"Sraynpoomhikwayfamweelngeeplay ngloo?"

"Yeep!" says the spontaneous guest, alarmed.

'Sorry, but I have no living idea what you just said. You can respond like {this}.'

'Little motel in a podunk town in Pennsylvania. I think it was called Keystone or something.'

'...Where's that?'

'Do you mean where in Pennsylvania or have you never heard of Pennsylvania?' Odd, but if this girl came from some random non-America country...well, it's not like she can name all the Canadian provinces or anything.

'We've never heard of Pennsylvania.'

'Me and Holly. I'm Crystal.'

'We're unusual,' agrees Crystal. 'Um, where is Pennsylvania?'

Mental image of a globe. Mental image of the United States on the globe. Mental image of Pennsylvania's location in the United States.

'...Because it's the planet?'

'...We're from a flat place. With a hole in it. It's not round.'

"Are you sure? Lots of people used to think the Earth was flat. It's not hard, it's really huge, it looks flat until you get really, really far away."

'We're... pretty sure. Suns would probably come back eventually if they were going on a round thing.'

'Suns? Earth has a sun. The world goes around it, and spins.' Simplified mental image of the solar system.

'I guess that would work if you lived on a round thing, but we don't.'

'Apparently. How'd you leave?'

'A demon ate us.'

'What.'

'We didn't recognize the kind, it looked like a snake with a big mirror for a face, and it was chasing us and we weren't fast enough, and then - we were here. We don't know if it got our brother and his cohabitor too.'

'A snake with a mirror for a face? Cohabitor? Demons don't exist. Here. Demons don't exist here. Presumably they exist where you're from. We don't know anything about them.'

'Our brother knows more about demons but he was asleep, his cohabitor was running away at the time. ...Cohabitor is the person who lives with you? Our brother and his are normal, they aren't awake at the same time like us and you.'

'We're unusual because we were born all together. Our brother too until he moved out.'

'And people who are born normally just--move into each other? Why?'

'So they don't have to sleep. Well, our brother moved out because he's a boy.'

'That part makes sense, but why would people not want to sleep?'

'So the klaonso don't eat their souls.'

'What...what are klaonso?'

'They're an insubstantial kind of demon. You can't keep them out except with really expensive wards, so those are for children who haven't cohabited yet and everyone else doesn't sleep physically, they just let their cohabitor take over. But we can switch fast and be a little bit awake at the same time.'

'That's terrible. Don't your bodies need to sleep?'

She pats their backpack. There is a small mouse cage dangling from it. 'That's what mice are for. A lot of ours died on the trip though.'

'How do mice make you not need to sleep?'

'I put the sleepiness in them instead,' says Holly, who has been mostly dormant for this conversation but emerges to take credit for her magical prowess.

'How do you that? Did you invest to get it? Does everyone's investiture make them not need to physically sleep?'

'...What are you talking about?'

'You said you put the sleepiness in the mice. What, is that some, I dunno, demon world person power separate from investiture?'

'It's troportation, anybody can do it.' She touches one of several colorful tags sewn to the inside of her jacket; and tag and jacket swap colors. 'Like that. You can't do that?'

'I've never even heard of anything like that.'

'Oh. Well, everyone where we're from can do it.'

'You also have demons and a flat probably-not-a-planet. It doesn't surprise either of us that you have magic we don't.'

'What's yours like?'

'What do you mean? We just have heart investiture.'

'I don't know what that is.'

'It's when you...take your heart...and invest it in something? Or someone. Do you not do that? I think we've heard that historically there have been societies that considered it taboo...'

'We don't do that? We keep our heart in our chest?'

'Not the physical organ.'

'Well, then something's wrong with your mind talky thing because I don't know what else it'd be!'

'Yeah?'

'People have hearts. That's...that's how people work.'

'Except we... don't.'

'How can you be sure?'

'Don't you think somebody would have noticed?'

'Maybe.' Or maybe something with the demons or lack of sleep or something interfered. Whatever, it's probably not polite to interrogate them about their possible literal heartlessness.

'And if a whole world of people could just not notice I don't see how it's that important.'

'It's important to us, but we take your point.'

"And you do a thing with them?"

