The girls start chattering at each other in an unfamiliar language. They seem excited.

The woman in the chair crosses her arms and observes this. She continues to look slightly perturbed.

"Yes. This is extremely irritating," she says. "I am extremely irritated."

"Sorry, we'll send you back real soon," says the younger girl. "We just have to show you to Nemaar and then back you go."

"Your lack of an afterlife offends my aesthetics."

Both girls blink. "What?" asks the blonde one.

"What part of that statement do you need explained?" she inquires.

"First of all how can you tell, second of all why would you have aesthetics about that, and third why did it seem relevant?" asks the blonde girl.

"I am the administrator of an afterlife. I strongly dislike irretrievable destruction," she says. "If you do not return me immediately I will arrange for this world to connect to my domain so that I do not have to continue being surrounded by impermanent things."

"Um, well, we're planning to unsummon you in a few degrees," says Korulen. "...You can 'arrange' that from in there?"

"Yes." She pauses, then adds, "I have now done it. I am still irritated, but less urgently."

"I suppose it's a good thing neither of us are religious," comments Korulen, looking kind of disturbed.

The self-described administrator has no response to that, except to settle back in her chair and resume looking slightly perturbed.

"I can instantiate objects," says the administrator.

"What, like, anything?" asks the blonde girl.

"There are currently limitations on the magical properties I could assign," she says. "It is inconvenient. Otherwise, yes."

"You have now shown me to Nemaar," she reminds them.

The administrator raises her eyebrows slightly.

"Do I correctly understand that you are incapable of returning me?"

"We'll probably be able to after I get a familiar, but that will take a while, months maybe..."

"I am extremely irritated again."

The administrator has no comment on this exchange.

"Native?"

"If you were from this world we could put you in another world with a sending spell, but we can't, you're just here because of the summon," says Korulen, clenching her hands in her hair.

"Your magic has inconvenient properties," she remarks.

"I am currently restricted to the area defined by this diagram?" she asks.

"Yes," says Korulen. "It's a ward, it's standard with the spell."

She looks contemplative.

"But as long as you aren't going to murder anybody or anything Mom will probably let you out when she's checked you."

"Given that your world's magic can summon people from my domain, murdering someone might not inconvenience them very much," she observes.

"You are demonstrably able to summon people from my domain," she says. "I connected your world to my domain; all people who have died and objects which have been destroyed here are available to it, and that will remain the case. Unless your magic is incapable of summoning a specified person, anyone who dies here will be immediately retrievable."

"I am neither," says the administrator.

"My assertions are easily verified," she points out. "You need only summon someone who is already dead."

The administrator settles back in her chair again.

"The dead of my domain are in most respects similar to their living selves, except that they cannot reproduce, are inhospitable to bacteria or parasites, and under circumstances whe they would otherwise die again, they are instead restored to a state of optimal health."

"...So is he going to restore-to-optimal-health of old age every five minutes? That sounds kind of terrible actually."

"You have an interestingly pessimistic definition of optimal health."

"He was really old. Humans die when they're about that old no matter how healthy they were before."

"Optimal health implies not being close to dying of any infirmity, old age included."

"Does that mean he'll be young again?"

"He will be healthy. Over repeated restorations the visible effects of age also diminish."

"Oh, huh. That's cool."

"I am proud of the design."

"Why can't they reproduce?"

"It would be untidy."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I would find it untidy if the dead of my domain could create further life in it. It would be an unnecessary complication."

"But my grandpa isn't going to be in your domain."

"He will still retain the properties he acquired on arriving."

The administrator observes this activity without comment.

"Yes," says the administrator.

The administrator declines to elaborate on Saasnil's description of her.

"Is this a difficulty?" inquires the administrator.

"Low CC?" asks Saasnil. "Yeah. That's why we had to co-cast to summon you, I wanted to be doing it but I couldn't alone."

"Is it a difficulty that you would have to die in order to return me using this method?" she clarifies. "It seems straightforward."

"Well I mean I could overchannel but I'm scared."

"I see."

"I'm not familiar with the intricacies of your world's magic, but I would guess that he is now native to my domain."

"Oh. That's not great," says Saasnil, frowning.

The administrator looks at her.

"Hello. I'm Keo," says Keo. "I'm very sorry for the inconvenience these girls have caused you, but in spite of that I can only let you out of that circle if you'll let me check to see if you're safe to have out of it. Do you mind if I check?"

"I have no strong preferences about whether my time here is spent within or outside this circle," she says. "How do you propose to check?"

"I have copious mind magic - which doesn't see anything I'm not looking for - but if you don't want to leave we can skip it," says Keo.

"I am indifferent on the subject of you checking."

The administrator is disinclined, as a general rule, to do things. She is unlikely to address any given situation with more effort than it strictly requires, and now that she has fixed the problem of unaesthetic impermanence, she is mildly annoyed to be kept away from her domain but disinclined to do anything about it since one or the other of the girls is certainly going to die eventually without her help. It's conceivable that there might be some circumstance which she would find it necessary to address with unsafe behaviour of some kind, but there are limits to how unsafe her behaviour can be in an ultimate sense; she has an absolute preference never to destroy anything past retrieval, and has in fact ensured that doing so in Elcenia will never be possible again.

