Calsa was at work at the steel mill, so she's distracted by all her flame getting yanked too far away to sustain.

Woah, was that a spiritual experience? And she missed it?!

She looks around at the bizarre landscape, feeling the damp and smelling the salt. Oh, there's a frogold over there. "Hi, I'm Calsa?" If Sotalese doesn't work, she can try writing High Elvish on the sand...

"Hello, Calsa. I'm Lin Kaiet Pali, of -" shouldn't say Kef "Argolake."

"I used to live in Argolake! Did you just get here too? I'm glad we both speak Sotalese. Was it like -" she describes the vision.

"Yes.

I'm trying to tell if we're still on Ansaf..."

"How could we be? It's not that hot and there's all this water."

"Do you know that the wind on Lacrimos is divided into several bands with opposite flows? I've heard speculation that Ansaf could have another storm deep in the drybright, a band where the wind flows darkward at the ground, cooling off as it goes and releasing water. If the water flows brightward again to get picked up by the hotter air, the cycle will continue. I had assumed that the shaded stormlands would be the habitable part, but I suppose that the evaporating water would cool down the air, providing another habitable area."

Lin gazes at jungle. "Something is odd about those plants..."

"Huh. Well, wherever we are, I'd say the metahuman wants us to populate it. Let's go find the rest of the catfolk and frogolds!"

"Mm." As they get closer to the jungle, Lin points at a tree. "Oh! It's shading its own leaves! That's why it looks so dappled.

Which suggests that the wind changes a lot, or the sun moves, or someone made it like that... but this arrangement doesn't produce the maximum amount of shaded leaves, if that was what they wanted, and all the plants are like this even though they're all different types. I think this is a new world.

What shall we call it?"

"Well the others might have a name already, but if we're the first, how about 'E'?" (Literally 'potable water', in an obvious theme with 'Ansaf', which literally means 'rock'.) "Or 'Ensaf'?" She lights up as they go into the jungle.

The rocks would be quite tricky to climb over but if they go to the side for a while they will see a path in a low spot of rocks that someone obviously cleared out- Not a werewolf, the marks look more like tools. (They see a few fallen palm fronds and even a coconut, too, among the general beach debris and crabs.)

If they walk along the rough path of beaten-down and dug out vegetation into the trees, most of them are still palms, though there's a few other varieties. 

And someone is tromping along this path towards the beach, dragging a Travois with four clay pots tied to it with twine. She blinks rapidly at them.

...Her hand goes to a leather waterskin on her hip, uncapping it and bringing out an orb of water which she magically holds above one hand, a little defensively.

Oh good, signs of people.

A person! And of an unfamiliar species, too! ...which means they probably don't speak Sotalese.

Seems wary, so Calsa stops and takes a non-threatening posture: smile, ears forward, tail relaxed, hands up, fingers spread to show she's not holding anything to throw, claws retracted, no flames except the one that was already on her left ear.

Lin stays back far enough that Calsa is beyond frogold range.

...and raises her hands too, since the new person might not recognize frogolds. They might not even recognize catfolk!

"Hi, dost thou canst a language what is similar to my language, so thou canst understand if I declaim slowly and archaically?" Most languages on Ansaf are descended from High Elvish, so it's worth a try!

"No, but I can understand you anyway. It must be part of this place and the weird curse... I'm sorry. You two are probably stuck here now, like us."

"A curse? Hm. Did you seem to be snatched up by a huge person who was possibly not entirely benevolent?"

"Yes, a vast figure that laughed and then a sense of falling... I tried to build a raft and leave. It didn't work. As soon as you get far from the island a huge storm whips up and drives you back here. I have tried eight times."

"That sounds more like hostile people than a 'curse' - uh, which is a fictional term for me, not a real kind of magic, is it fictional for you? Are you sure that a group of people of various species, including water-movers, can't make a storm? What's your species called? My name is Calsa and I'm a catfolk, the most common species where I'm from, and this is Lin, a frogold, a somewhat less common species."

...She puts the water away and sighs.

"I don't know. It'd take an awful lot of them, if they're like me? I can only move about my own size of water at once and storms are big. ...I'm a Deeplin. There's one other person here- That I know of- Theo. He's a Dynafer. He can sense metal and move it, but only directly towards or away from him... Welcome, I guess. Be glad you won't find things as difficult as we did when we first got here. We've got two houses and a little farm inland a ways. It's... Comfortable."

She bites out the last word like it's a swear.

"It could be the big guy doing it." She relaxes too and holds out a handful of fire. "Catfolk make fire, on our bodies or on things we touch. Frogolds grab things and spit them out without the things moving between here and there. I figured that the big guy was the one who originally set up our planet, and he's doing it again now with a new one, but - there's only one of each species and he's keeping us trapped here in particular, so I don't know. How long have you been here?"

Lin approaches behind Calsa. "Are the plants familiar from your home?"