'Yes. When you invest your heart in something it becomes a magical artifact; when you invest your heart in someone they get powers.'

'What kind of things do the powers and artifacts do?'

'Well, I can talk to you like this. Emily has this nifty magnetism thing.'

'That's cool.'

'And one of the things about a spherical planet is that it has a magnetic field.'

'Well what it mostly shakes out to is flying and metallokinesis.'

'Cool.'

'It's pretty great. What can you do with your thing besides not sleep and change the colors on stuff?'

'I'm pretty good at magic! If we weren't stranded on a round thing I'd be going to do it professionally one day moving souls into cohabiting bodies and stuff. Uh, sleepiness isn't the only thing you can put in a mouse? I killed a different demon by putting all the heat in an entire tree into a leaf so the leaf would catch fire because that kind of demon dies to fire.'

'All of it?'

'Yeah, I kind of hurt ourselves doing that and killed some of the mice. I'm going to need more mice, can I get them here?'

'Oh, probably. I'm sure we can figure something out. ...Do you need a doctor or did you take care of that, I imagine being in the vicinity of a tree at absolute zero would be, um, really not fun.'

"I didn't kill all the mice. They're dealing with it."

'Okay. We think you can get mice at pet stores, but you probably shouldn't tell whoever's working there what you plan to do with them.'

'...What else do you do with mice?'

'Some people think they're cute and fuzzy enough to keep as pets.'

"Huh. We try not to get attached to them. But I can pretend, I guess. Also this is a travel cage and they shouldn't have to live a dozen in this space if I'm not hiking through the woods, if they get sick or they're always asleep I can't use them."

'They shouldn't expect you to gush over the fuzziness, just don't overtly mention planning to make them sick or anything.'

"Okay."

'When do you need the new mice by? I usually trade in favors these days so I don't have a lot of cash on me, and finding a pet store with an employee that needed something I could give them could take a bit of time--finding someone willing to pay me for something like that would probably take less time, actually. Anyway there aren't any soul-stealing sleep-demons here so if you want to sleep out of childhood nostalgia or wanting to ration the mice or something that wouldn't be problematic.'

'We don't want to sleep. Even if it weren't a terrifying idea! What a waste of time!'

'Just checking. Anyway, timetable on the mice?'

'We can probably stay awake another five or six suns easily, ten if we have to, without any. But sooner's better.'

'Given that our sun works differently here, I'm not sure how long that means, exactly. Um...' She unstraps the digital watch on their wrist, and hands it over. '{Those} are seconds, {those} are minutes, and {those} are hours. Sixty seconds is a minute and sixty minutes is an hour,' she adds, since the seconds are the only ones actively changing. 'Do any of those seem familiar?'

'Okay. That gives us a general idea; we don't need to know the exact amount of time. How long will the mice you have last you?'

'They're sleeping off a lot of tiredness already, the live ones... if Holly transfers instead of swaps we'll be fine for maybe thirty or forty suns, but they'll die, you can't fit that much tiredness in a mouse and have it just wake up later. So we'd need more.'

'Well, we don't mind sleeping, so you could use us in a pinch, but we'd better get started looking around for odd jobs. Come to think of it I'm not sure a town this small would have a pet store; how do you feel about us flying and carrying you?'

'That sounds cool,' says Holly.

'Awesome. Just let us pack up and we can get going.'

'Thanks!'

Packing up doesn't take very long; everything they own fits in a large, somewhat tattered, wire-reinforced duffel bag. When they're grabbing what's left of the packaged food the concierge left them, it occurs to at least one of them to ask, 'How are you two doing food-wise?'

'Uh, it's been a while but we're not hungry enough yet to eat troported food, which is what we have. If we're not going to hike anyway.'

'Is troported food worse than regular?'

'It'll keep your soul in your body but it doesn't taste so great.'

'Why not? Can't you just move the taste around too?'

"Eh. Kinda. It loses a little bit every time."

'Can you import flavor from things that taste good but would be bad to actually eat? Like poisonous berries or mushrooms?'

'I guess, yeah. As long as I can touch it without getting poisoned, or I don't mind losing a mouse for it. Did you develop a taste for a poisonous thing?'

