"What? No I was gonna say that some things you can only do once."

"Cute," she replies with a snicker. "Well, if you promise not to attack us, you can come inside to chat. I'd make a threat about kicking you out to fall if you tried anything, but," she gestures at the wingsuit, "I doubt it'd do shit if I did."

"I'm immortal!" She says, excitedly. "But I won't bite," first "promise!"

"I mean, in the right sorta context, bites are great. But the first time meeting a new friend we haven't even flirted with yet probably isn't that context."

She leans back in the window and then swings the door open wide. "Can you make it in on your own, or do you need a hand getting off the roof?"

She also steps close to Eva and murmurs, "Seems friendly enough."

"We're bound to get unlucky eventually," Eva murmurs back. "But for now it's okay."

"Uh, one second." She aims downwards, then teleports, faceplanting on the floor of the train cabin. "I'm ok."

"You can teleport!", Sable exclaims excitedly, reclaiming front from Hailey. "That's so cool."

She gestures around at the cabin of the locomotive, then at her girlfriend. "Welcome aboard my trainship. I'm Sable, and this is Eva."

"Nice to meet you." Eva offers a hand up to Strawberry.

"Hah, thanks." She allows herself to be helped up. "My name is Strawberry." Nope, still weird. "What brings you here on a flying fucking train oh my god this thing is so cool." She gawks at the cockpit interior.

She bounces in place excitedly. "I know, right? It's awesome! Can fold in new train cars, too, if we find something we want to add. As for why we're here, a mix of exploring and," she trails off and looks over at Eva. Is the leaky bridge aura problem private information? She doesn't really know.

She peers at Eva questioningly.

Eva simply nods. "I have a bridge to this plane that's a bit too strong, and bad luck's been bleeding through. We're here to try and fix that with practice."

"You have a bridge? Do you mean, like, how conduits feel like bridges?"

"Sorta yeah, the — idea is that conduits are sort of the same thing as bridges, in a way? Something that spans the worlds. So you can get some of the effects of bridges near conduits who are attuned to worlds particularly strongly. The Academy leaks corruption, so bad luck can happen near its bridges, which is what's happening to me. Basically my connection to this world is leaky and I need to figure out how to isolate it."

"Corruption, right." Like that stuff that transformed the Mu creatures. "I've seen that before. But, uh, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm a conduit, and I can tell that the two of you are conduits, so maybe we can compare notes. I've only been doing this conduit thing for a little over a month, I'm big into exploring too."

"Yeah, we just started a few weeks ago ourselves. I almost died, I can tell you the story later, and while I have an immortality it kind of sucks so I'm trying pretty hard not to get killed. We've been logging kelp for cash, and once we figure out how to stop the random strokes of bad luck we're probably going to go hang out on Rorch and learn parkour."

"We have a few books from some older conduits and have been cribbing from them a bit. Trying our best out there, you know how it is."

"Eva's the reason we have access to the books, honestly. Most of what I bring to the table is just the trainship," Sable replies with a shrug and a smile.

"Ah, yeah, I have a friend with a library in their Bevin, there's some scattered stuff in there about the other worlds. I know about four other conduits besides you two."

"You're the second we've met, not counting each other."

"Was this conduit a brass butterfly by any chance?"

Huh. "Nnno. A black-haired dude who made stuff from glass." Sable shakes her head. "A brass butterfly, huh? I suppose we'll find all kinds out here."

"So that makes eight of us so far." Well if nothing else I should tell Fib, Cean and Groundskeeper about these two. "Hey, can this thing go to space?"

"Yep. She's rated for all environments, from the depths of the ocean to the empty black."