"...Do you," Keo asks, "have any physical needs that would have to involve magic or leaving the ward to address?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," she says. "To the extent that I can be said to have physical needs, I address them with magic."

"But you can do that inside the ward?"

"Yes. If I could not, I would prefer to be out of it."

"Possibly," says Keo.

"I would find it interesting to discuss that."

"According to Korulen there's a limiting factor in that the retrieved people aren't considered native to Elcenia anymore and therefore need active spells to stay."

"It's possible. Those details are not transparent to me."

"Well, it's testable," says Keo. "What condition are dead Elcenians currently in while they aren't summoned?"

"Inactive. Not conscious or subject to change in any way. But they have entered the queue, so at some point they will begin to be woken. Exactly when is unpredictable, but not likely to be in the next thousand years."

"In my domain. I interfere as little as possible in the activities and interactions of residents."

"What are they like without your interference?"

"It is pleasingly infrequent that any of them bothers me about anything."

"That's not what I asked."

"Perhaps you could rephrase, then."

"What is the society that these people are going to wake up into like in - organization and standard of living, or whatever it's customary to call it besides 'living'?"

"There is a residence system that provides everyone with a home," she says. "Other material needs are supplied somewhat more haphazardly by a regular semirandom accumulation of instances of previously destroyed objects - food appears in kitchens, toiletries appear in bathrooms, miscellaneous items appear in other rooms. I don't concern myself with their social structures, except that I split the area into two levels and assigned a small staff to sort those who are very unlikely to make trouble for each other into one level and everyone else into the other. At last report, perhaps half a million years ago, the upper level was doing very well and the lower level had ceased to complain."

"What were they complaining about before?" asks Keo.

"The tendency of residents to cause trouble for one another."

"How do you sort these people, anyway?"

"The judges evaluate the contents of their lives."

"They are the staff I mentioned whose job it is to sort arrivals."

"Are you being deliberately unhelpful?" wonders Keo.

"No."

"It appears that billions of Elcenians can now expect to wind up in your domain. I want to know what they will find if they wake up in it instead of being summoned back."

"I have told you several things about that," she says. "It is not obvious to me what more you want to know. There is a further staff whose job it is to answer the questions of new arrivals; perhaps you would like to visit and speak with one."

"Perhaps. You could also let me look, since you don't seem to have strong opinions about that."

"The type of information you seek may not be readily available, depending on what exactly you are looking for. I have very little personal contact with residents."

"Maybe I'll visit, then. Where would be a good place to land?"

"The guide office in the upper base level of the tower."

"Elcenia. My daughter and her roommate accidentally summoned someone who claims to have added my world to this - afterlife, I suppose - so I'm checking it out. Perhaps you can help."

"I haven't heard anything about a new world, but I guess I wouldn't, if it's that new," she says. "What exactly did you want my help with?"

"Apparently everyone from Elcenia is in some kind of stasis now, but may start to wake up eventually if we don't get them all summoned out of here quick enough. What will happen if they wake up here?"

"Well, a judge will look at them and give them papers and send them to this office, and if they're very very good the papers will say Upside and I or some other guide will take them up the elevator and show them how to use the public transit to get to their res, and if they're not, the papers will say Downside and maybe a sentence and their guide will take them down the elevator and show them how to use public transit to get to their res and tell them about torturers and contractors. Most people end up Downside," she says.

"Torturers?" says Keo sharply.

The guide shrugs. "Yeah. The deal is, if you're bad enough, the judges will sentence you to a few hours of quality time with someone whose job it is to hurt people. A contractor is someone who substitutes for people they don't think deserve their sentences."

"Why is this the system?"

"Search me," she says with another shrug. "Way before my time. I'm not going to say it's ideal, but the senior judges don't take it well when somebody suggests reforms."

"And this not taking it well manifests how?"

"Well, last time it happened, the guide just got fired. But she was Upside - the time before that, he was a Downsider and Di sent him home with a stack of sentences for everything on the books he'd done since he was hired. And they didn't take another guide from Downside for the next couple thousand. Years."

Keo chews her lip. "I'm not dead. Can they do anything to me? Any of these unpleasant people."

"Nobody who's not dead has ever showed up here before," says the guide. "I have no idea what kind of difference it makes. If it doesn't, though, judges can sight you - read your whole history from your perspective at a glance - and torturers can get control on you, which means get your body on magic puppet strings, basically. And that's just the magic stuff. If you walk around Downside, nothing's to stop somebody from walking up and taking your head off with an axe."

"All humans as far as I know. Torturer's control is a body thing, not a mind thing."

"Is that all of the magic stuff? Nobody here has other kinds of magic?"

"Well, I guess language patching is magic," she says. "But I can't see why you'd be worried about somebody giving you the ability to speak a language."

"...I am not worried about that," agrees Keo.

"It's not very threatening," says the guide.