"I have been here for five hundred and twenty-seven [days]. I want out.  And, yes, mostly... Not every variety, but the general types are familiar. Palm trees, Nipa, Bananas... That right there is Lemongrass..."

She points.

"It's edible but not very calorie dense, but good for deterring insects... I think If you two don't mind I want to finish going to the beach and getting water while we talk." She gestures to the travois and the pots she is still dragging. "We are on a dry cycle and the farm needs it."

...She hesitates.

"Also there are these... Weird structures that I haven't really been able to get into. I don't know how to explain it except to show you. There's four that I know about."

"If there's a way out, I hope we can find it together.

How many cycles of sleeping and waking is that for you?"

"There are variations in the weather, separate from the rotation of the planet? Because of the orbit or just the weather, if you know?

I don't recognize any of these particular plants but they look like they could be related, like those with the three-part seedpods, or those flowers with the branching stamen.

Theo arrived when you did, from the same home planet?"

Back to the beach.

"Four structures and four of us? Or two groups of us so far, with two more to come. Some kind of test, maybe..."

"...Thank you. What do people have if not each other? ...I'll take you on a tour of the structures later. They do seem... Test-like... To our cultural references... One of them implies there's five tests. It's a large archway with five symbols. Three of the symbols are present on the other three sites I've found. ...That's five hundred twenty seven sleeping-and-waking- I sleep when the planet rotates such that the sun is behind it, and wake when it's above again."

Tromp tromp past the rocks and down the sand. She sets the travois down with a grunt and stretches her arms for a bit. Then she lays out an animal skin and focuses on the water. A large globule comes up from the sea and starts - spinning rapidly. Salt settles out of it, being flung onto the hide in a dusty spray. Eventually, the globule goes into a pot and she starts repeating the process.

"Theo is from the same planet as me, [Water], and this place resembles in some respects that planet. We arrived together. We're used to [seasons], orbit-variations of weather, that take close to a full orbit to play out, but the cycles on this island take twenty to forty [days] which is far too short and irregular for [seasons] to be a satisfactory explanation. There are temperate cycles, dry cycles, and storm cycles."

A second globule of clean water into the second of four pots.

"And that sleep schedule feels natural to you? Does your home planet also rotate, and at the same speed? Hm, Water, not [potable-water] - " Lin tastes the ocean and immediately spits it back. "What's wrong with the water?! What are you removing?"

"Yeah. I'm removing salt- The ocean is salty."

Lin takes another taste and throws it back just as quickly. "Huh, it really is just salt. That's how it goes, enough of anything can be harmful."

She taps a finger against her other hand, a bit slower than once each Earth second. "I call these divisions of time [seconds]. There are 50 [seconds] in a [minute], 50 [minutes] in an [hour], and 30 [hours] in a cycle. Is that about the length of the days? 

Because we, like you, have natural sleep-wake cycles. The length varies a little between individuals, but the distribution is the same for all of our species, and we know of no natural reason that it has to be that particular length. I think that we, or, to be precise, our oldest species, which went on to make the other species, was taken from a planet like yours."

"Didn't we already suspect that?"

"If our sleep cycles match, that would be more evidence.

The being that took us here might be different from the being that created [human] magic. They might have different goals."

"Maybe we'll get another magic if we pass the test!"

Calsa turns back to Erebys. "Does your home have stories like this? Where did your magic come from, and where did your species come from, if that's different?"

"Every medicine is also a poison." She nods sagely. "That amount of time sounds... About right? We use sixty seconds and sixty minutes and twenty-four hours..."

Third large pot is full now.

"We don't really know where all the specieses came from. They just kind of exist, and occasionally they die out- Dracotyrants did that a few thousand years ago, or so I heard. Hunted to the last in a war. If they caused someone pain, they could mind-control them, depending on how much pain... People have species magic, but you occasionally hear of someone having the destiny of a great hero or - finding lost artifacts of wonder or things like that, and getting more magic. Do you not have [days]? Are they a different length? ...I'm not sure how Theo will take this. I'm - excited. There's a new avenue to pursue here. But... We don't get along perfectly. --Oh, my name is Erebys. Nice to meet you two."

All four pots are now full. She squats and lifts the travois back onto her shoulders, grunting with effort at the weight. That much water, it must be several hundred pounds. The tree limb structure is bending.

"Glad to have your acquaintance, Erebys, even if I can't say I'm glad to be in the situation that caused us to meet.

We have stories about great heroes and lost artifacts but I'm moderately sure they're fictional. Our only real magic is species magic, and whatever made that first species.

Dracotyrants sound scary, but it's still sad that they were killed. I'm sure they had some good uses. In your world, are there only a few dangerous species magics? I've been assuming that you could easily drown me, but I suppose there might be some limitation on that? Sorry, maybe I shouldn't ask that! There are a lot of scary species at home on the planet [Rock] and we get along mostly fine."

