Pedestrians on this wide, landscaped, glass-bottomed bridge (mostly professional-looking women), yelp in surprise and scatter at the strange apparition in their midst.

Towering superstructures connect to either end of the bridge, stretching down through a few scattered clouds to the surface streets far below, and up to pierce the vast blue sky.

A vast blue sky that is full of moons. Or rather, planets. Looming huge, impossibly close, there are at least five green-blue spheres wrapped in the white of clouds, each rimmed by an odd halo of color. Each identical, though showing a different face.

Verity has just enough time to stop herself from falling before she gets distracted by the sky.  She stares at the planets, buildings, and clouds with confusion, unable to place what she's seeing.  

Everything is so big, and so distant.  

Among the passers-by who don't hurry on their way, there are a handful of women in pantsuits who seem to be speaking into holographic interfaces or holding said interfaces up, recording, while others still seem to be scrolling through pages of information that to their frustration and/or excitement cannot identify the stranger's mount.

A (young?) man dressed in a half-cape with epaulets picks up a little girl who squirms and protests, "Daddy! I wanna pet the blue doggy!"

Araeneve is paying a little more attention to the people, and notices something alarming immediately.  None of the people around here seem to have daemons. 

This snaps Verity out of her thoughts and prompts her to look around, too.  The clothing is also different than she's used to.  Holographic interfaces aren't unheard of, but she's not used to them being so common, either.  

There is, indeed, not a daemon in sight.

And there are a lot of people. Less than a hundred on this bridgeway, growing in number as more passers-by stop to see what the fuss is about, but other bridges between buildings wind through the great glassy edifices. In one direction the city continues all the way to the horizon, above and behind which looms a tower of impossible scale, surrounded by moving lights. In the other direction, the city tapers down, thinning into vast, cultivated parks that might or might not transition into lush forest about fifty miles off.

Ahead, inside the building at the end of this bridge, is a gorgeously decorated complex of multiple restaurants. Behind, inside the building at the other end of this bridge, is what appears to be an office complex and a showroom for what is probably some form of modern art.

Gawkers murmur to each other curiously but no one thinks to question or interfere with the woman on the unidentified creature. After all, there're too many summons-species, familiar-species, and imported aliens to keep track of, and teleporting outside authorized transit points is a crime that is only slightly more severe than speeding in a groundcar.

She should probably find someone to explain what happened, or where she is.  That's going to be difficult, considering the visceral reaction of horror at their lack of visible souls.  They don't seem to be zombies, so maybe they're in another place nearby?  She can't imagine a good reason to separate everyone, though.  

With the lack of anyone suspicious nearby who might have been responsible, she heads in the direction of the office complex. 

People get out of her way. The little girl squirms and makes another demand to pet the blue doggy. One woman steps off the side of the bridgeway and flies under her own power to the next bridge over. A few people gawk at that, but it is approximately one-quarter as interesting as the majestic alien dog-creature.

Inside the office complex, there are cavernous, tastefully decorated floors of desks and holographic screens, sparsely occupied. The lobby is suspended, giving a view into three such floors, connected by wide staircases to one side. There is a rather generic corporate logo etched in glass behind a wide, ivory reception desk.

The receptionist is an extremely pretty young man, dressed in a symmetrical golden split cape over a sheer white fishnet shirt with bangles at the ribs and a low-cut pair of airy silken trousers. He watches the approaching alien beast with noticeable this-is-outside-my-job-description alarm.

Verity dismounted Araeneve just before entering the building, but the suicune is still following close behind.  They'd never had an especially long range from each other, even after Araeneve had settled into such a large shape.  

She feels distinctly out of place in the large and fancy structure.  Her own clothing is decent, made of silk in every shade of blue and woven with bits of crystal in elaborate fractal patterns trailing down from the shoulders, but she didn't grab her finest outfit to tromp about in the farm district.  It's about as ratty an outfit as she was allowed to wear, as a Legendary, the pants in a slightly different array of blue shades where they'd been replaced once before from mud and tearing through brambles.  The boots only match in that they are blue.

She walks up to the receptionist and tries, "Hello. I was teleported to the bridge outside against my will by some kind of... mirror?  I'm not sure where I am."

Receptionist boy visibly relaxes.

"Welcome to Vivid. We're located on the 140th floor of the Arylide Plaza, South Cranagan 4th District. How may I help you?"

"I'm not sure.  The mirror teleported me somewhere far enough away that I don't recognize any of that.  Originally I was on a sub-light generational ship, travelling through space.  Is there... some kind of place where people who suddenly appear are supposed to go?"

"Oh, that does sound like quite a trip. Yes, I do believe I can call the local TSAB office. They should know what to do. One moment."

Receptionist boy calls up a holographic screen and talks to an incident handler, who agrees to send someone to pick up the displaced individual and help her out.

"All good. Someone's on the way."

"Thank you."  

Now she can just kind of stand around and wait for them to arrive, and gawk at the architecture.  Not that there weren't large and opulent rooms on the ships, but they went for different aesthetics.  

An intricate circular diagram of scintillating violet light unfolds at the back of the room, in a clearly-marked section of floorspace. It builds itself from a point, spreading out. It rotates... only it is more like it is rapidly reforming itself than actually rotating. It is not a hologram. The light it gives off is nearly tangible.

A svelte woman appears, slipping into existence through rended spacetime. She wears elaborate layers of form-fitting subtly glowing purple armor decorated heavily with dark blue opals and accented by detached white sleeves on all four limbs that do not appear to obey the laws of physics. She is standing on the not-hologram, about a foot off the floor.

She hops off and approaches. "Hello! TSAB General Affairs Agent Eelesia Rimac. I understand you two are quite significantly displaced. Would you like to come talk about what we can do about that?"

"Sure.  I'm Verity-and-Araeneve.  Do you get people displaced by mirrors often?"

Eelesia beckons toward her magic circle.

"Mirrors in particular weren't involved in any of the incidents I'm familiar with. There was a mirror?"

"I was walking through a farm and heard something coming up from behind us.  All I saw was a mirror coming towards me, and then I was here."

"How odd."

She moves to the middle of her magic Circle.

"Step onto the Circle, please."

Right.  She doesn't feel especially confident about the magic circle, but there's not much choice.  Verity and Araeneve step on at once, Verity's hand in Araeneve's mane, just in case it transports them immediately.  

The Circle is... not quite solid, but solid enough, and provides an incongruous amount of traction.

It doesn't transport them immediately. Eelesia has to center herself and then use the Circle as the firmament of and fulcrum for the mana pattern she emits from her own body.

Navigation will, of course, be handled by her Intelligent Device. "Destination: Traceback."

Soaring Anima responds in a synthetic feminine voice, DIMENSIONAL TRANSFER.

And now they're somewhere else.

A cavernous space, big enough to hold the detailed holographic map of all nine of the primary dimensionally linked Childas and surrounding star systems at something close to accurate scale. A smooth, mirror-finish floor extends into the distance in every direction. Every hundred feet or so, large, lit-up work areas are sunken into the floor. Each pit is as large as some apartments, ringed by sofa-like seating, and contains a center of holographic screens, desks, chairs, a break area, and a meeting area.

Eelesia's is much like the countless others spaced across this vast chamber. She steps off the Circle and down the handful of steps, beckoning Verity and Araeneve towards the console at the center. As soon as they follow her, the Circle disassembles itself, scattering into motes of purple light.

They follow, Verity still holding her daémon's mane and letting her guide as she's distractedly craning her neck to look at everything.

Eelesia takes a seat on a plush armchair in the meeting nook.

"So, first thing. What would you say your highest or most urgent priority is right now?"

She has to think about that for a minute.  They weren't really needed for anything important on the ships, and would rather not go back anyway.

"More information about... everything.  Why people don't have their daémons around.  Where I am - I'm guessing this is a planet?"

"Yes." She points up at the second planet from the star, in the center layer of the nine parallel star systems. "That one."

She goes on to explain, "The Time-Space Administration Bureau is the coordinating organization for an interstellar and interdimensional disaster prevention and relief force. We're headquartered here, on MidChilda. General Affairs Agents like me don't get involved in Lost Logia containment or other big disasters you might have heard about, but it is still my job to prevent and to solve problems, only the problems I deal with are the small, civil ones. Like ensuring that situations such as yours result in the least possible hardship on all sides."

Eelesia pauses, thoughtful. (While her device, Soaring Anima, does a context search for "daemon". She gets many results, none of them usefully clarifying.)

"I'm sorry, I don't know what a 'daemon' is, so I can't answer why none are present."

"I'm a daemon," Araeneve speaks up.  Suicune aren't gendered, but the voice sounds more masculine than feminine.  "Daemon are the souls of our person, in physical form.  Everyone has one - at least that we've ever seen before today, and different people get different shapes with different abilities.  We can't go very far from each other, and it's painful to come into contact with a person who isn't our own."  

"We just arrived today, less than an hour ago," Verity says.  "Before that, our ships never got into contact with people outside of our fleet.  About 200 years ago, our people used to live in a pocket dimension of some kind, with a single planet in it.  The pocket dimension began to die, and they built a fleet of ships to go to a new one.  They made it to a much larger universe, but between stars, and have been going towards the closest likely planet ever since."

"Ooh. What can you tell me about this pocket dimension? Size? Properties? Boundary conditions? Was its field neutrality higher-energy or lower-energy than real space? Do you know what caused it to collapse? Did it have any mappings to imaginary..."

Eelesia stops herself, trailing off with a sheepish giggle.

"Sorry. That can wait."

She glances between Verity and Araeneve.

"Are the, are you a collective entity with two bodies? I was assuming you were separate individuals. Silly of me."

"We are the same person in a lot of ways."  She's never had to describe daemons before, and is unsure how someone who doesn't have one is different.

"I can try to remember what I learned of our old world in school, but I'm not much of a scientist."

"That's okay. Tentatively, you are the only point of contact with and only source of information on your civilization. I should have a trained interviewer from the Infinite Library talk to you, later, if you don't mind."

Eelesia pauses and peers at Araeneve. The soul in physical form, they said? That is actually potentially concerning. Probably not urgently so, if it the configuration is standard among her people, but still.

"This isn't urgent either, but would you consent to a medical scan? I've never heard of a configuration of body and soul like you say you have... unless calling Araeneve your physical soul was allegorical?"

"It's literal."  The phrasing does make her a bit more comfortable.  At least it implies that they have some known configuration of souls.  

"A medical scan sounds like a good idea.  Speaking of that, I have up-to-date vaccinations for diseases on the fleet, but you probably have a different set here, too."

"Oh, we don't, actually! Our healing mages are all trained in biotic exclusion, and we mastered endobiome cultivation decades ago. If anyone at all gets sick ever, that's a big enough deal that it usually is national news."

Eelesia pulls up a holographic screen while talking and requests an appointment.

"I'm not an ontobiologist, but I have role-played one on the extranet! Ahem. The soul as we understand it is the part of us that extracts mana from the dimensional sea, like, gills extracting oxygen from water. When our linker cores respire that mana, our soul is the thing that is moving. But it doesn't have physical form, and some people have survived having their souls completely destroyed; they eventually grew back, and this had no effect at all on those people's minds."

Eelesia gets a curious look on her face. "Huh, I wonder what would happen if I... do you know how to soulspeak?"

The idea of souls getting destroyed is unnerving.  "I don't know what soulspeak is.  Or, uh, mana, dimensional sea, linker cores...?" 

~Soulspeak is when you modulate your mana respiration instead of your breath, to talk. It takes more practice than talking out loud but not much more. Most teenagers learn it, even though it takes above-average mana capacity to do more than whisper.~

When Araeneve hears the not-sound, there's a strange tingling electrical sensation going along with the words.  Not painful or debilitating, but alarming.  Araeneve yelps, and jumps to his feet, hackles raised.

Verity can't hear any of it, but the alarm is transferred.  "You tried soulspeak?  I didn't hear anything."

"I did."

"Well?"

"I..." He wants to be outside, somewhere else.  He whines and tries to nudge Verity away, not that he has any idea where the door is.  "Uh.  Something about teenagers?  I.  Wasn't paying attention, sorry."

"Sorry! I should've guessed that might be a peculiar experience for a... daemon."

Eelesia notices the restless nudging.

"...no one will complain or stop you if you wanna, like, sprint to the far wall and back."

Restless energy aside, Verity would rather stay.  Araeneve can pace back and forth within range.

"Our daemon halves show emotion much more readily than our person, but that doesn't necessarily mean I think it's worthwhile to run around right now."

"Fair."

"It's actually very reassuring that Araeneve could hear me at all, but also somewhat unsettling that Verity couldn't. Usually that means someone's soul is completely gone. The implications are rather fascinating. Do your people have mages or any thaumtronics?"

"No, those don't sound familiar.  Our daemons can learn moves which do things we sometimes refer to as magic, but humans can't learn them."

"Ooh. Like what?"

"There are about 800 known moves, and each daemon species is able to perform a few dozen kinds on average and have 4 ready in their mind at a time.  Some moves can be learned by almost anyone, while others are rare.

"Some create a material out of nothing: water, sand, rock, silk, plant matter, steel, gold.  They can generate electricity, light, or heat, or take away heat to make something cold.  Um.  Healing, teleportation, putting people to sleep or stopping them from moving.  A few others.  Many are only useful in fights between daemons.

"There are also special effects that certain daemons have.  Suicune like Araeneve in particular can purify water.  Those don't count for the 4-move limit.  Right now, Araeneve knows the moves Blizzard, Surf, Reflect, and Rest - that means she can create a room-sized vortex of cold air and snow, create water, make a wall of light that slows things trying to pass through, and can go into a short trance-like sleep to recover if injured."

Eelesia bounces in her seat a little.

