He is on a - hill? No, not a hill. He can see the curvature of the horizon, that's not just where the ground drops away.

There is a field of lavender here, and a woman picking the lavender.

He takes a deep breath, assembles his requirements in his head, and then demands of reality that it explain its physical characteristics in his immediate vicinity. 

It is, as it appeared to be, a field of lavender. He is standing between two rows of it and the lavender continues in all directions in the inspected radius; the woman, who hasn't noticed him yet, is outside of it. The dirt is well-watered, good quality soil and remarkably free of stones. The air is breathable, and the wind is light, and the sun is shining warmly. There is a snail over there.

And the weirdness with the curvature of the horizon?

It's just actually how this planet is curved.

It's about nine miles in diameter.

...Okay. He looks around for a sun, or any other visible celestial object.

Yup, there's a sun over there.

There's another one, smaller or farther away, over thataway.

And a very small or very faraway one, still too large to just be a pinprick of a star, over there.

Also there are - moons? Lots of moons, way more of those than suns. With stuff on them.

He reaches out to the "moons."

They are like what he is standing on. Some of them are a bit smaller; the one he's on seems to be one of the larger ones. Some of them have more people and some have fewer.

He considers the woman picking lavender, checking with his eyes to see if she's visibly noticed him and with his magic to see if she's any amount of mage. 

She's not a mage at all. She hasn't noti- ah, now she's standing up and stretching and notices him! "Something in a foreign language!" she says.

What did she just say? 

She said "Oh! Hello! Where did you come from?"

He makes a helpless shrug. 

"I certainly didn't make you!"

He nods. He gestures off into the distance, then at his feet, then makes a puzzled face. 

"...can you talk?"

He shakes his head, then coughs dramatically. 

"And you don't know where you came from?"

He makes a so-so gesture. 

She squints around in the field. "Hello?!" she calls. "Who made this man? Look, it's still illegal, but it's a lot less illegal if you fess up and explain what you did!"

No one answers.

...Who made this man? That's...an interesting question to ask. Is there anyone besides the two of them on this little planet moon thing?

Yes, but not nearby; in a handful of villages there are concentrations of people and in between there are groups not exceeding three.

Are any of these people mages, or at least hedgewitches?

Nope!

Well. He already knew that whatever was happening had to be very weird. He supposes he'll just have to keep paying attention for now. 

The woman tromps around a bit, careful not to step on the lavender, looking for a hiding child and giving Atennesi a wide berth. Then she huffs. "You can understand me, you just have a sore throat?" she says.

He nods. 

"Okay. Can you stay right here, so you don't get anyone else sick, while I go to the nearest village and tell them what's happened?"

He tilts his head, and blinks and looks confused, and shakes his head. 

"- you can't stay here, you'd wander off?"

He shakes his head again, then bends, takes a pinch of dirt that isn't attached to any lavender, stands, throws the dirt, points to the resulting dust in the air, then mimes inhaling deeply then coughing violently. 

"...okay. So you don't think you're contagious, and you'll be able to talk soon?"

He nods. 

"I didn't hear you coughing. How long have you been here, hold up one finger per hour -"

He hesitates, and then raises one finger to the first knuckle. 

"Then I ought to have heard you coughing - I ought to have noticed whoever made you -"

He tilts his head and looks puzzled. 

"I didn't make you! Don't even think it!" she exclaims, horrified.

He looks surprised. 

"Did you - did you just walk here, from somewhere else -"

He makes a so-so gesture. 

"...bicycle?" she says hopefully.

He cocks his head, then shrugs. 

"I suppose considering how much it looks like a criminal wandered onto my farm, made you, and ran off I probably shouldn't assume your memories are accurate," she muses. "Who knows what they'd put in your head. Well. Will you walk with me to the village?"

He nods. 

She sets off through the lavender field.

He takes magical snapshots of the planet thing going back at intervals of a month to start with, over the past five years. 

No one performs magic he can recognize on this planet.

They have moveable type for their dizzyingly complicated writing system, bicycles, and weird boat things that float at the tops of tall buildings in three of the villages.

Sometimes, adults who weren't there last month appear; but sometimes people come and go via boat-thing.

The weather doesn't follow an obvious seasonal pattern; there is snow and fog and rain and (mostly) clear weather.

...Those boat-things do not look like they would non-magically succeed as lighter-than-air craft. He's never heard of something non-magically succeeding as heavier-than-air craft. That's...very, very strange.

Huh. That...appears to be where gravity stops. Well, that's...interesting. 

...Something niggles at the back of his mind. What's the age distribution like? 

There are exactly two children on this planet, one five and one eight. Everyone else is at least 14, and mostly over 20.

...That is very weird, and most likely related to the woman's references to making people. He considers several guesses as to how it all fits together, but refrains from committing to any of them without more data. 

It's a long walk. Eventually they get out of the lavender and into an adjacent field with potatoes.

He listens to conversations held in public in the village they're travelling to, hoping to pick up as much of the language as possible before his "sore throat" excuse wears out. 

People are talking about selling seeds (they're both against it), about a recent exploratory mission from a city round to some rounds that have recently drifted into traveling distance, about a child from the city who has some unfortunate habits and a forum discussion about how to engineer that out in adults even if it's unavoidable in children. There is an argument about whether, when creating someone to assist and then succeed you on your farm, it is okay to also make them not fully adult and interested in having sex with you, since a farmer on this round has done so (one party to this argument thinks you shouldn't make anyone not fully adult ever even if 'sixteen' is borderline; a second thinks amateurs even if they have the basic skill necessary to make a successor shouldn't make people who want to have sex with them that they expect to outlive because it's cruel and hard to do carefully enough that it isn't cruel; and the third party thinks that the farmer must have been made incorrectly in the first place to want to have sex with people physically younger than himself who certainly aren't going to stay that way because it's an unsustainable preference). Someone over there is reporting to someone else about how the new variety of apple is going over. Someone is observing the sky through a telescope and reporting on faraway weather trajectories to someone on the ground; apparently a storm might make it to adjacent New Riverround and if it doesn't spend itself there it'll hit this one next.

This is all incredibly fascinating. 

Doing magic directly to your own mind is an incredibly risky process with unavoidable side effects. No one, including him, has found a way to change that. 

But doing magic to your brain chemistry...is risky in different ways, ways he is much better equipped to work around. 

