He steps close to her, and rests his hands on her bare hips. "In that case," – he kisses her briefly, on the lips – "I should be delighted." He's smiling.

"She has an enchanted scrying tablet," Tegan summarizes to Alvin.

To Cameron: "I think we both wanted to ask about your – duplication? Is this you an illusion?"

Mm. She leans into his touch and puts her hands on him, moving to where she can help him out of his clothes. Her skin is smooth like silk, unnaturally perfect, and her hips soft even as her muscles move under his hands, pressing her into his bulge while she explores his chest.

"I have a portable computing device," Cameron corrects. "It's a mundane machine. I am sort of an illusion? My mind is instanced, and my body is a simulated material pattern projected by... the thing that is to light what light is to sound."

Cameron holds out her arm, and swipes at herself hard enough to scratch. Instead of a red line, the mark on her arm glows with rainbow light, as if her skin is a thin paint on top of... well, it looks a lot like what's inside those mana dice Cameron showed Tegan earlier.

        "Extraordinary." His hands wander over her back and butt and shoulders, as much caressing as exploring for his own sake.

        He cooperates with her undressing him, but doesn't actually do any of it himself.

"I think that makes... three? impossible things about you. No, four. At some point one has to wonder."

        "...the healing, the duplication, the – nonmagical scrying abacus?, and—?"

"Her arrival. Apparently the starstone yesterday was actually her. They have space-ships where she comes from, and she was shipwrecked."

        He blinks, processing this. "...I imagine we will all have much to learn from you, should you see fit to teach."

That's fine, assuming none of his clothes are tricky to remove. She strips him to he waist while making appreciative noises at his wandering hands. Then she moves below the waist and strips him to the ankles, at which point he may have to finish undressing himself.

Heh. Cameron as: alien space babe. That's fun.

"I'm not a very good teacher, but I'll answer any questions I can. Eventually..." She trails off. "I can actually think of a way to contact my partner, but it'll be expensive and I want to know more about... where here is in relation to where I'm from, before I try that."

      It appears that he kept his body well-groomed, even in his old age.

      He steps out of his shoes and trousers. When he removes his socks, the process is more aesthetic than efficient, without quite crossing the line into overtly putting on a show. He puts one foot up on the bed, which incidentally flexes a variety of interesting muscles, and uses both hands to remove the sock; the overall effect is reminiscent of a soldier unlacing a boot. After repeating the process with the other foot, he turns to her, smiling; takes her hand; and sits on the edge of the bed so that he's looking up at her.

      The whole process has an air of disciplined elegance to it, and his body language at the end is not so much inviting as expectant, a low-key coiled tension like a soldier awaiting orders or a prey animal meeting its predator's gaze. "I hope you will not be too gentle with me," he murmurs, and kisses her fingers.

      His erection stands rigidly at attention.

      "Well. Obviously I am professionally interested in your medical knowledge, but perhaps you have a better idea regarding what might be most usefully prioritized. From what I understood of your references to machines, it seems as though your home country has answered questions that it would not even occur to me to ask."

"Is there anything we could do to help you with making contact, or maybe scrying to match up the maps?"

Cameron smiles knowingly and pushes him back, before crawling forward in a way that drags her breast up his thigh, up the length of his dick, up his belly. She gracefully pivots forward to straddle him. Her lips hover over him, both sets, a teasing kiss and a teasing... kiss.

Then, without warning, she drops. She's more than wet enough, for him to glide right in, and more than tight enough for him to feel every inch. She shivers in pleasure, at having him in her, but there's no pause before her hips start twerking, hard, jolting him every time she comes down. She kisses him just as hard.

"I do have to start somewhere," Cameron says to the Doc. "What does occur to you is as good a place as any."

And to Tegan, "I doubt it, but I am curious how you'd do that. How does your scrying technique work?"

He falls back, unresisting – shivers, his eyes fluttering closed – kisses back, half-moans –

– and gasps sharply when she drops, his eyes flying open. He presses up into her, meeting her kiss with a hot fierce passion born of the thrill of being had.