'No, just brainstorming ways to make troported food less tasteless in the future. Oh, one thing you might be able to do, I don't know if you have maple trees but we boil the sap to make sweet syrups and candies, if you had anything like that you could probably get the sweet flavor just from the sap.'

"I can't count on running across anything tasty in the woods, though."

'Fair enough. You said you could put all the heat in a tree into one leaf; could you stockpile a large amount of flavor in a very small thing and dole it out later?'

'Flavor only swaps, doesn't transfer. Some things only do one or the other.'

[...Okay. This might be hard especially if I can't write things down.]

[Why couldn't you write things down?]

[I didn't bring much paper.]

[Notebooks and pens are cheap. In fact--] and they open the drawer beside the bed and pull out a pad of motel stationary and a pen with the motel's name written on the side. [Here. To start with. I can get you real notepaper later.]

[Thanks.] And she starts noting down transliterations of the words she's sure she remembers how they correspond to meanings.

[You're welcome,] she replies, and finishes packing their bag and zips it shut. [Alright, we'll make a brief circuit of the town to see if anyone needs something metal dealt with or help remembering something or something, and then off to a larger town.]

[Okay. We can help too, if you find anything we can - well, mostly Holly - can do, the mice are for us.]

[I'll let you know if either of us see anything obvious; we're not as familiar with the practical applications for your abilities as our own.]

[Basically she can move properties between things she's touching. Either make it so they have each other's, or so all of the property goes from one into the other, but like she said not all properties do both versions.]

[We still don't have years of habit looking out for stuff like that], Edie points out, [but noted.]

[You're being really helpful. We really appreciate it.]

[We've never met anyone like us before. And we're a bit lonely, truth be told. We appreciate your company while it lasts.]

[We've never met anybody like us before either! Even at home where everybody's got cohabitors it's one at a time.]

[No?]

[Sometimes we sort of--melt together, so we're functionally one person for a while.]

[We're always two people...]

[Yeah, we don't know why we do it. It just sort of happens sometimes.]

[We can hear each other thinking and we're always a little awake, especially Holly, so we can switch off for each other pretty well. But it's always been that we were separate. We got mad at our parents calling all three of us Holly when we were little.]

[Even when we're one person we don't like the name we were born with for casual use. We didn't really mind when our parents called us that, though,] she says, a little sadly.

[Book picked himself a name and Holly picked one for me. She was awake most often so we all thought of her as having the name they gave us.]

[Neither of us can really imagine using the name we were born with. I mean, the aesthetics aren't great, but it would feel like--like one of us was the "real" Elaine Xavier and the other was just a voice in her head. Or like we were inviting other people to think that, anyway.]

[Maybe it was different for us because it's usual to have people sharing bodies.]

[That seems likely.]

[How'd you pick your names?]

[Edie was our grandmother's name. Emily thought that name was pretty, and she liked that it started with an E to match. My name and our birth name and our mother's name. It was Erika.]

[Cute.]

[Cuteness is often what happens when small children name things!]

Giggle.

Colors are easy; Crystal can do them.

Well, then this lady can get her dress in a color that wasn't in the catalog and this teenager can get his toy in black instead of "playskool" (whatever that is) orange, and since troportation is unknown here they get a good bit more money for this than if it were known how trivial colors are.

Hooray! They're helping!

[It's weird that the money is paper. I guess it's easier to carry around if you can't put the weight in something else.]

[It's also pretty low in volume. Why, what do you use?]

[Coins. They're called suns.]

[We use coins for very small denominations. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters.]

[Why not just more paper?]

[We don't know.]

[Where do we get mice?]

[Once we get to a larger town we can look up local petstores.]

[Okay.] Sigh. [We have a fox, but we lost track of her while the demon was chasing us.]

[What was she for?]

[She was just a pet. We don't keep pet mice but we do foxes.]

[Oh. Foxes aren't generally pets, here.]

[Why not?]

[We don't really specifically know? I mean, we have a general understanding of why cats and dogs are pets, but why any given other animal isn't never really crossed either of our minds to check.]

[They're so cute.] Sigh. [I hope Tyang's all right.]

[Do demons typically go after foxes?]

