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A dragon explores space, finds Amenta.
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The secrets of Delver technology could not resist decryption forever. While the tools they wielded are deeply weird, jealously guarded, and immensely complicated, living beings built the tools that brought aliens to the dragons' first world. The great calamity left ruins aplenty behind, and once grown the Seeker gathered these old tools as their very favorite sort of treasure. Dragons are not intelligent in quite the same way as a No-Tail, but they are far from stupid. They live forever and can be very determined if they set their mind to it.

The Seeker brought all its tools and treasure along with it when the world was evacuated ahead of the Tailless's relentless growth and hunger for resources. It studied under the great elder Darktooth on the new world, studied together with Darktooth (an arrangement not very common with dragons, as they are not particularly social), for a very long time. And eventually, by application of the hard claws of experiment and calculation and theorizing, the universe revealed its workings, cold and precise and mathematical. Creating more and more tools of the highest sophistication, and teaching others of its kind in exchange for wealth, and even spawning offspring and guiding them to adulthood, was all satisfying for a long while, but eventually... He got bored.

And so, the Seeker wondered if the long sleep for the journey between stars was really necessary, and got to work seeing about making it not. He managed it eventually, and built a starship, and went exploring. Stars come in a beautiful variety of kinds, and the worlds around them do too, but very, very few bear any sign of life. They are mostly barren and empty.

...Oh, this one is emitting curious amounts of low-frequency light. Worth investigating. Pushing a starship faster than light requires a touch of magic (at least for now), which he provides.

In the outer solar system of a certain star, well above the plane of the ecliptic, a black sphere the size of a city block appears and has a look around with powerful telescopes.

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The numbers on the story go up!

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That means people are reading it, and might be less blatantly wrong about Draak in the future! She Quotes something to this effect and then sleeps in preparation for six de-springings the next day.

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She is presented with three purples, a yellow, a grey, and a green over the course of the day, their arrival times staggered.

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She asks each one whether they want to spring an average amount, or very little. She patiently works on them, getting more used to this minimal and delicate kind of Enkindling each time.

...She rejects the green and asks him to come back tomorrow. I have to think about your case a bit more...

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"- is something wrong with me? Wronger than it just being spring -"

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No. You are subtly different than the others, a different combination of complicating factors that makes your spring slightly trickier, and I want time to consider it before moving.

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The green looks at Ruan, who ushers him away and figures out a replacement time slot the next day. The green hits on Ruan. Ruan turns him down and sends him off.

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Some Amentans will be straightforward and easy to de-spring now. I could do sixty or more each day and speed up even more as time passes. Others, like him, will not. The latter are more interesting and likelier to expand my understanding, but will take longer. I can tell you which are which, among the people I've been people-watching the most.

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"The greens who are following along could maybe use that to make predictions."

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Yes, the mysterious practice of Statistics. That sounds potentially useful. I can also judge many, many more people for simplicity or complexity in a single day, if gathering that information seems like a good use of time.

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"Let's see if anything jumps out from the existing data before trying that."

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She goes down the list with him, sometimes needing prompting like 'the one with the hair clip', or pictures. About four fifths of these people would be simple to de-spring, apparently.

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"Once you've thought about someone complicated will they take longer than everyone else?"

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Probably more time, but not more energy.

I should do this to a red and a blue. The castes are subtly different.

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"- getting a red here may be difficult."

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I can go to them for this.

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"That would be much worse. Is it important for anything besides de-springing more reds?"

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Her tail twitches in what might be an upset manner.

A fuller picture of things never hurts.

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"I'll... look into it. One will do?"

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It may be necessary to see many for a full understanding, eventually. 

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"I'll try to get you a batch to drive in after everyone else will have left."

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Why do people hate them?

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"...they're unclean."

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That explains the separation, the aversion, the disgust. But I fail to see why it must lead to outright hate.

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"I don't think most people do hate them outright."

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