"I only know the basics, but – in general, you need a scrying ground like a mirror or a crystal, and a focus token to direct the scrying. Plus the arcane basics – every spell takes at minimum a ritual environment, a power source, and an incantation."

"It usually takes more power, and a more specific focus, to scry over longer distances, but some things are harder or easier to scry than others. It's easier to scry the surface of the moon twelve thousand miles up than a town square fifty miles over."

        "Part of that is line of sight," Alvin puts in, "though it is also possible to make use of curved paths. The near side of a mountain may be scried more readily than the far side, but both are considerably easier than the inside."

"It's also harder to get close-up views of things. Has to do with specificity." Pause. "—What I don't understand is, you showed me your city on your tablet. If you can – machine-scry it, from here, why can't you do that same kind of thing to show you the path between here and there?"

Cameron is intimately familiar with that reaction.

It quickly becomes obvious that Cameron can keep this pace without getting tired. Every time her hips slam down, the bed shakes, and her walls clench around him, but there's a sense of restrained strength even so. Cameron isn't any heavier than a girl her size should be, but she isn't bothering to hide the hints that she is far stronger.

And, somehow, its like she knows which slight variations in angle are more pleasurable for him with each thrust, and like she knows exactly how close he is to his peak, even before he does. Her superhuman grace and precision obviously exceeds her strength. The pause between slamming her hips down and lifting them up for the next stroke grows just the right amount to keep him on the edge.

"I can't 'machine-scry' it, from here," Cameron explains. "I can only look at what the device had in its memory at the time."

Eelesia would be better at this. Cameron misses her.

"We have different terminology, obviously, but 'pure' sorcery also requires... a pattern for the mana to follow, a source of mana, and vocal pronouncements as a catalyst. It sounds like you guys have some kind of local, ambient power source, though? Especially since those rules are... not the behavior I'd expect from efficient scrying sorcery? I don't think I've ever heard of sorcerous scrying being practical for anything but looking at the insides of things, actually. And I also didn't see the Doc use anything I'd recognize as a power source for that thing you did with the bowl."

It's been a long time since delaying his climax was this challenging, but he isn't out of practice either.

—and then it becomes clear just how thoroughly she is in control, and he lets out a breathy moan-whimper of lust and need and helpless submission and the despair-pleasure of being made to ride the edge, and he lets himself go, because there really is nothing he can do to affect how long she prolongs his delicious suffering—he wants it to be soon but he hopes it won't—

"Ah."

        Nod. "The water cleansing uses cleareye sage for the power source. And there is ambient magic, but in most places it's too weak to use as a power source."

"...I wonder if you know something we don't about efficiency? Or possibly vice versa."

She watches the signals play along his nerves (there's oddities in the way the impulses move, all the same signs, but drawn slightly differently) and feels him stop holding back. Her hips slam down, and stay down, and her walls clench hard as she moves her lips to his neck, watches the orgasm build in his brain right up to the edge... and stay there. It starts to recede, and she flexes her walls that much tighter, keeping him there, keeping him there. She moves with him, holding him down without letting him thrust against her, and if she were less than perfect at it that would be enough to push him into orgasm. If she breathes wrong, he'll cum.

She doesn't.

She watches it try to diminish, waiting, and then... the nerve signals change. Flashover from falling to rising.

Now.

Suddenly she's riding him with fast, full strokes, rolling her hips against him hard. And despite being on the edge a moment ago, he doesn't cum right away. Instead the intensity rises and rises and rises until it fills his whole body and then erupts from his cock in a roaring torrent that goes on and on.

Cameron cums too, during that, but it's quick and she barely acknowledges it. All of her attention is on moving her body and on her magical perception of Simon's nervous system. Still, she's a little shaky and breathless as she coaxes the last few spurts out of him.

"I think its more likely that you have a different set of figurative and literal tools," Cameron guesses. She frowns. "What does clear-eye sage come from? And is it only a power source or is it also a pattern-reference?"

The edge is razor-thin, closer than he's ever experienced without falling over, one more impossibility from this impossible woman.

