He wakes up in a hammock, under a blanket. There's something hard wrapped around each of his legs.

There's someone in the hammock next to him, and someone else writing at the desk on the other side of the room.

He opens his eyes and leans up and pings everyone he knows and – his legs twinge, quite badly.

… He was pretty sure, rather certain, that his injuries were worse than that. Someone must have come with healing powers, got him out. It's only a matter of time until there's another attempt on his life—

But he doesn't think he recognizes where he is.

He's in a square room whose walls, ceiling, and floor are made of a pale and waxy wood. Dim purple light streams in through the large hole in the wall. A healer he may recognize is asleep and under a blanket in the hammock next to his, held up by hooks from the ceiling.

When he moves, the person at the desk looks up and says something in a language he doesn't know. She's noticeably greener than the average human.

"… Hello," he says in English, frowning. "I don't recognize that language."

He does in fact recognize the healer. That is probably why his legs are not as bad as he thought.

She points at him and the healer, then at her legs, and says something that sounds like a question.

He does not really know what she's trying to ask, so instead he – says aloud, as he transmits: "Could you repeat that?"

She looks very surprised, but tries to think loudly as she repeats "What happened to you, are your legs healing correctly?" and adds, "I don't know if they set right- I have no idea what you are. How did you do that?"

"I'm Relay, Formed," he responds. "I was in a disaster zone – I'm not sure if they're healing correctly. I think they're set right, and they should be fine when this guy wakes up." He indicates the person in green next to him, the healer.

"That's good. A disaster zone, like of a plague? What are you? How did you get there?"

"– I'm just going to send it all, might be sort of disorienting."

So he sends a visual of the scene, as it happened, and his communication with the other Turned and Formed. They all have superpowers, all the non-civilians, with the Turned outnumbering the Formed by a large factor. People who appeared, fully-grown, with powers, those are Formed; as compared to Turned, those who had normal human childhoods and then got powers within the past seven years. They're all varying levels of broken. The visual then returns to him, showing his last moments: everything blurs, his range shrinks and makes him feel claustrophobic, and after a short deal of terror, he's swiftly knocked down, crushed, and made to fall unconscious.

So they're just like that, it's not a side effect of some bizarre disease. They're probably from a different planet, with the weird grey things growing from the ground, and both gods making people shaped like humans, somehow. She tries to send confusion and the sense that he's probably on a different planet than before, sorrow for whatever bizarre pain happened to him and his friend.

People are typically not green on his planet, no: people all come in the species of human, at least the ones he's acquainted with, and human looks like this and varies approximately like this. (He sends a few example people and ranges and variants on different body parts. It includes what they look like in… relatively graphic detail, sort of superimposed so she can see the differences and variation.) His planet looks like this (but only vaguely, only approximately).

Well, if she's ever feeling particularly blasphemous and sure of her abilities, now she's got more inspiration, and what.

That is an absurd shape for a planet to be, she'd been assuming he was from an actual planet (attempt at sending what a real planet looks like, a slowly growing cylinder of soil, surrounded by a glowing bubble. This one's covered in plants, the other ones are too far away to tell for sure what's on them, but they're definitely the same general shape.)

He's… not sure why it would be absurd for a planet to be spherical, like, here it is sent again but with a better idea of how large it is, look, huge, doesn't grow. Other planets are – nowhere near nearby, you need a telescope – or maybe a pair of binoculars, he's not sure – to look at them properly, and they do not have any glowing bubbles surrounding them.

… Is there any chance she can give him an idea of the local political sphere? He's used to large countries with presidents and small districts, currently mostly set up as it was before heroes started appearing, but he's not sure what to expect here.

Well if the spheres are very big, the top should be flat enough for some people to stay on, at least. They'll run out of room pretty quickly, though. And how do they not run out of water, or have enough light for anything to grow? Maybe they just haven't noticed the bubbles, somehow?