"...Is there anyone I can talk to who's less staggeringly desensitized to this place but has had longer than an angle to think about it?"

"I'll take the card," says Keo.

"Mmkay." She produces a smallish business card; on one side it has a logo consisting of a thin, sharp-pointed crescent, and on the other side it has the number she mentioned.

Keo takes it, and heads for the elevator, and follows the instructions.

Keo follows the arrows.

"I'm not dead," says Keo. "I'm given to understand that's unusual here."

"...Yeah, no kidding," she says. "Like, to the point where I'm pretty sure you're either joking or very, very confused."

"My daughter and her roommate performed an unauthorized summoning spell and got someone claiming to administrate this -" gesture, "place. She said she added my world to its scope; my daughter was able to summon her roommate's deceased grandfather, who is now to all appearances completely healthy. The first summonee was not very helpful in explaining what anyone who woke up while still here might expect to see, so my husband sent me here to check the place out, but via magic, not via untimely demise."

"...Okay," she says, pulling her knees up to her chest and crossing her arms over them. "Let's say I buy it. Do you want me to tell you all about how this place is kind of shit? Because this place is kind of shit. In oh so many ways."

"Yes. In particular, while my daughter will be able to send your administrator back soon, she does not actually have to do so on any particularly constraining schedule," says Keo with a tight smile. "She's in a very convenient place to receive complaints, right now."

"...You have the admin locked up somewhere in your live world?" she says incredulously. "Wow. I am impressed and a little frightened. What's she like?"

"...Indifferent," Keo says. "Not very helpful, although plausibly she's just far enough removed from the motivations behind my questions that she really didn't know how to answer them usefully."

"I'd buy that," says the woman on the desk. "I've never met anyone who'll admit to having seen her. I don't think even most judges have seen her, although supposedly she appointed the most senior ones herself. All most people know about her, if they know anything about her, is that she spends all her time at the top of the Tower and it's a bad idea to try to get her attention. But it's the judges who come down on you for it, even then."

"Well, if you want to talk to her, we could summon you for a visit," remarks Keo.

"...Tempted," she says. "Could go horribly wrong, but since when do I let that stop me?"

"I don't think she can get out of the ward she's in, but she can apparently do at least 'adding the world to the afterlife' through it, and possibly other things. And of course it would be hard to keep her forever."

She grins. "Whatever. There is a limit to how bad it could possibly be. So how's this summoning thing work?"

"My husband and I draw a diagram on the floor of his office, one of us casts a spell, you appear in the diagram and we let you out. Assuming it's safe to let you out, which I may as well figure out here instead of there."

"And you figure that out by...?"

"Well, part of the reason most people don't use summoning spells is that they don't have a good way to do it, but I have copious amounts of mind magic, I can check if you care to let me. I won't pick up on anything I'm not looking for and I won't change anything unless you ask me."

"...Copious mind magic. Okay then," she says. "Sure, go ahead."

"Sure! Just gimme a minute to find somebody to cover the desk," she says, hopping off it and heading for a door in the wall behind her that turns out to lead to a hallway.

Keo hangs out. Back in Elcenia, Kanaat starts drawing the circle.

Meanwhile, the man looks at Keo and... pauses.

"The circle will take a bit longer," she informs Eights. "What are you looking at?" she inquires of the man.

"Evidence seems to suggest that you aren't dead," he says. "It's very curious."

"She didn't believe me at first," Keo says, pointing at Eights. "Did she tell you or what?"

"If she had told me, I would not be so surprised," he says. "No, it's the... accumulation of details. You don't know Eights's name, so you are new, but you cannot be that new and have scars that old, however small and insignificant. And your hair is naturally green. That's not evidence that you're live, particularly, but it is evidence that you're strange in some way."

"The hair comes of being a dragon," says Keo.

"Does it."

"Curious," he says again.

"If you're not used to it, I suppose."

"Circle's almost done," says Keo to Eights. "Do you want to go first or me?"

She shrugs. "I dunno, does it matter much?"

He breaks her circle, then unsends Keo, who pops into place in her sending circle just to Eights's left. "Welcome to Elcenia. This is my husband, Kanaat."

"Nice to meet you," she says to Kanaat.

Eights follows her, glancing around curiously.

"Yeah, I can see that. Snazzy."

And here is the girls' old room, and in it, an diagram, and in that, an admin.

"Hi," says Eights.

"You are a contractor, and not from this world. For what purpose have you been brought here?"

"...To... talk to you?"

"Oookay," says Eights. "So... I dunno, how aware are you that Downside is complete bullshit?"

"I am not sure what you mean."

"There's no oversight on the judges. I don't know what they were like when you set them up but these days they're viciously bitter and they've been escalating sentences since I can remember. The Crescent helps, but we're not a solution, we're just a patch. And it's a pretty shitty patch, to be honest. While I'm at it, there's no good reason why res space has to be a popularity contest. I mean, why? Why any of it?"

"That aspect of the residential system was an early experiment I saw no reason to change later," she says. "As for the rest - people complained. They suggested solutions to their complaints. I implemented the solutions."

