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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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It's a possibility. She would notice a spirit trying to form if it did that near her. She should probably tell Ruan about this, actually.

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"...would you be able to interrupt its formation?" he wants to know.

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...Yes...

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"- I don't know if that's the ideal response but it seem important to know if it's possible. What would it be likely to do if one finished forming?"

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Spirits are very individual. They are fairly intelligent but very - inflexible. They don't really learn. I could certainly talk to it if it was strong enough to cause much trouble, or bully it somewhere uninhabited, or shred it while it's weak if it is evil. If it's any kind of spirit I'm familiar with, one of wind or rain or leaves or a hot spring, it could be convinced into the botanical garden or some patch of wilderness easily enough.

If a new spirit has something to do with elevators or glass or the internet I wouldn't really understand what it wants. Such spirits sound impossible to me, but since you want to consider all possibilities I mention it.

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"What would the familiar types do?"

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A river spirit might play in the waters and eject pollution and trash to the banks if there is any, but a very old and powerful river spirit could cause flooding. A wind spirit would spread leaves and seeds everywhere. A tree spirit would make trees grow faster and be healthier. A fire or warmth spirit... Could be trouble.

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"Flooding would be trouble too."

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Tail-shrug. You don't have to be a Draak to kill a spirit. Attacking whatever it's affecting hurts it.

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"I admit I'm not clear on how to attack wind or a body of water."

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I could show you a memory that might make it clearer?

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"Please do."

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Here is her memory of fighting a wind spirit! It leaves a faint visible outline, a distortion in the air, and seems to affect only an area about fifty feet across at once, and while it's fast it's a bit predictable and Bloom charges through it, breathing fire. Eventually it wanders away, slightly diminished.

I have never had cause to hurt a water spirit, but that wind spirit was chaos for the birds I liked so I drove it away. Wind spirits are the fastest spirits. Water cannons like on those fire-fighting machines would have hurt it too. And a thick cloud of dust would have slowed it down.

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"All right. Some of them sound beneficial, but it's not something we're used to working with..."

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Some of them can be useful and beneficial, yes. I don't think spirits will come here soon.

I notice that I keep not thinking of things you might like to know until later. I'm not sure what to do about that.

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"So far it hasn't been a serious problem. I'm trying to think of ways to be more exhaustive but don't have any obvious ideas."

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While the topic is fresh in my mind: I had been assuming you already knew this but perhaps you do not - Enkindled beings are slightly smarter. The effect is significant in animals but would be very slight in Amentans, considering how intelligent you already are. Even the one who gained the magic of cold - I would not be surprised if he failed to notice.

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"We did have word on that already and have been offering IQ tests to your patients. They're getting smarter by an average of three quarters of a point if you abstract out the noise."

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It's a shame Draak can't be Enkindled without ruining their ability to do freeform magic. I would like to be smarter.

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"How does Enkindling affect that?"

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Draak have natural magic inside us. Our very breath is magical. It's extremely complex and elegant. I think that if I were two hundred times better at Enkindling, I might be able to turn someone into a Draak... At least in spirit. If we did not have such magic, it would be impossible for something so large and heavy to fly. Enkindling presses magical patterns into a new and self-sustaining configuration, which twists and bends the magic Draak have. Or did you mean why does it affect intelligence? That I am not quite sure of. Perhaps the same thing that allows spirits to think.

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"I meant the first but the second thing is also interesting to know."

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Seeker thinks we were designed by the Onesong. Or by someone. How would evolution have produced such a complex inner spirit for us but not done so for any of the other animals around?

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"Without your home planet to check for fossil records I don't know that our greens are likely to come to a very educated guess."

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It's a bad idea to go explore a bear's cave except with great caution. We don't know if there is one, or a thousand, or no bears in our old cave in this metaphor.

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