"Maybe, if you want to? It's not exactly fun work, and I don't know how much demand there is for small packages that me and my friends aren't already covering. We've got five semis in the garage plus some shipping containers we share with the off-Rim settlements, so volume-wise we're doing alright."

"Well... I can use my Bevin as extradimensional storage, so I can actually move quite a bit of volume, even if its not all that big, at least compared to Groundskeeper's Bevin." She gets up and stretches. "So you guys want to take a look around here?"

Oh, yeah other Conduits' Bevins aren't inhabited by other people who will be significantly endangered by a big explosion and 0-3 monsters getting pulled in. "That would probably be helpful, actually, now that you mention it. Me and Sniper will ask around about that. Having someone other than me who can bring stuff to Rorch in bulk would be a major boon, I think," he says, glancing to Sniper for their opinion, who nods back.

"And yeah, probably scouting out some of the further afield bridges I can feel, stuff that's out past the edge of your maps."

"Sounds like a plan!" A binder appears in her hand, she gets on her knees and spreads the constituent sheets of the map on the picnic blanket, then points to the northwestern region of the map. "We're here." She gestures to the markings on the map. "I don't know where you have been, the nearest bridge from here is this one, leading to Arbor, followed by this one, leading to Earth. I haven't had a chance to scout it yet. There are two other bridges to Earth, one to Brazen, one to Rorch and one leading to Crucible, though those last two are pretty far away."

Fib nods. "There's a bridge to Yomi, too, and one to the Aether though it's quite far. And of course there's a bridge to Kuiper but it's up there," he gestures vaguely up at the morning sky. "So, finding that Earth bridge seems like a good first stop, them maybe one of the further out ones afterwards?"

She looks up. "Huh." I wonder if I could teleport up there? She had an idea for how to gain infinite height with teleportation without risking death, but that was an idea for later. "Alright, do you want to ride there, or should I teleport us?"

"I personally prefer to ride, since I need to get my time in anyway, and the exercise is hardly bad for my health! But, we can just meet you there if you'd rather not walk or ride with us."

"I don't have a bike, maybe I'll run, and jump ahead if I fall behind."

"I could also head back to the Rim and make another bike for you in, like, a few minutes? Including however long it takes to handle whatever pops up during the jumps."

Ok, no, she has to know. "When you jump, what happens? How dangerous is it?" Groundskeeper described his jumps as explosions and minor disasters. How much danger was he willing to put himself in? The question was whether he was so used to it that he didn't see it as a danger, or-

-or that the danger to himself mattered less to him than inconveniencing her.

"So, I've got this thing where-- you know how bridges to most worlds have some kind of weirdness about them? Like the world on the other side is bleeding through a bit? That same kind of weirdness follows me around, for every world I'm connected to. And then I've also got a thing that makes it so that whenever I jump, those weirdness effects all get majorly amplified, all at once, for a little bit, especially when I'm jumping with lots of big vehicles. Some of the effects are mostly, like, mental, and those suck for me and my friends but they're also usually pretty manageable even with the dial turned to 11 with the help of some Color, but there's decent number of physical effects too, and when they're all pumped up at once, it can be a destructive. Plus, three of the effects involve, like, monsters potentially showing up, like I mentioned earlier, and then if more than one of those procs at the same time they tend to not like each other and that can be its own issue."

He takes a breath, then gets a thoughtful look as he reviews his memories. "Overall, it's not super dangerous for me personally? I've gotten pretty good at managing the results over the last decade and change, i'm always traveling at least with Sniper, who is appropriately a crack shot with that rifle, and even if I die or get maimed or something I can just pop back to the Bondworks and make sure to stock up on Color the next time I'm in Mu. It's more dangerous to the people around me, which is why with more populated places, like here, I make sure there's nobody around before I jump, and with my Bevin I always try and send them a warning a few minutes before hand so that there's nobody hanging around the mudroom who might get caught in the blastzone or stomped on by a dinosaur or whatever."