"Yep, we don't have days! [Rock] doesn't rotate. Well, it rotates once per year, so that the sun doesn't move in the sky. Until a few minutes ago, I would have said that rocky planets capable of supporting life almost never rotate. That's what astronomers generally believe. But either they're wrong, or the 'big guys' like their planets to rotate and made an exception for [Rock]."

"Can we help with carrying?"

(Calsa is about 165cm tall and not visibly muscled. Lin is about 120cm and looks like she would pop if she stepped on a sharp rock, although she's been walking barefoot over the beach and boulders and jungle and it hasn't happened yet.)

"I'll be fine. I'm using magic to take part of the load. And I like the feeling of exercise, to a point... Maybe carry the skin with the salt on it? I have no idea what the 'big guys' could possibly want. Or rather, many ideas and no clue which is right. I could probably drown you. I'm not going to do that. Most species' magic is dangerous in some way? There is a species called Angels who can heal diseases with a touch, but also cause them. But - if you kill someone - that's murder, and you'll be executed? Or if there's a war- Wars are very bad. There is a Deeplin country that lives under the ocean where most other species can't get easily. And they attack and steal things from coastal villages sometimes. So my species is not - very trusted on the dry parts of [Water]."

Calsa takes the salt!

"Yeah. My magic is good for stealing things."

"And she could suck the blood right out of us from back there, but no one worries about that. Hurting people with magic is really bad.

Is there anything we can do to be less alarming to Theo?"

"...He stopped trying to leave much sooner than I did. And I'm not even stopped, just - paused. I don't really - understand why - and he doesn't like to talk to me about it. He's great at making tools and things? I think he was some sort of scholar back home..."

That sounds like a normal trauma response to her. In fact, Erebys trying to leave by raft seven - eh, six -  more times after it became clear that that approach wasn't allowed, that's just as much a sign of emotional disturbance as apathy is.

"He's given up? Our arrival means that things are still happening - he can't just keep doing what he's been doing?"

"I suppose so."

Back into the jungly path.

"...I think it'll be fine, just, neither of us are especially happy, I guess. Still, it'll be less lonely than before now. I kind of hate being glad someone else got sent here though, because it's not good for you necessarily."

"It's okay, I don't blame you for being glad. You didn't cause us to get kidnapped. Even if that were somehow possible, you can honestly feel what you feel about the idea, as a separate concern from deciding about actually doing it.

Huh, now I'm wondering if we did something to attract the big guy's attention. I was just at a place where there are machines for getting iron out of rocks and turning it into steel, doing exactly the same thing as all the catfolk next to me."

"What town?"

"Kef. It's a new town in the [drydark] out past Archer's Tabard."

"I must admit a lie, then. I used to live in Argolake, but I'm of Kef now. The magistrate has been secretly collecting a population of frogolds in the aqueduct, with some sort of peaceful integration planned."

That fits with Merta's grumbles about food and logistics. "That makes sense. Oh, my wife is a clerk of Kef, I guess that's slightly unusual about me. She's a werewolf and our [adopted-child] is a mouseling. If the big guy was watching for a while, maybe he saw that I could handle being thrown together with a bunch of new species? Specifically in a situation where we have to work together really closely, not just, like, being polite to the wroth who comes through once a year - Wroths can become insubstantial and smell people's insides to detect disease, and they can't speak aloud" she adds for Erebys. "And I'm a dumb wolfy cat. Uh, catfolk breed ourselves for intelligence, and werewolves breed themselves for [social-intelligence]."

"I wasn't doing anything interesting, either, just talking about [galois theory] with another frogold. I wonder if the big guy objects to catfolk breeding? I have some qualms about frogold breeding, or the lack thereof, which I hardly ever talk about, but he could plausibly know about that."

Calsa is a queer species-crosser, which is giving her an idea for a selection criterion that she will wait to mention until she gets a better read on Erebys, meets Theo, and studies the mysterious artifacts.

"Taking both of us from Kef suggests that he has at least one limitation."

"...Neither Theo or I had married. And I don't think species - explicitly breed themselves for things, on purpose, on [Water]. Mostly they do it by accident. We're not all four of us female. We're not the same species- Spirits, Theo would have a [stress episode] about the idea of starting a new population if a female Dynafer had showed up- Water, fire, moving metal, and teleportation... I was just a ship pusher. I think I have an unusual personality?"

Hm! "How would you feel about starting a new population?"

"...Largely ambivalent? If I decided on that course I wound undertake it with dedication and careful preparation. Anything worth doing is worth doing your best. But motherhood neither appeals nor repulses. -Well, pregnancy does sound unpleasant but that doesn't matter much."

"Aha. So, on [Rock], species do breed themselves, probably because catfolk and werewolves, old and widespread species, have litters of several pups. If everyone did that, there wouldn't be food for them all, and eventually they'd starve or kill each other, so it's better to restrict reproduction beforehand.