"I want to ask a ton of questions about this, especially the creating material out of nothing part, but it remains true that answering your questions should come first."

Eelesia composes herself.

"What do you need to know to decide what you want to do going forward?"

She considers this.  "Whether it's possible to contact the fleet sounds important.  I don't necessarily want to go back, though.  What my options are."

"Most of... everything?  About this place.  Laws?"

"Your options include anything I can fit in my discretionary budget for the day, which is considerable. If you'd like to apply for Childan citizenship, your subsequent options will include anything you can afford with your then irrevocable Civil Dividend. You don't have to pick off a limited list or anything. What I do here is do my best to get you where you actually want to be in life. Administrated Space is a strict meritocracy and we don't believe in punitive justice. The only laws we strongly enforce are the ones about merit fraud, which is not something you might do by accident."

Eelesia pulls up a full-color holographic map of the Milky Way galaxy between them.

"Unfortunately, whatever transported you to downtown Cranagan has proven itself untraceable, so to contact your fleet, first we'll have to find them the hard way. Do you recognize this galaxy, at least?"

"We're in a spiral galaxy.  It looks about the same, but there's supposed to be a lot and I'm not sure I could tell them apart.  Uh, assuming this is the right one, it'd be somewhere in one of these places," she points.  In the disc of the galaxy itself but near the very edge, in-between the star-dense arms. 

"We've been headed towards a star we've identified as being stable and having a rocky planet with a day-night cycle and the other things we can't terraform ourselves.  It should be another 90 years if we don't develop ftl along the way or get someone with a Palkia daemon.  Travelling at about 0.08 lightspeed, with that being the best planet within 200 years of our travel."  She shudders a bit.  She hates the ships, and even now that there's probably a way she doesn't have to spend her entire life there the thought of it is still depressing.  

Eelesia peers at the stars around where Verity points.

"That's not near anything of ours, and it is well outside teleportation range. We'd have to charter a dimensional cruiser to go investigate. Which we can do, to be clear, but not today. Possibly not even this week. I'll log and queue the request, if you want me to, though."

Eelesia points at the thick part of the 'elbow' where one of the spiral arms joins the 'bar' of core stars. "We're here, by the way."

"Even if it isn't done this year, finding them will get them somewhere not-the-fleet faster than they will on their own."  Most of the people there are happy with their lives, but they should still have a choice.  

She nods about the map, but doesn't know if the location is important.  

Araeneve chimes up after Verity can't think of what to say.  "We're not sure where we want to be, when given options.  People's fate is pretty tightly chosen on the ships."

"...should I perhaps ask where you don't want to be?"

"I don't want to be a religious figurehead.  Or anything to do with politics or leadership."  That one is obvious and automatic to her.  More slowly and thoughtfully, she adds, "I liked going to different parts of the ship to purify the waterways and reservoirs, especially in the night when no one would stare, or in the less-visited farm sections."

"Oh," Eelesia says. That was fast, and specific. "You were a religious figurehead? Sounds like that was really not fun for you. Don't worry. That certainly won't be difficult to avoid."

"What did you like most about your night-time purification jaunts?"

"Suicune are Legendary.  They occur about 1 in a 100,000 people, and are unusually powerful.  The religion believes that people with legendaries are reincarnations of everyone who's ever settled with the same one, and are expected to guide humanity."  

"Getting to wander around, see different parts of the ships."

That goes against every bit of meritocratic common sense, Eelesia doesn't say. "I see. That sounds very unfair."

"You like exploring?"

"Yes.  Seeing new places, anyway.  I don't know how well I'd do going anywhere completely unknown."

Eelesia nods. "It sounds like you needed the escapism, more than anything."

A message arrives. She reads it.

"Our medical staff can be ready for you in twenty minutes. Is that okay?"

"That's fine."  

She watches Eelesia to see if they should be standing up and going somewhere, or if the medical staff will be coming to them.  

Eelesia smiles at her guests' apparent restlessness.

"I can teleport us when its time. Or, we could go on a little adventure and race to the edge..."

She had forgotten about instant teleportation.  Still, "A race sounds like fun."

Verity will need a moment to get on Araeneve's back, then lines up to start running.

Eelesia pings the interior traffic server. A pair of illuminated trails light up inside the mirror-floor outside her sunken work area, flashing along in sequence, vanishing to a point in the far distance where a hair-thin line of light reveals the sky outside.

A ripple in space-time shakes the clutter on Eelesia's desks as she lifts off, hovering up to to float over Verity's shoulder. Lines of violet light glint along the seams in her form-fitting armor. It is rather a point of pride with Eelesia that she is among the exceptional few who can fly without a spell, on sheer power and mental focus, respiring mana in a way that creates localized turbulence in the dimensional sea, warping space around her body to create propulsion. She doesn't expect Verity and Araeneve to notice the significance of the skill but does maybe look a little smug.

"Ready when you are."

Verity counts down, then they start racing. 

Suicune are pretty fast when they get going, nearly twice as fast as a cheetah and with more than enough stamina to go to the wall and back several times over without tiring.

Eelesia waits to see how fast they are before catching up easily and keeping pace in the air beside them. She slaloms playfully from one side to the other.

It's twenty miles to the edge, a ten-minute journey.

That thread of light in the distance... is not a wall.

Verity is not good at chicken.  They slow to a comfortable stop, unwinded by the brief run, then pad the remaining few feet to look at the not-a-wall.

They're very high. A forcefield keeps the wind out, but there is no wall and no window, and they're high enough to see significant curvature of the planet. The city spreads across the land below, diminishing into suburbs and parkland towards the horizon.

Directly below, many more conventional skyscrapers, great gleaming testaments to free-handed architects, reach up towards them, looking like toys.

A handful of tiny specks that might be vehicles or people descend toward the metropolis below, from elsewhere.

"Come on. It's safe. I promise."

She drifts out through the forcefield, her hair streaming in the wind. Then she cuts her propulsion and drops like a stone.

It's not more dangerous looking than the air-stunts people like to do in the ships, and Eelesia seems unlikely to want her dead and more than able to catch her.  After a moment of steeling herself, they take a leap out of the tower chasing her.  

Unprotected ears pop.

The strobing holographic trails continue, marking a path straight down through open air.

Eelesia is falling backwards, but when she sees Verity and Araeneve catching up, she spins into a dive. This is a much more fair contest, purely about gravity and aerodynamics. And in that at least Araeneve has her beat. Eelesia falls behind.

At about twice again the altitude of the tallest skyscraper, they fall through a screen of light. The air in front of them luminesces, like a re-entry burn, but its not hot. It doesn't burn. The drag field slows them gently from terminal velocity to a fall speed that even an unaided human could survive, as the holographic trails curve up into a gliding path to lead them toward a large balcony on the side of a skyscraper that is adorned with a big green plus sign.

Eelesia lets Verity and Araeneve touch down first, then darts down to alight beside them.

"Fun, huh? But just so you know, the safety barrier doesn't cover the whole city. Just 1st district. So."

Even after a little while of slow descent to calm down, Verity's hands are still bunched white-knuckled in her daemon's mane.  She debates with herself for a moment.  Yeah, it was fun, though she thinks she'd prefer a solid hang glider if she does it again, barrier or not.  She takes note of the barrier's location, and nods.  

"Where are we now?"

"First Veteran Medical Center."

The balcony they're on is maybe a hundred stories up, and is sectioned off into what appear to be several different kinds of landing pad, but that side of the building directly faces a chasm between skyscrapers, a massive thoroughfare running into the base pillar of the vaguely mushroom-shaped space tower.

Eelesia leads them inside, into a massive but comfy-looking lobby. The boy at the reception desk (also wearing another variation on waist-and-cape coverage that shows off a bit of bare chest) is expecting them. He gawks at Araeneve but keeps it subtle. He tells them that Healer Zenos will be with them momentarily and to please have a seat while they wait.

The lobby isn't empty, but it's big enough relative to the small number of waiting patients that it feels empty.

She sits, noticing the room size and the size of the people.  "If you don't have daemons, why are the rooms here so large?"

Eelesia looks around at the perfectly normal... okay, actually, yes. Objectively speaking, there does tend to be more room than necessary, most places.

"Hm. I've never really thought about it, but now that you ask, I suppose its because it doesn't really cost us more or take more time to build big than it does to build small, so really the only constraint on size would be the inherent impracticality experienced by people who cannot teleport or fly."

"This room wouldn't be out of place on Citadel of Spring, the ship designed to accommodate the largest daemons, but we don't have anything like the large room we jumped down from.  My ancestors had less resources and time when they were putting the ships together.  

"Can many people here teleport or fly?"

"Linker capacity obeys a logarithmic curve. The low end is limited to operating thaumtronics, and around the fortieth percentile is where an average person might begin to accomplish more with magic than with physical strength and also where it becomes practical to maintain a Barrier Jacket. Anyone can cast a flight spell with the aid of a Device, but to overcome habitable gravity one typically needs to be in the sixtieth percentile or higher. I am able to generate a twelve-G warp bubble without any technological aid. That's rare. To put that in perspective, I'm ninety-sixth percentile and my linker capacity is measured in grams. Ninety-ninth percentile capacities are measured in kilograms of mana, though; I think there are only like a dozen of those in the whole system---three of them are super famous actually."

"Teleporting via dimensional transfer is complicated and highly variant in power requirements but ends up being doable routinely by about a third of our trained agents. Flight is mostly a measure of raw ability while teleporting mostly isn't."

Verity focuses intensely, trying to follow that.  She was never good at math.  Do the percentiles go before or after the logarithmic-ing?  Well, there are only a dozen 99ths in the system and more than 1200 people living here.  So sixtieth percentile is probably something less than 40% of the population.

"I think you might have more people who can learn to teleport than we do, if agents aren't too unusual in capacity.  Most people who can learn to teleport on the fleet do so.  Flying is more commonly learnable than teleport for us, but less often learned."

Depending on how short 'momentarily' means in this culture, she might not have time to ask more clarifying questions.

"You have teleportation? Without---"

A door opens and out steps the hottest guy they have ever met. Even by the standards of a post-ailment post-scarcity civilization, he is striking on the level of a superstimulus optimized for the alien standards of beauty present in Childan society.

As per protocol, his Barrier Jacket is deployed. The design might be slightly inappropriate for a medical professional but the highly personal nature of one's Barrier Jacket gets a lot of leeway in this society, and he considers the occasional sexism from women who don't take attractive young men very seriously to be part of the fun. Black, layered, form-fitting trousers with strategic cutouts and glowing emerald embroidery, tucked into greaves with green armor plates around the ankle. An entirely bare torso, barring a few strategically placed emerald straps. Tight, cape-like sleeves across his shoulders and down his arms, threaded with fastening belts covered in more glowing emerald embroidery. On his left wrist, a chrome bracer set with a large emerald jewel.

He takes in the sight of Araeneve and gives them a warm, professional smile. "We're ready for you now."

In retrospect, she isn't sure why she expected alien doctors to wear the same pink and white uniforms as fleet ones.  That's going to be rather distracting, and she intentionally forces her view on the door frame behind him, flustered.  Maybe people here are just used to this, and she doesn't want to be the weird one.  

"Okay," she says, standing up.  If this is anything like doctor visits on the fleet there'll be an examination room, though she supposes he might just wave his hands and do some kind of alien healing magic in the lobby.

(He mentally notes Verity's flustered effort to avoid ogling him with a small amount of concerned interest but doesn't acknowledge it since that sort of thing isn't relevant in his current professional capacity.)

Healer Zenos leads them down a short spacious hallway into a cavernous circular room. The wall(s) are display screens. A white Static Circle hums softly overhead in the center of the ceiling. The center of the room has a circular raised dais, about a foot high, illuminated from within with a softer white light.

"We'll be performing a PADATS and a HORI, is that correct?"

"Yes, that's right."

Eelesia is too demisexual for unexpected physical hotness to fluster her in the first place, and she can also multitask well enough to ogle the pretty without losing any other trains of thought. But she does stare a bit.

"That's a Phase Aligned Deep Axis Topology Scry and a Hyperlight Ordered Refraction Imaging," Eelesia explains helpfully.

Phase aligned... what?  That sounds like something a ship in a sci-fi story might do to a passing asteroid.  She just nods.  Presumably they know what they're doing.

"It's okay. Most people don't know what those stand for."

Smiling, he turns to Eelesia. "Why don't you go first. Demonstrate how this works. Please, step on the dais and withdraw your Barrier Jacket."

"Of course."

Eelesia hops up onto the illuminated dais, spins around, and then her body is engulfed in eye-searing eldritch hues, like the Color Out Of Space is trying to burst through the seams of reality. A moment later, the eldritch colors all suck into a small card-shape and disappear, leaving behind only the metal jewel-set card form of her Device. Eelesia herself is now dressed in ordinary slacks and a sweater.

Healer Zenos runs the scans.

Images appear on the wall behind him. He waves at them, pulling them out in holographic form to hover in front of him.

The first one shows something that bears some resemblance to a nervous system, at least until it rotates in some higher dimension, collapsing down to a point before exploding outwards in a rough sphere of swooping protrusions and rippling ribbons of light. It kind of resembles a ball of trees made of feathers, as rendered by an artist who'd never actually seen either.

"What we're looking at here is an extrapolated image, approximately the shadow Eelesia Rimac's soul would cast on her linker core as seen from within. It lets us get a good look at the skein dynamics around her interface with the dimensional sea as well as watch her mana respiration in real time. Which all looks perfectly normal for a healthy A-class mage, by the way."

The other is a near-perfect life-size image of Eelesia herself.

"Fair warning, most people find this next part a little gross if they're not used to it."

With that, he pokes the hologram, and it... comes apart. Disassembling itself to reveal all of Eelesia's internal organs laid out in detailed full-color, operating in real-time. Little free-floating tags of holographic text appear throughout, reading out data on metabolics and cell conditions.