Bad.

It was bad. She's going to have to have the Groundskeeper conversation again. She schooled her features as best she could. "Fib, if our positions were reversed, would you have asked me to go make you a bike?"

He scratches his flame-beard again. "I don't really know what your situations is like, not in any details, so it's hard for me to say? If you're worried about me though, it's really not a big deal. I have to jump super often anyway or else my Tethers start forcing me to at random, which is even worse, and the Rim is already where I'm jumping to and from the most. Adding one more jump there and back every couple weeks or whatever, it's not actually that much more risk?"

His colors shift in an increasingly chaotic way, until he shrugs and injects enough green to calm himself down. "It's fine either way. I'd feel kind of bad about riding while you run, though, so maybe we can just all walk?"

She looked away, maybe she's completely wrong. She had thought maybe she would try to race them with her magical girl transformation and newfound parkour abilities, but at this point she felt it would've been too awkward to suggest it. "Yeah, sure, if you're good with walking."

Another little wave of blue, purple, and even a little bit of red crackle through his fire before he batters it away with more green. "Sure. Like I said, exercise is hardly unwelcome."

And then they can start making their way to that Earth bridge.

Idyllic parks and beaches pass them by as they walk, she hangs just a little behind to stay out of Fib's peripheral vision, and keeps an eye on his flames. She makes an effort to relax, and remembers that she is making new friends. Cool new friends wreathed in flames and clad in golden armor. Before long she's smiling again as she looks at the bright blue sky.

"So how do the flames work?"

He remains mostly green, though it's less pure, and perhaps less forced thereby, with more natural tinges of cyan and chartreuse, and little tongues of yellow as he turns his head and glances back with a bit of a smile to answer. "So, you know how Azoth is kind of like a fire in your chest? Mine's all mixed up with my Reservoir-- that's, like, kind of like a second circulatory system that's full of Color, and because I try and make sure I've always got lots of Color in me, and since it gets all mixed up with my Azoth, it comes out like this. That's what we've figured from comparing me to other stuff from Mu that metabolizes Color, anyway."

So Azoth can be mixed with stuff from other worlds. "So, what is Color exactly? What is it's relationship to emotion?"

"It's this sort of luminous goop that flows in big streams through Mu's upper layers, and it sort of is emotions? It both sort of reifies the state of having an emotion and is also reactive to their presence. There's a whole sort of funky psionic chemistry going on with it, combined with the starlight from Mu's stars, which we're pretty sure is how the psychic powers from there work."

"Oh, right! Psychic powers! What kind of psychic powers are there? Telekinesis? ESP?"

"We haven't exactly done a detailed survey, but so far we've found various types of empathy, telepathy, that sort of thing both receptive and projective, as well as, like..." he makes a vague grasping gesture with his hand, "Biokinesis? Fleshwarping? Except there are some big fishy bastards who can do it to stone too. We don't really know what's up with that, and getting close enough to get a better look seems unwise."

Biokinesis?! Like Amy Dallon? Or like Akira? "That actually sounds pretty spooky. What do they even do with biokinesis? Can they do it at a distance? Or do they have to touch you?"

"Thankfully we haven't found anything that can do it at range, though we don't know if it's strictly impossible. And most of the animals use it for camouflage and various sorts of parasitism, but the local people-- they call themselves something along the lines of 'dreamborn', though they don't really have language such as it is, since they're all proper telepaths on top of being biokinetics, but they use their biokinesis mostly for self-expression, body-mods and making fancy bespoke pets, that sort of thing."

"Huh, blinging out your pet with biokinesis sounds horrifying, but telepathy probably balances that out a bit. More pet owners should be able to read their pets' minds. What are the local people like, anyway?"

"Not a fan of guests, or answering questions, sadly. The three we've tried to contact have all mind-controlled our ambassadors to leave them alone after making basic introductions. I'm still not entirely sure if they saw as more than particularly complex, annoying animals."