"I have had the impression that it is normally pretty difficult for people to get as far as complaining to you," says Keo.

"Yes," she says. "This was all a very long time ago."

"So you locked in a system that heavily features torturing people and then got harder to yell at. Grand."

"I do not enjoy complaints."

"I'll bet," says Eights. "Well, I'm complaining. Wanna hear my proposed solutions?"

"It has occurred to me that since this world's magic is able to move people between here and my domain, it may be time for some changes," she says. "I find the implications interesting from a design standpoint, and I am not opposed to suggestions." She addresses Keo. "Are all possible summons of ultimately limited duration?"

"A summoning lasts until it's undone, or broken, or the caster dies. Breaking is hard to do and it's unlikely to be much of a factor. Also, a given caster can only have one of a given individual summoning spell active at a given time, but it's relatively easy to invent more variations that count as different spells when this is worthwhile."

"Then it seems that the dead will not be permanently retrievable," she says. "That is less interesting than if they were, and perhaps more complicated."

"Someone whose summon is broken could be re-summoned, but no, nothing really permanent is currently available."

"...So," says Eights, "as much shit as I'm gonna get if anyone ever finds out this was me - ditch the whole thing. Fire all the torturers and all the judges, rescind control and judgesight - I'm assuming you can do that, you're basically God. Guides can wake people up and stick languages on 'em, and then let them ask if they wanna try for Upside, and somebody can judgesight them then if they agree to it, if you're that desperate to keep the plebes out. Just do not make that person anybody who's already a judge right now, because they're all assholes. And don't let them try to argue you into bringing the torture back. Do not bring the torture back. Torture is bad."

"Potentially workable," the administrator says thoughtfully. "I'll consider it."

"Seconding the torture being bad," says Keo. "What's judgesight?"

"The ability of judges to read a person's history in all original detail."

"...And they use this? On a regular basis? I could do that too but I was not brought up that way."

"It is necessary to their jobs."

"Who was it who proposed this sick joke of a system?"

"They are now the senior judges."

"Make it need target consent," Eights puts in. "Judgesight, I mean, if you give it to new people. Like control on a contractor."

Keo nods.

"If neither of you has further substantial input right now, I will take some time to think about this," she says.

Keo glances at Eights.

She shrugs. "I've covered all the major stuff. I mean - expand the minimum res space, even if you don't want to ditch the algorithm for who starts off with more. Some people might still want to dwell in shoeboxes, but fewer people should have to. Apart from that, can't think of anything else."

"Your suggestion is noted," she says, and ceases to pay attention to either of them.

"...So... anything to do around here while we wait?"

"It's an entire world," shrugs Keo. "With lots of magic and culture and scenery. What sorts of things do you like?"

"Scenery sounds nice," says Eights. "There kind of isn't any, Downside."

"Isn't there? Well, if we just walk out this building, there's mostly grassland, some patches of trees. I can teleport a few places around the world - extremely chilly mountains? Forests? Edge of the planet? Beach?"

"Edge of the planet sounds interesting. But grassland and trees is just fine if you're busy."

"Nothing overwhelmingly pressing. My official job description is being my husband's secretary," shrugs Keo, "and he's not busy at the moment. I have to be touching you to teleport you." She holds out a hand.

Eights takes it.

"Nice," she says, peering over it. "Reminds me of the cliffs, kinda. But I've never seen those from up top."

"It's not really a cliff; if you walk over the edge you'll swing around over to the side."

"If you'd warned me you were going to do that I would have warned you it tends to be nausea-inducing," says Keo dryly.

She laughs, and walks back over to the top.

"So this is the edge of the world, it sounds more interesting than it actually is. Anything else you want to see?"

She shrugs. "Forests? Mountains? How chilly are the mountains?"

"Pretty chilly. Though it's spring, so not as bad as they could be. I'm only ever up there to visit my sister."

"I could go for pretty chilly mountains. I like heights."

"Do you want to borrow a coat?"

"Sure, if you've got a spare one. No big deal, though."

Eights dons the coat. The style is unfamiliar, but coats are still coats.

A human-looking boy with red irises opens the door, and is deeply surprised by the contents. "Oh. I thought this was Korulen's room. Who are you?"

"Korulen has moved," she says. "She and her roommate accidentally summoned me to this world. I am an administrator."

"...She did not seem like the casual summoning type. Oookay. Administrator of what?"

"An afterlife, to which your world is now linked."

"You did not previously have anything of the kind, and I found it unpleasant to be surrounded by impermanence, so when they proved unable or unwilling to return me immediately, I connected this world to my domain. Now I am contemplating what changes to make in response to the fact that it is possible for inhabitants of my domain to be summoned to this world, however temporarily. I have been told that truly permanent transportation is not available, which is less than ideal."

"Well, it's not theoretically impossible, it'd just require pretty high-percentile channeling capacity no matter how you slimmed it down plus a preposterous pain tolerance and virtuoso intentionality... you'd have to do it as an installation not a static is the thing. So we can just summon dead people now? When did this happen, why isn't it in the papers?"