Frogolds are kind of like that and kind of not. We have lots of eggs, but most of them don't hatch, and many of the taddies don't live to metamorphosize into adults. There are two problems with this.

First, well, people say that this breeds frogolds to be scheming and miserable, and this is not true, definitely not true of the frogolds I know - but I think there's a possibility that it could become true. Or we might accidentally breed ourselves for something else, like a specific artistic taste, and that would be fine! But I don't know in advance which way it will go. It might not even be predictable. We should at least come up with some standardized tests to track the things we care about. It's enough that it's possible that we could end up in a bad state, and I think we should take the idea seriously, even though the people saying it usually follow it up with 'and that's why all frogolds are thieves and miscreants'.

Second, we kill disappointing taddies without feeling bad about it because they're supposedly not people. But I remember being a taddie and I remember thinking, at the time, that I was clearly a person. Which is harder to believe: that I have an unusually good memory of that time, or that I have an unusually good memory and also that I was unusual in being a person but most taddies aren't? The fix for this is simple and we could do it right away without arguing about any details: just don't kill taddies, and eat a few more eggs instead. This would also address the concern about taddies knowing that their life depends on keeping an adult's protection, which is the main reason to worry about breeding ourselves to be manipulative in particular, rather than some other unhappy attractor.

Anyway, it seems like all four of us might tolerate, at least better than average, populating a planet in a way other than our usual sort of reproduction, and tolerate the absence of people of the same species and the other sex. So if there's a new kind of magic prepared for us, perhaps that's what it will do: make copies of people, or bud off children, or create whole new people somehow."

"...That makes at least as much sense as many of my other ideas?"

The types of plants around are changing as they progress along the path. The vegetation is much thicker. Fewer palms. Lots of variety.

"-Careful. There, tree spider. They're venomous."

It's a palm-sized fuzzy spider sitting on a random fallen piece of wood a couple feet out of the cleared path.

"What are your other ideas?"

"It looks so soft!" But she will stay away from it.

"We have partridges - birds - in a little enclosure up at our farm. They're soft too, and the eggs and meat are nice. I guess with four people it might count as a hamlet or village, not just a farm, at some point... Anyway, maybe the big guys just thought it would be funny. Maybe they set up something automated to see how people act in extremis, and then see if they're clever enough to use whatever 'reward' is in the offering. Cultivate talent. Maybe it really is just... Random, or the result of twisty magic left alone too long. Maybe this is part of turning into a Big Guy. Maybe someone wants us to build things, then take over- But then, why not communicate? I don't know. It's a lot faster to get to the farm now that I carved out this path, we're like... A third there."

"It's funny to think about something being carved through a forest that was just sitting there. At home, forests are rare and precious. Is there more that needs to be carved? I could burn through the trees, if you're watching to smother any [non-catfolk, fuel-consuming] fire. Or did you carve the trees with water?

If you knew for sure that someone took us here to build something for them, would you cooperate?"

"Theo did about half of this actually- It was a long process to make metal shovels and axes but now he can wield them with his magic, sort of mostly. Fire is useful for other things too- Cooking, drying things, and firing pots, and working metal, just to start.

...I don't know. Depends a lot on how good their explanation is, and what the 'reward' is. My spite says 'no', my reason says 'maybe?'. It's nice to have a clear goal."

"Mm."

"I would only refuse if I thought that they would have been able to tell in advance that I was going to refuse."

"My fire doesn't get hot enough to melt all metals, but I can do the other things. What kind of metal have you found here?"

"Mostly copper. -I have more thoughts on motivation and incentives if that's not - too touchy."

She glances at Lin, who seems fine. "Sure, go ahead."

"Have you heard of the concept of 'the social contract'? It means- What it is to live in a society, is an unspoken understanding with everyone around you, to follow the rules and norms, whatever that may currently be. But no single person designed the social contract, except maybe the very first one when two people said- Hey, I'm not gonna hurt you if you don't hurt me. It's - this horrible mushy mess of overlapping expectations and add-ons over time. Like hurting people with magic- That's extra special extra bad, to you? That's part of your social contract. It's not part of mine. I think the closest we got to that kind of - revulsion - is with Dracotyrants. Society has laws and customs and traditions and cultures and teachings and, and, nobody's coordinating it all, or if someone is, they can't possibly get it all- And I think a huge part of how societies work boils down to thinking about peoples' incentives. People are mostly smart, social smart, and people who have power can tell if you're planning to - remove their power, either intentionally or not, and then they do things to keep that power. And this is all very vague but I think certain ways of government do more good for more people than others because of the incentives of people in power, but if I lived in the Redscale Kingdom and a Dracotyrant offered me a very rewarding job sailing a ship that was transporting slaves- I'm not sure I wouldn't take it, on the logic that the slaves are already slaves, and someone else could drive the ship, and there's no - no coordination with other Deeplin to say 'fuck you, do without our magic' to the Redscales."