That's disturbing, though Verity's rule when it comes to medical things is if it helps keep people alive and healthy, it doesn't matter how creepy it is.  She looks at the internal organs enough to identify what she's looking at, but winds up turning back to the abstract feather trees.

"Okay," she says.  "Would I get scanned seperate from Araeneve or at once?"

"Good question. I think we'll try separately, first."

She nods, and heads towards the platform, ready to step on once Eelesia gets down.

With Eelesia exchanged for Verity, he runs the PADATS.

A pair of perfect reflected sine waves form, the hologram displaying a flat (2d), pair of opposed curves like a river of darkness in a mirror. One end converges to a point, while the other frays into invisibility. Arcs of light zip between the two black sine curves, forming ever-shifting bands of monochromatic light.

Healer Zenos stares. "What."

"Okay... This is different."

She looks over at the image.  "That's the one that normally shows the soul?"

"It shows a projection of the soul on the linker core, yes. But I have no idea what I'm looking at, here. You don't appear to have a linker core, but without a linker core the PADATS should just be blank. I've never even heard of anything like this."

He fiddles with the settings. The image stubbornly refuses to change.

Well, it refuses to change in response to his fiddling. If Verity or Araeneve fidget or move around at all, they might notice that the gap between the sine curves shrinks as they get further apart, and grows as they get nearer each other.

Considering how Araeneve is prone to pacing when nervous, this doesn't take too long once its clear there's something strange going on.

They make a humming noise.  "It's picking up me?  Or our bond," they guess, sidestepping closer then farther from Verity, keeping their eyes on the changing waves.  

"I wonder if it'll just show a hologram of me if I jump on."  They look at the healer, tilting their head quizzically for permission.  

"Your bond?"

He waves Araeneve up.

The frayed ends of the twin dark rivers bloom into full 3d, filling the room with snaking corona'd tubular constructs. Five of them, each like the silhouette of a snake crossed with a pitcher plant, shrinking to sharp points as the far ends fade into the extradimensional distance.

He blinks. "...I think the two of you, collectively, are a linker core. How does this bond of yours work? What do you know about it? What can you tell me?"

"Daemons are the souls of people in my world," Verity says, gaping at the suddenly appearing images while trying to come up with a rundown on daemons.  "Everyone on the ships, and the world we came from before, is born with one.  When we're children they start out as Ditto - a formless blob which can take the forms of other daemons around it.  During puberty, they change into one of a few hundred other shapes permanently, based on personality.  Each can do different magical things.

"We need to stay within about 20 feet from each other at all times, or there's psychological pain.  It's possible to Separate by ignoring the pain and walking much farther until the bond reconfigures itself into a version without distance limits, but almost no one does it.  I haven't.  

"If a person dies, the daemon vanishes.  Also if the daemon dies the human always dies too.  That's rarer since they're so much more durable, but it sometimes happens.  Also, there's psychological pain if our daemon is touched by another human - they can only be touched by their person half or other daemons.  Or inanimate objects, I guess.  

"Um." She tries to think of other facts.  "We have different minds, but things transfer over.  Emotions, especially.  We're the same person with two consciousnesses and bodies, not two people tied together.  Normally conversations have the two humans talking to each other, then the two daemons talking to each other at the same time.  Lots of daemons only talk to their person or other daemons.  They usually express emotions the human is trying to ignore or hide."

She still thinks for a few more seconds, but can't come up with anything else obvious.

Eelesia listens raptly, but restrains herself to not interrupt.

"I see."

He has questions, he ticks them off on his fingers as he asks them.

"Do the properties of the emotion sharing change if the bond changes? What counts as a touch? Does the pain have specific properties or effects? Do you know why death propogates? What, exactly, counts as death and is it recursive?"

"For death, no one has ever been revived after their daemon vanished.  I haven't read much about it.  There is a popular horror movie monster called a 'zombie' that are people who've had their souls die or been removed, and some people think they might have been based on something real or possible.

"Touch is skin contact.  Daemon fur or feathers counts as them, but human hair doesn't count as human.  Gloves are technically enough to stop it, but still taboo.  It's pain is like... the person is everywhere and invading your mind, or has their hands in your brain.  Accidental brushes or toddlers with faulty instincts are unpleasant.  Harmful intent or longer than a few seconds makes it much worse.  It's placed in the same category as rape, morally and legally, with similar long-term effects."

"Nothing changes with distance Separation other than the distance.  They'll be upset for a while afterwards, but I haven't read anything that implies it's an unnatural sort of unhappiness.

"As for the feeling of separation - it feels like you're abandoning your soul.  And a little like you're doing something cruel to yourself.  Or like trying to intentionally bend your finger enough to break it?"  That's not quite it, but it's such an obvious feeling it's hard to put into words.  She stares at the display, trying to find a better way of phrasing it.  "I can go a little ways out.  Enough to feel the strain but not too bad.  I want to see if it registers on the hologram somehow."  

"It sounds like it is the exact conditions under which daemons vanish that are important for us to know. Do you not know those?"

He nods to Araeneve. "I'm guessing it would be safe for you to touch any mage with an active Barrier Jacket, but if even gloves are taboo it would be unreasonable to test this."

As Verity steps off the scanning dais, the visualization blanks out completely. Apparently the PADATS doesn't work on a daemon alone. They have to put Verity back on the dais and have Araeneve trot aside instead to get a good look.

The hologram of the twin dark rivers shows those rivers almost touching. The light between the rivers flickers intensely, compressed, as each twinge of pain is accompanied by a shard of light breaking off into one of the rivers before rushing away down that river towards either Verity or Araeneve.

Araeneve jumps back to right next to the dais as soon as the tests have enough data, but doesn't get back onto it to fill the room with ghost-snake-things again.  Verity kneels down to run her hands through the mane.  "I'd really like to see the difference between mine and someone separated, but I don't think I could manage it personally.  What is the light that was breaking off?"

"I'm not sure.  Probably brain death?"  She's been trying to think of more details.  This just isn't something she ever studied.  "Organs kept alive in labs don't count as people.  The daemon will survive for a while if the person's fallen into freezing water, and they don't vanish for heart transplants, so it isn't heartbeat.  Uh, going the other direction, it only appears when we first breathe, though there isn't any delay or strangeness about that for emergency babies taken out a bit early."

"I have no idea. I'd have to get a sample... I'd have to design a new procedure, just to get a sample. But I'd strongly suspect that a 'separated' bond looks like two straight rivers, parallel, without any of that light in between." He points at the hologram and a readout enlarges. "See? There's slightly less of whatever this is, now. I suspect your 'separation' is the process of discharging this exotic mass entirely."

"And I'll make a note in your file. Err on the side of caution should you ever require invasive medical attention. Alright, shall we move on to the HORI? I expect that'll be less exciting."

"Okay."  She stands back up and holds still.  Possibly not necessary, but it couldn't hurt.  Verity focuses her eyes on Araeneve, suspecting the image of organs might be worse if they're her own.

At least for the standards of her own less-advanced civilization she's a healthy 21 year old, tall at 1.86 meters and more muscular than average.  She has a small chip implanted which does birth control and deals with menstrual issues, and a small scar on her left thumb.  

Healer Zenos studies the exploded hologram of all her organs.

"Pre-panhuman physiology. Cybernetic patch. Unusual antibody mix. Yes, there don't appear to be any surprises. What about Araeneve?"

They swap places.  

Those certainly are a lot of translucent, crystalline organs accompanied by error messages. It's not even returning unknowns, just failures to even get a response.

"It appears you aren't even slightly organic. Huh. This reads like you have a Barrier Jacket up, but if that were the case the interior imaging would also be dark. A thaumotic conjuration, maybe? That would fit the other things you've said."

Verity makes a considering hum and peers at the crystalline organs.  She doesn't have enough knowledge to make an informed comment, and isn't sure what to ask, either.  

"Barrier Jackets and thaomotic conjurations would be things made out of magic?" she guesses, trying to put what she knows of what's going on together.  

"Made of magic isn't a coherent idea, really," Eelesia chimes in. "But there are a lot of different ways physical objects can be made out of mana. That does fit. Mana constructs of any variety are inherently non-perpetual without an on-going imposition of order."

She hesitates a moment. "Do you not know what a Barrier Jacket is? You were kind of acting like you knew what we were talking about, but..."

"We don't have anything like them.  The name - or whatever translation effect is letting me talk to everyone is translating it to - is descriptive, though.  I've figured out that they're the glowy outfit that you were wearing, and probably the one that Healer Zenos is wearing too.  Are they always existent, but pulled out of somewhere when you want them, or do you make them when you put them on?  And I gather they cover your entire body in a barrier, not just what looks clothlike, right?"  

Eelesia nods.

"That's correct. The clothlike and jewel-like parts serve as anchors and fulcrums for several flavors of integrated protective phase barrier, yes. The physical parts are made of our own mana but we don't conjure them each time. They're extremely massive relative to even a high mana capacity like mine, so typically one's Device grows and maintains one's Barrier Jacket in the same hyperspace pocket where it keeps most of its other machinery."

"We also don't have Devices." She thinks back.  Some of these terms are blurring together to her.  "Those are the things that let people cast 'spells' which are maybe something like daemon moves?"

"Thinking of those, I'd be interested in seeing if Araeneve using Reflect or Rest shows up on the scans.  Or the other two they know, but those might be destructive."

"Effects don't usually."

Eelesia nods again. "Spell is our colloquialism for a pre-programmed technology-aided thaumobaric resonance pattern. High-energy mana-driven field effect shaping, in other words. I can explain how that works when we're done here, if you'd like."

"I'd appreciate that.  Was there anything else to do, other than scans?  I'd kind of like to know what the snake-looking-things in the scans were or meant." 

She suspects this is all a bit out of the range of normal for here, but she also doesn't know how much variation linker cores have in their appearance, only ever seeing one normal image.

"I couldn't begin to guess. It may simply be the normal ontobiological anatomy of a daemon, but since Araeneve is the only daemon I've ever examined there's no way to be sure."

"And no, we're all done here. Medically speaking, you're free to go wherever or do whatever."

"Oh, good."  That would be following Eelesia around.  They look towards her for the cue to leave.  

Eelesia exchanges pleasantries with Healer Zenos and then they can head back out into the lobby. She meanders in the general direction of the teleportation area.

"So, that was all interesting, and revealed nothing urgent. How are you feeling about things?"

"It's interesting!  I think I'm seeing the general shape of things here, though I still have a lot of questions."

Araeneve is practically bouncing with energy beside them.  "You mentioned explaining spells?  This time in smaller words?"

"I can do that! Before I do that, are you, like, hungry or anything else in that genre."

She instinctively checks her pockets for a phone, but doesn't have it with her.  "Uh, I ate about an hour before the mirror-thing ate me," she says.  She's not sure how long that's been.  "I don't feel especially hungry yet, but if it's normally lunchtime here I can start adapting to the local schedule."

"Just checking."

They reach the teleport area. Her blazing violet Circle unfurls and constructs itself under their feet, flush with the floor, and she uses it to transport them all back to her comfortably furnished work pit in the space tower.

"So, does your society know anything at all about mana respiration or should I start with the really basic stuff?"

"We don't know anything about it."

"Okay. So... firstly. Mana itself. Raw mana is actually a relatively simple form of exotic matter. A proton and an anti-proton bound together by four reptrons. Atomic mass of six, atomic weight of negative two. Neutrally charged, non-reactive to both matter and anti-matter."

"Secondly, time-crystals. It's possible to take a photon and fold it into higher dimensions as well as temporally to create a repeating pattern in space-time that can function as a sub-atomic 'fuse' that our linker cores can chain onto the mana passing through itself. A linker core can set this fuse with extreme precision, down to the picosecond. This is the fundamental primitive action of casting. You respire mana, prime that mana, and then release it onto our plane, after which the fuse will break the reptron bonds and allow the proton and anti-proton to touch and annihilate into energy. The light produced is polarized by the time-crystals, which constrain it to a particular wavelength within your linker core's chromaprint. Commonly called manalight or mana color."

"The final fundamental action is producing what we call volatile mana. The exact wavelength of light released by annihilating mana is a function of your chromaprint and the exact length of the time-crystal fuse, and with practice one can prime mana in a way that makes the fuse reactive instead of on a timer. It'll be as stable as unprimed mana, until it is hit by a photon corresponding to the annihilation of only one possible length of timed fuse. Follow so far?"

She needs to go over this in her head for a full minute.

"So, raw mana is a particle that can make a matter-antimatter interaction if the reptron bits are removed, and the linker core can make fuses that remove them after a very specific time.  The fuses are called time-crystals.  Spellcasting is getting mana, putting the fuses on it, sending it to this plane, and letting the fuses go off.  The light's color depends on your 'chromaprint', and how long the fuse is.  You can also make mana that has a fuse that you can then set off only by hitting it with a very specific color of light later on.  Is that correct?

"Also, what's a chromaprint?"

"Oversimplifying, it's what color your linker core is. Everyone's is unique. And no, I haven't even gotten to spellcasting yet."

She nods, correcting her mental image.  "Do different people have different colors, or can you change the color?  Does the color of the chromaprint change what things you can do?"

"It's entirely cosmetic, but you're born with yours and it is uniquely identifying."

More nodding.  "Okay, what comes after that?"

"Math!"

Eelesia laughs a little.

"Probabilistic geometry, to start with. Alongside control exercises."

She holds out a hand to demonstrate. The air above her palm starts to sparkle, then glow, then it blazes like a purple sun.