She sends a general impression of the political system, with conventions of scribes in the capital and larger towns debating and deciding the law and sending out messengers if anything changes. There's a process for petitions, with a better chance of succeeding if there are signs that you've been useful to the people around you. She hasn't paid much attention to it, since there aren't any laws about engineering she'd like changed and would have any hope of changing, and her housemate hasn't particularly needed anything. There's another area with a different organization and set of laws, somewhere on the far side of the center, with looser regulations. They've invented and traded some things that are useful, but have a greater chance of growing out of control, or being otherwise inconvenient.

The countries, on his world, go all around the sphere. Because people live on it from all sides. Because 'down' means 'towards the nearest center of large mass', approximately, or in fact just means 'towards masses nearest you', weighted by how close you are and how heavy it is. The sphere is huge. The sphere orbits another huge sphere, one that is even bigger, and has a smaller sphere that orbits it.

… He's curious how 'useful' is defined, if it's just if people you know like you, or if this is like the concept of political influence that he's used to, where you know someone high up and can possibly trade favors with them.

That seems like a pointlessly complicated way to have a planet, and will probably eventually run out of room, but apparently it works for the people who live on it. Does life on his planet not need light and water? What are the bigger and smaller spheres for?

If you're particularly good at something you're trying to change a law about, your opinion about the subject is more likely to be meaningful than the opinion of someone who's not. She thinks she'd have a reasonably good chance of succeeding if she petitioned to change a minor law or regulation about engineering, because many people buy the seeds she makes. Some people are really good at more general things (like her housemate's friend with all the bracelets who is good at logistics and convincing people of things) or do a lot of politicking, who are more likely to successfully push any kind of change. So yes, either expertise in an area, or persuading scribes with charisma and trade in order to have influence.

The larger sphere provides light, the smaller sphere is not 'for' anything except tides. Tides are where gravity from the moon (the smaller sphere) produces changes in water height around coasts daily. They do not seem to have run out of water, seeing as the oceans are huge and they also get rain and a water cycle.

Engineering with seeds…? Is this genetic engineering?

Water just sits around on top of - of course it does, why should its extremely limited surface area all be habitable, and she should probably stop criticizing his weird spherical planet and its weird transparent god.

Confusion. She changes the patterns of seeds to make the plants they grow into more useful to people?

Changes the patterns how…? He's used to DNA, looks like this if you go in with a microscope, genetic engineering is where you change this through some method (he thinks by introducing a specially-designed virus or by splitting it up with some enzyme?) and it can do things like golden rice (see, higher yield and lower disease resistance and better nutrition and he really hates starvation, this might be clear).

… The planet does in fact have limited surface area, but it's quite a large limit, and he's not sure how large her… circle on top of a cylinder is. And they do not have a transparent god unless you mean bubble-like thing surrounding the planet, in which case he thinks you might mean 'atmosphere', which is again caused by gravity, of the huge object. Protects them from harmful radiation (approximately: invisible damage) from the Sun, keeps all the air in (otherwise they suffocate), helps keep the water cycle going (the rain and the lakes and so on, has she seen this?).

You touch something and feel its patterns and if it's a seed you can change them? She sends an impression of editing something, and the symbols she would use to draw it: there are four main kinds of pieces of instruction, which connect "horizontally" in groups of three, and "vertically" in long strings, and branch with the fifth kind of piece, which splits a string into two strings. Both of the two types of outer piece can connect with up to two other outer pieces, and with one inner piece. Both of the two types of inner piece can connect with up to two outer pieces, and with up to two branching pieces. Each branching piece connects to one inner piece on the string it branches from, and two other inner pieces, on on each of the strings it branches to. You can change any outer piece to any other outer piece, and any inner piece to any other inner piece, and feel generally what change results. It's harder to do, but you can move branching pieces around. If you try harder than that, you can sometimes force an inner piece to generate an attached branching piece.