"For me, coming here to build stuff wouldn't be a 'very rewarding job'" if it meant never seeing her family again "but I see what you mean about needing to coordinate to refuse, or else refusing doesn't accomplish anything. Is that what you mean by 'social contract', the coordination? Not by an explicit agreement, but by accumulating a shared expectation that slavery is bad and the Redscales are bad and it's virtuous to refuse? I'm not quite sure how a 'social contract' is different from 'society' or 'culture'.

An example of how it goes on [Rock], so maybe you can tell what I'm missing, is that our country used to have slavery and stopped. Er, our slavery might be different from yours, if moving slaves to a different place is common on [Water]? An analogous situation for us might be refusing business dealings with a group that used slave labor. That would be pretty disruptive, so instead you still do your job but you complain to the ruler of your town, or the [senior person] of your species, and eventually enough people complain that the ruler can tell they need to change to prevent a revolt?"

"I'm imagining the lure of new magic as the 'very rewarding' part... I think that's close? The social contract is more - a term for the shared understanding of how things work. You obey the law, and the law protects you in thus and such ways. Social contract specifically means the rules of society, not the society itself."

The ground is starting to get muddy and wet, and the insects are getting really dense. They might be bothering Calsa or Lin. The path is gravel, now.

"...Our slavery might be different from yours. I do think slavery is awful. And I did mean to imply the difficulty of coordinating a change or refusal... Your context, what you think of as normal, hits really hard. Below the waves everyone, everyone was so very sure that all the surfacers were out to get them and loved nothing more than to jeer at our bedraggled selves and murder us if we went on land alone. Above, everyone was sure that I was one small slip away from going mad and killing people, that I was a spy, that I was inherently untrustworthy and shifty. And- A lot of people join the army fully believing the rhetoric about cruel surfacers who'd just as easily pincushion a Deeplin with Dynafer magic, as throw away a piece of trash. It's hard to see the problems from inside the system. It's hard to change the system because it has - inertia, people don't want to change, or they're afraid to change, or they don't know that other people would agree to change and worry about seeming rebellious-"

"Not worth it, unless I could bring it back with me and it'd be particularly useful on [Rock]."

Snack time.

Calsa smoulders to keep the insects off.

"Ah, the shared understanding of the rules, like 'surfacers will attack you' and 'if you work together with your comrades you'll keep each other safe' and 'but if you go on the surface alone don't expect help'? So you would refuse if there was a rule that we all refuse jobs that we didn't get to discuss in advance, even we happen to get a deal we personally like, so that the big guys are forced to talk first? Only if that was part of the 'context' that people really believed unquestioningly, but not if it was merely an explicit agreement, because that isn't strong enough?"

"...I think I'm confused. If it was part of the context, or part of an explicit agreement, to refuse the Redscales, I think I probably wouldn't work for them in most circumstances? But in absence of that, just thinking they're awful- Maybe. I may have lost track of my original point."

"No, you're fine, I think I get what you're saying about needing a social contract.

What social contract do you want to have for the hamlet?"

"...It seems silly to use money when there's just four people, but everyone ought to work to keep things working and well supplied. And I want us to investigate the odd sites together and try to get through them but Theo- Does not want to do that, so. I guess we don't. It was really hard at first... I think you two might sleep in the cellar until we can start building your own huts? We don't talk about each other's - thoughts about the island anymore."

"It's not obvious to me that money works better with more people, but I'm happy to forgo it.

I'll be careful to not talk about the island in front of Theo.

And we don't do big things, or things out of the ordinary, unless all of us agree? Hrm."

"If we're refusing to engage with the 'odd sites', that seems like a big decision itself, not the default."

"Maybe Theo will be up to investigate again with more people. Should probably talk to him about it. We haven't talked about it in a long time. I just - stopped, because it didn't seem to be helping. We're almost there, just a bit further there's a little valley with better soil than anywhere else on the island."

The wetness and extreme insect density is receding again. It's more standard jungle now, with only the path and different plants as a landmark.

-Except actually not, there's a series of odd fences off to the side. They pass two spots where crisscrossing wooden stakes are driven into the ground in long lines, creating a barrier with a small gap in the middle where the ground looks a bit funny.

"I would be happy to talk to him about that if he wants. Separately, I want to clarify if abstaining from things requires unanimity."

"Yeah, there's no need to rush him on anything."

Calsa has never seen a fence in her life. "What are you growing on those trellises?"

"-Mm. I'm not going to abstain even if he doesn't want, I don't think. So- I'm not sure about unanimity, there. Ah, those are trapping fences. Boars have to go around them and that makes them more likely to fall in the pit at the center as they wander. It's never a sure thing but occasionally one does and we get a lot of meat."