[No, foxes don't have souls to eat, but she could still get hurt if she got in the way.]

[Well, I hope she's alright too then.]

[We're more worried about Book and Lightning. But maybe they just - landed somewhere, too, and they're fine like we are.]

[Yeah. We'll have to see if we can--find a mage who has a power that could help you get home and/or find your brother and friend.]

[Do you think somebody can?]

[Who knows? There are more potential powers for mages than there are stars in the sky. That's what people say, anyway.]

[Stars?]

[Oh, right, you have weird sky stuff. Um, grains of sand?]

[That's a lot. How many people are there here?]

[Well, six billion give or take, but the expression is used not just to describe all the people who exist, but also all the people who could potentially come to exist in the future.]

[...That's a lot of people.]

[Yes it is.]

[I'm not sure we have that many in all the countries in my world, even counting people instead of bodies.]

[What happens to the bodies that get...moved out of?]

[Burned, usually. When there's no one left in them; Book just left us ours. Didn't even take any traits, he just found a cohabitor he liked the look of enough without.]

[Traits?]

[What usually happens is people who think they'd make good cohabitors compromise on how they want to look after. If you always hated your nose you use the other person's nose, that sort of thing. It happens pretty often that people want to move into bodies of the other sex, too, like Book, and then they have to find a cohabitor who's shaped how they want. You can do this other times too, though, if you and somebody just want each other's eye colors or whatever,] says Holly.

[We hadn't even thought of that application for troporting. What would you have done if Book had wanted to keep something?]

[There's a couple things he might have wanted but he didn't ask. And we like how we look and Book knew that so we wouldn't have wanted anything from Lightning.]

[I am so curious how this all works genetically, but I don't think you probably know.]

[No idea, sorry. We look like our parents? And parents are pretty much always cohabiting adults.]

[So do you have--how many parents do you have?]

[Four, of course.]

[Two's the norm here, since people don't generally cohabit. Considering how many fundamental differences our worlds seemed to have, four seemed like a good guess but we didn't want to assume.]

[Well, only two of them actually decided to have a kid and got us, the other two have other spouses.]

[That sounds...really complicated.]

[I guess? They're not awake at the same time as their cohabitors, there's only ever two of them at a time.]

[Yeah, but--you can't move somewhere else easily because you'd be dragging someone else along that you can never directly talk to, if they wanted to move with you they'd have to negotiate with their spouse's cohabitor as well as their spouse...logistics kind of stuff.]

[Oh. Yeah, people don't move very much, especially not once they're of an age where somebody's married.]

[We don't think it sounds fun, being stuck like that. Not saying your way is worse, or anything, but--that sounds like a downside.]

[Well, they don't do it for fun. We wouldn't want to be separate though. ...We do sort of wish we could fall totally asleep if we wanted.]

[Sleep's nice. I could try sending one of you to sleep if you wanted, my power goes pretty far beyond just talking.]

[It's not that sleep is pleasant, it's, um, I have a crush on somebody and Holly doesn't at all and it's awkward. But he's not here. But it might happen again one day, I guess, even if we can't get home.]

[Sending you to sleep the once to try it would be a lot easier than making you able to do it. I could try, but...that seems like the kind of thing where I'd have to spend a lot of time observing more of your minds than most people are at all comfortable with to have a decent shot.]

[We don't really know enough about your magic to know if we'd want you to try.]

[I have...mind magic comprehensive enough that I try to avoid letting strangers know how comprehensive it is so I don't get mobs with torches and pitchforks after me.]

[There's no mind magic at all except moving souls around where we're from so we don't know how comprehensive strangers you usually meet expect it to be.]

[What I can do to someone else's mind seems primarily limited by my ethics and skill.]

[Yeah, that could be pretty scary. You seem nice about it though.]

[I try. My limits are pretty much self-defined but I put a lot of thought into defining them.]

[I guess I'd mostly be worried that you know how minds work but not how souls work and something would be messed up if one of us went all the way asleep. Book was able to move out okay but he was always the most able to fade back and not pay attention.]

[A valid concern. I've never been sure that there was a meaningful difference between a mind and a soul myself, but--unsurety goes both ways.]

[Yeah.]

