Fib can feel her auras suddenly appear back around the Crucible bridge, and leads Sniper back to it, finding the sitting Strawberry easily from there.

"So, ready for the tour? We'll be back here in probably six--, well, I guess probably you won't want to stick around for the whole Rim portion since I imagine you don't want to just mill around for three days. So if we skip that, you'll be back here in, like, 14 or 15 hours."

"I don't mind milling around, actually. If stuff needs doing that I can do, I'll do it. Besides, it's an opportunity to learn about what you do and how you operate." She has been milling around enough as is, actual work will be a nice change of pace.

Fib shrugs, but he's got a bit of a smile. "Fair enough! And, hey, since you've got teleportation, you could probably visit my Conduit friend, Cean, a lot more easily."

Sniper pats him on the shoulder, and he turns and nods, then turns back to Strawberry. "So, ready to go?"

"Yeah, I'm ready. Let's go!"

"See you on the other side!"

Then Fib and Sniper will pedal off, and once they're going at a decent clip, they disappear, the terrible, almost writhing weight of Fib's world-auras disappearing along with them.

"Right, let's see." She opts to teleport to the boiler room rather than go straight through the bridge to Brazen. 

"Ok, first step into a new alien world. Here goes nothing." With but a thought, her surroundings shift, and she is on the other side.

A faint smell of metal greets her as her shoes sink into white sand, the girl spins slowly in place, taking in the massive false sky. "Woah."

Fib and Sniper are visible not too far away! And they appear to be covered in white-sand and carrying their bikes on their backs. Fib appears to be waving at her as they approach.

Right. "Hey guys, should I be taking those?" She jogs ahead to catch up with them.

"What?!" Fib yells back, evidently not quite hearing her. Sniper says something to him, then he continues, "Yeah! That'd be nice!"

And indeed they'll hand over their bikes for storage, once they've met up. "I don't recommend falling in this stuff," he gestures to the white sand on which they're standing, "It's a pain in the ass to clean up and if breath it in it will fuck up your lungs."

"Right, don't breathe in the sand. I can do that." She looks around. "What are the natives like here?"

"There's two main types. There's the bees, who are a bit stand-offish, towards me at least, but can at least be bargained with, though the proceedings are always kind of tense, and the wasps, who are, uh...Violent."

"We haven't managed to communicate at all with any of them so far," Sniper adds.

"In generally, we mostly stick to these white sands. Nothing really grows out here, so the locals mostly avoid it."

"Bees and wasps, huh? You can talk to the bees? I didn't think they'd talk."

"Oh, they don't. Our procedure so far has just been to kind of, shove stuff that we guess they might like in their general direction and then stand still until they stop dancing angrily at us, take it, and then go away."

"I... see." Dancing? Isn't that a thing that real bees do? Kinda? "They communicate by dancing? They're sapient, right?"

"They've got the emotional complexity for it at least. We don't usually try and follow them back to wherever they take the stuff we bribe them with, since they seem kind of territorial."

"I wonder if the language could be learned." She does possess language learning powers, theoretically it should help. "So are you trading with them or are you just giving them stuff?"

"I don't see why not? Assuming you've got the same language talent power thing that Groundskeeper has, and are able to get them to teach you. And, we're 'trading' for the occasional right to move through the forest, since there're sandstorms out here sometimes and the forest's the only decent nearby shelter. I've considered building some kind of orichalcum bunker out here instead but I've never pulled the trigger on it since I don't know how the locals will react."

"Right, giant territorial sapient bees." Bees. "Do they make honey?"

Fib and Sniper shrug simultaneously.

"I was wondering if they gather anything from the local flora. Maybe their territory is their territory because they need the vegetation in it. I mean, assuming that they work like normal bees. But metal or no, the plants here grow, so they must be alive, Groundskeeper grew some in her garden, so maybe some of them have something that the bees can make into honey."

"Makes sense. I know the trees have flowers, rarely, and that there's some red sand too that has more, smaller plants that are a lot more prone to flowering."

"Groundskleeper's... bleh," That girl needs a real name. "Groundskeeper's garden has red sand in it, she has collected some of the metal flowers from here, they're very pretty." She didn't really think of herself as a garden person, but man, metal plants are fucking cool. "So what's next on the itinerary, boss?" 

"Well, the plan was to just kind of chill here for, like, an hour and fifteen-ish, then head to the statue garden. We could explore around here if you want, though we didn't bring much to pacify the local's with."

"Ah, yeah. Well..." She really wants to see the bees, and the forest, and-

-and everything really. "I could probably jump around and scry on things from my Bevin. Maybe I could check the interior of a hive, find out what they do in there."

"Sure! Let me know what you find, I'm honestly pretty curious myself, I just figure I'd get torn to pieces and waste a bunch of time and Color if I tried to investigate myself. We'll stick around the bridge so you can just hop back here if you run into trouble. Maybe I'll see about building a little fort in the meantime..."