"This is a basic shell technique. What I'm doing right now is releasing primed mana from a point in a steady stream while simultaneously scattering volatile mana into the air around it to create an inward force and sharpen the boundary. The really useful part is what happens to the reptrons after annihilation. Reptrons can't exist naively in a three-plus-one darkskein, so the instant they're freed they decompose and punch back into the dimensional sea. This can have all myriads of useful effects, but the simplest is a sort of kinetic recoil. Creating interference patterns or amplification patterns in that recoil is the basis of using thaumobaric resonance."

Math.  She sort of knows geometry and probability separately.

"Volatile mana that the primed mana is setting off?  What happens if someone makes volatile mana and doesn't set it off for a while?  

"Is it sort of like how things falling into water will make ripples that can interact with each other?"  

"That is a popular introductory analogy. Nothing happens to loose mana, though. It eventually drifts into space and away from all gravity wells."

She lets the shell of manalight fade.

"In this exercise, I used the interaction between the timing and the positioning of the volatile mana to actually get a stable boundary. The velocity of released mana is always small and very imprecise; it varies with your respiration and with conditions in the dimensional sea."

Nods.  "Do you immediately get the mana from the sea then use it, or do you have some kind of pool that you can draw from and run out of if you use too much before it refills?"

"Neither. The introductory analogy is that it is actually a lot like breathing. You can breath faster to process more oxygen but the amount of oxygen you can process is only loosely correlated to the volume and rate of atmosphere passing in and out of your body. The analogy kind of breaks down beyond that, though. The ontobiology is complicated, and there are several different limiting factors. The energy to produce the time crystals is metabollically sourced, for one. Respiring too hard can cause other exotic particles besides mana to leak into your linker core, which hurts a lot and can have subsequent effects ranging from nerve damage to radiation sickness, for another."

She takes another moment to pause and consider it, then nods.  

"Is that enough context? For 'a spell is that stuff when a computer program does it'?"

"Yeah.  

"Though, you mentioned that people still need to have a certain linker capacity before they can, hmm.  Your example was use a flight spell with enough power to get over normal gravity, or something like that?  Does that mean the computers can't get mana out of the dimensional sea on their own?  How much of the process is handled by them?"

"Depends on the Device, but barring exceptions, calculation and manifestation placement exclusively. I mean, artificial linker cores exist but they're not something this civilization has the means to manufacture. A lot of Devices have some form of mana storage, but they all have to get it from your respiration or from some other form of storage. Integrating a Device with a mage's linker core is also a very individual process. With the exception of the really basic training Devices that lack most of the important features, every Device is unique, and bespoke, and will be incompatible with a majority of other mages."

"What percentage of people have a Device?"

"Training Devices are issued to anyone who signs up for, er, training. With any vetted education service offering magical instruction. The TSAB subsidizes that. As for proper, Storage, Armed, Intelligent, or even Unison Devices, about eight percent of civilians as well as all non-probationary members of the TSAB."

"I'd be interested in seeing whether my kind of human, ones with daemons, can use one.  Not necessarily right away, since it requires enrolling somewhere, and," she trails off, considering all the steps she'd have to deal with before enrolling in anything.  It's starting to sink in that there is quite a list of things that are going to be different from how they worked on the ships, and even simple things like getting groceries might be confusing for the next few weeks.  She's very tempted to ignore those for now and keep asking questions about mana.

There wouldn't actually be that many steps involved but Eelesia cannot reassure Verity on that point if Verity continues to avoid the subject!

"Given how you, um, half-reacted to soultalk, it is probably impossible, but we can certainly arrange for you to try after you've decided what you want to do on the scale of the next few days."

"Hmm.  I'd also like to see what your science makes of daemons, if there are more advanced tests than the medical scan. 

"Though, I guess the most important thing to handle next would be figuring out essentials, like how houses are assigned and how money works here.  You mentioned I could apply for citizenship earlier?  I know how transfer between ships in the fleet is done, but I don't know how much more complicated it's going to be moving between the fleet and here."

"Citizenship is on the table if you want to settle anywhere in Administrated Space, but you don't have to make any real decision today. If you'd like, I can issue you a visitor's visa right now. Comes with enough money for a two-week stay at a good hotel, and will serve as valid identification for six months, incurring no obligations. If you still want to charter a dimensional cruiser to search for your fleet, citizenship would make that easier, but I've already promised to arrange that for you myself, so."

"We're unlikely to prefer going back to the fleet even after it's been found," Araeneve says, mostly to Verity but intentionally loud enough to be overheard.  That isn't a very high bar, even if there were no mysteries or the promise of actual space to run that isn't orchards and hallways. 

"A visitors visa would make sense, though.  We don't know much about this place other than three buildings."

"That should be easy to remedy with the extranet... which you can't access. Because you can't soultalk. One second, let me look up what we have for that. I'll have to set you up with a non-thaumtronic terminal of some kind."

Araeneve settles down next to Verity's feet as they wait.  

"Will many things be hard to do without mana?"

"I wouldn't think so. Most technology doesn't require you to be a mage. Soultalk is just such a convenient interface medium."

"Ah! This is convenient. So, one option for the visitor visa is a skinprint, a temporary electronic tattoo, that serves as a terminal in addition to being your wallet and your ID."

"Huh, sounds interesting."  She tries to imagine how that would work, having originally pictured something more like a phone.  "Finally something that can access a net that I won't accidentally leave behind half the time.  Are they easier to install than they sound?"

"It looks like just a patch you slap on the back of your hand."

The printer under a desk behind her turns on and starts manufacturing one.

What an impressive printer.

Araeneve scoots out of the way so that Verity can stand up to get the patch once it's finished.

Eelesia pulls it off the printer tray and hands it over.

"Just out of curiosity, have you thought about what you're going to say to your people if we do locate your fleet? I don't go in for religious, um. The only example that the words 'reluctant religious figurehead' bring to mind is Vivio Takamachi from The Saint's Cradle disaster, which... isn't encouraging."

She examines the tattoo.  

"I'm not sure.  Maybe a request to have my things packed up and shipped to my new address.  I'm not irreplaceable to them, with 9 others with Legendary Daemons, and I was already avoiding most things except holidays and voting.  Hopefully they'll take the opportunity to not have me around and contradicting everything they say.  

"Who was Vivio Takamachi?"

When she peels away the patch, the revealed tattoo is almost invisible. Just a slight darkening of the skin in a geometric pattern extending from a central circle to each of her fingers. Briefly, it lights up, each part of the mark luminescing a different color, then all of them shining a soft white for a moment before fading back to near-invisibility.

"So, what happened was. About a decade ago there was a man who managed to reconstruct a genetic sample belonging to the central figure of worship from the most popular religion in Administrated Space. Vivio Takamachi is a clone born from that sample. Long story short, it turned out that man's motivations had nothing to do with religion. Vivio was the genetic key to the Saint's Cradle, a planet-killing city-ship from the height of the ancient Belkan Empire's reign of terror. Thankfully, the man failed and was arrested, but there Vivio still was, the more-or-less god of the Saint's Church as a living, breathing, ten-year-old girl."

Eelesia pauses.

"And even though Vivio was adopted by two of the most dangerous mages in the known multiverse, who were both already more famous and beloved than she was, even though they convinced the Saint's Church's leadership that it was the Church's pious duty to ensure Vivio got to have as normal a childhood as possible, you still hear about incidents with entitled fanatics trying things on a semi-regular basis."

"I don't usually worry about my safety on the ships," Verity considers.  "People will bother me, but it's always... asking me to foresee their future, or offer them good luck, or get me to start arguing for their favorite political choice.  Or just staring at me or taking pictures.  I think one of the differences is that Legendaries are more expected to be around, and not... singular.  As far as anyone can tell, we've always been about one in one hundred thousand, even if different cultures ascribe different meanings."

"The basics of the religion is: Normal daemons are said to contain a tiny fragment of the Divine Totem that's associated with their species, and that's what causes the form they'll assume during puberty.  They are expected to live up to their totem’s ideals and exalt themselves, so that when they die, their spark will rejoin the totem and empower it.  To perform evil will bring tarnish and weakness into the totem rather than glory.  This is supposed to be important for some Final Battle at the end of the universe.

"Legendaries are said to be outright our totem reborn, bringing their entire personalities and memories condensed into a single person in order to act as leaders and guides of humanity.  Presumably subconsciously, though some claim to actually have knowledge.  They're almost certainly lying, and don't seem to have any more insight into things than anyone else.  Interpreting the dreams of Legendaries is supposed to be important.

"Each daemon is also split into groups associated with their elemental type.  For dual-types, this is the first element only, so Bulbasaur is grass, but not poison.  Each type is supposed to perform certain duties, handing different holidays and stuff.  Also focusing on particular virtues.  As a water-type, we're supposed to be focused on Cleanliness and Health."

Eelesia nods along.

"Yeah those are the kinds of things make up the majority of the incidents for the Takamachis. That's all going to fascinate our anthropologists, though. What are all the types and their duties?"

"For spring, Ground is frugality, Poison is happiness, Water is cleanliness, and Fairy is thankfulness," she recites.  These have a cadence in her native language which may or may not be coming across in translation.  Her family hadn't been especially devout, but there were things that anyone knew well enough to recite.  

"For summer, Fire is productivity, Bug is justice/mercy, Dragon is honesty, Electric is generosity, and Grass is kindness.  For autumn, Flying is courage, Steel is protection, Normal is diligence, and Psychic is temperance.  For winter, Ice is prudence, Dark is cleverness, Fighting is patience, Rock is humility, and Ghost is hope/faith. 

"They each have special holidays every year, focused on them and the virtue.  Traditionally, they'd focus on jobs related to those virtues, too.  Since leaving on the ships, the religious duties of each type have been blurring with the duties to keep the ship running.  Electric types generating electricity, bug types creating cloth, psychic and flying types handling transportation..."

"Nifty."

She shrugs.  "I'd prefer a world where anyone could do any job they wanted, but not everyone can learn every Move and for now we're reliant on them to keep the ships running."

She turns her attention to the tattoo, considering what the controls would be like.  Does anything happen if she starts tapping it in places?

Nothing happens in response to tattoo tapping.

"Yes. I just meant, complicated cultural stuff. Is nifty. But what even is the point of having interesting traditions if they're about pruning your options instead of expanding your options, y'know? And besides, wanting to do a job right is a pretty important feature in the best person to do that job."

"Yeah.  Maybe one of these days we'll figure out the trick of letting all daemons learn the move Sketch, then everyone can do what they want.  Or get to a technological point where people don't need to work at all if they don't want to," she considers.  That was an even less likely possibility before, but there was just so much technology here.  

"No one in Administrated Space has to work if they don't want to. Citizenship comes with a permanent, inalienable living wage we call the Civil Dividend. It would be completely untenable to take in refugees like we're designed to if we expected them to support themselves! And also it turns out that paying people to not work actually leads to far more prosperity than absorbing the cumulative consequences of reluctant and or underqualified labor. Our strict meritocratic systems couldn't function without that."

"Where do refugees normally come from?"

"Usually from new worlds that make contact for one reason or another, or from the aftermath of Lost Logia incidents that the TSAB is too late to prevent."

"Are they all human?  Do they all have the same soul system you do?"

"Most are human. Some are panhuman. Some are near-human offshoots. Some aren't human. Maybe a quarter of non-panhuman life has recognizable, functional linker cores?" She looks this up. "About a quarter."

She is going to need more historical context before asking intelligent questions, and history has never struck her as an important subject to get into.  It is nice getting extra confirmation that she isn't too unusual for not having a normal linker core.  

Her attention turns back to the tattoo terminal.  "How do I use this?"

Eelesia checks.

"Tap your thumb and pinkie together twice to bring up or dismiss your menu. It does gaze-tracking and speech recognition, so it knows what you're looking at and it understands you when you talk. Mostly."

She follows the instructions.  Does it work?

It does!

A holographic screen appears in the air in front of her, positioned and moving relative to her rather than just her hand. It contains a query bar, a map icon, a stylized coin icon, an icon of two hands meeting across a pane of glass, and an icon of a bright red eye.

If she looks at one of the icons, text rises out of the screen to hover above it.

Map: "Navigation"
Coin: "Bank"
Glass: "Communication"
Eye: "History"

History probably being her web search history, not a list of historical events, assuming the device hasn't been listening in and deciding to give her that result due to what it's heard them talking about.  If so, it isn't something that will spiral into a deep rabbit-hole of searches that'd better be left for later.  All she wants to do right now is get the controls down.  She tries blinking at it, poking at the vague area of 'screen' with her hand, and other possible ways that might activate a hologram until one happens to work.  

The screen responds to poking. It doesn't seem to respond to blinking.

Poking blank space just makes that spot brighter for half a second. Poking the query bar will make it flash expectantly. Poking one of the icons will open a new screen.

She opens up the eye-shaped History icon's screen, then attempts a few methods of closing a window.  Then she tries to figure out how to input text.  Does a keyboard-shaped window pop up if she taps on the search bar a few times?  

No amount of tapping on the query bar produces a keyboard.

The History screen displays a graphic timeline, with visual slides depicting simplified renderings of Verity and Araeneve in every moment in time since they appeared in the city. It automatically scrolls through to enlarge and center whichever part of her timeline she looks at. Every slide is surrounded by a uniform dull red frame.

A screen may be told to close, or forced closed by tapping her thumb and pinkie.

Okay.  She can open and close windows, and has an idea on what requires finger presses and what presumably requires speech.  That'll do until she can look through it more thoroughly later.  

The history is much stranger and alarming.  "Does your city record every person at every point in time, or do these things have the ability to see the past?"

"We don't have technology that can see into the past, unfortunately... Is something wrong?"

"I think our cultures have a different idea on how acceptable it is to keep tabs on everyone walking around," she says.  "That's not technically a problem, just... given the historical reasons we have laws against setting up permanent cameras in public it's a bit worrying?"

