Oh, that would be quite a bit. "Hm..."

After more flipping through notes, and searching for a couple other notebooks and more flipping through them, he's able to provide a list of plants, mostly smaller ground-covering plants that compete with or parasitize the flowering vines. The vines themselves already regrow from the portions of their network that cling to the trees, though.

"Honestly, it's not related to plant life, but I'm a little worried about the dock. It's pretty durable, since the currents in the Zestsaksanrewp Strait were quite violent, but much heavier yearly snowfall might start wearing it down in a way I'm not really equipped to repair."

"We can take care of the dock," Tateneka, who can make recommendations to the First Contact Bursary Board, promises. "How often do you typically need resupply?"

He considers that question pretty thoroughly as well, putting away the seasonal weather notebooks and finding his resource usage logbooks. "Back home, food delivery and waste management came by once a month, but that was also when I was just a couple miles offshore, not in the middle of the ocean. The stores I have here right now can hold out for six months before I need to start foraging. I'd have to start defecating in the woods once my septic tank starts backing up though, which I'd like to avoid. I don't know exactly how soon that'd happen, but to be safe I'd probably guess a little over two months?"

Tateneka frowns.

"We usually design septic systems with a larger capacity than that. Is there something about the layout of your site ..."

She will spend a good amount of time talking through a plan for keeping the nature reserve functional, while continuing to subtly absorb cultural context from Rermjetsest. In the background, the Archivist makes a serious dent in the library.

The scanned pages get striped across a local redundant disk array. The presence of books with new metadata triggers an automatic push notification to the Archive's geographically distributed indexing servers. The backup servers notice that there are books registered with the index system that are not stored locally, and automatically add the missing books' UUIDs to their content-request advertisements.

The networking hardware between the Archive's backup servers and the CSLSS Contemporary Account's terrestrial downlink negotiates for reserved priority capacity — the benefit of having an institution as old as the written word, and with connections to every government on the planet. The books saturate the ship's network link, radio packets flying from the Archivist's device, to the ship, to the mainland where they become laser pulses, and spread out across the entire planet. All automatic, all designed with the most robust possible protocols, on a network stack that was recently proved formally correct.

And then the Archivist radios in a check to make sure the books are making it through anyway. Because you don't get to become the oldest institution in the world by just assuming that a battle-tested, proven-correct system works without actually checking.

Most þereminians don't really think about the details of how the Network, the Archive, the various territorial agreements, the networking standards, the spectrum-allocation systems, etc. all work together to smoothly save alien books — for one thing, they're distracted by the alien books. But if you told them, they would not be particularly surprised. The þereminian Network is a machine made of rules, wires, lasers, transistors, and, at every turn, the soul-deep understanding that getting written words to eyes that want to see them, forever, is important.

Someone who would be considerably more surprised is hiding in a storage closet.

Previously:

Dzarmpsoz is not unfamiliar with stowing away on ships. As an illicit healer, and a smoke-mage unwilling to live in a pen and chew grass like cattle, she's been on the run from Federation witch-hunters for years.

She had thought Zestsaksanrewp Island would be a reasonably safe place to hide out for a while, slowly build up her reserves again with shellfish and birds, then sneak back out on the ferry with one of the tourist crowds.

She did not anticipate the mainland disappearing into the fog like in some kind of ghost story. So, naturally, when some strangers showed up, she took her shot, sneaking onto their boat (cloaked and muffled, naturally), and hitched a ride back to their bigger, fancier, kind of scary metal ship.

She didn't realize that they're all speaking some kind of gobbledygook, though, which has made trying to eavesdrop a bit harder. Thus, her now keeping to herself in a storage closet, hoping that they won't notice her dipping into their food supply, at least not until they make land and she can disappear into the night again.

The CSLSS Contemporary Accounts is a shipping vessel — that is, a ship that usually carries many more boxes than people. A ship with many places to hide, and a relatively small crew. A ship that is crewed by sailors, not spies or professional pessimists.

All of which is to say: no, they don't notice her.

Especially not when some Emergency Services people are airlifted out as part of the first wave, and then as they busy themselves relocating everything to the IWTESSS Outstretched Hand when it anchors a few hundred feet away.

If she remains in her closet, emerging ever so carefully to snag food when nobody is around to observe ...

... then she will remain undiscovered until the ship docks.

Dzarmpsoz is a naturally curious woman. Her curiosity is what lead her to experiment with her smoke even as her parents forbade it, and what lead her to explore woods around their village, which in turn lead to her finding the wood-witch's camp, and thus to her tutelage under her.

But she is also a cautious woman, not by nature but by painstaking lesson after lesson. She wants to know what's happening outside, she wants to know these people are saying, she wants to know what happened. But she wants to stay alive more, and all the years of life as a witch have taught her that means staying hidden.

It's fortunate that, wherever she's ended up, they don't seem to be expecting her.

Well, they're not expecting her, but they are at least entertaining the possibility of disease. When the ship docks, it is not in its usual berth — instead, it is at a dock near a big white tent where the crew are being given a medical checkup and then conveyed to quarantine housing, just in case.

The dock itself is at the edge of a medium-sized port — too small for container ships, but large enough to have a decent amount of shipping traffic — which sits down a rolling, grass-covered hill from a dense, vertical city.

That looks a lot like some kind of disease control protocol. The island warden never mentioned or wrote anything about a disease, though? Maybe these people already had something before they arrived?