—and then it's, somehow, something else, beyond the edge yet not over it, as though she had thrown him off the cliff and he found himself not falling but flying—and then he does fall, comes, and even that continues too—

—and, finally, he's spent, catching his breath as he lies beneath her, gazing up at her starry-eyed.

"...please," he finally manages, "please let this, today, be real. Please be real."

Nod. "Plausible."

        "From... the garden...? I don't think I understand the question."

        "It's not only a power source, but it's not quite a pattern reference either. Different sources provide different kinds of power; I would describe it as a choice of raw material for construction, rather than a set of plans."

"The realest," Cameron giggles.

She lets him recover at his own pace, being his soft, breasty blanket until he's ready to get up.

And a whisper, "Cleansing Aura."

Cameron nods thoughtfully at the Doc. "Yes. That's how I'd describe it too. But to extend the analogy, all of the raw materials found in nature are either toxic or mutagenic, thus mana dice. So just what the fuck lives in your garden?"

He'll probably lay here for at least a few minutes. He's not in a hurry.

        Doc blinks. "While it's not unheard of for raw natural magic to have side effects, a competent spell design should be able to counteract the unwanted tendencies, or at minimum make them more manageable. Domesticated plants and animals are also easier to work with than their wild counterparts, though that's hardly specific to magic in particular."

Snuggle.

"That... it's like half of what you're saying makes perfect sense but then you pivot from there into something that makes no sense. I mean, it sounds as though you use mundane ingredients to power sorcery, but that's nonsense. Unless your herb garden is itself some kind of... flower elemental? Or something? And maybe there are ways to mitigate the mutagenic effects of using impure sources, but you should still have green skin or flower petals for hair or something!"

Cameron slumps and leans back in her chair.

"I'm increasingly sure there is some... weird local factor, confounding things, here. Like the Veil used to be for everyone else. If... some alien showed up from outside the Veil's range, and didn't know about it, they would've seen all those people taking leave of their senses in bizarre but eerily consistent ways and been very confused. Some phenomenon that acts consistently enough that, living within it, you've never questioned it's ubiquity..."

Snuggle.

And eventually he's ready to get up. Not that lying here isn't pleasant, but – he finds himself full of energy again, wanting to get up and move.

After several minutes looking over various ledgers, he ducks into a side room and shortly emerges with a hinged wooden box in an elegant style that flirts with minimalism without seeming too plain.

Inside, the bottom is a tray for holding bars like the ones Tegan gave her, two rows of twenty-four slots each, marked out at every six. The center twenty slots, ten in each row, are filled with gold bars. In the lid, a small bundle of papers is held in place by a ribbon; the frontmost is a scrip for a pound of salt from "Malja Shannast, Costallow". The whole thing weighs about five or six pounds.

"With my compliments. I've chosen a larger box, in anticipation of your future work; may you fill it quickly."

        "The garden is just a place where I plant things in the dirt."

"My guess would be that it's what you called ambient magic. Everything is at least a little bit magical, but dramatic side effects like that would only come from correspondingly powerful sources. Do your mundane things work the same way? Are you able to, I don't know, eat bread without wheat sprouting from your hair? Can you wash your hands without a river strong enough to sweep you away in the current?"

"Thank you, Simon."

She takes the box, and it vanishes into a seam in the air.

"Please do tell your friends about this."

She gives him one more brief kiss before they head back out to join Tegan and the Doc.

"No, of course," duplicate Cameron is saying, "magical things don't do that either---" and she dissolves into a rapidly dispersing aurora mid-word as the real Cameron and Simon come into view.

"---just the use of non-pure mana for sorcery you perform yourself, because of the aural resonance between the tainted mana and your etherum-shadow," the real Cameron continues, leaning on the back of her now-vacant seat. "So yes, I think we mean very different things by 'ambient magic' and the thing you mean is a prime candidate for the thing."

And then she says, "thing," one more time, just because.

        Is that her voice coming from the next room? Simon supposes it wouldn't be the strangest thing about her. —yes, it must have been, she's continuing the conversation. He mentally adds it to the ever-growing pile of mysteries and impossibilities that surrounds her.