"I've heard that many civilizations outside of Administrated Space have laws meant to suppress their citizens' ability to supply evidence of wrongs done against them, but you don't strike me as a professional liar? Granted, it's not a perfect system, which is why my job even exists, but disbursing the power of evidence as widely as possible seems like an unambiguous good to me."

"The laws were meant to prevent misuse of power in the case of corruption.  And the chance of data leaks or private corporations getting ahold of it and them misusing it," Verity says, trying to remember what the examples she learned in school were. 

"Before our laws were in place, people were getting outed as gay for going to lgbt clubs or resource groups.  Not being straight was illegal some places of the old world for a while, and even after the governments changed it took awhile for the people to do so - family or bosses would find out and people would get fired or kicked out of their homes.  Similar for other things, if someone supported a party in a democracy that was threatening the current majority they would 'happen' to get arrested for long enough to miss a vote or lose their jobs or reputations, even if they were found not guilty afterwards.  Or people on government assistance getting it taken away if it showed they were dating someone with a job, since that meant they 'didn't need help any more.'  Or having medical bills increased or medical insurance cancelled if you visited an ice cream shop too often, or getting fired preemptively if certain diseases turn out to run in your family and the employer didn't want to deal with the absences or costs.

"Some places on the ship like the engines have cameras and require cards to enter, but people can't be forced to go there.  Things like internet and public transport can't keep records at all.  Medical records and money information is highly confidential."

"That all sounds horrible, and like a clear argument for universal data rights rather than against? We do have highly secure areas one can't enter without suspending their data rights, but those places are designed to be impossible to stumble into by accident anyway. All the rest of that sounds like exactly the sorts of problems you get when the power of evidence is consolidated in the hands of a few rather than distributed equally, or else like problems that just don't exist in a competently designed administration. Your history record can't be used against you. That's the whole point. The device sapience that archives and accesses everyone's history is designed so it can't be misused. It is intentionally blind to rank or riches."

"Assuming that you trust the archive, and how unhackable the information is stored.  Our idea of data rights is centered around the right to not get recorded if we don't want to.  No one is stopping people from recording themselves or wearing trackers or using them as evidence, as long as they aren't forced to, don't film others without their permission, and don't need to give the data to anyone."

Eelesia holds in a sigh of exasperation.

"The information exists. It was always going to exist. It always will exist. It would inevitably exist just as a side effect of not routinely lobotomizing all of our sapient software. Any policy that assumes or claims otherwise is at best criminally incompetent and at worst actively duplicitous. Our systems were designed with this in mind, so that we don't have to rely on fallible laws or corruptible authorities to decide who gets access to what information. Your history is yours to use, anyone capable of 'hacking' into your history would have a much easier time 'hacking' into your literal brain. It has never happened, and as far as I know never even been credibly attempted."

From Araeneve's posture they're still unsure about that, but Verity drops it.  They can't stop the creepy spying system recording everyone, and it's not like she could return to the ship right now if she wanted to.  Even with said creepy spying, it's probably better here than home.  

"How does your system handle mind reading?" she wonders, trying to drop it but picking up something closely related.

Eelesia ought to be better than this at reassuring them. She is reasonably certain that Verity is just confused about how things work, but she can't explain if Verity doesn't want to know. But she can be more careful going forward.

"How do you mean? Can you give me an example?"

"Is there something going around and collecting people's thoughts into a big database?  Or more locally, what if a random citizen decides to read someone else's mind?  If they have a psychic... well, no daemons.  Some other kind of mind reading ability or machine."

"There is a Move called Mind Reader that lets a daemon read minds.  The TM for learning it is kept in an offline system with publicly-accessible logs of who visits the room it's stored in - it's one of the few places that are constantly filmed and normal privacy laws are suspended.  People are allowed to learn it for special circumstances, if someone asks to be mind-read by a neutral party for some reason, but they need to replace it again before leaving the area it's kept.  Daemons who learn it naturally are sometimes randomly checked with a ditto, and in general it's hard to hold an illegal move unless people are able to avoid all children. 

"Many psychic daemons can get something out of physical contact without a Move.  Supposedly, it makes the bad effects of daemon touching even worse, so no one does it outside of emergencies, and is illegal to do to anyone who didn't consent.  It's also much more noticable - you can't not notice if a daemon grabs you.

"There's also empathy, but that's considered a separate thing.  Empaths can't control their abilities, and we can't arrest people for settling as ralts.  Most people can't control their facial features and daemon reactions to a strong enough degree to avoid learning about emotions the indirect way, so it's just treated the same way echolocation or electroreceptivity."

Inability to arrest seems like an unprincipled reason to make something legal and then pretend it is different than the rest of an illegal category, but Eelesia suspects Verity already knows that, given how she phrased that. It would be unkind to call attention to her hypocrisy just now.

"Well, we don't have anything collecting people's thoughts, systemic or otherwise, yet. The work being done on that is slow and mostly academic, because the demand for resurrection is really rare, our per-capita death rate being what it is. As for civil infringements involving mind-reading, an agent like me would handle those on a case-by-case basis, but the capability is not common or naturally-occurring among our typical citizens. Do you know anything about the mechanism your psychic daemons use?"

"No.  Daemon moves and abilities in general defy our understanding.  We know the results when they're used and how to use them, but we haven't," she waves her hand as if encompassing the general idea of the civilization she's currently sitting it.  "We haven't turned it into a science yet."

Verity is distracted by the thought of resurrection.  The thought of having all of her information far away where she wouldn't be able to tell if someone was looking at it is still revolting, but...  "Can you do resurrections?"

"I'd be surprised if a Barrier Jacket doesn't block that wholesale, but I suppose it could be exogenous... And no. We can't. Because to resurrect someone you have to have complete information about their mind-state at the time of their death. Which as I said is information that we don't yet have the means to collect. But Administrated Space is typically safe enough that the average citizen's expected life-span is greater than the entire scope of our historical knowledge. If I recall correctly, the latest estimate was somewhere around fifteen-thousand years."

"We haven't figured out how to stop old age yet.  Is that an inherent thing to the magic here, or a medical treatment?"

"Medical treatment! Not even a very advanced one. There's a combination of nine healing spells that repairs old age very straightforwardly. I've only been through it once, but it wasn't a big deal."

"That's good," Verity says.  Normally, she'd be much more enthusiastic, but is still a bit unhappy and everything that's happened today is starting to catch up with her.

"Would this be an acceptable time to take a break?" Araeneve asks.  "We'd like to have the chance to talk to each other in..." not private apparently, but, "somewhere quiet?  Possibly look through whatever information that you give to people from other places considering citizenship."

"Sure. Why don't you query for a hotel or something, pick one you like the look of, and I'll teleport you there?"

"Okay."

She taps her thumb and pinkie to open the display.  While staring at the query bar, she tries, "Search for hotels with vacant rooms."  Without thinking, her speech automatically shifts to a different accent that pronounces all sounds more clearly like she would for a speech-recognition device in the fleet.

She gets a detailed false-color 3d hologram of the entire city with every hotel in the city highlighted in bright blue. There are hundreds.

Wow, that's a lot of hotels, even given that the city is considerably larger than the fleet.  She's going to need to narrow that down.  Glancing away from the display and to Eelesia, "What cost range should I be asking for?"

"Depends how long you want it for and how much of your visa-bonus you want left over. You can be as specific as you want. You're not going to confuse it."

Eyes back on the query bar.  "Search for the three hotels with the lowest cost vacant rooms," Verity tries.  Going all the way to the bottom of the cost brackets will serve a second purpose other than just saving money - she wants to know what the poorest places and people relying on only the civil dividend are like, and how much of the fancy technology has made its way down there.

The hologram of the city shrinks dramatically, enough that the curvature of the planet is visible. Three lone blue spots appear. Two on the southern edges of the map, one on the east edge.

Three full-color models of three different buildings appear, accompanied by colorfully designed info sheets with text and photos. All three are spacious residences with multiple rooms, full kitchens, customizable furnishings, and advertise weekly wilderness tours. Verity's six-month visa comes with enough money to rent any of them for more than a year.

"Seriously. You can just tell it what you want without the awkward phrasing. You really aren't going to confuse it, I promise."

She's so used to the phrasing of fleet-tech internet searches that she has a hard time figuring out how that was awkward.  

"I think I underestimated how complicated hotels are here," she murmurs, skimming over the info sheets.  "Any of these seem fine.  I guess this one, unless you think there's something important likely to be missing," she says, pointing to one of the sheets mostly at random and checking for the hotel name.

Valley Trails, lodging for the lone hiker who wishes to contemplate the natural woodlands in solitude.

Given Verity's other preferences, it doesn't strike Eelesia as incongruous that Verity might actually prefer to bunk in a hiking lodge out on the frontier, but it doesn't, actually, seem like Verity has groked the basic premise here. Eelesia would be remiss in her duty if she didn't ensure Verity was actually getting what she wanted.

"Complicated? How so?"

"There's a lot of them, for one.  And they do things like advertise tours.  I spend more time than most people in hotels back in the fleet, and they were just rooms to sleep and bathe when taking multi-day trips to another ship or otherwise not able to use your apartment.  I guess with a much larger number of places you'd have people travelling for fun more..."

"Um, so are these? I think that one in particular is just pointing out things that are close by? People do travel for fun a lot. Not everyone wants to buy their own property and nest in one place. I'm still not sure what the complicated part is, to you?"

"Trying to figure out which one is best when there are so many options and we aren't sure even what traits we're comparing between them, mostly.    We can go with this one for a week and move if it's terrible for some reason, right?"

"You don't have to compare them manually. Just ask about whatever criteria you care about. But yes, of course. That's probably sensible anyway. I don't know how long the search for your fleet will take, and you wanted to be on the ship when it goes?"

"I don't have criteria.  Other than things they'd presumably all have, like places to get food within a 30 minute trip or closable doors.  I just want somewhere to rest and read and head back to after looking around."

Whether or not to be on the ship will require some thought.  She probably should, to help with explaining the cultural differences.  "Maybe?  How soon would I have to go?  I want to spend at least a few days here."

"It'll take at least a few days to charter. Maybe as much as a week. You can absolutely spend that week wandering in the wilderness if you want to. I just want to be sure you're not... under the impression that you have access to less than you actually do."

She debates whether to mention it, then decides that not doing so would be dishonest.  "One of the reasons I want to see the cheapest hotels is to see how your society looks from that perspective.  Though the hotels happening to be near wilderness is also nice.  I wouldn't have thought to go hiking immediately."

"I mean, I think the reason the cheapest places are so cheap is because they're like a thousand miles from the Cranagan metropolitan area, but sure."

Araeneve is officially done with the conversation.  "It's been an overwhelming day and we don't want to keep looking when this one is sufficient.  We can always try another place some other week."

Nod. "Would you like to go now, then?"

"Yeah."

Eelesia stands up and deploys her Barrier Jacket. Eldritch hues burst through the seams of reality to replace her ordinary clothes with her form-fitting violet armor. Then she turns and a blazing violet Circle builds itself half an inch above the floor.

Once Verity and Araeneve are on the Circle, Eelesia's Device chimes, DIMENSIONAL TRANSFER.

And the cavernous chamber and Eelesia's work pit vanish, replaced by an idyllic, flower-lined brick road and the smell of shade trees. Tucked into a clearing is a pretty but generic-looking ski-cabin-aesthetic two-story house.

She looks around for some sort of signage indicating where people are supposed to check in.  Barring that, the front door is probably the correct place. 

A holographic screen appears on the front door as she approaches.

Welcome to Valley Trails
Cabin 17 is currently VACANT.

Would you like to claim occupancy?
( }-1.68 per night.)

"C-" she starts, then cuts herself off.  She's supposed to be speaking less awkwardly.  "Yes, I would like to claim occupancy."

Is there anything indicating that this is either cabin 17 or a visitor center?  

Does the plaque reading "17" next to the door, or the front door audibly unlocking (accompanied by the holographic screen playing a suggestive animation before vanishing) count?

Yep!  She appreciates well-labeled cabins, and being able to avoid the awkwardness of trying to get into the wrong one.  They make their way to the nearest soft surface and flop down.  Not sleeping, just staring up at the ceiling and doing the mental equivalent of catching one's breath.

"It's unlikely that this place will be worse than the fleet," Araeneve notes after a few minutes.  "That's such a low bar.  Even if we find out they have slavery or cannibalism or something they'll probably pass, and it's not like we can pass judgement on them if the civil dividend doesn't turn out to be as good as claimed, since the fleet doesn't have one.  Whatever else we find, the cure for aging alone would be worth it."

"The fleet will change a lot once it's discovered.  So much of what's wrong with it is wrong because we were all stuck in space without the resources to automate more things.  And I wouldn't expect this place to hoard its de-aging.  The religious thing is still bad, and probably won't go away if this place has a religion still too - I should probably check and see how long ago that... what was their name?  Vivio?"

"Maybe.  Let's add looking up how their names work to the list of things to do, too.  The second name they all seem to have sounds kind of like daemon names, but can't be."

Verity doesn't feel like checking the terminal for a notepad app.  "I wonder how the spying AI thing will hold up to rotom."  Everyone on the fleet knew that databases being hacked was a 'when' and not an 'if.'  Even without rotom being able to cheat any security measure anyone had been able to develop, it was impossible to get a perfectly secure system and expect it to last forever without someone figuring out how to fake a signature eventually.  Supposedly this one had never been hacked.  Considering how thorough the spying is, it seems likely that if it ever was hacked it would have been covered up.  It's going to be hard to prove that something hadn't happened, though.

Verity shifts position and activates the terminal.  Keeping in mind that she's not supposed to phrase it awkwardly, but again unconsciously falling into Proper Pronunciation accent, she searches, "I'd like to see informational packets that are offered to people considering citizenship."

This gets her the citizenship contract, and three different informational video thumbnails.