"Good."

"There's meat just wandering around? Wow. I guess it makes sense - you've got all the vegetables lying around, and the water... What happened to the salty water anyway... what else do you have lots of... What makes the good soil better than the other soil? Lots of metal for Dynafers to use, that's nice..."

"I imagine there was a bunch of salt somewhere in the whole huge area covered by the water. Does anything live in the water?"

"Yeah. Lots of things. I go fishing and forage in the tide pools on alternate days. Not that fishing is very hard with my magic, but you have to be careful not to overharvest. I'm not sure where the salt came from... I just have it as a natural fact of the universe that the ocean is salty. Deeplin learn the separation trick as children. It's a developmental milestone. And I'm not sure about the soil either. We just know that things seem to grow faster amd healthier here."

"The water on [Water] is salty, too, huh, it must be common for there to be salt in the ground somewhere, at least on planets that are capable of supporting life. Speaking of which, it occurred to me that even if most small rocky planets with life don't rotate, the ones that do rotate can support a whole lot of life. Maybe most people are on planets that rotate, and most habitable places, so it's actually not that surprising to be here meeting you.

How do the fish survive in the salty water? They don't have magic, right? Animals don't have magic?"

"Actually, how do you catch fish with your magic? Can you pick things up in a bowl made of water?"

"Animals don't have magic. They're-- They're saltwater fish, they'd die in water without salt, they just evolved that way. And- Not really a bowl but I can kind of shove things around with flowing water- Have it push and then loop back and do it again, or let go of water that is past what I'm pushing and grab new water behind it- So I end up basically flinging fish out of the water onto the sand. I fought a shark once." She smiles. "Big predator fish. Longer than I am tall. It was big enough I couldn't entirely control its motion with my magic. That was fun."

They turn a bend around a large tree and a boulder and can see before them a vibrantly green valley, maybe two miles long and one wide. There are steep hills on all sides of it. There are a few structures clustered together maybe a quarter mile away, and a series of rectangular cultivated fields around it, and a carpeting of grass and wild plants throughout the rest.

Calsa giggles at the shark fight.

"I see now why you couldn't cut through the trees with a knife made of water."

"How do you know for sure that saltwater fish evolved like that? Even if [Water] has no species capable of altering living creatures, maybe they were taken from another world that did? Do you have a magic that reads the history of a creature from its genetic material in sufficient detail to rule out tampering? [Rock] has a species, drakes, that make genetic material change in an uncontrolled way that I think would be hard to distinguish from evolution - although if a drake could make a fish require saltwater, I would be just as impressed by that as by the fish evolving naturally."

"I suppose I don't."

Theo was busy at the free standing loom, weaving more cloth and beating snakegrass into loose fibers to spin into yarn for even more cloth. Never enough cloth.

When he sees three figures approaching in the distance, he goes still and shuts his three eyes for a bit, then siiiighs and goes into one of the houses to light up a stove. Four dinners instead of two, hmm, what to make...

Calsa is used to above-ground buildings in Kef, so it's not until they're closer that she realizes that this is another rotating-planet weirdness. "What are your houses made of, plants? And clay? Too bad we don't have a werewolf." Too bad they don't have one werewolf in particular, hmph. "Werewolves can shape rock - we make almost everything out of rock on [Rock]. How many species do you have? Is the number known?"

Mmm food is cooking...

"The stone one took a lot longer. Mud bricks- You can stiffen mud into something marginally rock-ish by mixing in fibers and heating it up. That's a kilnforge, for working metal and clay, that is mud brick as well. And the sheds are palm weave and wood, yeah. Theo! I met two new people!"

She is dumping the clean water into a cistern and peering into it.

"Around half... I'll get more water later."

"I could tell! Egg fried rice and coconut fish for dinner!"

"Ah, like how we put metal wires in rock to make it stronger." Ooh what kind of eggs, she wants to ask, but she has to be gentle. "Hi, Theo. I'm Calsa. I'm pleased to meet you, apart from the circumstances. Thank you for feeding us."

"And I'm Lin. We're from the same world, [Rock]."

"Don't worry about it for today. That's the thing we worked out. I build, I cook, make things. Erebys hunts, fishes, gathers. We both help farm. So the mists are grabbing more people? I'm sorry, ladies. It's not a great situation."

"My species, catfolk, makes fire. I don't have any particular skill in cooking, or making things with clay or glass - catfolk are really common at home - but I can learn!" She frowns at the smelly fire in the process of destroying perfectly good material. "At least, I can save you time gathering fuel, if that takes up a lot of time. I also know a bit about melting out the metal that's mixed in with rocks, if you can't just pull it out yourself?"

"I'm going to go on another water run. If I'm right, it'll be about twenty minutes until food is ready so I'll be back around then."

Well, the stove is a good design, which means it's not using up as much material, and the smoke goes right outside.