[So how do you want to do this? We can put our arms around your waist and you can put yours around our neck, or you could cling to our back, or we could try to rig you some kind of harness for flying in.]

[Um, clinging to your back sounds... least terrifying.]

[We do have non-irrelevant quantities of metal on hand, we can secure you using that, too, regardless of whatever else; mostly the "harness" option was because some people just plain dislike physical contact.]

[We don't have that problem.]

[Just checking.] Quicksilver rivulets of metal probably not identifiable to people without considerable metallurgical knowledge or some variety of cheating snake their way out of the dufflebag.

Crystal watches them with interest.

They're pretty much going to hang in the air until the two bodies are holding onto each other enough to secure.

Holly takes over to arrange herself piggyback.

And the various pieces of metal wrap around all four of them in various places, joining with their other ends and solidifying.

...Flying now?

Yep! They start off slowly, but they'll start picking up speed once they're well above the treeline.

Holly giggles, squinting against the wind.

"Eep!" laughs Holly.

[Sorry! Didn't want to overshoot!]

[It's okay.]

They descend somewhat more sedately.

And Holly hops off their back.

[Okay, now we need to find a petstore, which means looking one up, which means using the internet, which means explaining the internet. So there are these devices called computers that can talk to each other--not literally talking, they're not people. But if you have one then you can connect it to a network that lets it access information stored in much bigger ones...somewhere else. And these have any number of useful and entertaining things stored thereon, including in this case directories for businesses in any given city.]

[I've never tried to explain the internet before. Logistical point right now is that I need to find somewhere to connect. One category of place that usually lets you do that sells food. Annnd also beverages that help people stay awake, come to think of it. If for some reason it takes us longer than I'm expecting to get you two your mice then maybe caffeine would help. Anyway our original point was that this kind of place generally looks unkindly on people who don't buy anything so if you're at all hungry now's a good time.]

[Caffeine can help, it just doesn't keep working indefinitely. And I am pretty hungry.]

[Oh, you do have caffeine where you're from? Kudos.] Okay, there's a Starbucks over there. Any less...Starbucks...coffee shops in sight? No? Well, beggars can't be choosers. Starbucks it is. [Let me know what looks good and we'll order for all of us,] Edie suggests as she leads the other two into the cafe.

[I smell coffee but I'm not sure I recognize anything else.]

[There's a pastry cabinet over there,] she indicates. [I can translate the labels if you want.]

[Yes please.]

The pastry cabinet contains an approximately coffeeshop-typical assortment of pastries. [Red velvet is just chocolate with red food coloring, I think. I'm not completely sure why it's a thing but I can appreciate it on an aesthetic level,] she commentates as they pass over the muffin section.

[...Huh, I guess you would need to mix coloring into stuff, wouldn't you. I'll have the one with nuts? And that sandwich? I'm really hungry.]

The Earth natives purchase the requested items and then locate a table for the nonnatives to eat and for themselves to look for pet stores.

Oh wow it's real non-troported food this is the best thing om nom nom.

[It depends on if we have to stuff them all in the travel cage or not.]

[We could get you a larger cage if you want but as long as you're relying on us as you're native guides you're probably going to do a fair amount of traveling.]

[The travel cage can fit twelve and they should all be females so they don't fight or breed.]

[That, I actually found while I was researching pet mice.]

[It's still weird people keep them as pets.]

[We sleep and don't troport. We have no reason not to.]

[Yeah, I guess that makes sense.]

[The store's farther than I'd rather walk given alternatives and intra-city flight is likely to draw attention. How would you like a hands-on lesson on public transportation?]

[Um, like carriages?]

[Bigger, faster, made of metal, not pulled by horses.]

[Okay, let's do it.]

[Okay.]

Bus stop and bus are both fairly standard examples of their types. There aren't a lot of seats open, so the Xaviers demonstrate the use of the dangling loops.

Okay then! Holly catches on pretty well.

As the bus starts moving it soon becomes apparent that these loops really are necessary for not falling over.

Holly's got decent balance, but yes, the loops help.

From there it doesn't take long to get to the pet store, which contains a highly chipper saleslady who is slightly bemused at an order for twelve mice and keeps trying to persuade them to buy a larger cage.