He stumbles slightly, the temporary alterations that increase linguistic neuroplasticity having ripple effects on his motor control, but manages to adjust for it after that. 

"- are you okay?" asks the lavender farmer.

He nods.

"Okay," she says uncertainly. Onward. Now they're surrounded by wheat!

He would love to analyze the differences between these plants and their counterparts on his planet but he really has bigger issues to worry about. 

He continues to listen intently to the village. 

It's been getting harder to get cheese. One person is loudly of the opinion that everyone should be made to be satisfied with plain, easily-grown things, and someone else says they've tried that in a foreign polity and it leads to nutrition deficiencies. There's some romantic drama. The same person who thinks everyone should be made to like plain food also thinks everyone should be made asexual. Someone counters that sex is a really cheap hobby and it's hard to make people who don't want to have any hobbies at all sustainably happy with their lives.

How curious. Does plain-food person seem to have a reason for thinking everyone should be asexual?

It will prevent romantic drama like the kind currently being gossiped about.

Hm. 

He continues listening intently to the language until they reach the village, occasionally mouthing phonemes when he's sure his guide isn't looking at him. 

She doesn't look at him very much. Here's the village! It is small and cute. She brings him to a building that might be like a city hall or something. "Can you talk yet?" she asks before they go in.

"A little," he says raspily. 

"Okay, I'll tell them to hold it down to yes or no questions." She heads in.

He follows her, dropping the spells eavesdropping on the rest of the village to focus his attention here. 

She explains him to an official-looking person, saying that she thinks perhaps a child made him and ran away, are the children accounted for, and the official-looking guy says that he'll check where they were known to be at the relevant time.

The idea offends his dignity but he hasn't survived as long as he has by not knowing when to tell his dignity to sit down and shut up so. 

"What's your name?" official guy asks.

"Ataran."

"Ataran, we need to figure out where you came from. What's your earliest really clear memory, one where you can remember lots of little details?"

He considers this. 

"I was--" cough "--on a ship." 

"- okay. What can you tell us about the ship?"

"Two men were arguing. Everyone was upset."

"What were they arguing about?"

"One of them wanted more crew. The other one said that no one on board was trained to make people well and having an outsider do it would hurt the ship's unity."

"Did they give you a job on the ship?"

"I think the one who made me wanted to, but the other one was very angry and pushed me off."

"Were you docked at the time?"

"Yes." 

"On this round?"

"I'm not sure. I hit my head. Everything's fuzzy up until a few hours ago." 

"- oh dear. Okay, I think you might need medical attention for your head injury. Do you think you can stay on a horse all right?"

"I think so." 

He dismisses the lavender farmer, who turns around and heads back down to her farm, and finds a suitable escort to bring "Ataran" on horseback to the next village, where there is a doctor.

On the way, "Ataran" carefully does magic to his head to mimic the symptoms of a head injury that's had about a day to heal, making sure not to actually harm his brain in any way.

The doctor is completely fooled by this although she is an exceptionally good doctor. She tests him for brain damage with quizzes - since she can't expect any particular common knowledge it's simple arithmetic and watching her finger move across his field of vision and asking him what she said five minutes ago.

He passes all of the quizzes easily albeit with a still somewhat raspy voice. 

She looks at his throat. They don't have electric lights but they have got a cunning mirror arrangement so she doesn't have to stick a candle in his face.

He presents symptoms almost exactly like he choked on some dust a couple of hours ago!

She gives him some water and advises him on how to most usefully cough up the rest of the dust.

"Thank you," he says, giving her a not totally unfeigned grateful smile. He doesn't really need her help, but the fact that she would offer it thinking he does means a lot more than nothing. 

"Of course!" she says. "I'd like to keep you here while you sleep and check on you again in the morning."

"Okay," he agrees. "Is there anything I can do to be useful until then?"

"No, no, please rest. Is there anything you want to know about where you are?"

"What is the name of this village? What is the name of the round?"

"The village is called Mill Dock and the round is called Springround. The village the farmer brought you to was called Sorvay Village."

He nods. "Thank you." 

"Of course!" she says. "And I'm Wiramig."

He nods, then coughs some more. 

She puts him into bed and later brings him some soup. "My wife made it, she's a cook," she says.

"Tell her thank you for me?" he asks. 

"Of course!" smiles Wiramig.

"Can I borrow books?"

"You really shouldn't do anything as intellectually lively as reading right after hitting your head."

"Okay."

She closes all the curtains so it will be nice and dim in the room and leaves him be.

He waits until she's been gone for several minutes before slipping out of bed and exploring the room. Are there any books in here? 

This room is not where she keeps most of her books but there is an almanac someone set down and forgot that he can find.

That'll do for puzzling out the script. He takes it back to the bed and starts flipping through for images he can connect to the words around them. 

They don't write in an alphabet; characters seem to stand for whole words, and modifications to the characters adjust things like tense and plurality, so no progress can be made at sounding anything out. There are charts in the almanac predicting the movements of rounds and suns over the next "span" (a handy conversion table indicates that a centispan is 354 wakes or 8496 hours and a span is 100 centispans). There are pictures of plants and descriptions of their growing habits, dates of various festivals, and a small atlas of the surfaces of key rounds in and near this polity.

A phonetic alphabet would be much more convenient but he'll make do. 

He stays up all night making as much progress as he can with the script, using magic to take care of most of the effects of missing a night's sleep, and certainly all that the doctor can find. 

The doctor pronounces him in good health come morning and says he's free to go; there are some sails in town if he'd like to try to sign on with one of them to use his presumable sail-crewing skills.

"What happens if I do that and then it turns out I was badly made enough that I don't have any?"

"I'd recommend getting on one taking a short trip, to New Riverround or Woodsail."

"What are those rounds like?"

"Woodsail's got a lot of logging on it, it's been maybe half cut by now but they're talking about planting more trees instead of doing shorter lived crops on the rest of it since it will be in good trading distance for a few decispans yet. It has one good sized town on it and some little villages like the ones here on Springround. New Riverround is mostly city."

He nods. "Okay. I'll try that." 

"And then you're no worse off if it turns out you can't crew - do you have any guesses at backup things you might be able to do or do you think you were made without?"

"Uh--I think I can sew?"

"There you go! Maybe you'll find a way to contribute by sewing."

"Okay," he says agreeably. "I'd hate to be useless because I was badly made."

"Badly made people can adjust! You don't have to stay exactly how you were made forever. But it's possible you'd have to move farther away."