Is that how DNA works? She doesn't know what the patterns would actually look like close up. Of course they edit food plants to grow more quickly, be more nutritious or tasty, and produce more. Starvation is pretty terrible, but it doesn't usually happen unless there's a plague, or something else of about that magnitude goes incredibly wrong. Is it a common problem on his world? She can buy him seeds for things that are pretty hard to kill that grow a lot of food. Apparently people in his world can't edit patterns, so someone would need to fix the beginnings of their patterns to let them grow, although his planet is weird, and they'd want to check if anything could actually grow there. ... Does he know how to get back and forth between the planets?

Oh! Yes, the bubble-like thing surrounding the planet, which creates rain and light and new species, that's the god. She doesn't know if there's air outside of the bubbles, but if there isn't then it's very good there's something to hold it in. But his other sphere, the Sun, also makes light, but it invisibly hurts people? That seems bad, even if their god protects them from it, have they tried getting rid of the Sun?

The atmosphere doesn't make light, or at least not in quantity that it'd help you with daily functions – you get things like the aurora borealis, but he's pretty sure that's due to the Sun. They have not tried getting rid of the Sun, no, because it is the only thing that produces this necessary sunlight in their local environment.

He does not know how to get back and forth between the planets, and he has no idea how he got here, and he's suspecting it was a part of the disaster but he has not heard of 'teleportation to as-yet-unknown place with other magic' being part of a disaster before.

Genetic engineering… possibly works like that, somewhat; he's not sure, not having taken any higher-level biology classes. He does not think he can do that unless it's a special feature about this place and not his species. Would she, perhaps, like to show him a seed he can try doing it on while he tries to prod the healer awake? His legs are annoying him.

It seems like it would be vastly better for his "atmosphere" to just produce the light directly rather than having to filter external light to not hurt people more, but she doesn't know how to make that happen.

He's probably here forever, then? She sends the feeling of extending sympathy, and a sense that there are logistics that will need to be figured out at some point.

She can get him a seed, yes. The ones in her workshop are too complicated to be a good test, she'll grab him some simpler ones. If his legs are hurting him she can get something to numb them, assuming it works on his kind of person?

He unfortunately does not know if her painkillers will function on him but it's okay because the person in the green spandex-or-whatever can probably help.

(He prods them a few times. They seem to stir a little.)

Okay, she'll just grab him some simple vine seeds, then, while he waits for his acquaintance to wake up and help him.

She waves and climbs out the window.

The healer eventually wakes up. They seems quite bewildered.

Relay tries to explain where they are. He goes through how he thinks they've been transported, and how there's a nice woman who's fetching some seeds, and he doesn't know how they got here.

The healer, Bond, wants to go, wants to go find some people they recognize. Relay explains that it's probably not easy to get back to people they know, that there isn't anyone in his range and the people here seem to be humanoid but definitely not humans.

The healer doesn't seem to get this. They seem to think he's either lying or mistaken, even though he doesn't seem the type to lie.

They don't seem to hear him when he repeats that he can't contact anyone he remembers, that there probably isn't anyone around, and that his range is back to what it was before. He's not sure how they can get back.

Instead of paying attention or focusing on Relay at all, the healer pokes around the room and doesn't pay any attention to Relay as he asks them for some names or faces.

The room contains hammocks, blankets, Relay, a desk, and a chair. The desk is a long piece of wood, held up by vines from the wall growing through holes along its edges. The desk is covered with sheets of tan, pentagonal paper, filled with densely painted ink symbols, and labeled diagrams of vines and bizarre things that might be bugs. There's also a thin paintbrush, and a wooden cup of thick black liquid. The chair is a three-legged wooden stool, topped with a thick teal cushion.

Through the window, he can see tall trees whose branches converge into cubes before reaching out again, with rope ladders hanging from holes in the sides, and trellises holding up flowering vines, and bushes with tiny red-glowing berries, and paths of empty soil lined in glowing teal grass. The sky visible through the dense leaves overhead is a dim reddish-purple.

