"That sounds amazing and I want to see it. In fact take me with you." She sits back up.

"Uh..." You know, fair enough. There's all kinds. "Sure, though which one did you mean?"

"All of them! I want to see the multiverse, man!" She raises her hands into the air. "And what kind of multiverse doesn't have bizarre psychic eldritch abominations?" She points to Fib. "A boring one, that's what." She shrugs. "Besides, I've been procrastinating here for a month, I really need to go out there and explore."

Fib and Sniper give each other glance, wordlessly agreeing that it's probably not worth trying to argue about the boring-ness of a multiverse that isn't trying to kill-you-or-worse, before turning back to Strawberry, giving her a nod. "Sure, though given how rough my jumps are, I hope it's alright if we don't break from the schedule too much? I've got a route worked out to help with keeping my Tethers happy and make sure I don't miss packages."

"Sounds great," She stretches. "when do we leave?"

"Uh. Well, I was planing on exploring here some more for probably a few hours to keep working on calming my Tether to it? We could head out early, but we'll just need to wait around the next world, the metal forest, instead, which is...not super safe or comfortable, or else my whole schedule will be off."

She blinks. Would he have done something so harmful to himself if she had insisted? "No, no, there's no rush! We should obviously go with whatever you find most convenient, I'm not the one who has to equally distribute time between a bunch of worlds."

His flames green a little, and his face relaxes in a brief expression of relief. "Cool. Thanks for understanding."

Then he checks his phone, looking at his picture of the map and comparing to some prior notes taken, before deciding on a direction to head in...after they finish breaking fast.

The two of them both seem open to further questions, but aren't necessarily talkative of their own accord.

There is a fundamental lack of assertiveness that nags her. If she were in Fib's position and some tart decided to tag along for shits and giggles, then she would be informing said tart in no uncertain terms that they would play around her schedule or not at all. Berry should have zero say in Fib's schedule, barring some catastrophic emergency.

It puts her in mind of the conversation she just had with Groundskeeper and wonders if she has the mental fortitude to deeply interrogate a second person's relationship with assertiveness in the same day. It might be a conversation for later.

Further data is required.

She looks at the golden bycicles. "Cool bikes."

If she's paying pretty close attention, Strawberry might notice some flicks of teal and cyan in Fib's flames, which sort of percolate out and transmute into a more pervasive spread of purple, similar to the normal color of Azoth, before he gives himself another shot of gold, right before she comments on the bikes. He gives her an exaggeratedly cocky grin and replies with an odd intonation, "I made them myself!" Then, a beat. "Following the designs that the engineers back at Revival Base drew up. They're really comfortable, too. I never learned how to ride a bike back before I became a Conduit but it's been surprisingly easy when I can make my own bike from scratch just how I want it."

She feels like she's going to have to ask about the flames at some point, there's something worryingly deliberate about the way it flares gold before he looks happy again. Would she be happying herself if she could? Maybe, it honestly sounds really useful, but why would he keep needing it like that?

"No shit? Is making things a power of yours? Is that where the armor comes from?"

"Yeah! Sort of. I can summon the gold, orichalcum the aengelim call it, by...uh...praying, which makes it appear in big blocks, then I need to sort of fold it in on itself until its whatever shape I want it to be. There's also another world, the pink desert where everything wants to literally fuck you, where I can turn the sand into this sort of glass, but it's weird glass, since I can make malleable or elastic, and also working it is a...it's an experience, I guess." Another lick or two of blue, though they seem to fade on their own quickly.

Gold is obviously happy, green is probably relief? So what're blue and purple?

If its literally everything that wants to fuck you, maybe the sand gets frisky? Blue could be embarrassment. "What are the aengelim like?"

"Very serious, and very, uh...like christian conservatives, if your Earth has those. Honestly kind of a pain, though I'm fortunate enough to be in contact with one of the more liberal factions at least. They're still not very fun to be around, though."

Lovely. She thought. With any luck they aren't as acquainted with slurs as they are on my Earth, or else I might just kill somebody this time. "Figures. Angels are real and they're assholes." She thinks of something. "None of these worlds are, like, any of Earth's afterlives, right?"

Fib nods, then scratches his flame-beard. "Yomi's kind of afterlife-y, but not as much as the Aether is like a fucked up version of Heaven. But people don't just, like, automatically end up in either, at least as far as we've been able to table. Yomi does have cursed potions that will make you go there when you die, though. We had some run-ins with that in the early days, back before I had the Bondworks figured out."

"I see, I'll avoid eating or drinking in Yomi then." The thought that she was in some kind of afterlife had occurred to her, she had gotten here by dying. But if other people who died resurrected as conduits then the worlds would be flooded with them by now. The thought occurred that on her last moments on Earth were spent as a conduit and she hadn't even known. That she became immortal before that car hit her.

She turns to Sniper. "So, you're not a conduit, are you?"

Sniper nods. "Correct. I, and all the sosei-shita, are former kagemono, inhabitants of Yomi, that Fib has helped release from that place. I and a few of the others at Revival Base often travel with him through his power to bring others with him, but we don't have the ability to travel between worlds on our own, except by way of reviving at the Bondworks when killed."

Ah, the noble speedrunning tradition of the death warp. "I see, what is Revival Base, actually?"

"It's the main sosei-shita settlement," Sniper replies. "A few dozen of us living there permanently, and another couple hundred that are there on a more temporary basis, making a life for ourselves out in the Rim, exploiting the time-advantage to develop skills and build infrastructure that's useful to our other settlements on a the Earths, the Pink Desert, the Aether, Crucible, and Rorch."

"You have settlements on Earths?" Now that sounded surreal, the introduction of a supernatural element to an otherwise mundane Earth was easily one of the most pervasive thoughts she had, seeing it happen in person would be truly weird, was Fib a celebrity? Would she be a celebrity? Was she ready to go to an Earth? A little knot in her stomach formed at the thought of her Earth. "Are you guys, I don't know, famous? Or are you trying to lay low?"

"We-" / "We-" the two of them begin simultaneously, Fib letting Sniper take the lead this time. "We haven't been advertising ourselves, exactly, but haven't been hiding...previously at least. It is surprisingly easy for rural communities that have little to no connection to larger road or infrastructural networks are easy to miss. There is some attention on them, and it has been growing...but we've also learned relatively recently that there's a threat on the Earths that specifically targets conduits and their associates, so we're going to be implementing more information security, as much as we're able at least."

"Opsec is important." She looks away. "I might just lay low when we get to Earth, if you don't mind. If there are enemies hunting conduits then the less people know about me or Groundskeeper, the better."

Fib makes an accepting gesture with his hand. "Oh, for sure. Honestly if I didn't, uh...cause a giant explosion most of the time when I jump, and drag a palpable zone of Weird with me everywhere I go, I'd be trying a lot harder to lay low too. We've been working on figuring out a more, eh...protracted methodology for interacting with our non-sosei-shita trading partners on the Earths, but there's only so much security we can build in, like, a month or however long it's been on Earth since we first found out."

Hm, I can move people through bridges. Should she offer? It's a commitment to providing a service maybe only she can provide. The thought isn't thrilling, the freedom of being beholden to nothing is something she has always craved. She might need to follow a schedule, or need to work long hours. Or worse, not be asked, but know that if she doesn't do anything, people will have a bad time.

That might already be the case, though. "I can shove people through bridges, or pull them through. I can't move really big things, but I can move smaller stuff between bridges. Maybe I could help." She can teleport, if anything ever becomes truly intolerable she could just leave.