"How do you get better at making people? I don't think I know that."

"Oh, there are books on it, if you weren't made knowing or if there's been new advances in the state of the art."

He nods. "Thank you. I really don't want to make what happened to me happen to someone else." He cocks his head. "Even if the head injury part is avoidable."

"Certainly don't make anyone yourself until you've learned all about it and found out what's needful and gotten authorization," she says. "Lots of people never make anyone, it's fine."

"Authorization?"

"This polity requires a government OK before you can make people. You have to pass a test on people creation in general and give an outline of who you're going to make and why."

"Oh. How many rounds are in this polity?"

"Eleven!" she smiles.

He smiles back and nods. "I think that's a good way for a polity to be."

"Oh, good," she says. "Here, have some breakfast." It's a stuffed flatbread.

He eats the stuffed flatbread. Mm, carbs and filling. 

"Thank you. I think I'm going to try to get a job on a sail." 

"The docking tower's easy to see from here, can't miss it!"

"Thank you!" he says, and leaves. 

He strolls away from the doctor's office in the direction of the docking tower, and when he's out of sight of the office he starts looking for a discreet cranny to duck into. 

The town is not very closely spaced; he can go between houses but it's not exactly an alley. There are shrubs he could hide behind.

He hides behind a shrub when no one is looking. Then he turns invisible and strolls out from behind the shrub. He leans against a wall somewhere he won't leave footprints or get bumped into anytime soon and gazes up at the rounds in the sky, magically casting his vision to get a look at their surfaces. 

The nearest round visible from here at this time of day might be the one with the trees that the doctor mentioned; it's pretty foresty, with a lake visible. The next nearest ones look like another farm round, and one with a mix of towns and farms like it's a farm round that's getting built up over time.

Can he find any that are completely uninhabited?

Nope!

He teleports to a part of the tree one that's already been mostly deforested and doesn't have any people around right now. 

Can he see New Riverround from here? 

That one might be New Riverround, not quite in eclipse past Springround.

He teleports to a visible rooftop on the round that might be New Riverround and looks around. 

It's a city. No very tall buildings, probably so you don't run out of gravity in your attic. It's busy and dense, though there are parks between sections and plenty of trees lining the streets. People have bicycles.

Alright. 

He carefully defines book in his mind, then pings for the five highest concentrations of them on the round. 

There and there and there and there and there. In that order.

He teleports to the first one, still invisible. 

Bookstore.

He peruses the stacks, careful to keep an eye out for customers so as to get out of their way. 

There are customers, but sparse ones; no one notices footsteps or the odd draft of his movement. He's in the cookbook section.

Can he find history? 

Yup, history is between social science and philosophy!

Perfect. What kind of history is there. 

History of New Riverround (settled from a round known as Riverround, since drifted off too far to be the same polity, amicably departed), history of the polity (Escarin) and its ancestor polities (the one that had its capital on Riverround, the one that settled Riverround, etc.), history of neighboring polities, biographies of specific people, books about wars, histories of specific subjects like theater or governance or farming.

He reads history for a few hours, then puts the book he's currently reading back, careful to repair any incidental wear and tear from his handling it. 

He looks for books about making people. 

There's a whole section on that! There's a bunch of copies of a whole series called State of the Art of Creation (fourth edition), with volumes titled On Bodies, On Minds, On Desires, On Awareness, On Skills, and On Children. There are also other books like Make the Perfect Spouse! and Are You Ready For A Child? and Prolecraft and Introspection: Know Who You're Making Friends For.

...Gosh. 

He defines the boundary he wants, then duplicates the entire section on the top of the building, invisible. Then he teleports to the top of the building, defines his location with respect to the pirated books, and teleports all of them back to the tree planet. 

Now he is invisible in a forest with a lot of invisible books.

He defines a boundary. He locks the current appearance of the area within the boundary, so that no matter what happens within anyone outside the area will see exactly what's currently there. Then he de-invisibles himself and the books and starts reading, starting with the most basic guide to making people he can find. 

How You Were Made is a layperson's overview of the concept. While you can make a very underdefined person, in what the book calls a "civilized" society no one is allowed to do that, because inadequately described people are filled in at apparent random with traits to complete them, including traits that are unhealthy, antisocial, prevent the person from living a happy life, or can't let them productively contribute to society. Instead, it is correct to come up with useful skills that the economy needs, a cheerful disposition to do that work, backup skills and interests, hobbies (especially "inexpensive" hobbies, that don't require equipment or have a high injury risk) to let them have some downtime even though you can get need-for-downtime very low, a starting attitude towards at least you and ideally several people that will allow the new person to slot into a social graph, a healthy and pretty body, and (unless you're deliberately making a prole, but a prole probably isn't reading this book) a personality that is lively and even inventive without veering too close to revolutionary or mentally ill.

...He picks up Prolecraft to find out what the heck a Prole is supposed to be. 

Proles do the necessary labor in farming and manufacturing and suchlike, things that a generically made person optimized for intellectual sparkle wouldn't find interesting but which it's possible to make people who love. A well-made prole delights in their work, is competent to make their own successor(s) with all the accumulated experience in that work informing their creation so the next generation of proles can be that much better, and has low social, emotional, cognitive, and material needs to allow them to be better workers, though you should never make an actually stupid person even for prole work, or one who's too wedded to routine to handle emergencies. There is a whole chapter about the pros and cons of making them asexual; the author concludes that you should only do that if they're definitely going to have to live alone, because proles like all other creations can drift over time and can wind up unhappy if they don't have anything else that brings them happiness besides their job or backup job. It recommends that if you make them asexual you should have them enjoy singing (and of course it would be cruel to make someone who likes singing without paying attention to making them good at it). Different kinds of proles need different kinds of physical optimizations.

The lavender farmer he met was probably a prole.

...Huh. 

Well, he's not interested in making proles. Magic can do pretty much everything anyone in his world might need a prole for; it's magic itself that is the bottleneck. 

He starts skimming the book titles for books about making skilled people, making people with specific personalities, and making people with specific priorities. 

State of the Art of Creation is his friend here.