The healer decides they need to get out of the room, get down a tree if they're in one, and then run off into the distance and find where the nearest less-crazy society is, and they did not sign up for a disaster that included terrifying hallucinations and/or illusions.

Relay tells them to just stop and listen and show him what they see and heal his legs because at this rate he can't do anything but talk to that woman who's gone to fetch some seeds –

– and there's a little mental click as he does it –

– and then all in one go, the healer stops moving and sends what they see and starts healing his legs.

The woman is back, with the seeds. She waves to the other person, who seems to be awake and uninjured.

"I have some simple seeds for you to try. Will he also understand if I think to him?" she asks aloud and sends.

– I can relay it, he sends back, looking at the healer.

The healer is not doing much of anything. They are standing and they seem slightly greener than usual but are otherwise standing quite motionlessly.

Not enough to look like a human, though. Weird. Do people like you change colors often?

She walks to the talking-person and holds out a seed to drop into his hand.

It's part of my power, says a voice in her head (after a few moments) that sounds plausibly like it could have come from the healer.

"Thank you," says Relay, looking at it. "What do I do with it?"

"Oh, okay. You- you're definitely touching it, right? There should be a pattern you can feel, and push changes into?"

He looks at it, observes he's touching it, and tries poking it.

... She sends him the sensation of feeling the patterns of a seed. Maybe he just is somehow not noticing them?

Or it could be something his kind of people just can't do.

He cannot in fact notice those. Would she care to just – keep sending that, while he works out if he's just not used to noticing them?

Sure. The feeling of the patterns of that particular seed, the feeling of pushing changes into the patterns of similar seeds. The much fainter feeling of the patterns in the wood of the floor, in case that helps?

Yep, if she can just keep sending that, that'll be helpful.

She's probably not very practiced with this form of communication. Would be a shame if she was leaking any other information, such as her opinions about him, if she happens to be lying about not knowing what or who he is, that sort of thing.

She sends a sense of what each of the components of the pattern of the seed she's holding does, and what effect different changes she could make to it might have.

She doesn't intend to send pity that he's injured and might be unable to do the objectively most fun and interesting thing ever, or consciously suppressed revulsion and nervousness (what sort of horrifying disease would turn people that color?  But it's not a disease they're just weirdly humanoid aliens, her instincts can hush). Nor does she mean to send guilt that she didn't ask the not-Relay-Formed person their (his?) name and now it's too late to not be possibly-insulting, and they might be sending all sorts of cues she hasn't noticed that she's actually harming them or being appallingly rude and that her housemate would be better at this but can't, and that she thinks she has a way to make tifozhe more productive and stop them from just undoing it but she needs to figure out if they'd still be light enough to float and trying to visualize the other effects of the changes she wants to make without writing it down or pausing too much in sending the changes she could make to the simple vine.

After a bit of trying to study the seed, he asks her how to actually modify the patterns, how you would try to enforce your change.

The other person, the not-Relay person, is not really moving. It's somewhat conspicuous.

Maybe it's a healing thing? Or something that kind of person just does? (They were standing up and sending thoughts to the Relay-Formed person, they aren't horrifically diseased or injured, they're just an alien.)

She nods and starts sending the specific sensations of transforming each outer piece into each of the others, then the inner pieces, and branching pieces. Then the sensation of forcing pieces to move or grow where they weren't before.

The other person is really weird and kind of creepy but she shouldn't judge. She continues to methodically send the feeling of pushing each change while trying to envision the effects of the changes she wants to make to the fozho vine. She's distracted from the design with the thought that if someone were unethical and blasphemous enough, they might make something like the alien people to protect them from malicious random editing in a smaller village. Obviously the tradeoff wouldn't be worth it if it meant they couldn't edit, as it seems increasingly likely that poor Relay-Formed can't, but she didn't feel any patterns at all when she helped her housemate apply the casts, as lifeless as clean water.