"It has not been very long. Only one dead person from this world and one from a different one have been summoned so far, to my knowledge. How could a summoning installation be arranged? I would prefer there to be one. Possibly more, but certainly at least one."

"You'd get me to invent it and then pay a really, really good wizard to cast it. I guess this really really good wizard could invent it too, but I'm already thinking about it. I thiiiink that Keo's brother has the CC to pull it off, he's at least ninety-ninth percentile, I remember from his profile when he invented the spell globe..."

"Could the installation be made to serve as a permanent crossing point, allowing those in my domain to come here and those here to enter my domain, and visitors in either direction to return to their point of origin? What form might it take?"

"I'd want to base the user experience more or less on the teleportation circle, yeah, only I guess without schedule switching. It'd be a spot on the ground where if you stood there long enough you'd go be in a circle in the other world and have to shoo smart quick before you got summoned back the other way."

"The - 'shooing' - sounds inconvenient," she says.

"Well, I guess if you wanted to pay your wizard truly exorbitant amounts of money instead of merely somewhat extravagant amounts of money you could make two, one in each direction. That miiiiight even cut the cost of each spell, but not by very much, it still has to be reactive."

"I do not believe I have money or any especially convenient way to acquire some," she says. "But surely it can be obtained for this purpose. Or perhaps I could instantiate valuable objects. Are there any items which have been destroyed in this world and would be valuable if restored? Size is not a concern, except in that it may prove inconvenient to instantiate large things from within this circle."

"And inconvenient to get them out of there, too. Uuuuh, naturally occurring gemstones? I suppose asking you to 'instantiate' a 'naturally occurring' gem might be an oxymoron."

"If duplication is an issue I can refrain from making multiple copies of a single item. I do not normally duplicate in that way in any case."

"Yeah, I just don't know how it'd show up on a counterfeit checking spell. I guess there are probably wrecked paintings and books and archaeological stuff people would like to have that would be about as valuable even if it did ding a counterfeit checker."

"For the purpose of creating a convenient and conveniently located transfer installation, I will instantiate any such object that is described in sufficient detail for me to identify it."

"Swell. I'll work out a price sheet for the R&D. You probably want Keo putting you in touch with buyers or in touch with somebody who could find them better than I could, though. If," Kaylo says, "you can just plain summon people out of the afterlife, are my parents going to be in natural form such that I'll need a circle the size of the entire campus lawn to summon them?"

"Your species is... interesting," says the administrator. "They are currently not physically present in my domain, because they had too many irregularities as a group to integrate smoothly into the existing system. Size at time of death is one of those irregularities. There is also the matter of the two subsets who had an insufficiency of a species-unique resource in life, causing early death in one case and peculiar adaptations in the other. I believe in both cases I will see to it that the insufficiency is corrected after death. It seems the most elegant option. But I am less sure what to do with the array of alternate physical shapes. There are intricacies involved. I suppose it would be more convenient from your perspective if shapes with blocked access due to injury were recovered along with their associated items?"

"Yeah. Having to re-learn the shape and replace an outfit wouldn't usually be a big deal, but it'd be more convenient not to have to. You're saying my parents aren't there at all because they're dragons?"

"Yes. The species as a whole will be instantiated once I have made all the relevant design decisions and created a suitable area for them to occupy. I will need to create a version of the storage space local to my domain, since I cannot directly make changes in the other one, but there should be no outwardly visible difference since I can copy it directly... I see there are more varieties of people with similar access, although of a more limited kind. They will need less specific attention. I find it inelegant that the choice of a shape is permanent; I will include an option for the dead to relinquish and replace them. Similarly, all forms will undergo the usual restoration on fatal injury, instead of being switched out and blocked. Do you have any suggestions to make, since you are a member of the relevant species?"

"The - storage space. Lialenan matter theory is correct?" he asks, opening his eyes very wide.

"If Lialenan matter theory says that alternate physical shapes are stored in a space of loose matter while not in use, it is correct," she says. "Is this surprising?"

"Well, I already thought so, but it's not an orthodox opinion. Can you outline the - limits of the parameters of suggestions I could usefully make?"

"Perhaps not easily. What kind of parameters do you mean?"

"Okay, like - insufficiency of a species-unique resource? What is that? I have guesses, but only that. And the relinquishing forms thing, are you saying we'll be able to replace what we've picked up as many times as we want like we're all unusual blues? Just how ridiculously powerful are you?"

"Yes, that is what I mean. The limitations of what I can do in my domain are mostly driven by complexity," she says. "For example, it took me several hundred years to perfect my design for a rule to inhibit the accumulation of dust on surfaces. Minds, their association with their bodies, and the decisions they make are all recognized as fundamental constructs by my magic; everything else is just different varieties of organized matter and energy, and in order to manipulate it I have to address it on that level. The species-unique resource in question is the same one that drives all of your species-specific magic. One type of insufficiency is a fatal condition in the very young; the other type is associated with an adaptation that prevents flight."

"Shrens and dragon infant mortality. Damn," says Kaylo, letting all his breath out in a whoosh.