You need not have all of the skills or knowledge a person you make has. However, the less you understand about that skill or knowledge - what it looks like done well; where the information might be written down - then the more likely it will come through poorly, more like "I feel like I'd be good at that, but when I try it I'm not quite" or "I remember a lot of facts about this subject but the words don't quite click for me, I don't really understand them". Languages are pretty easy. You can and should make people who speak every language you have ever heard of; people turn out to be able to hold dozens of languages if they're made by someone attending to that without noticeable compensatory diminishment in other domains. But they may have to work at it to go from "speaking every language you've ever heard of" and "very talented at writing poetry in languages you know" all the way to "good at poetry in a language you have heard of but don't personally read poetry in". You don't have to hold the whole person in working memory, but, like the skills and knowledge, you need to know what you're referring to - writing a description down is useful (here's the standard format in Escarin).

Personality is freely moldable and you definitely don't want a random personality. Many people who were not specifically made to be people-makers are really bad at holding a personality in mind in the right way - it has to be a personality that someone can really have, and people usually think about each other as simplified models. Unlike knowledge and skills, you can't just copy from a personality you know to exist out there somewhere. You can't just copy yourself or a friend. All you will get if you do that is someone who is like your model of yourself/your friend, with all the many gaps filled in with random noise that doesn't outright contradict what you had in mind but will rapidly produce divergent results. The standard practice nowadays is to firmly hold in mind anything you need as an absolute, like "won't commit crimes", and then more gently mentally suggest things about what mental architecture might underly that, so that the former holds and the latter falls apart if you've gotten the connection between the two wrong somehow. It is often good practice to try writing at least one novel first to practice making a fleshed out character personality and see where you might need consultation; this is a genre, called "paper creation".

You can do priorities. It's fairly common to design people with oneself (or one's creator, if they live and you're still close) as a priority, especially if you're going to be married or otherwise very close. Priorities shift naturally over time depending on how tractable they are when theory meets reality, and whether there's social accord (it's hard to be the only person with a particular priority), and so change more and faster than many other things about a person, but will continue to have echoes and effects decispans down the line. If you make someone with a personality and a priority that are in tension the personality will win.

Okay. 

He is going to start with one person, first, in case, as is so often the case, reality fails to live up to theory. 

He creates some blank paper and starts writing things down. 

Body: young but not a child, let's say eighteen, every underblood benefit Karole and every other researcher at his university has ever come up with, every physical benefit he can find in any of these books. (He leaves space to add specifics as he finds them in the books). 

Languages: Every language on Earth, every language he can find reference to in any of these books plus whatever ones he's run across in history books. 

Skills: The new person should be at least as skilled as he is at magic; he'll try to give her the skill of the other Great Mages living and dead, too, in case that sticks. As an afterthought, he adds every craft that's ever been a hobby of his for long enough for him to get a grasp on how it generally works, as backup. If one newly-created person can't hold all of that the magic should be the priority. Knowing the sensation of casting magic, of course. 

Personality: This is the important bit. Priorities, first: anti-death, pro-sapient-flourishing, pro-individual-self-determination. Strongly disinclined but not psychologically forbidden from breaking the laws of mages, such as killing a non-mage with magic or performing mind magic on someone else. Strongly resistant to all three forms of magical mental side effect, absolutely, with the following soft descriptor of tentative underlying psychology. Introspective. Self-modifying, as much as possible. Smart, obviously, as smart as he can get them. Strongly indifferent to pain. Not conflict-averse to the point where ousting and possibly even executing Great Mages will be a dealbreaker, but also not aggressive to the point of seeking out conflict. 

And then he puts his lists aside and goes back to reading books, because going into this without more information rather than less is a kind of dumb he is not. 

Well-made people appear oriented to time, place, location, and creator. They are not surprised, confused, lost, or dismayed; you don't want them upset to exist but you sometimes get weird emotional effects if you aim for "delighted". Unless you're creating someone who for whatever reason will want to be naked around at least you in particular, you don't want them to be too upset about being naked in general; you cannot make a person precisely located enough to appear them in a set of clothes already.

You can make them with memories in addition to knowledge and skills, but this isn't usually the best way to do whatever you're trying to do; they can have as-though-secondhand factual knowledge about things that have happened in the past without false recollections of having been present. You might want to do memories if you have been trying a controversial technique where you and anyone else who will be close to this person behave as though they exist for some wakes or even a whole centispan in advance, to notice what you expect from someone occupying their role in your life and have time to think of traits and quirks that might suit them; then they will remember one-sided conversations you attempted to have with them, for example.

Bodies and brains can go wrong in all kinds of horrifying ways. Things that are particularly easy to do by accident but easy to omit if you're savvy include making people whose hair won't grow, people who produce extra teeth they don't need for some reason, people prone to headaches, people with exercise-induced asthma, people with various unfortunate sexual dysfunctions or paraphilias, people who cannot see all of the colors, people who are too flexible, people who are producing a strange white fluid from their nipples, people who are bad at imagining pictures or sound, people who have no sense of smell, people who can't distinguish pitches they hear, people who sleepwalk, people who eat to excess and gain weight and keep it, people who forget or refuse to eat, people who if they eat some random thing will have a disease reaction, people who respond to nutrient deficiencies by eating weird non-food things, people who are "too happy" and wind up sleepless and risk-seeking and impulsive as a result (you can still aim at "happy", just not this particular brand), people who cannot distinguish human faces from one another, people who do not want to be the sex you made them, and various other little problems a well-made person won't have.

Atennesi probably doesn't need any of the child-specific advice. It's considered a very dangerous thing to do, because they have so much time in which to drift from their initial conditions, but it's one way people learn new things about how people can be in ways that wouldn't have been obvious to invent, and some people find raising children very rewarding.

If Atennesi wanted a child he could create one in the normal-for-him way; having not done so for the past over-a-millenium he certainly doesn't plan to create one in this way anytime soon. 

He makes notes to avoid allergies or supernumerary teeth or headaches or asthma or colorblindness or random lactation or hypermania or tone-deafness or obesity or pica or faceblindness or any of the other miscellaneous things that can go wrong with the human body or brain, or even just might be inconvenient. 

He makes notes to ensure that his creation is familiar with Genosha as though she had grown up there and familiar with the general socio-political landscape of his world, and as familiar with the local culture as possible. 

There's a whole bunch of books on the controversial pretending-your-person-exists method. The aggregate impression, editing out the hardcore proponents, is that it is a good idea to at least halfassedly try it if you are adding a spouse to a preexisting relationship of two or more and not that helpful otherwise. There are several books specifically about how to optimize sex partners for yourself, though mostly they assume you have other uses in mind for an entire human being. There are books about the ages you can make people at; sixteen centispans is generally past the danger zone for most problems of making children, but some people like to make people in their twenties. It's considered cruel to make elderly people.