The aliens are apparently made of something else, not patterns, they could probably just walk out in the wild safely. Well, not safe but safer. She could probably make someone with the same protection, not a lack of patterns but something dead outside, like scaley plates of bark or fingernails. But that would be gross and bad and wrong and she shouldn't even be thinking it, so she forces her thoughts harder into the repetition of sending the feeling of pushing different changes into a nice abstract pattern. After a bit of this she asks "Is this helping?"

It's such a shame Relay forgot to warn her about all the leaking thoughts. Just such a shame.

"I don't think I can do it," he says, observing the seed that he is pretty sure he's been unable to change. "Is everything made out of these patterns, or just seeds…?"

Poor Relay-Formed. It would be so awful to not be able to even feel the patterns, or change them and watch the results grow. If it happened to her, she would probably - but it won't because it's an effect of the kind of thing he is.

"Everything that is or was alive is made out of patterns, but humans can only change the patterns in seeds. There aren't patterns in rain, or soil, or air, or things that have been really thoroughly burned."

"That sounds kind of like DNA," he comments. "Except we can't change it without technology or – some sort of power, I guess. My planet is definitely spherical, and the atmosphere – we don't call it a god, it's just a natural thing that does stuff."

"Your planet is bizarre, and your atmosphere-god inadequate, but I'm glad it mostly works for you. For what it's worth, it feels like you actually don't have patterns? I helped my housemate with the casts." She should have told him earlier, if he were a normal person he wouldn't want to talk to her again, she's an engineer and it would've been so invasive, but he doesn't have patterns she can sense so maybe it doesn't matter? (Maybe she could do that, if a human could have a layer of flexible shell like a slonde, but entirely dead and slowly replaced, like bark? Making the pattern unreadable by naturally having a layer of soil, somehow? And wow immediately after one violation of ethics she's contemplating another.) She tries to send a sense of apology for doing something that might have let her sense his patterns without permission, and not telling him about it.

"Genetic stuff isn't developed to the point you could do that so casually, back home, so there isn't really – etiquette on it. But thanks for being careful anyway."

Well. There are some benefits to the people of his world being unable to edit. Not that it's worth it but it does mean that it was less bad.

"Glad it wasn't as bad as it could be."

Nod. "So you can't edit the patterns of living creatures, past the seed stage?"

"No, some creatures can, but humans can't." Everything that moves edits at least slightly differently, and it's not clear why.

"… Are you able to edit– gametes?"

"No, nor can any creatures I know of, but something might. Why?"

"I'm not sure if you can do things like removing genetic diseases? If you even have them – patterns are sort of confusing."

"You don't have patterns, as far as I can tell, so I couldn't even theoretically remove them from your kind of person. When people are having children they check for errors in the patterns of seeds before they plant them, usually against a list with a scribe supervising and helping. If there's something wrong with one of them, it just isn't planted. There are simple errors we remove from other species, though?"

"Oh, you grow like plants?" Pause. "Do you have any animals? Because we grow slightly differently, we aren't planted."

"We are plants? What else would we be? I don't know what you mean- I am confused." Does he mean that his type of person grows without being deliberately planted, with wind-blown seeds or something like that? Wouldn't that lead to confused infants dying in whatever random place they happened go grow? That would be tragic, and need to be fixed. Or they could bud and merge with each other like some small-seeds do, which would be weird but not necessarily a problem.

"It's… it'd probably be quite weird for you to find out how we work," he says.

"All right. If someone of your species did have a mistake or disease in their patterns, we wouldn't be able to tell, let alone fix it. In ours, if someone's pattern is damaged, they don't have children afterward, usually, if it would be heritable." Even when it's a few simple changes that anyone who had ever touched a seed could fix in a moment, except that would be wrong.

"Sounds like… a way to clean up the gene pool," he remarks, not transmitting.

Leaning over to look at his legs, he pokes at the cast thing to see how hard it'd be to remove. His legs twinge a little, but they're probably fixed enough to use at this point.