"Relatedly, your species has an unusually high proportion of dead infants," she says. "While I am reorganizing, perhaps I will implement a directory so that visitors can locate their relatives among the suspended arrivals and wake them, without needing to use a temporary summons or wait for them to be woken the long way, which can take many thousands of years. The major difficulty would be indexing the directory... would genetic information and time of death be sufficient to look someone up? I can have both automatically retrieved without much trouble."

"We usually come in clutches. There'll be plenty of babies with the same parents and gender and color who died on the same day," says Kaylo, shaking his head. "And they die without names when it's that early. I mean, maybe most people will want to fetch entire clutches all at once, but they might want one at a time and care which, and that'd probably be by traits like 'the one that made the cute squeaking noise' or 'the one that liked carrots'..."

"I see. That kind of information is more difficult to retrieve and handle. But I suppose that does not necessarily make the directory valueless. It is possible to match the identity of an individual seen in a person's memory, but targeting the correct memory is non-trivial. If I designed such a system, it might require testing."

"Well, I want my parents back, and they probably want at least some of my brothers and sisters."

"Would you like to test the directory by retrieving them?"

"Unless their status as test subjects will cause some form of disaster, yes."

"Okay, so I'll need to find somebody to send me 'cause I can't send myself, either that or just wait for circles to be set up, I think I can get it invented in mmmmaybe three weeks, possibly less depending on how much fine detail of teleportation circles turns out to be applicable. Keo's brother is ludicrously rich and might be willing to do something fancy like front you the money for the casting and the land to do it on if you let him handle the finding-interested-archaeologists thing... Merfolk should be able to use a suitably underwater version of the circle but I guess that means he needs to do more castings... they could use the aboveground version if there was a watermage on staff on both ends and a canal from the Elcenian end of the circle to the ocean, I guess."

"Water on my end can be supplied, potentially."

"Yeah, the reactivity I have in mind will activate if they touch the circle, so enough water for them to swim close and put a hand on it will do. And there can be a watermage or maybe just a spell to make hovering water on the Elcenian end, and a canal, and we make sure they line up, and they can get into the ocean from there, and maybe if they live in the opposite corner of the world they have a bit of a trip but at least they aren't drowning. Size I'm thinking they'd need maybe ten percent of its area in a blob near an edge."

"How large do you mean your circle or circles to be? I will need to create a suitable place to put them."

"About the length of this room in radius. There's no compelling reason to have them near each other if that makes layouts more convenient or whatever."

"It seems most convenient to have them in the same room but separated by some distance. A transit station in the upper base level of the tower should be suitable. It will connect to the indexed catacomb transit, and to the upper and lower Tower Stations."

"That would probably sound great if I knew what those places were."

"My domain is bisected by an extremely tall cliff. At the arbitrarily chosen centerpoint of the cliff, there is a tall tower. It reaches from the bottom of the cliff to the top and then that distance again up into the air. The transit systems of the upper and lower levels are distinct, and each has a separate station at its own level of the tower, called Tower Station in both cases. The catacombs are the complex of tunnels and rooms in which the unwoken dead are stored until waking. They radiate outward from the tower, beginning at the upper base level, which is just under ground level for the high side of the cliffs. I intend to create an indexed transit system for them, which will have its hub in a room containing your circles. Transit systems work by teleportation in a way that seems similar in some respects to your teleportation circles, except more convenient and organized."

"Arbitrarily chosen centerpoint? Is it infinite?" asks Kaylo.

"Yes."

"Coooool. Okay, so yeah, as long as there's uniquely defined sufficient space in your domain - does it not have a name besides 'your domain'? - then the caster will be able to aim the scry that handles that end's reactivity in just fine. The spell will technically all be located in and working from Elcenia; wizardry doesn't play nice in other worlds."

"The two levels have been nicknamed Downside and Upside respectively, but my domain as a whole is nameless. Is wizardry the type of magic related to the numeric quantity attached to Elcenians?"

"Yes. It is that thing. The numeric quantity is called channeling capacity and if you are about to tell me you can screw around with CC for fun and profit I will become very annoyed that you are too warded to high-five."

"Wizarding reservoir," says Kaylo. "...By entity what exactly do you mean?"

"I can perceive that it has a mind which makes decisions, but not very much more beyond that."

"Who are the Sand Dusk Chanters?"

"They're this ridiculous little cult that took some specious, methodologically laughable research suggesting that the reservoir was sentient and concluded that they ought to worship it," says Kaylo, sounding like he's talking from under seven hundred pounds of weapons-grade exasperation. "I might have to actually talk to one in order to get ahold of some of their 'prayer spells' in order to let you talk to it. Although I think their best spells only convince it to give you weird colors and stuff."

"Does this," she inquires, "mean that you do not want to high-five me after all?"

"It's hardly your fault that a weird little cult happens to have extracted about half a correct guess from some solider literature," sighs Kaylo.

She grins again.

"Are you likely to be able to make anything of it if I cast one of their prayer spells on you and the reservoir makes you see colors in response to things you say?"

"I do not know. It seems unlikely to have much depth as a communication method."