You can make people who are sick. You shouldn't do that unless you are a signatory to the Omniround Accords and making soldiers who will expire instead of choosing to make soldiers who want to marry each other and settle down on farms when the war is over. If you are making an expiring soldier here's how to make sure they will die but aren't contagious with various tradeoffs against their fighting ability but really, have you considered making them want to settle down on farms, you can just do a farm prole who is grimly prepared to fight your enemies until the need is past.

He has no desire whatever to make disposable soldiers, eeugh. 

He has no intention of creating her with false memories or deciding anything about her sex life aside from that she can have one if she wants one. 

If you don't decide something, it will be random, within the pool of ways humans can apparently randomly be - but "naturally" for some value of naturally; if you make genuinely random people (DON'T DO THIS) then they can appear with missing limbs but they won't have scars, for example. Discoveries made by creating random people and less-random-but-still-very-drifty babies include:

- You can make asexuals! Go for it under circumstances that call for it!
- You can make psychotic people! Don't!
- You can make people who just plain can't see, or hear, or are really bad at those things, for no reason! Don't!
- You can make people who think they are several people sharing a body! This does allow you to get slightly more diverse skillsets without needing more food but it's really hard to specify right in your head and you should only do it if you have incredibly special circumstances, like "your sail lost most of its supplies and crew to pirates and you need some incompatible dispositions to man the other half of the shift clock to make roundfall".
- You can make people who are sexually attracted to children! Don't do that, turns out it's not good for the children!
- You can make people who are sexually attracted to animals! There's no obvious reason not to, the author supposes, but there's no reason to do it either!
- You can make people who, without any particular functional impairment, "see sound" or "hear smells" or whatever, and lots of them think this is fun and cool, follow your bliss on this one.
- You can make people who won't make eye contact and move around funny and don't like wearing wool, they don't know why these have appeared as bundled traits more than once but they have! Disrecommended!
- You can make people who do not have any innate understanding of it being bad to hurt others! There might exist professions for which this would be a useful protective factor but you have to be really careful with the other traits.
- You can make people who are weirdly pale and sunburn like crazy! Don't!
- You can make people who are short and stumpy! Disrecommended; it's just really inconvenient to be them.

Atennesi has no intention of making pedophiles or psychopaths or sociopaths or blind or deaf or otherwise sensory impaired people.or people who are into bestiality or people with congenital missing limbs.

He supposes he has no particular reason to make albinos or autistics or multiples or people with dwarfism. 

The author would like to note that all the research from which this research derives was very unethical and speculates in the afterword that one day perhaps children will come to be seen as unethical too.

Well, children are going to continue to be a thing in Atennesi's world, so he's disinclined to speculate in that direction. 

Eventually he has extracted everything there is to know from the books.

Okay. 

He looks over his list. He leans back and counts to ten and takes deep breaths and looks over the paper again to see what he does and doesn't remember. 

He memorizes everything he can. 

He makes a dress, choosing easy to put on over maximally pretty. 

And he tries to make a person. 

Here she is.

She blinks.

She picks up the dress and shrugs it on.

"Hello." And it is just hitting him that he made a person, what do you say in this situation. "I hope my specifications were satisfactory."

"Seems like it," she says, stretching. She attempts to twirl in her dress. She falls. "Okay, mostly."

"Ah. I apologize. For what it's worth, I believe magic should be able to compensate for a balance issue." 

"Yeah, I'm on it." She gets up and dusts herself off. Both of these actions are accomplished telekinetically.

"I realize that under the circumstances this may be inane but I am genuinely pleased to meet you." 

"Nice to meet you too."

"I am going to check now whether I can teleport back to Genosha, since if I can but can't return here you'll be able to handle ensuring that people in this universe cease to die of old age and suffer from pathogen-derived illnesses and such." 

"You want me to wait here while you look into that?"

"If you have something you'd rather do, I am for the moment significantly more magically powerful than you, and can teleport without significant inconvenience." 

"I don't need to go anywhere right now, but if there's some emergency at home and you're gone for ages I might try turning a tree into a sailboat."

He nods. 

He disappears. 

He reappears a moment later. 

"It seems," he says, pleased, "that I can leave and come back." 

She has made a tree grow her some thin flat bits of wood to write on and begun writing on them. "Great! And nothing's on fire?"

"I reassured the University staff that I was fine," he says, "they were extremely relieved. But the island did not fall out of the sky, and my--peers--had not been informed of my disappearance. I will need to spend some time detangling knots, later, but there were no fires." 

"Your peers are super concerning. How many - heh, brothers and sisters? - am I gonna have?"

"I haven't decided yet. I--lack the perspective of a person created in adulthood, and I wanted to see how well you flourished and whether any lack of flourishing was something I could correct before I committed to more than just you. I welcome your advice; just because I created you the round way and not the planet way doesn't mean I have your perspective."

"I feel flourish-y. You're probably gonna need more of me but I don't know how exactly you can get more of me..."

"Using the same criteria again would, as I understand it, probably not create more of you exactly, but might suffice anyways."

"I wonder if I could get close enough to get more of me in the relevant senses. Probably could, I think."

"Intense self-awareness was one of the criteria I specified." 

"Yes you did! I appreciate it!"

"I'm glad! I do feel responsible for your well-being, at least to the extent that it derives directly from my decisions in creating you."

"Thanks. You can go ahead and be smug about me, I rock."

He laughs gleefully. "I think I will. Do you want to see Genosha?" 

"Yeah!"

And then they are in his office. "Atennisi! And, uh--" says a woman who was sitting in a chair to the side going through some papers. 

"This is Belamaveth," says Atennisi. "I trust her implicitly." 

"Okay," says the woman, taking this in stride. "Pleased to meet you, Belamaveth." 

"Pleased to meet you too!" Handshake?

Handshake! "I haven't seen you before, you need a tour?"

"Let's go with yes."

"Okay!" she says. "Getting-around tour or getting-a-feel-for-the-place tour?"

"Feel for the place."

"Okay!" 

She leads Belamaveth around, pointing out notable classrooms and offices and things. Once they're done with this building she points out gardens on the way to the next building. 

The gardens are, as a frequent playground for biologically-focused mages, extremely pretty and even more eclectic. 