Emily and Edie are going to have to address this for her because Holly doesn't know a lick of English and even Crystal hasn't got more than a few words.

Holly dumps the dead mice outside - she shrinks them first - and cleans the mat on a random leaf with troportation and then puts the mice in.

[Probably a good thing she didn't see the dead mice. Would've made that conversation even less fun.]

[I guess that makes sense.]

[Yeah, the whole not making a pet of them if you're going to use them as batteries thing has merit; people tend to get more worked up about creatures when they go in the small fuzzy family member category.]

[Yeah. I mean, I'd drowse Tyang if I had to and was out of mice, but Tiag's soul won't get eaten if she falls asleep.]

[Worst comes to worst yours wouldn't either, here, but I certainly understand not wanting to confirm that empirically.]

[Sleeping is - you don't even close your eyes and put your head down. Complete strangers will come over and kick you if it looks like you might fall asleep. It's just so terrifying once you're out of the dreamward.]

[We're glad we live here instead. Not having to sleep would be nice, but being able to is also nice and being capable of doing so but your soul gets eaten if you do is a kind of scary we have no desire to add to our lives.]

[Well, I'm glad you like it.]

[Emily's a little surprised you don't have any positive memories of it from when you were children.]

[I think some people do... we dreamed weird.]

[Really? Weird like how?]

[We can hear each other thinking - and Book was there too when we were little - but we didn't have the same dreams and it was really disorienting.]

[Oh. That is weird. Emily and I hear each other all the time too but we do have the same dreams. Or close enough, anyway.]

[That sounds nice.]

[It is. But you only spend so much time each night in REM sleep; it would still be more efficient not to have to. Unfortunately we don't "sleep" in the back of our head even as much as you do, so I doubt mouse-drowsing would be a decent long-term solution for us.]

[Yeah, the soul needs rest too and mice don't have any to put the tired in.]

[Still probably better than caffeine. It was slightly surprising that you had coffee, given that.]

[Mice are better but you don't want to rely on just one thing when you will literally die if you fall asleep!]

[So we've got all kinds of drugs and stuff for it in case there's a mouse plague or something.]

[I suppose we haven't been thinking through all the implications of your world's demon problem.]

[The other kinds of demons all have physical bodies and can be kept out of towns most of the time. We were just on a dangerous wilderness hike for what in retrospect seem like kind of stupid reasons, having been eaten by a demon and all.]

[Do you know how the dreamwards work and why they're expensive?]

[There's some rare expensive materials where if you put all their special properties in the same thing it can hedge klaonso out. And the properties break if you try to expand the materials the way you can most things.]

[Ah-ha. Do you know what the materials are? They might not be as rare and expensive here.]

[Yeah actually, since I was gonna be a professional troporter -] And she lists a bunch of things that Emily and Edie have never heard of.

[Might be worth it to go to a geologist of some description with that list just in case but we don't recognize any of those things. Damn.]

[Oh well.]

[We were hoping it was something like aluminum that used to be really rare and expensive and is now used to make disposable containers, among other highly affordable objects.]

[I don't think I know what aluminum is.]

[It's a kind of metal that's really hard to refine unless you know how to do it right.]

[Maybe we don't have it. Or we do but we don't know how to refine it, I guess.]

[Seems likely. Here, there was a slice of history where people had discovered it and could refine it but only with great difficulty before we figured out how to do it better, but it wasn't a huge slice.]

[We wouldn't have that problem. If we had any of it we'd have as much as we wanted.]

[Unless it had weird dreamward properties, but that doesn't seem likely.]

[Yeah. The dreamward things and living things are the only ones where there's much problem getting lots.]

[Do living things have inherent properties that make it difficult aside from souls in humans or are they just tricky because biology is complicated?]

[You can only move properties to places that have somewhere to put them. You can't put aliveness in a rock or something, because rocks don't have a place to put it. You can't even bring an animal to life if you sacrifice another animal to get it because dying means losing the place to put your aliveness. So all alive things have to actually grow, we can't just get rocks and turn them into steak or whatever.]

[Well a steak doesn't really have aliveness--you said you could do food, right?]