"I'm sure that'll be handy if you'd like to help. Most of it's not so hard, the big thing to always do is recording what's going bad soon and making sure we don't eat anything that'll make us sick, or lose too much to rot. Manipulating hot metal is real dangerous and finicky, that too- It's a skill I didn't appreciate until I was here. I was a machine operator, working a compressed air supply hub, practically an office worker, not a forger. I can't pull on anything that's still oxide, only elemental metals. Maybe in the days to come we can process some of the ore sitting in a pile up on the highlands. Firing up the forge always takes a whole pile of wood and charcoal, having magic for it instead will save time... I like doing things, making things. Feeling productive. It distracts me from the unfair situation. So I'll be happy to teach- Both of you, if you like."

"Heh, that's a classic task for a catfolk to do. Have you collected data on how long each kind of food usually keeps?

Melting the ore will probably still need a lot of fuel, just less. For the difficult metals, we get a whole bunch of catfolk heating the air in stages. What's a [debasement] and a [something-akin-to-pure] metal? What kind of eggs are you cooking? I ate a frogold egg once, and I've heard that fish eggs and bird eggs are good."

"Erebys, I'll follow you to the place with all the bugs, stay there, and join up with you again when you come back with more water, okay? I want to find out how much I can feed myself that way. If they make me sick, I think it's better for that to happen now while my health is still the best it's going to be for a while."

"Oh, good point, I can eat raw meat, including small animals that you might have been ignoring if they're too hard to prepare according to your dietary needs?"

To Lin: "Sure. Theo bakes bugs into protein bars sometimes, anyway, I imagine it'll help. And since you asked earlier, we do get some groundwater, but not enough for two people and a farm..."

"They're bird eggs! You can see the birds while we wait for this to finish if you like. Sometimes we'll eat them to keep the population stable too. I didn't like that at first, but where did my meat come from back home, eh? We feed them insects and sometimes rice or sago or nuts."

He stirs some rice.

"I suppose we could set up a bunch of little traps. You get mice and little lizards that way. We stopped bothering once we were fairly secure, though, this is more than enough farmland for two people. Or four. I'm not sure what you mean about the oxides and elements? Oxide is the material that metal usually is before you refine it, and elements are pure substances. How does your fire's heat work? If we can get temperatures hot enough to forge iron or steel that'd be grand. I've been working with copper mostly."

"Oh, the soft birds! Yeah, you get used to it."

"Huh? But 'oxide' and 'ore' are different words, as are 'pure' and 'element'? - I think something funny is happening with the translation. I'll talk with Lin when she gets back and see what she thinks." Also, what the hunger, they were just talking about all kinds of magic, and none of them remembered the magic translation. Suspicious.

"My fire makes air hot - hotter than it already is. To melt glass or copper I need a tube with flame all along it, which means there needs to be a way to open it up to touch the inner surface - I have to touch something to put a flame on it, but the flame will continue by itself as long as I'm awake and stay within one catlength, er, [20 meters]. The air goes through the tube and heats up and then heats up again and comes out as a glassflame. To melt iron and make steel, we use a really long tube that coils up on itself, with a group of catfolk to heat it, and more catfolk to drive a turbine to push the air through it, and then we have more turbines to blow cold air to prevent everything else from melting, and to blow air through the iron to make it into steel, and to keep everything clean."

Just in case Theo's presence is what allowed her to remember the magic translation, and she's going to forget as soon as she steps away, she looks around for something to take a note on. Does the stove have an opening she could reach into?  "My fire doesn't consume fuel or air, can I take over heating the stove?"

The stove is a packed-mud box with a hole at the bottom where the fire is, a few small holes letting air pass through to the top, and an open space in the middle with a few sticks serving as a rack. Four ceramic cookpots are sitting inside, mostly filling it. There's even a little copper door to mostly keep the heat in.

"Go ahead! Sometimes we want the smoke, for preserving meat, but not right now. Erebys might be upset she doesn't have an excuse to exercise by chopping wood." He rolls one of his eyes. "Hmm... I'm having trouble imagining it, let's draw some pictures in the dirt later? I have vague recollections of a blast furnace, which got iron-hot by burning coal and forcing air... Maybe I should try to make paper and ink again..."

"She can fight some more sharks, then."

Calsa beats out the fire with her palm, pushes the embers aside, and puts down catfire instead. If someone looked really closely, they might notice that the flames are arranged in the High Elvish logogram for 'language', but the purpose is not for someone to read it with their eyes; the purpose is for Calsa to either stay at least vaguely aware of what she did, or to forget and then notice that her fire went out, which will be startling for her - sustaining a single small fire is a kitten's game.

"Does [Water] have myths about each species having a secret second magic?"

"-Per species? Not really. There's myths about the secret universal magic that anyone can learn if they have the right kind of mind and teacher. I always thought those were just people rationalizing away things they don't understand as 'must be magic, somehow'."