        "I don't think I understood most of that, but I think my first question would be whether the 'etherum shadow' might be what we call the soul," Doc says, "and how literally to interpret the word 'shadow'. Is there an etherum-light in which one might cast a shadow?"

"Um, the mind, by which I mean the movement of energy in your brain, would be the 'light' in this uncomfortably stretched analogy," Cameron says. "It's more like a wake? It doesn't have effects on you, you have effects on it. It's the thing that causes spirit accretion. Magical girls don't have it."

        "That sounds loosely analogous to how the soul forms – actually, under certain theories, how magic in general comes about – though it would be more properly described as a growth than an accretion, and the relationship is certainly not one-way. Is there anything else that causes spirit accretion? Anything else that casts an etherum shadow?"

"...are you, all of you, possessed?" Cameron asks, sounding more intrigued than disturbed, but kind of disturbed.

"No. Possession is a fundamentally different kind of thing from souls. The possessing spirit exists separately from the person, and the person from the spirit, both before and after the time during which it inhabits them. The soul is a part of the person, and grows with them in the same way as their lungs or their nerves; it cannot be separated from them without both dying."

"Well, the first half of that is sort of true... but you're not using the words 'spirit' or 'soul' in ways that make sense to me. Let's... try not using those words?"

Cameron gets a rather abstract expression on her face as she tries (and only mostly succeeds in) remembering how Eelesia explained this to her.

"So... the etherum-shadow is what causes the phenomenon where an object or location accretes conceptual attributes when a large consensus of people pays attention to it a lot, and is also the medium by which a mundane mortal's voice can catalyze a closed mana channel, since the-phenomenon-we're-not-calling-spirits is caused by the open mana channels left behind by the etherum-shadow."

Cameron is almost certain she missed a detail in there somewhere.

"I am a former human who's mind was uplifted into an artificial god-brain that is immensely sophisticated and a self-contained, inexhaustible source of magical power."

Cameron spreads her hands, palms up, and shrugs.

What.

"We don't know what causes places, or inorganic objects, to have particular magical properties, but if the same kind of stone is quarried from different places, the magical qualities will be more similar than two different types of stone from the same place. The magical properties of living things seem to be a kind of natural spellcraft, in the same way that a hawk's talons are natural weapons or a tortoise's shell is natural armor."

"The same materials and species bear the same properties across cultures, and new species and materials already have their magical properties when they are first discovered."

"Every human being has a complex magical structure integrated with their body; it is often considered as the part of the body that is composed of magic. This structure is incidentally involved in a variety of biological processes, and necessarily involved in every instance of spellcasting, since as the part of the person that is of magic it is the means by which one interacts with magic. This is what we call the soul."

"Other living things have magical aspects likewise, but none so potent or complex as a person's. We do not truly understand why, but it is often speculated to be related to the capacity for speech, due to the importance of incantations; though people mute from birth exhibit no known magical differences from any other person."

"Just as people, animals, and plants are primarily physical and secondarily magical, there are likewise types of beings that are primarily magical and secondarily physical. Some types of these can attach themselves parasitically to a person, inhibiting their ability to think clearly and overshadowing their thoughts and feelings with its own animalistic ones, until it is removed. Others attach themselves in a similar way to an animal, in which case the relationship is not necessarily harmful to the animal, and may even be beneficial. Still others attach to a place, influencing the flora and fauna there in subtle ways. Most types, however, are largely independent of any such symbiosis."

"This class of beings is what we call spirits, and the parasitic attachment we call possession."

No, seriously, what.

"An artificial god brain? That's – you're talking about apotheosis. That's not a thing. People don't just become gods, any more than trees spontaneously turn into clouds!"

        "There are stories, about alchemists," Simon murmurs thoughtfully. "I never found any more substantial than wild rumor, but, well. It would hardly be the first impossible thing about Cameron, but it is the first that might go some way toward explaining the others."

"Ghhkhkkl," Tegan opines insightfully.