'hello', to write down, I'll wanna color code it."

"Hmm," she says, doing no magic to anything she says. She picks up a pencil. "Pencil," she says incomprehensibly. She picks up another. "Pencil. One pencil, two pencils."

"Peh-n-si-lla," attempts Peka, then again without belaboring the non-Tapap phoneme as badly, and when she gets a nod she writes it down.