"What kind of things can it supposedly do, anything at all? Our myths are per species, yeah, and not hard to learn, just hard to do.

Like, if a werewolf goes deep underground, completely surrounded by rock, and meditates for a long time, supposedly they can, well, survive without food and air, and also turn into a giant animal wolf that's made of stone. The story is that our planet is such a wolf, a hero from long ago. Similarly with catfolk, burning as much flame as possible all over our body and sustaining that will make us turn into a mythical species that we call an 'angel'" which is the same word as a real species on [Water], what are you playing at, mysterious translation magic? "and our sun is a really big one.

For other species... for mouselings, who control reed sculptures, it's more like how you said, with the 'right kind of mind and teacher', they can supposedly 'realize' that their body is just another sculpture, and according to some stories gain awareness of their 'real' body, and according to others, gain the ability to control an unlimited number of bodies and outlive their original one. Elves, who store memories, can become ghosts. Kitsune, who teleport, can duplicate themselves? Gnomunks, who store things, can store themselves and I'm not sure what's supposed to happen after that. Equartiers, who run fast, can time travel? Stuff like that."

"There's never any one specific thing. Usual things for the mythical over-magic to do are: Give you extra species magics, reverse old age, resurrect the dead, make people agree with you except it's not mind control for some reason, it's just you being really convincing- Stupid caveat in my opinion it's still mind control if you're using words to do it- Make you able to come back from dying if a special object survives, make you really really good at some skill or another, make you able to change your species and body, make you able to change other people's species and bodies, do arbitrary magic just by wanting hard enough, turn into a great spirit that can hear people thinking about them and do magic anywhere people are thinking about them... Too many different things, and none of them often enough to be the thing."

Something that makes people agree but isn't mind control, like, mm, magically changing the words they hear? No, if the magical translation was distorting words that blatantly, why would it let her know it was capable of that? Maybe to make her give up trying to outwit it? But that would imply that it's worried that she can indeed outwit it!

Maybe it thought she might respond by avoiding verbal communication entirely, and developing a whole new way to communicate that she thinks is safe, and this would be bad somehow, worse than trusting the unsafe speech?

Wait, why is she assuming that the translation is acting against her? Well, because it was trying to hide. But maybe it's just scared. Maybe it has parts, some helpful and some adversarial.

"Are the soft birds, the quail, close enough to look at while you cook? Within [20 meters]?"

"Hmm..."

He closes his eyes for a moment. "The metal latch on the gate is I think twelve [meters] away? If I'm understanding [meters] right."

-And hesitation, but he says, "Erebys is going to want to try and leave again, isn't she? That's a real sore spot for me, but I'll be thinking about it."

- She can talk to the translation spirit later. It was rude of her to try and dash out suddenly anyway.

"From what I know of her, probably, yeah. She said you didn't like her doing that, but I don't really know why, I mean, is it because you don't want to be alone, or don't want to think about the situation, or because she's endangering you...?" Closer to not wanting to think about the situation, it seems, but Calsa doesn't know what exactly bothers him about it. For some people, the best way to get them talking is to talk first and give them something to disagree with.

"It's just... Hard. Complicated. And it's not all one feeling. I'll think about it while you say hi to the birds."

"Alright!" Off to look at these birds.

Theo can sense metal, so she sits inside the cage, operating the latch to open the gate and close it behind her - she's never seen an animal farm before but she's used to keeping entrances closed in Kef.

The birds do look soft. (And smell delicious.)

"So, hi. If you can understand words, can I talk to you? Do I have to be talking to someone? Hi birds, you don't need to hide from me. Changing words is scary, but where I'm from, lots of people have scary magic, but we can be friends. The translation is really useful! What else can you do? I guess you can't reply unless someone talks to me. Or can I write on the ground and read it back?" She brushes a hand over the ground and writes 'here is some writing' in fire.

It's a pretty big cage, big enough to stand in, lined with individual little nesting boxes at one side. The birds are definitely a little scared of her, but not as much as wild ones would be. They've had a couple generations to chill out about people-shaped handlers. They gather near a feeder at her entry. Wait, she's not bringing food?

(If she squints really hard at her own writing she can... Get an impression of how to write the same thing in some new languages?)

She didn't know she was supposed to bring food, sorry, birds! 

Huh, can she tell anything about the new languages? Do they write with alphabets? Do they have sounds like in Sotalese? Do they require a different word order?

There's one that sticks out. It has sounds, and they seem to be the sounds Erebys and Theo have been using. It's subject-verb-object but not very strict about it, and seems to be phonetically written. Another is definitely written with characters but the grammar is nearly entirely ambiguous. It has no pronunciation attached to it. There also appears to be modern Elvish in there, and a different subject-verb-object language that feels related to the first one. It's a somewhat difficult mental trick to try to deliberately focus on any of these, though.