"Maybe they've gotten it to do other things too, although I'm pretty sure if they'd gotten it to say anything much that'd be in the news. I'm going to have to talk to one. I'm going to have to pretend to respect their beliefs, probably. Ugh. It's worth a try," he sighs.

"It occurs to me," she says after a moment, "that unlike most species, yours has no natural settling point for the aging process. It seems potentially convenient to make the young dead able to age normally, but at what point should they stop? I assume it would not be convenient if they continued growing indefinitely."

"Uh, yeah, that would get really inconvenient after a few more thousand years. I guess we should stop no later than four thousand years. Never having exceeded twenty feet nose to tail myself I'm not sure if it should be earlier than that given the choice... could ask Mom and Dad after I fetch them, though."

"Four thousand years can be the limit for now, then."

"Yeah. Like, at minimum, the buildings on Dragon Island can handle people that big and I am pretty sure they can still do midair shifting to escape from closed-in architecture. Man, various religions are going to freak out about this entire thing. The Sand Dusk Chanters will be smug and everybody else will be running around in circles like the moon's falling out of the sky."

"That sounds... noisy. I hope that no one decides to address their complaints to me. I dislike complaints."

"I would expect them to pile up in great intractable drifts everywhere. I'm not actually sure why I was able to get in this room - I suppose Korulen and whoever she was living with moved completely out of it and you're here for long-term enough that you count as the occupant, now? Well, the door has a ward and if it thinks you live here it'll respond to you circle or no, you don't have to let shouting Thanetans and singing Aleists and outraged Kovin and - reservoir knows what else. Chanters are going to be so smug."

"Are shouting and singing common respective behaviours of Thanetans and Aleists, or was that arrangement of phrasings rhetorical?"

"They are in fact not uncommon, although I imagine the reverse also occurs. There's always Thanetan street preachers who don't know when to shut up and Aleist churches always have - reasonably pretty, I suppose - hymns wafting out the windows."

"I see. I will be pleased if none of these people succeed in complaining to me about the implications of my existence."

"Yeah... I mean if it gets really bad the school will start refusing to admit anybody but students, but some fraction of students are this or that. Pretty sure my Nanela History class has a Kovin and an Aleist in it."

"Although I suppose if I am to instantiate large numbers of valuable objects, I will have to be let out of the circle and will therefore be able to escape their attention by leaving this building if I choose."

"They don't have to let you out of the circle to take stuff you make. They could do that with a calling circle. I dunno why you haven't been let out, but needing to remove things prrrrobably won't be the deciding factor."

"I did express a lack of any strong preference over whether my time here is spent in this circle or out of it."

"Might be it, though I'd still expect it to be a pain in the neck for somebody to feed you and so on, unless you... don't... eat or anything?"

"I do not require food or other maintenance from any outside source."

"Handy-dandy, how do you do that?"

"It is technically the same form of restoration available to the dead of my domain, but while they must wait for otherwise fatal conditions to trigger the process, I can cause it to happen whenever I choose."

"Interesting... sort of like mages only instead of specific causes of death and fancy elemental powers you get to start over in mint condition?"

"Yes. It looks like this," she says, and she is briefly consumed by a wash of very real-looking fire that doesn't seem to burn her exactly so much as - gently dissolve. It doesn't do a thing to her clothes or her chair, despite extensive physical contact with both. When it dissipates, she looks exactly the same as she did before.

"That's... cosmetically interesting. Is it going to interact weird with people who die with unactivated mage potential?"

"Mage potential is the type of magic conditional on a near-death experience? No," she says. "This form of restoration - colloquially called 'torching' - acts strictly as a last resort. A dead unactivated mage who subsequently encounters the conditions of their activation will activate. And," she adds, "since it seems much more convenient that way, the restoration will not deactivate them."

"Yeah, people would be annoyed if they had to reactivate their maging all the time, they get really attached to it. I assume lights and sorcerers annnnd merfolk have those colorists and shamans, they're also covered?"

"Yes. Mages are a special case because the active or inactive state of their powers is determined by a specific trigger event rather than developing naturally regardless of environmental stimulus, or being a species-wide learnable magic like the two kinds unique to merfolk. 'Lights' is obvious, but are 'sorcerers' the innate magical ability to remotely manipulate objects, or the species-specific information-gathering power?"

"Sorcerers are the remote manipulator thing. I'm not sure what you're talking about for the other one. Which species? What information-gathering?"

"The species with limited shapechange between a humanoid form and one resembling a bat. Some members have a magical ability to receive information from nearby nonliving objects, presented in the form of audible speech."

"Thaaaaat was widely considered a mental illness. This is. Interesting."

"I wonder if I have any more disconcerting revelations available. It is not obvious to me which facts about your world are widely known and which are not."

"Yeah, I dunno where to start summarizing. Am I missing any other forms of magic people have? Channeling capacities, mages lights sorcerers, colorists shamans... the vampire kind... dragon magic for dragons and enough to shift with for near descendants, shifting for vampires, aaaand wolfrider mindlinks?"