She hasn't felt any sickness in herself, but she gives herself a quick scan anyway, and she does discover that there's a bunch of new microbes in her gut and on her skin, though nothing that's out-competing her native microbiota (unsurprising, enchanted as they are), and none acting as sufficiently virulent pathogens as to overcome her immune system. Wherever she's ended up, the microbe species here look to be completely different. She should try and get a sample from one of the locals at some point, once she's in safer conditions.

The city is beautiful, like what she's imagined the secret land's cities looked like.

And like what her teacher said the High King's palace-city looked like. Naturally, since the High King had made her home in the image of the greatest thing she could imagine.

It looks dangerous. Like it has a lot of people, and a lot of eyes.

It'll be a bit tricky to skirt around it without going into the water, but she'll live. Hopefully, anyway. Once she's past the city's edge into the wilderness, she'll get away from the water and see if she can catch something to eat.

The landscape does not particularly suit sneaking, tending to wide, grassy expanses. But she's already near the edge of the port area, and so is able to circle around and get a hill between her and the city with not too much effort.

There are a number of scattered outlying buildings, connected by paved roads, but the density gradually decreases as she works her way away from the city.

To cruelly summarize the geography of the area, it has:
- Craggy cliffs
- Beaches
- Hills
- Grass
- Free-roaming sheep
- No trees

Once she's far enough out that she's not scared of being identified as a quarantine-breaker, she'll drop her cloak and muffler constructs, lack of cover be damned. She's low on smoke, low on life, and feeling the bone-deep tiredness that comes from being so spiritually drained, and the relative lack of security measures (or at least, security measures that didn't seem utterly unprepared for her) has left her judgement leaning towards conserving her remaining spirit.

She's sad to not have the spare mental bandwidth to appreciate the scenery more, a thin part of her brain feels like it must be beautiful, but too much of her is focused on other things right now to really experience it.

The sheep catch her interest, though. Do they seem marked, in a way where one sheep going missing will be noticed?

Yes — they have simple metal ear-tags.

Darn. It'd have been too easy otherwise, she supposes. Does she want to risk provoking a missing livestock investigation? How much spiritual energy would she be able to build back up, in how little time?

How big does this herd look to be? If she goes up to one of the sheep and gives them a sniff, how strong does its spirit smell?

The herd numbers perhaps 40 animals, although given that the sheep seem to have been given the free run of the area, it's possible that this is a smaller portion of a larger herd.

As for their spirits — they smell strong, healthy, and slightly of lanolin.

Djarz jajdwet, she's hungry. But she needs to be smart about this. What do the ear-tags look like? Do they have individual symbols on them, like the witch-runes? Strings of symbols that look like they could be names? Shorter strings with a lot of repeated symbols that might be numbers?

They have a pattern of lines of different thicknesses, with small square symbols etched below them. If she checks a sample of tags, she'll find that there are six different thicknesses of lines, thirty-six different square symbols, and exactly two lines per symbol.

Huh. That does look quite a bit numbers, even if it's not with symbols she's familiar with. If she interprets the thinnest line as a zero digit, the second thinnest as a one, and so one, and reads the lines from closest to the ear as the most significant digit and then decreasing as she goes further away, what sorts of numbers does she see?

Numbers such as 1052'4340'0241, 1050'0351'5422, 1052'4110'3520, 1054'0240'5254, and 1050'0244'4242. The writing is fairly small.

(Someone who was familiar with þereminian inventory-accounting practices would recognize these as being standard non-sequential barcodes.)

(Someone who was even more familiar with þereminian inventory-accounting practices would probably have opinions about things like hierarchical code-space delegation and woefully lacking error-checking. They would be able to tell you at great length about how the barcodes could be made more efficient and more durable by switching to a Galois error-correction scheme. And then their economist friend would interrupt them to point out that printing and scanning machinery for the current crop of barcodes has been standardized for a long time, and switching formats has a real cost, which isn't worth it in most cases. And then the discussion would devolve into an argument about the cost of tolerating legacy approaches and how much money should be set aside to manage such a transition.)

(Hypothetically.)

Well, she doesn't know much about this system, but it doesn't look they're obviously incrementing, so she can't just look for the sheep with the largest number and skim off the top. It does look like they all start with 105, though? So she'll look for one that has 1055 as the first four digits (and will settle for 1054 if she can't find any), then keep the selected sheep calm as she leans down and exhales a good puff of soporific smoke in front of its nose. Once it's fallen asleep, she'll heft it up over her shoulder and start carrying it away from herd, looking for some kind of nook or other hiding spot she could eat without scaring the herd and drawing attention.

There are several sheep that start with 1055. And the sheep are fairly used to humans, and unbothered to have one wander around in their flock. The other thing that Island Without Trees doesn't have is any large predators.

There is, across the field, a sort of shallow square pit lined with stones which seems as though it ought to do for hiding from the sheep (and anyone else looking out over the hills).

Hm. That definitely looks man-made. Before she starts, she'll lay the sheep back down for a moment and climb down into the pit to double check that there isn't anything weird inside.

That really depends on her standards of weird. The pit contains: a small plaque covered in dense writing, a circular arrangement of stones, an arch in one wall that opens onto sod, and the sort of long, tough grasses that will survive a winter buried under several feet of snow.

Everything is a little weird in a place where she can't even guess at the writing. This looks like it might be a place of ritual significance, though, which means someone could come by basically whenever. She'll climb back out, pick the sheep back up, and continue her search a good place to hide while she eats.