The citizenship contract is actually just a couple of pages, and boils down to three main points:

1) If you knowingly and with intent commit merit fraud, you will be arrested and, baring exceptional circumstances, your citizenship revoked.
2) You will be given a basic income of }-80.00 per day.
3) If the cost of repairing any and all property and/or emotional damages you cause over time (according to this clever and simple-to-understand algorithm) predictably exceeds the costs of long-term detainment and therapy, you will be detained and therapized. (The assumption that detainment is both humane and rehabilitative rather than punitive is baked into the phrasing, like the writer assumed that went without saying.)

The first two videos are basically advertisements for the thriving open-source scientific and artistic cultures of Cranagan, and the freedom that comes with a post-scarcity economy.

The third video is more interesting. It seems to be a narrated infographic about how work is allocated in said post-scarcity, open-source culture. Robust simulation plays a heavy roll. For example, say a new building was to be built. A Terms-Of-Project will be published, along with an invested sum. Literally anyone can submit a design for automated simulation testing and once the designs that hold up architecturally and functionally are identified, each of those designers gets an equal share of the invested sum. (This is a widely-use financial model, because it produces naturally good incentives; the less popular a job is, the more it pays, without anyone having to set a price.) Next, those designs all get drawn to the attention of the people (selected by impartial algorithm) who are most likely to be actually working and/or living in the building, who can test-run the virtual versions to compare and contrast, or make suggestions. Once a clear choice emerges, that designer gets a share of ownership. (Then the building is built by automated construction drones, which is such a small part of the process that it's only mentioned as an afterthought.)

That sounds like a good system for creating things.  Resources being relegated to an afterthought is strange.  Even a small shuttle takes weeks of using Magnet Bomb over and over to collect the generated steel fragments to melt down, or choosing things to destroy and reclaim materials from.

"Are medicine and basic education separately universal, or does it come out of the basic income?  What sorts of things count as merit fraud?  And how does a 'meritocratic' government work?"

'Merit' keeps coming up in places she doesn't normally hear it.  The translation is good enough to be unnoticable, so the meaning is probably very close to the same, but... would a meritocracy be a government where the most accomplished person is in charge?  Or you get more votes for every thing you create?  

There is a footnote at that part of the infographic video about something called Siata Preservation.

Pages from relevant sites appear in response to questions.

All education is completely free, not just basic. Although actual physical schools, which are more of a niche thing than a general ed thing, are typically crowdfunded.

Merit fraud is an act of deliberate deception for the express purpose of being placed in a job or position of authority ahead of a more qualified applicant, that actually succeeds in giving you decision-making power that rightfully belongs to someone else. It's actually functionally impossible in most situations to even attempt, so it doesn't come up much.

The government runs mostly on facilitating people who want to solve problems to solve said problems, in a systematized way. Many and varied methods exist to serve the core principle of getting the best possible person to make any given decision in a position to make that decision. A large component of this is similar to the infographic example. Anyone can just start doing a job in simulation; the system will recognize and reward competence and results.

She wishes Azure was here.  He knows enough about governments to ask useful questions.  Maybe if they find the fleet she'll wind up asking him to summarize it for her once he's looked it over.  Instead she looks back at the other things.  "What's 'Siata Preservation'?"

A wiki article appears.

Siata Preservation is an industrial process invented by Allana Siata at the turn of the century.

Siata is a thaumic engineer who worked with Exclusion Barriers. When an Exclusion Barrier is deployed, the excluded subjects can still interact with a facsimile of the reality they've been excluded from. This is due to the phase measure of the probability mass of large, immobile objects as compared to matter with a future probability-state below the Benz Threshold. On the Barrier's collapse, the two versions of causality reconcile and one is lost. (In practice spell safeties ensure that it is the facsimile that is erased from causality.) Siata revolutionized materials-production when she discovered a way to spoof the causality-resolution and force both possibilities to become real, completely duplicating the non-excluded static contents of an Exclusion Barrier, and then going on to develop the technique used to 'catch' the newly instantiated matter before it it can be lost to or damaged by the dimensional sea.

That mostly went over Verity's head, but she grasps the general idea of 'material duplication' out of the jargon.   Sounds useful, particularly since it doesn't seem like they're limited to the handful of materials that daemons can produce.  Perhaps next time she's in the city she'll pay more attention to what materials things are made from.  She'd mostly been focused on the shapes before.  

She continues to lie around for a minute before forcing herself back up to sitting.  Actually napping should be avoided, or at least done in a proper bed and not a couch.  Was there anything else before she goes off wandering... oh, "What is the local naming convention, for people's names?"

This gets her an annotated list of the most common names.

Derivable from the annotations is the standard naming model in which a person has a personal name chosen by parents or other relevant individuals, as well as a second name inherited from their mother.

Kind of like what nobility did on the old homeworld, but for everyone.  She nods.  It wasn't an important fact, but it's a mystery she can check off the list.  

She navigates away from the searches and to the map icon.

This produces the false-color holographic map she saw before, only this time it shows the sparsely populated area around her current location.

They look at it for a while, getting a lay of the land.  They'd spent countless hours in VR simulations of the old homeworld, so aren't too unfamiliar with how non-ship towns are laid out.  How much that translates to this culture's construction remains to be seen. 

She looks for any sort of nearby shopping hub, figuring that there would be something to provide food and other goods to people living or visiting here.  Unable to help themselves, they also take a look towards whatever hiking or wilderness trails go outward.  It would be so tempting to do that today, but it should probably wait.  With VR, if she got tired or thirsty she could always just remove her helmet, but a real forest might take actual preparation of some kind.

The many cabins of Valley Trails are laid out in a wide-spread branching of paths, almost like someone was trying to make a town-sized drawing of a poofy little tree. All of the paths join each other at various points, building up to a single highway-sized road that passes through a complex that looks big enough to be a shopping hub but on closer inspection appears more like a sports club or a meeting hall, or perhaps a lobby.

On the opposite end of the map, there are indeed several hiking trails leading off into the untamed woodland.

Cabin 17 is highlighted. And a tiny solid-color figure of Verity herself marks her own position in the map.

Ugh, sooo creepy.  Just because someone can put in a picture of someone doesn't mean they should.  She greatly prefers the inverted water-drop shaped 'you are here' icons from the fleet.  

She's made up her mind to go look into the main hub, though still doesn't want to deal with people again just yet.  Instead, she kills a bit of time exploring the cabin.  Do the bathroom and kitchen fixtures look like what she's used to?  Are there any supplies other than furniture, like backpacks which are rented alongside the cabin, or should she be on the lookout for somewhere to buy those?

As if she thinks the devices that display an inverted water-drop don't have a literal camera watching her face while she uses them...

The bathrooms and kitchen are luxuriously spacious and well-appointed. (Multi-headed wall-less shower, big enough to run around in, for example.) The cabin appears to come pre-stocked with hiking and camping gear like someone was preparing for the apocalypse. The equipment is all complementary, but will not be replaced during her occupancy. (Relinquishing occupancy for less than six weeks before reclaiming occupancy will not refill the cabin's supplies. This limit applies across all Valley Trails cabins.)

In addition to the equipment and supplies, there is a small berth for a team of cleaning and repair drones. (They look like rounded boxes maybe a foot long, with a pair of bendy balloon-like arms each.) They are currently shut down, but may be activated by request at need.

Useful, though she's having a hard time stopping herself from thinking about how many people on the fleet could use the resources that a single person here takes for granted.  Do the supplies also include food, or is that something she'll have to pick up fresh?

She exits the cabin, gets on Araeneve's back, and starts heading towards the main lobby.

There are a variety of nonperishables that seem to be intended as part of the camping supplies, but no fresh ingredients or anything like that.

Brickwork, flower-lined paths that grow wider and more elaborate as they join up, stately shade-trees. An occasional glimpse of another cabin in the distance.

The mall-sized clubhouse is nearly deserted when she arrives. The upper floor has almost a library vibe, comfortable and quiet, but while there are a few possibly-decorative bookshelves, it is mostly open with unobstructed floor-to-ceiling windows, and does not seem to serve any particular purpose. The lower floor, split on either side of the main path, is on one side a collection of arenas and courts and such for sports, while the other side houses a restaurant / bar / swimming pool / lounge separated from a shooting range by a soundproof wall.

No employees are in evidence. The restaurant appears to be automated, designed primarily to send drones out to deliver completed meals to the cabins.

There are only three other people to be found. A man and a woman in the largest arena compete intensely at something that involves dodging brightly-colored holographic water-spouts, and are likely a couple going by their state of undress and their laughing enjoyment when they collide and the sultry undertone to their trash-talk. In the pool, a woman is swimming laps.

She decides she likes this place.  It feels like the comfortably empty corridors in the very early morning, but properly lit.  She leaves the couple alone, and considers hanging around the pool but eventually decides that given everything else the pool might be considered crowded if more than one person is in it, no matter how many wailords would fit by fleet standards.  Instead, she decides to sit in the lounge for a little while, and read about cultural differences and hiking unless interrupted.  

The chairs are plush and comfortable and no one disturbs her.

Eventually she starts to get hungry.  It feels silly to walk all the way back and then call a drone to deliver food when she's already at the place the food would be delivered from.  She goes looking for a table at the restaurant or bar area, then queries the terminal for how to order and what the choices are.  

This sorts her choices by options that may be delivered from this location. There are a lot of options, represented in a cloud of labeled photos that enlarge and center when she looks at one, popping out a textual description (the thus-redundant blurb about the restaurant is shrunk into a smaller font).

That is a lot of options.  "Please select whatever is most popular around here for me," she tells the terminal, not wanting to spend the next hour reading all of the descriptions.

This will get her a succulent steak dinner with a colorful steamed vegetable mix with a potato-like side-dish. The meat is beautifully textured, unnaturally so, and too regular throughout to have plausibly come from an animal. She is charged }-4.29 in total.

She's not familiar with even the concept of meat, and therefore doesn't recognize it.  As she's not sure what all the vegetables are either it doesn't stand out, and the entire meal parses as 'strange but good very foreign food.'  

Then she can have a nice peaceful dinner that, in a lower-tech world, would have probably given her digestion issues that she will in actuality never have to know were even a risk.

Then she can return to her cabin, slower this time and spending longer looking at the flowers.

Nothing interrupts her peaceful walk.

"Are these hand terminals waterproof?" she asks said terminal, going towards a bedroom.  She normally goes to sleep in the ship's equivalent of late afternoon anyway, for her very early morning schedule.  "And can I order clothing through this?"

It is waterproof, of course. And she can peruse a selection of popular clothing-design communities and services and browse these recommended assortments or queue for time on one of these Intelligent clothing-design suites.

She just wants pre-designed clothing, and adds onto the search that she's looking for things that can be delivered within a day, considering that she only currently has the one set.  Clothes that won't cost too much for her to afford and still have food and money left over for other things.  Also things that cover most of her skin other than hands and head but would be fine for being outside in this climate, mostly in a fit of pique rather than caring about her arms being seen or the (probably nonexistent, given everything else) risk of sunburn.  She debates whether to suggest the clothing be blue, or anything else except blue, but eventually winds up not asking for either.  

Her current balance is }-994.03 and if she just wants generic, functional clothing in printable materials she can get that delivered from the clubhouse's textile printer for the cost of raw materials and drone time, which for a single complete outfit is measured in fractions of a single unit of currency.

Is she sure she wouldn't like something less crude? Something with self-cleaning fabric, self-cooling fabric, hydrotransient fabric (breathes and is not waterproof, but can't itself get wet), frictionless fabric, tear-proof fabric, or perhaps even biotically-laced auto-bandaging fabric?

Verity is being stubborn and demanding normal fabric.  The clothing she picks is non-blue after all:  Something vibrant green with coppery metallic threads, and a muted dark purple with thin lines of pale pink concentrated most densely around the hems, and an outfit made up of sunset colors worn over a mostly-concealed black underlayer.  All colors that were considered unseemly for a water-type by the fleet's standards.  Three sets is more than enough for now, each intricate enough to hopefully not stand out as shabby, loose enough to run around in and pants rather than skirts.  

Skirts do not seem to be available at all among the generic varieties of clothing.

The concept of the (non-sports) bra also does not seem to exist, here, nor anything that shows cleavage. It is also somewhat difficult to find the more elaborate colors and accents she wants in tasteful sorts of designs, but 'difficult' is relative and she might not even notice the (by local standards) lack of selection in her preference niche.

Everything she does order will be tailored to fit her perfectly, though.

If most of their bridges are made of glass, she can see why skirts wouldn't be popular.

She finalizes the order and asks whether the drone can let itself inside to put the clothes near the door or something.  Even if it'll show up in five minutes she's already sitting on the bed and doesn't intend to go meet it if she doesn't have to.  

Given the degree to which some feminine styles show off the hip-area and upper legs, that is probably not why there are no skirts.

She can give that drone one-time permission to open her front door, yes.

It will, in fact, take a bit longer than five minutes. The textile printer in the clubhouse is primitive and slow by modern standards.

Verity gives it permission, kicks off her boots, and climbs into bed.  Araeneve jumps up and curls up around her protectively.  

---

As usual, she wakes up well before dawn.  She retrieves her new clothing and takes a quick shower, standing in a small corner of it for just long enough to scrub clean before changing into the green outfit, Araeneve standing beside her.  That out of the way, she orders yet another meal - whatever is popular and different enough from the first to be novel - to be delivered for breakfast.  She also asks for something to be delivered which can make a decent lunch after a few hours in a bag, as she hasn't yet gotten used to the idea of drones finding her and not an address.  

It's been put off long enough.  She goes to retrieve some hiking gear, and spends the remaining time until morning figuring out what to bring for an entire day walking around and looking at trees.

Ordering lunch while out on a hike wouldn't be sporting anyway.