[...you can't just troport sizes for food. You have to troport all the properties of the food into a thing the right size, or there will only be as much... foodness... in the big food as there was in the small one. And nobody eats troported food if they can avoid it.]

[Fair enough. Emily is so curious how this all works on a chemical level but that's not something we can investigate at the moment.]

[Well, I can port some stuff for you later if you want.]

[If we can find a microscope or something she might take you up on that.]

[What's that?]

[A machine that lets you look at things too small for the eye to see.]

[How does it do that?]

[As in what's it like to use one or as in what are the mechanics?]

[Um, both.]

{image of a microscope}[You look in the tube and you see a circular view of what's on the base. We don't really know how exactly it works besides having to do with glass and light.]

[Huh. Looks very ruins-artifact-y.]

[There's a lot of abandoned and destroyed towns closer to the sinkhole than anybody lives anymore and they have weird stuff in them. That's why we were on our hike, we wanted to go find stuff and bring it home.]

[The sinkhole? What's that?]

[There was a really big earthquake and the ground opened up to the hellscape and that's when all the klaonso got out. And other demons, way more of them than earthquakes ever spat out before. And everybody had to run away from the sinkhole and figure out cohabiting real quick.]

[It was a long time ago. It's the biggest disaster ever to happen but it was really long ago, centuries and centuries.]

[Less that, and more--your world is really hazardous, and we feel like if we could just find the right investitures we could fix it, or at least some of it, but there's still so much we don't know. We had no idea that there's apparently a hellscape directly underneath your flat world or that earthquakes release them or--anything like that.]

[Oh. Well, there's a hellscape directly under our flat world and earthquakes will spit out a handful of demons but the sinkhole spits out as many as feel like emerging, basically.]

[Okay, first question: are there any demons that are people.]

[No. I don't think so, anyway? There might be demons who were people that just happened to find eating souls the only motivating thing in the world.]

[Then is there any reason that you know of that a mage with sufficiently ridiculous firepower couldn't invade hell and make it cease to be a problem.]

[...Hell's probably infinite too?]

[Well, even if clearing the whole thing out isn't doable, it might be possible to wipe out the ones close enough to the sinkhole to be an immediate problem and then repair the ground somehow.]

[Klaonso travel really fast and there's already a lot of them on the surface, but I guess that would help.]

[Is there some pre-existing way to kill those? We were figuring that would be a separate magic problem.]

[Klaonso? No, nobody knows how to kill them.]

[Okay, so we'll have to figure that out too.]

[That'd be really nice.]

[Troporting could probably do a fair bit of good here, too, but it doesn't seem to be as diverse as investiture.]

[Yeah, everybody troports the same way.]

[Granted that any given troporter can probably do more things than any given mage.]

[Well, if they're good at it. I'm really good.]

[Emily and I are on the high end of mages and whether or not you rate us as more powerful than you, we seem to have considerably narrower spheres of influence.]

[Yeah, but you can affect things you aren't touching, there's that.]

[True enough.]

[It'd be so convenient if I could troport at range, like, wow.]

[That does sound impressive.]

[I wonder if there's a way to get hearts and do the investiture thing with each other like you two did.]

[...I mean...it doesn't really feel like anything until you invest it. For all we know--maybe entering the universe did it, or getting touched by my mind-heart-power. We wouldn't know unless you actually tried and failed to invest it, and even then investiture was tricky for us.]

[Tricky how?]

[You're not supposed to be able to invest your heart in your own body. Doing it anyway involved convincing ourselves that "no I'm not putting it in my body I'm putting it in her body" long enough for it to work.]

[So maybe whichever of us is faded back and not feeling body things should do it. Or try to do it without waking up all the way, anyway.]

[I don't know if that would be necessary--Emily and I are both each as awake as the other, and we managed it--but it might help.]

[What do you actually - do?]

[{This.} It's a purely mental action, although some people like to dress it up with physical ceremony.]

[Most people don't have--someone like us. Investing your heart in someone is a huge commitment. It gives them a lot of power over you.]

[Does the ritual help?]

[Not really. It's just symbolic.]

[Crystal's trying but she's not getting anywhere. She's going to come up and can you tell the thing again?]

{Thing}

Click.