She tries to send a sense that she doesn't know what he just said. "I can go get something to remove those?" Probably with the explanation that they'd been wrong about whether the bones were broken, rather than that they had already healed.

"– Don't worry, it was nothing," he responds, and then, "That would be helpful, thanks."

The healer continues to stand blankly, and Relay looks at them briefly before returning to lying down in the hammock.

(The healer is kind of weird. Maybe they'll be less weird if they rest more.)

"I'll go get it then." She climbs back out the window.

After she's gone, Relay pokes the healer. Mentally.

The response consists of, basically, an echo. Which was not precisely what he wanted. He didn't realize he could break a person just by thinking at them loudly enough to stop.

Another poke gets the same result.

He decides… he is probably just going to have to deal with the fact he has a broken person here. Somehow. Maybe he will claim ignorance, or something.

In the meantime, he might pilot them around.

Relay is not super in the mood to try anything without the ability to walk around properly, though, so he just stays in the hammock.

And eventually the woman comes back, carrying a lidded wooden jar of some kind of thin liquid in her hand, with a serrated wooden knife sticking out of a pocket in her vest.

He smiles at her, a bit weakly, as she returns. "Sorry about them," he says, gesturing at the healer. "I think they're a bit overwhelmed." (… Sort of true.) "Is that for the cast?"

(... weird and kind of creepy. Possibly they have some sort of long-term organ damage, but it would be rude to ask, especially given the explanation.)

"Yes, the liquid softens the cast's material enough for the knife to cut it. Do you have a preference about whether I cut the cast off or you do? I should probably pour the liquid unless you really want to." (Both the cast's material and the fluid are harvested from the same plant, whose ancestor stiffened its fibrous leaves in response to substances in creatures' saliva and loosened them with the release of a fluid it normally held in sacs in the main stem. It's a very cool plant but obnoxiously difficult to grow intentionally, and too complicated to edit efficiently for most purposes. The cast-plant is much simpler to work and more useful than its ancestor. She wants one anyway.)

"I think I should be able to do it," he responds, leaning up a little. Internally, he's somewhat confused – he thinks he's starting to like the stranger, but he's wary of letting anyone near him with a potential weapon, especially given he thinks the earlier 'accident' was less than accidental. He tries to keep this off his face, as much as he can.

She hands over the jar and the knife (hilt-first), carefully avoiding touching his skin. The worst-case is probably just that he oversoaks the cast and its slime drips somewhere or he slips and slightly cuts his leg, and he can probably feel enough to be careful not to do that. She tries to send an impression of about the right amount of liquid to pour, enough to dampen the material in a line along where he intends to cut, and then leave it about half a minute before cutting it.

"Thanks," he responds.

He starts pouring, being careful to get the liquid only on the cast itself.

It dampens, and quickly reaches a texture somewhere between "spongy", "springy", and "cloth-like".

Not too hard to do it himself, then. He starts fiddling with the cast using the knife – carefully.

The knife's serration lets it cut through the material fairly steadily. It is eventually possible to peel it off.

He does so, gingerly in case his leg is still damaged. The twinge is still present, not much improved from its earlier pain, but definitely noticeably so.

He eyes the healer momentarily, considering his options, but finishes cutting apart the cast without doing anything.

She carefully takes the casts and wraps them in paper, trying to broadcast her intention to do that unless he objects. (Once she's outside, she'll put it in the two-layered-seal container where small-seed plants destroy biological materials that were once part of people, just in case, but it's probably fine to leave wrapped on her desk for now.)

"There are medicines that reduce pain, either on a specific spot or everywhere, although I'm not sure whether they would work on you."

He doesn't object to her doing so.

"I'm not sure, either," he responds. "Do you know how they work, or anything about their chemical makeup?" It sure would be nice if he knew more biochemistry.

The kind that is swallowed dissolves in alcohols better than in water and much better than in oil, while the kind that is spread upon skin is the opposite. The ones that are swallowed make pain smaller or less important, and the ones that are spread make the area numb for a time.