The nearby areas of woodland are mostly flat, cut up by the occasional shallow creek or small, easily-scalable cliff. The weather is temperate, and the sky clear. The trees are tall and stately and the underbrush is thin.

They run around and explore the forest.  Occasionally she runs her hands over the bark of the trees or smells the plants, since it isn't a VR simulation this time and she can finally do more than just see and hear things.  Araeneve leaps around on top of the creeks, following them for a short while, and Verity clambers up the small cliffs.  Every so often she stops to ask the terminal for information about unfamiliar species that stand out.

It's an eclectic mix of native flora and imported flora, none of it dangerous. Some of it is mildly poisonous. Some of it is actually a mystery, non-native to the planet but not traceable to any of the seedstock used during terraforming. It could've been anyone from the Belkans to the lost Al-Hazard, but under unguessable circumstances since MidChilda was not settled or strategically relevant until the founding of the TSAB.

Ooh, plants of mysterious origins.  

Around early afternoon they get tired and start heading back.  Then food, another quick shower, reading some more, and sleep.  She misses cooking her own food, a little, but nowhere near enough to take time away from the other things she could be doing.  The cleaning part she doesn't miss at all.

The next few days are much the same.  Sitting beside a creek and listening to the water while eating lunch.  Looking at the variety of rock types found in the water-smooth pebbles.  On the fleet, a stone that daemons can't generate were precious keepsakes from the dead world, but on a planet they're just common rocks.  Standing right next to a tree and looking straight up, to get a sense of the scale of how tall trees can get when not constrained.  

After several days of idyll, while wandering a patch of anonymous wilderness, Verity gets a notification asking if she would like to share her current location with Eelesia Rimac.

"Okay."

A few minutes later, there is a sonic boom in the distance. A violet shooting star.

Spotting the woman and her daemon, Eelesia cuts through the sky in a supersonic arc before decelerating hard and wafting gently downwards to land in the forest beside them.

"Hi."

Impressive.  "Hi.  The ship's about ready to leave, then?" she guesses.  

"Yes. The DNEV Mononoke was available. It ships out tomorrow morning."

Eelesia peers at Verity, smiling.

"Do you still want to come with?"

"I do."  As much fun as she's been having, knowing that there's something still left to do is leaving her restless and ready to go and take care of it.

"Alright. I'll see you bright and early, then."

"How are you? You look, better... In your element, so to speak. I'm glad. You didn't have any problems?"

"It has been nice here," she confirms.

"Good!"

She lifts off, going weightless, but pauses before flying away in case Verity has a last-minute question or something.

She can't think of any, and just waves farewell.  

Unexpectedly impatient to be off, they spend the rest of the day darting around at high speed to burn off energy, like a long-distance version of pacing.  She doesn't have much to pack, only the two other outfits (Verity making the decision to sleep in her original blue set one last time while the others are cleaned, then discarding it in the morning).

And in the morning, Eelesia knocks on her front door, a blazing Circle rotating itself on the lawn behind her, ready to teleport them.

"Good morning!" Verity says cheerily, having woken up much earlier.  She grabs the small bag with her clothes from near the door.

"Morning! All set?"

The Dimensional Transfer is different this time. The distance is significantly greater than the previous times Eelesia has teleported Verity and Araeneve. It isn't instantaneous. For a heartbeat and a half, they're screaming through a torrential storm of eldritch colors, a wind of phantom insanity. It feels the way pain does in a dream, like it should be flaying the body and ripping the mind apart (or visaversa), but there is no actual sensation and no actual effects, and being awake during it makes this obvious.

A city hangs in space.

They arrive on a designated transport platform halfway up one wall of a hanger that could probably park Verity's entire fleet with room to spare. Half of it is open to space, though it holds an atmosphere as comfortable as the one they just left. Construction and maintenance bays line line the inner surfaces, many occupied by unidentifiable giga-scale arrays of machinery and catwalks.

Sleek, silvery ships travel into and out of the gargantuan hanger, tiny in comparison to the scale of the shipyard. As they watch, one of the massive structures in a distant maintenance bay starts... folding into itself, compacting, intersecting along imperceptible angles. Machinery vanishes into spaces too small to contain it as shiny hull panels align and connect, assembling and revealing the form of another of the sleek silvery ships, which lights up as it powers on and boarding gantries extend towards it from the inhabited sections of the dock.

One such sleek ship, shaped somewhat like a sharpened tuning fork, hangs nearby with a boarding gantry connected to another platform. It is maybe five-hundred feet long, at least on the outside. DNEV Mononoke, is printed on the hull.

"Was the teleport supposed to do that?" she asks, checking to make sure everything reappeared properly, before getting distracted by the folding ships.

"Almost certainly. Teleporting long distances can get a little psychedelic. Modern dimensional transfer spells are perfectly safe, though."

"Ah, that's good... and that's the ship?" she asks, automatically stepping away from the spot the teleport circle dropped them off.  She looks around to see if anyone else is standing on this platform or walking towards the ship, to see if it's time to board yet.

There are indeed a handful of uniformed women making their way aboard.

Eelesia leads Verity and Araeneve to follow them.

Inside, the Mononoke's motif seems to be smooth blue-tinted metallic walls with a soft horizontal strip of lighting running along the center of each wall.

"They've assigned us guest cabins," Eelesia explains, leading the way through the spacious corridors, passing the occasional crewmember, who seem to have been told to expect Araeneve and don't gawk. "There's a diplomatic team in the dignitary's suite. You don't have to meet them but you can if you want to. I asked them to put us in the crew quarters, so we can be near the bridge. I'll introduce you to Captain Anziel after you settle in."

The 'crew quarters' it turns out, are individual, private, three-story apartments with variable-gravity pathing (some of the walls are also floors, instead of there being anything as mundane as stairs), functional but high-quality amenities, and a ten-foot by twenty-foot viewscreen currently simulating a window.

"Helping with contact and informing the diplomats of things is one of the reasons I wanted to come along."

The spare outfits are placed on a chair for the moment, then she tries the gravity walls with trepidation.  She's not sure how long 'settling in' is expected to take or what is meant to be done during it, but she quickly returns to the normal floor and asks the viewscreen for a map to get a sense of what the ship has on it.

The floorplan of the dimensional cruiser actually mostly matches its exterior, though there are areas that should overlap but don't.

The map doesn't show Verity. It doesn't show Eelesia either, who is in her own quarters across the hall. But anyone in a public area of the ship is rendered as a little solid-color figure with a name tag attached.

The mess hall is a short walk after taking a right coming out of her room and then another right at the first intersection. The bridge is actually directly below them, accessible via vertical corridor from a short ways to the left down the corridor outside.

The dignitary suite is labeled, and seems to be directly underneath the bridge.

They hang around for a little while longer, looking into all of the rooms of the apartment, getting more used to the gravity-based walls, and switching the screen back into a false window.  

When they emerge, Eelesia is waiting in the corridor.

"Hey. We cast off in fifteen minutes. Wanna watch?"

"Sure."

Ships aren't all that interesting to her on their own, having grown up on one, but maybe whatever they plan to use to get them to the search area in less than decades will look interesting.

It's a short walk to the bridge.

The bridge is a cavernous chamber, shaped a little like a horseshoe. A flat wall at the back is the only solid surface. The floor and the walls and the ceiling are entirely transparent, or screens simulating perfect transparency; its actually impossible to tell just by looking.

A raised dais in the center holds the throne-like captain's chair, itself seeming more like a piece of heavy machinery than merely furniture.

A thin solid bank of seats and consoles stretch around the horseshoe shape, up against the outer screen. Crewwomen sit, arrayed along the consoles, operating holographic screens and controls mostly through silent soultalk interface.

There is a clear warning line, both painted on the floor and hovering holographically in the air. Stepping over the threshold onto the bridge gives Verity a warning notification that she's just entered a restricted area; her history within said area will be auto-shared with (list of relevant people, the Captain being one of them), and this is obligatory while she remains in the area.

She wasn't intending to do anything embarrassing or personal on the bridge regardless.  Their steps onto the glass floor are cautious, but mostly because of how it looks like open space.  

Instead, she's distracted looking at the crewwomen.  Everyone she'd seen coming on board was a woman, and she can barely remember it after so long but weren't most of the people where she'd first appeared also women?  Unfortunately, this doesn't seem like a good time to ask about that, so she files it away for later.

Verity stands next to Eelesia, with Araeneve a step behind.

Indeed, only two of the sixteen bridge crew are men.

"Captain," Eelesia greets.

Captain Anziel is a short woman with excited eyes and long greenish-blonde hair. She offers a cheerful, "Welcome aboard!" and offers to shake Verity's hand when Eelesia introduces them.

Handshake.  "We're Verity-and-Araeneve.  Thank you for allowing me to come on this search."

"I could hardly have refused! It's your people we're trying to find, after all. And this would be trickier without your cooperation, so really I should be thanking you."

"I'll help in any way I can."

"Awesome. The plan my crew is working up is brilliant in its simplicity. First, we get you to recall as many constellations as you can. That should let us more precisely plot a search area in galactic space. Once we're in sydar range, we dive and scan for... um, 'daemon bonds', which are apparently quite distinct phenomena. All we'd need from you is your best-effort reconstruction of your constellations and your PADATS data."

She nods.  "The PADATS was pretty memorable.  I can describe or draw it... or possibly just request the record be sent up?  Would we need to do that before leaving?  I'm not sure how your internet works for interstellar distances.  The stars will be a bit harder to remember, since I usually avoided the stargazing spots, but there were a few notable ones I can try drawing out.  There are more things I remember our longer range scans picking up about the closer stars.

"Should I be doing this immediately?"

"You just have to share the segment of time in which you were in the scanner," Eelesia chimes in. "As for the star chart, are you good at holosculpting? Or are you more comfortable with, like, paper or a paper-equivalent? It might not actually matter if the patterns are distinct enough. Or if you can't remember the relative size and or color of the relevant stars..."

She decides to focus on the stars, since those are what will be needed first.  "I'll try holosculpting."  It sounds new, but she's only used real physical paper a few times before and found it unpleasant.  The lack of an undo feature, in particular.

The Captain suggests making a sphere, standing in the middle, and painting the stars onto it.

But first! It's time to embark.

No one is late for duty, so they need not delay. The Captain sits in her big chair, and the Mononoke moves. It detaches from the dock and turns smoothly towards open space, the wide-open view panning across the gargantuan hanger bay, before, without a whisper of acceleration being felt, the metal and space-city drops away in seconds.

Then, the star-spangled black twists outward-inward in a way that hurts the eyes and is replaced by a dark haze of shifting aurora-colors, rippling and constantly changing. A moment later, those dark auroras twist incomprehensibly and are gone too, replaced by a more turbulent, psychedelic storm of bright hues.

They watch, occasionally glancing to make sure that the people who know what this kind of travel is supposed to look like are calm.  

After a minute, she turns to Eelesia and says quietly, "Unless there's something else, I'll go back to my quarters and work on the star chart.  Can the terminal do holosculpting, or will I need another piece of equipment?"

Eelesia decides to demonstrate, speaking aloud for Verity's benefit.

"Give me a new holosculpt canvas." ~Visible acknowledgement, please.~

A little holographic panel pops up, announcing the canvas and a few of its settable properties.

She holds up her hands. "I want a hollow platonic sphere, black."

A sphere appears, positioned to match her hands. "Bright white dot, here and..."

She pokes the surface of the sphere a couple times, leaving white dots behind.

"Now smaller and red."

She pokes the surface few more times, leaving red dots behind.

"Okay. Done. Erase it all."

The sphere and the canvas tag all vanish.

Eelesia turns to Verity with a questioning smile.

"Sounds straightforward."  She steps out of the bridge to avoid distracting or annoying the crew flying the ship.

"Create a perfect sphere of black around me.  This should be a long gray smudge, brighter in the center," she whispers, making a line just above the sphere's equator, going nearly all the way around.  That will be the backdrop of the galaxy.  "White dots here, here, here..." She points to a number of stars in a 'y' shape, just above the galaxy line.  "With this one being larger.  Make this one smaller, and slightly redder.  Hmm, no, move this one slightly..." she pulls the spot of white over a few inches.

"Add an information tag to this dot, saying 'farther away but a large star'.  And this one gets a tag saying 'third closest star to us, a small star.  Has two gas giants.'  Add a tag to this section, saying 'the way these stars are parallaxed by our movement means the shape looks like it's slowly closing its top two branches as we pass.'"

More dots are added.  She knows more information about what (unsuitable for life) planets are around the closest handfull stars than exactly how they look, so a lot of the information is contained in floating text.  The star at their destination, decades away at the speed the fleet is travelling, gets a paragraph.  One of it's planets is the right distance and size to be terraformed into a livable world.  A few of the closer stars she doesn't know where they are, only their descriptions, which go into a seperate set of text notes tacked onto the sphere's dark top.

She takes a minute to try and think of anything else, but has run out of things to add.  "Save this thing as-is but shrink it and move it into my hand," she whispers to it at last, then goes to carry it back to the captain.

The Captain appreciates her attention to detail! This is definitely enough to find the search area.

"Pattern-matching across a bounded infinity of possible galaxies could take days if you're not just from a divergent timeline, unfortunately. We've procedurally mapped totalities more than we've ever explored, so I'm confident there will be a match, but in the meantime we can fly aimlessly around likely parallel regions!"

The psychedelic storm accelerates, breaking around the forward tines of the dimensional cruiser.

"You think the mirror-faced thing that brought me to this civilization was able to send things through dimensions and not just space?"

"Actually, your arrival might even be exogenous! They still haven't detected any trace of spatial or dimensional travel, which means you came in on an axis that might go hundreds of layers deep, or more!"