...she will play with this one flower just a liiiiitle bit.

Organic things are so easy to work with when you know how they work, which she does!

Now it is pretty colors and ruffly. Onward!

Onward!

Here are some lecture halls, here are some laboratories for general chemistry, over there is a laboratory for work dangerous enough that it wants to be a little ways off from other stuff and also regularly magicked to remove dangerous traces of toxic chemicals, over this way is a dormitory hall, and of course wherever there aren't paths or trees or buildings or other uses of space there are gardens. Some of them are for magic experimentation, some are for decoration, but most of them grow edibles. It is a flying island, after all, and even with magic it's a good idea to grow more food rather than less. 

It's nice to see the place for real. She steadies herself with magic as she trots along.

The island is beautiful. The University itself is planned out in a spiderweb pattern that is both convenient for its inhabitants and aesthetically appealing. The rest of the island, which she isn't actively on a tour of but can see intermittently, is less carefully-planned but still guided enough that the miscellaneous eclectic elements harmonize rather than clashing oftener than not. 

"It's so pretty here!"

"It is! Where're you from?"

"Woodsail," she says after a pause.

"Never heard of it," she admits. "What's it like?"

"Lots of trees!"

"Trees are nice! They've got a good output-to-land ratio, in terms of like fruit and stuff, so there are a lot of them on the island. It's not a forest but I've never seen so many trees in a ground city."

"Most of the trees in Woodsail are for, uh, wood, not for fruit, but it's nice to have lots around," Belamaveth agrees.

"Trees take too long to grow for lumber to be a good use of space here, I'm pretty sure. A fruit tree keeps producing fruit for a long time."

"Yeah, that makes sense considering."

"You can make them grow faster with magic but it's not that much more efficient than cutting off a branch the tree can live without and growing that into more wood so."

"It's occurred to me. Woodsail's pretty sparsely inhabited, they don't need to be very efficient in space and do need to be reasonably efficient in labor."

Nod. "Resource considerations are really different up here, where magic is plentiful and space is at a premium, than on the ground where space is plentiful and magic is at a premium."

"Yup! Economics is interesting."

"I think so! It's not my main area, but my main area is immigration policy, which is related."

"Who gets to immigrate? Do a lot of people want to?"

"I don't know if it's a lot per capita on the ground but it's more than we can admit--every year we set up a budget of people to immigrate and some of it is for refugees and some of it is for mages with skills we want and some of it is for nonmagical skilled labor and we usually throw in like half a percent for people who are basically okay where they are but want the higher standard of living so many mages brings because it makes people a lot less likely to resent the magic floating island of wonders if they get to dream that one day they'll be there too." 

"Usually? Skip that in years where there are more refugees, or something?"

"Yeah, exactly. Although given how refugee situations aren't usually polite enough to warn us in advance that they're going to happen it's often more like 'okay, we went way overbudget last year and need a slimmer budget the next few years to compensate, what can we cut,' and the normal people margin is usually the first thing to go."

"Makes sense. Do people leave here much?"

"Sometimes! Usually it's mages who would rather be a big fish in a small pond than a medium fish in a big pond, but sometimes people leave for other reasons. It's pretty rare, though--I mean people come to live at the university while they study here and then go home when they graduate, but that's not quite the same thing. But people almost never leave who aren't mages, I don't think anywhere else in the world has the per capita mages to cover everyone's de-aging." 

(Belamaveth knows very well this isn't, actually, true, but it is the commonly accepted answer as to why people regularly die of senescence outside of Genosha.)

"Yeah." Sigh.

"It sucks," she sighs, kicking a rock. "Still, we do what we can." 

"...yes."

"I'm not a mage! I tried, but the side-effects...I couldn't handle it. I do my part working on policy. Maybe more mages should leave to do de-aging on the ground, but I don't think trying to make them would work out very well."

"I'm planning to go where I came from one day and get going on it."

"That's very good," she says approvingly. "Personally, I think we ought to send the University students down for fieldwork, let them see what the rest of the world is like while we're up here, but he won't budge on that one," she adds, her brow wrinkling in disgruntlement. 

(The reason Atennesi won't budge on that one, which this woman wouldn't know but Belamaveth may infer, is that any potential Great Mages who might make trouble for the establishment--the type of person Belamaveth was made to be--are killed as soon as the others find out about them, which Atennesi takes great pains to prevent should any spring up in Genosha.)

"Yeah. Do you get tourism much?"

"No--the occasional mage, but it isn't easy to get here casually."

"How do the immigrants get here, then?"

"We go and get them! We're not really interested in doing that for tourists."

"I guess that makes sense. Don't need tourism money?"

"No, the University and affiliated institutions bring in plenty. Trading magic for things is much more our comparative advantage than putting up the infrastructure for tourism for tourism money."

"Makes sense. I wonder how people decide they'd rather live here of all places if they can't have ever seen it."

"Nobody starves, here, and your children will definitely have the opportunity to become mages without having to hope that someone wants them as an apprentice."

"Yeah, but some people probably decide that's propaganda."

"Probably. There are a lot of desperate people out there, though."

"And you're capping immigration anyway so I suppose it's no terrible loss that some people are filtering out."

"Right. We'd like to take more, but Atennesi says the other Great Mages barely tolerated the loophole that let him found Genosha in the first place, and growing it too fast would almost certainly result in unwanted kinds of scrutiny."

She nods.

"I grew up in Iberia, I still have family there. I visit, with friends, sometimes--mage friends--so they're okay, it's not like no one who isn't here is, but..." she trails off. "Well." She chuckles. "If all goes well there'll be a new Great Mage soon; that should probably improve things."

"Who've you got your eye on?"

"Odette Zavier. Lovely girl, lots of Sympathy resistance, magicked her own brain for masochism and if it made her any more agreeable I can't tell it." 

"Wow! I'm not an outright masochist, I just don't mind. Her way sounds like it might be distracting."

"One imagines. I haven't heard anything about her reacting inappropriately in classes, though, so I'm not sure."

"That's good, then."

"You'll probably run into her if you stay long, or I could see if we could find her."

"I'd like to meet more" examples of "people!"

"Okay!" she says cheerfully, then locates the nearest group of students and makes a beeline for them. 

"Excuse me, do you know where Odette Zavier is?"

"...Is she in trouble?"

"No, I just have someone I'm showing around who'd like to meet her." 