"Wolfrider mindlinks are an interesting case. I have stored pairs together, and the unpaired infants each with the potential match who died soonest after them, starting from the beginning. There is one female unpaired rider left over at the moment."

"Yeah, the pairs are going to need to wake up at the exact same time, and I think the ones who aren't paired yet need to have some... thing... done to pair them off so they'll need to wait till somebody's going to do that for them, I guess."

"I will arrange for the unpaired infants to be woken only with another woken or living pair present; that seems easiest. Your world has a remarkable diversity of aware life."

"Yyyyyes. I know. You probably have more than enough information to figure out the weird little secret of why."

"...Interesting," she says. "Yes. I had not paid such close attention until now. - In which case, you may be interested to know that there is a new such species in the world, only somewhat less than two years old. They appear to inhabit a group of variously sized islands close to this continent and near the edge of the world."

"...That was not known either. Somebody is going to be in big trouble. Council decided a few tens of thousands of years ago that leonines were it, that we had enough species running around, and hasn't reversed that. What're they crossed with?"

"They are small and furred, with four short limbs. A type of rodent, I believe."

"Great. Somebody really really liked some rodent and their kids got established and now the Taavlas Isles are full of... something. Somebody is in trouble."

"Is it really so troublesome?"

"Maybe it is and maybe it isn't - although rodents, I'm sort of worried they'll overrun the planet - but it's very embarrassing."

"Your planet is much more in danger of being overrun by its own dead. You will need to branch out to new ones eventually, if they return in sufficient numbers rather than taking up residence in my domain."

"Well, we have the bottom of the planet and the moon for starters and after that I guess we can get the unique white-group a teleportation license and send him hunting for new planets."

"It's possible that space in my domain could be made available if you run out of suitable areas here. There is no reason why I need limit myself to one infinite plane of inhabited land. But you might find the lack of access to wizardry inconvenient."

"Extremely," agrees Kaylo. "Over any prolonged period of time, anyway. Maybe you'd get hypocrite Erubian colonists willing to interact with magic on a one-time basis to get away from it forever?"

"Perhaps."

"Ryganaavlanik may or may not come in that much hypocrite, they'd probably just try to slaughter anyone who asked them anyway." Kaylo snorts. "Maybe if you wake up they'll think they went to a lovely magicless Heaven. This only applies to the ones who died there since the cultural revolution, s'pose..."

"I usually don't concern myself with the inevitable culture shock of new arrivals. Would you like me to give you the restoration property? It might be convenient not to have to be woken and retrieved after death. Although I suppose I might have to wait until you visit my domain to make the change, because the circle could interfere if I tried it here."

"I don't know what will or won't interfere with you doing things, but in general if you can do anything much through that diagram it's unexpected. Restoration property sounds great as long as it won't, like, make me a midget in the one form and eternally looking like a teenager in the other, or screw up my CC, or anything. I'd like to see somebody else with the property get a spell to work is the big thing I'd want."

"Your CC will remain unchanged, and you will be subject to the same four-thousand-year upper bound as the rest of your species. But you can wait until you have seen a retrieved person cast a spell if you like."

"The four thousand year upper bound leaves how aging works in assumed forms the same as it currently is, right?"

"Yes."

"Good, that's not broken and doesn't require fixing. Hmmmmm, anything else preliminary to cover or should I go talk to a Sand Dusk Chanter about prayer spells?"

"You may as well go and talk to a Sand Dusk Chanter about prayer spells."

"Okay. If you start having to screen out howling religious visitors in the next while, I'm Kaylo, you can key me to the ward in particular instead of letting anybody open the door so you can see if they're me."

"Noted."

Kaylo waves and lets himself out.

While she waits, she doubles the minimum residence space - bumping quantities in existing accounts as appropriate - and designs and implements a water-filled storage and transit system for the merfolk, including a link to the new Central Tower Station and water channels going right up to the future locations of the paired circles. She also distributes an announcement to the guides describing their new resposibilities. (The torturers and judges have already been decommissioned.)

"...Kaylo was in here?" asks Keo. "He's offering to design complicated spells? He's still a student, albeit a talented one."

"I found him charming."

"Did you just smile?" says Eights. "I didn't know you smiled."

"What was Kaylo even doing here? I suppose he has a class with Korulen... Well, he can try the spell, but I'll want to look it over and get an opinion from Narax too."

"He suggested your brother as caster," she adds. "If payment is required, I can instantiate objects of value, such as lost items which may be of interest to archaeologists. I also got the impression that members of your species might be interested in learning that a new form of aware life has been developing in what he called the Taavlas Isles for the last year and a half."

"Narax is my brother," Keo specifies. "I'll get Kanaat on writing to museums and such. ...And that's embarrassing."

"So I am informed."

"...I'm missing something," says Eights. "Should I continue missing it?"

"Yes please," sighs Keo.

She shrugs. "'Kay."

"Narax will - probably want to talk to you anyway," Keo says. "Possibly without you in the room, Eights," she adds.

"All right," she says. "I'll go wander."

"Think my name really hard if you need me," Keo says, and then she contacts her brother.