"Oh, uh, I think she's calling patter-dancing for her sister and some people." 

"Ah. Belfoi dance building?" 

"I think so." 

She returns to Belamaveth. "This way!"

"Is she frequently in trouble?"

"No, but there aren't that many reasons why an adult in administration clothes would be looking for a student."

"Fair enough."

She leads Belamaveth into a building with a lot of padding in most of the rooms. 

From one of them comes an odd sound that, if Belamaveth adjusts her hearing, she can discern to be extremely accelerated music. 

"- patter dance, huh?"

"Mhm," she says, smiling a little smugly, and pushes the door open. 

A girl in a purple off-the-shoulder ribbon-hem dress is standing in the center of the room, hands twitching as though to conduct the buzzing music. Around her a handful of teenagers and twentysomethings dance, limbs flashing almost too fast to see, keeping up with the pace of the music. Sitting at the edges of the room, a greater number of students slump against the walls, drinking water and pointing at dancers and gossiping about who's going to fall out next. 

Regrettably, Belamaveth cannot honestly participate in this activity. She watches.

Eventually, all the students but one fall out of the dance, at which point the music ends and the last one steps out of her accelerated dance with a final twirl and laughs. 

"Oh, like you didn't know you were going to win."

"It's not the winning, it's the dancing!"

"Riiiight."

"Hi!" the caller says, ignoring the repartee in favor of the people at the door. "Can I help you?"

"Hi! I'm new," says Belamaveth. "I'm getting a tour and your name came up as an interesting person to meet. My name's Belamaveth."

"Odette. Nice name."

"Thanks!"

"Are you a new student?"

"I don't think I'm formally enrolled, actually; Atennesi invited me here."

"Oh wow that's impressive. What for?"

"He thinks I have potential."

"Oh, cool. I guess that's probably why I came up."

"It is! Have you got any Greatness planned?"

"I want to figure out how to raise the dead. By becoming so powerful I bull right through the time limit or finding a clever workaround, either way."

"I like that plan!"

"Thank you! What about you?"

"I'm gonna go home. It doesn't have anywhere near enough mages. Way fewer than most places."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I've thought about something like that, but Atennesi says it'd be a bad idea to leave Genosha until I'm much stronger. He's kinda cryptic about why, though."

"Probably a good idea to listen to him anyway."

"Yeah, he's old and wise and he runs the city well so I trust his judgment mostly. If I find out his reason and it's bad I'll ignore him but he's earned enough trust to default pretty strongly to not that."

"That's really encouraging, if everybody else thought he was a nut I'd have to start wondering whether I should trust him."

"He--saw a way to make the world better, and he took it, and he ran with it. And it's working great, or at least I think so."

"Genosha's lovely."

"Yeah!!!" 

"Have you lived here all your life?"

"Yeah, my parents moved here while Mom was pregnant with me and Illia."

"I was talking to the immigration officer about all the immigrant categories."

"My dad's a genius bloodworker, they got here on the skilled labor category."

"Nice! What kind of bloodworking?"

"He used to do practical but he quit magic because his talents and resistance didn't line up well enough so now it's just theoretical--uh, mostly human but not exclusively."

"Bloodworking is really cool. It's neat to know all the - causal interconnections between bits of people, you know?"

"Yeah! I guess you could say my dad works in nature and my mom works in nurture--she teaches little kids."

"Teaches them what?"

"Uh, reading writing basic math, also some self-defense because Mom grew up in kind of a crappy situation." 

"Crappy in a self-defense way? Yikes."

"Yeah there's some tragic backstory involved that's why I decided I was going to invent resurrection when I was, like, five, instead of waiting until I actually knew I was going to be a Great Mage someday."

"I heard you did some self-modification to that end. That was really brave."

"I dunno if brave is the right word--I was too much a young and silly teenager to be as scared as I should've been." 

"Well, at least you weren't silly enough to get it wrong."

"Sometimes I make bad choices but I'm very good at what I do." 

"Good! Probably! Unless you ever make a really bad choice!"

"I'm much less of a dumbass than I was three years ago." 

"That's good."

"I think most people are less dumbass-y at eighteen than fifteen but thanks."

"Yeah, I guess that's probably true. I haven't met a wide range."

"Not a lot of kids where you're from?"

"Woodsail's very sparsely populated and almost nobody there has kids."

"Huh. I'm sorry to hear that, kids are great." 

"I never really felt the lack but thank you."

"That's fair, I have a higher-than-average appreciation for them anyway." 

"Do you find yourself adequately supplied?"

"For now at least. I'll probably want my own someday but it's not, like, urgent on any particular timescale."

"Makes sense."

"So what's where you're from like? Besides not a lot of kids and not a lot of magic."

"Lot of trees. Woodsail exports wood."

"I guess that makes sense! Is it a port town?"

"Yeah. Lots of boat traffic. Boats are constructed there too."

"Makes sense," Odette nods, picturing completely inaccurate water-based ships. "What problems do they have for lack of mages? Besides, uh, the age thing."

"Lesser concerns of medicine, plus having to do everything with more labor instead of a little magic. It's a nice enough place, people there are happy, but it could be a lot better."

"Yeah, that makes sense. Sometimes I wish magic were more convenient, but it's a lot better than not having any."

"Yeah, if you have it you can make the tradeoff for yourself."

"That too, I was thinking of areas where the tradeoff is obviously--well, to me--worth it."

"There are some no-brainers out there, yep."

With a brief crack, Atennesi appears. 

"Hello! I see you two have met."

"Yes! She sounded interesting."

"I like to think I'm pretty interesting!"

"You generally manage that, yes," Atennesi says dryly, "and are in more broadly relevant to Belamaveth's interests in particular--but for the moment, I have things I need to discuss privately with the both of you. Do you mind if I teleport the three of us to my office?"

"I don't."

"Go for it."

Teleport!

He sits down, not behind his desk, but in a soft cushy chair off to the side, and conjures up a pair of soft cushy chairs forming roughly an equilateral triangle with the first. 

"Belamaveth, you're almost completely informed; do you mind if I spend a few minutes bringing Odette up to speed?"

"I don't mind."

So Atennesi explains to Odette, first about the conspiracy of the other Great Mages and why she is not supposed to leave Genosha, and then about the mirror-headed snake and where it sent him and how Belamaveth happened. 

Odette listens, wide-eyed, and at the end turns to Belamaveth and says, "That is incredibly cool."

"Thanks!"

"And, wow. This is...sort of good news? I mean, a conspiracy by the other Great Mages is fucking terrifying, but it's a lot more straightforwardly solvable than the logistics problem I thought we had."

"What logistics problem did you think we had?"

"Getting enough mages to enough places to cover everyone, which was apparently hard enough that Atennesi, who is much better at politics and other forms of convincing people do things than I am, had not managed to make visible inroads on in almost a century in a half."

"As far as I know there's no reason for that to be harder than it sounds absent conspiracy."

"Well, it's pretty hard to convince people to move away from Genosha." 

"Sure, but they wouldn't have to move away permanently to make a dent."

"I mean, I'm not as surprised as I could possibly be by the conspiracy thing."

"Sorry. I really don't know how well I would have done at figuring it out from what you knew, I never had to."

"It's alright. I wasn't really...trying, exactly. I thought I should frontload my efforts into getting better at magic now and then I could worry about solving all the problems when I was a Great Mage."

"Makes sense."

"And even aside from you and any more of you that happen your world is going to be big news. Talk about gains from trade!"

"Plus, like, teleportation is a big deal here but ultimately you can't just keep going forever in any direction, because it's all one planet. Rounds in my world drift apart and just keep going, teleportation is a bigger deal there than here even if you need a lot of hops."

"Yeah, definitely. And I don't see any reason why we can't combine the two and get magic proles, people who are super specialized for teleporting or de-aging or even contributing to holding up floating cities."

"I'm sort of rethinking the concept of proles. It's what works best there, now, but that's without any other magic. If nothing else we wouldn't need as many."

"Very true. And I don't necessarily even mean actual proles, specifically, but--even in magic, there are sometimes things that are hard to get people to do."

"Yeah, it's not the thing where people are made with convenient aptitudes that bothers me, it's how the state of the art in making a prole is making them so their whole life will be about what they were made for, plus maybe a spouse and one hobby, unless the economy changes and they switch to their backup job. Proles aren't stupid but they sort of have to have tunnel vision."

"Yeah, that's definitely...distasteful. Maybe it's genuinely necessary in roundsworld but I think magic probably obviates it."

"Pretty sure magic obviates it but if nothing else they don't need to be ninety percent of the population."

"Eugh, it's that much?"

"There's not really any counterpressure. There are only a few needs you can't fill with proles exclusively - you can make prole craftsmen but not particularly original prole artists and leaders, at least not reliably."

"I wouldn't make anyone a prole I didn't have to. I thought it would just be for jobs you'd have a hard time getting non-proles to do."

"Nope! Like, honestly, they don't have that good a sense of how many jobs that is - I think a lot of people from Kith would say you need a prole to bake bread, I think that's probably not true - there are some jobs that both proles and non-proles do, but if you don't make someone special for their profession they start at a disadvantage."

"And you can't make someone special for a job without giving them tunnel vision?"

"You can, but no one sees a reason not to make a prole at that point unless you're doing something really fancy. Non-proles will learn medicine and become doctors; but nobody makes a non-prole set up for that in the first place."

"...Maybe my instincts are different because I know so many people who are into something enough to reliably do it without having tunnel vision."

"Yeah. I have the advantage of double perspective here - a lot of things about my world are really different because they never get people any other way than making them, and the places where they don't mostly make rigidly specced proles are legitimately much worse to live in in most ways, and they don't have access to some information about person-space that this world gets for free."

"In what ways are they worse?"

"If you can make people at the drop of a hat - it takes seconds for the actual making process and you can't stop once you've started, it's design that takes a lot of time - and there's nobody stopping you, and nobody holding you responsible for that person's well-being, then some people responsibly make business partners and spouses and friends with useful skills, but some people make one-night stands who don't know how to do any useful work and turn them out the next morning, and some people make their favorite book characters because they want to meet them, and some people make political allies to win a short term conflict, and - on those rounds it is rude if not necessarily per se illegal to serve any meat that isn't clearly identifiable to people who don't trust you very well."

"Oh dear."

"Yep. And the people who get made can make people too, and have not always been made to be, themselves, very responsible custodians of the people they make..."

"There's something to be said for a system where producing another human being requires nine months of chronic illness."

"I mean, I don't actually love that part, I'd rather things be easy and just not done stupidly, but barriers to entry can do some of the work of responsibility."

"I won't deny that there are bad parents or that your system sounds more overall convenient, but I do think it's a silver lining that there isn't anywhere I can think of where you have to be that kind of careful about what's on your plate."

"I'll grant you that. Reproducing humans are not agriculturally efficient."

"We're so much harder to keep under control than any other animal and herbivores are way more pasture-to-food efficient." 

"So there's one thing we don't need to worry too much about right now, at least."

"--Do you know if these people know about prion diseases?"

"I don't believe so but I don't have full medical state of the art from there. I think they're behind here in general on tech and medicine and such, but with less of the increased mortality you'd expect because everyone can start really healthy and responsible with contaminants."

"Yeah...anyway, not exactly the lowest-hanging fruit." 

"Agreed."

"So I guess the next step is probably making more of you? Or, I don't know if you in particular, but people like you at least..."

"Atennesi can't make another person for about a week, but I can, or someone else could, using his specs or a refined set if we don't want just an army of me for some reason."

"An army of you seems like it would be pretty cool, but my instinct is that if we only do an army of you then we miss out on any improvements that could crop up randomly even in a sufficiently well-prescribed criterion set."

"That's not untrue but random experimentation doesn't usually produce anything good over a small sample size when people try it in my world. I guess if you're specifying a lot then the fill-in-the-blanks will be concordant with that and that might help."

Nod. "That's what I was thinking...and I wasn't thinking we don't do any more of you."

"Are you thinking of making some yourself?"

"I'd wanna look at all the notes and stuff, first, to see if it's the kind of thing I'd expect to do well...and it might be that I'll think of some criterion Atennesi forgot, just on account of being a different person with different blind spots."

"Hm, I suppose it's theoretically possible that I'm not perfect in every way."

"Well, there is the balance issue, trivial as it may be given the givens." 

"Fair enough. Omit that next time."

"I certainly intend to." 

"Balance issue?" 

"I'm not steady on my feet. I'm correcting for it."

"Ah. Yeah, that sounds more annoying when it's not going to be imminently possible to just fly everywhere."