"I'm not sure what that means.  Layers?  Also..." she tries to formulate a question, but isn't sure where to start.  "What is the color-stuff we're travelling through?  Are we going through different dimensions now?"

"Sort of? This is just five-space," Eelesia says.

"So, Dimensional Theory 101. The basic idea is that in the eigentotality every layer has a calculable inverse relationship with its dimensions. Three plus one is only three steps down from infinite size. It's not actually infinite but it might as well be. So we dive down to five plus one where our entire galaxy fits in a space not much bigger than a solar system. The trade-off is that we are flying in five-dimensional space right now. This is still relatively easy to navigate so it makes for a convenient way to get around in adjacent three-spaces quickly, but the relationship holds all the way down to Imaginary Space. The further you dive, the more axes of movement exist and the less distance matters, and the more getting where you're going becomes about aiming precisely enough rather than going fast enough."

She's quiet for a minute, trying to figure that out.  "The captain mentioned divergent timelines.  Can you go through those in five-space too?"

"Actually no! To get to an alternate quantum branch of your own timeline you need a second temporal axis. It's not actually as simple as going 'sideways' in time, but access to that second temporal degree of freedom is a prerequisite. You have to go down eleven spatial layers before its even possible to rotate on a second time axis, but this is actually a limit of our physics bounds; the totality doesn't enforce any particular relationship between number of time axes and number of spatial axes. Actually, the theoretical mathematicians say that the same imaginary space lies at the nexus of infinitely short infinite temporal dimensions the way it does at the infinitely small infinite spatial dimensions, but polarized matter---what we call matter or anti-matter---can't exist in even three temporal dimensions because it starts randomly flipping polarity and annihilating itself."

"Hmm."  Again, a long pause.  "How far down can the ship go?"

"The Mononoke is is an older ship, but he's rated for up to ten-million degrees of freedom," the Captain proclaims proudly.

"That's far enough down that you could walk from one end of the universe to the other over lunch," Eelesia adds.

"Ah."  She can't visualize that scale at all, but still manages to be impressed.

She tries to think of other questions.  Specifically, she tries to think of useful questions that couldn't be taken as possibly insulting or silly, like 'and you're sure you can get us back to the right timeline once we're done?' or 'is it possible to misstep and accidentally squish a planet when they're that small relative to us?'

"The Mononoke is a boy ship?"

Those would indeed be silly questions but no one would blame her for not instantly groking a field of physics she's never met before.

"Does your culture not do the thing where vehicles get gendered male for no particular reason?"

"No.  All of our ships and shuttles are 'it' pronoun-wise.

"Though, that brings to mind... do the humans from your world have an imbalanced gender ratio?  It didn't occur to me before today, but most of the people I've seen since arriving were women."

"We don't have a statistically significant gender imbalance in the population, but I'll admit our society hasn't completely shaken off the sexism we inherited from our pre-technological past, yet. Some things are still considered unmasculine in a way that clearly influences statistical averages of male interest in things like finance, sports, and combat magic. It doesn't help that women do, in fact, have a statistical advantage in mana capacity over men."

"Huh.  I think what people's daemons settled as is too obviously a difference to glue stereotypes and jobs to for any other differences to have caught on where my people came from."

"Well, in our case, it all goes back to pre-industrial living conditions when physical power determined a lot about one's ability to get through an average day, but stereotyping off daemon form didn't actually occur to me until you said it and now it's super obvious that would be a thing. It puts your religious troubles in a more annoying context, that's for sure."

"Yeah.  I was hoping that they'd cut it out once they had enough technology to stop relying on abilities and moves, though I suppose that would be too optimistic."

"Humans of any stripe are incorrigible categorizers, it is true."

"True."

She remembers that she was supposed to give the captain information about her PADATS image, and sets about ordering her terminal to show her the history.  It's still creepy, even after a few days to try and get used to it, and this not being something she'd mind sharing.  A few images that clearly show the ghostly tendrils are selected and ordered shared.

"Thanks! Edsel, work up a sydar filter."

The crew does its thing, and the Captain reclines in her chair. No one is going to kick Verity off the bridge but for the time being there's nothing else to do but wait.

She's probably going to need to figure out what people do for fun on these ships sooner or later, but for right now she still has things on her to-do list.  

"I guess next up is meeting with the diplomats," she says, and sends a message to the diplomatic team on the Mononoke that she'd like to meet them at their convenience.  "Want to come along when I do, Eelesia?"

"Given that I'm attached as a liaison, I probably should."

The head diplomat would be delighted to meet Verity and Araeneve and discuss her people's most likely concerns and angles of approach. They can come down to the dignitary suite any time.

They double-check the map, then make their way to the suite.  

The head diplomat, it turns out, is a short young woman with pink hair, dressed in a sharp little white suit.

"Hello! You must be Verity and Araeneve. It is truly wonderful to meet you. My name is Madoka."

"Hello," she says, offering to shake her hand.  

Handshake.

"This is my bodyguard, Homura."

"Hello."

She will greet Homura as well.  

Turning back to Madoka, "How much have you already heard about the fleet?"

"I've read Eelesia's summary. I'd enjoy hearing it from you directly, though. What can we expect?"

"It's a group of just under a million people, who have been in space for several generations.  Our technology is much lower.  We can't reverse aging, and we've gotten rid of most dangerous diseases but still have colds and such.  No sapient AI.  No... something-exception?  The thing where you can duplicate materials.  Instead we get new matter through daemons using moves, though not every material can be made. 

"People need to work to live.  The government makes sure everyone is housed and given basic education and healthcare, but not food or other things unless they're entirely unable to work.  Most of our government is a democracy, but the Legendaries choose the judges.  There's a majority religion that considers legendaries important, and encourages people to perform certain jobs and duties based on daemon type.  That might be similar to how you handle gender, but I haven't seen enough of how that looks to be sure.  Even without the religion, since daemon moves are so important in keeping the ships functioning, people wind up doing jobs they can do wherever their daemons are needed.

"Overall, the biggest problem is going to be the constant surveillance.  Being recorded without permission violates our right to privacy, even if the recordings aren't shared, and is considered hostile.  I don't know if this is an inherent difference between our types of human, or just the result of a culture living in close quarters on a ship with technology that is really easy to steal information out of.  Not filming the inside of the fleet after finding them is going to be very important.  Especially not the residential places where people bathe and sleep.

"There's also the lack of daemons.  Normally daemons will talk to each other parallel to the human pair, and add an extra layer into communication, the same way body language or voice tone do.  They aren't needed, but it is a little bit," she flails for words.  "Imprecise?  Muffled?  Compared to what we're used to."

"Some might want to ask for citizenship, but I think most will just want to be towed to an empty planet."

At first, Madoka nods along. At the comment about gender she looks first confused and then thoughtful. During the next part her eyes slowly grow wider and wider, and she almost misses the rest of what Verity says.

"An empty planet would be no trouble at all," Madoka says first.

"Um, I'm terribly sorry for what must have been a terrible shock, finding yourself unexpectedly exposed to strangers as you did. Could you tell me how your culture expects first meetings to be handled between individuals or internal organizations? I'm afraid I'm rather struggling to imagine how one navigates a cultural taboo on remembering a person without their explicit permission." In fact, isn't that a logical paradox? "I'm really curious how your society enforces that. Also, I'm not sure I follow the connection to entertainment media?"

Madoka says all this, sounding mildly apologetic.

"Remember?" she asks, confused.  Had she used that word?  "Oh, with recording?  No, memories aren't..."

"Hmm.  I suppose a culture with sapient AI wouldn't have much difference between recording something and memorizing it with a meat-based brain, would it?  And our emotions and taboos on the subject haven't been calibrated with the understanding that AI is likely.

"Perhaps I should explain why we have that taboo, to try and get the shape of what we mean by it?  I think there's technically two parts to it that might need to be handled separately."  She had been thinking of this for a while, while walking through the forests, picking it apart.  Exactly what she feels.  Why she feels what she feels.

"First, setting cameras in public places in order to make databases of where people are going.  We've historically had issues with that.  People being outed as gay or trans or polyamorous and getting fired or attacked or disowned for it, back when our culture still considered those immoral and people hid it to protect themselves.  A boss deciding to fire a worker that the database concludes is a member of an opposing political faction or religious minority, or if they get word of the person's family's history and decide that they don't want to spend money training someone who is at increased risk of some genetic issue.  Obviously, this law doesn't stop gossip or people remembering things, but gossip is unprovable and human memory is flawed and it's hard to get information out of someone without that person noticing, and people can't keep track of each other as well as even our computers from a few generations ago could. 

"Of the two, that one is the least important.  Admittedly, it's probably even outdated by our current systems, and being kept aloft because it's so entangled with the other one in our minds.  No one will mind someone walking by in public, and not even an AI coming along, as long as the brought camera or ...sensory-organ-equivalents?... can't see through walls, and aren't left behind to deliberately look for patterns.  People do sometimes take pictures of themselves in public and catch incidental frames of others.  It's specifically the universal keeping-track-of-people-at-scale-and-over-time thing that is going to upset them."

"The second, more important thing has to do with people's home privacy being invaded.  By not letting people be alone, unscanned, unwatched, while they're doing private things," she says, then reconsiders.  Probably best to be specific, no matter how embarrassing, to avoid confusion.  "Most relevantly having sex, but anything they might choose to do in their own homes.  Whoever is recording or watching that is involving themself in that without the other person's consent.  Even if they're just sitting still, people don't like to always be," she struggles for words again.  "Composed?  Proper?  But also don't like to be seen relaxing."  She trails off.  That sounds kind of silly, put like that, but thinking back it still sounds true.  

Madoka smiles awkwardly. "That is certainly a lot to untangle."

She takes a bracing breath, and lets the earnestness flow through her.

"To address your first concern, I believe you're simply mistaken about how our systems fundamentally function. Our founders' guiding light was the idea that, whatever they built, it would not give---it would be incapable of giving them special treatment. This is why they set out to build a truly impartial meritocracy from first principles! And one part of that was ensuring that the power to know other people's private secrets is prevented from accumulating in anyone's hands. I can also confidently assure you that it is significantly more difficult to get... 'external' information from someone without them noticing than it is to get 'internal' information from someone without them noticing, but it is true that most people you meet in Administrated Space wouldn't think to make that distinction."

Earnest smile.

"Regarding your second concern, I fear I still don't understand what it is, exactly, that you object to? No one can force you to share your," faint blush, "private moments, if you don't want to. That would be invasive, absolutely. Even though you are guaranteed to be safe from professional or legal repercussions even if you did suddenly decide to share your entire sex life with the public. Some people do. Some people don't. That is up to their own, um, kinks."

"The problem with that is that people aren't going to believe that your system is secure, just because you say it is. 

"We've spent a great deal of time and effort on preventing data theft, and it has always failed.  People have spent years on DRM or other security, then had it get cracked in hours.  Our phones have physical, circuit-breaking switches on the camera and microphone, because of how easy it would be to make them turn on digitally when compromised.  Our experience has trained us to expect that if someone has a recorded piece of information on us, it might as well already be in whatever hands we least want it to be in.

"It is possible that your databases are as secure as you claim.  It's possible that no one built a backdoor into it.  It's possible that there's never been some kind of leak, then cover-up, which would look identical.  It's possible that the security will last unbroken for the next century.  However, from all of our history and prior experience, no one on the fleet is going to consider it likely.  And there's no good way to prove a negative.

"Also, I'm not entirely sure which of your machines are sapient and which aren't, but if the database is sapient it would count as a person that people aren't going to want involving itself in their sex acts by watching even if no other humans see it."

"It's not a person," Eelesia interjects.

"I'm sorry. I should've realized earlier, but I focused on the wrong parts of your explanation. You're from a much more technologically primitive civilization than I assumed you were. You keep talking about 'cameras' and 'databases' and 'securing data' and that's not just a quirk of your phraseology is it?"

Eelesia sighs.

"There are no cameras. There have never been any cameras. There are no... um... 'system admins' managing 'databases'. For the really critical systems there aren't even any physical computing substrates, and most of the rest are thaumtronic and extradimensional and might as well be incorporeal. The system's spatial and causal comprehension is 'recorded' in the same way the direction of gravity is 'recorded' by your brain when you're standing somewhere. That comprehension is an inevitable consequence of existing."

Eelesia perks up as she explains.

"I also assumed your people had at least a rudimentary theory of mind, which is my bad. I really should've explained that decomposed cognition is a thing. Sapience, sentience, and agenticness are separate an independent phenomena. A person needs at least the first two and usually has all three. For example, a pet animal is sentient, but not sapient. An intelligent device is sapient but not sentient. Sapience is the ability to predict the future by understanding the present, more or less. Sentience is the subjective experience of sensory data, sometimes inadequately summarized as 'emotions'. Being agentic is having ordered preferences about the future, sometimes inadequately summarized as 'willpower' or 'proactiveness'. Each of these things has its own internal moving parts that can be implemented separately as well. The systems are not people. The systems are not conscious. They are only sapient and agentic in the specific ways they need to be. But that still means they start out as hard to hack as a human brain and don't come with any of the compensating vulnerabilities. If your computer scientists refuse to believe that, you can show them the architecture. It's all open source. Anyone can study it as much as they like."

Madoka nods along, then adds, "I believe I could arrange a test, if that seemed necessary? Bring your best hackers and psychics to MidChilda and have them try to subvert the administration?"

She puzzles through this.  "You can probably convince the computer scientists, though it'll take a while for them to learn how to read the architecture well enough to be sure.  And bringing hackers and psychics to test things does sound like a good idea. 

"Just, it's going to be really bad if the fleet is being recorded before the people inside are convinced.  Presumably the system isn't everywhere, or they would already be found.  Is there a way to tell it to hold off of other countries' territories?

"Hmm.  Also, what's the possibility that someone manages to create a hostile version of the same thing, that does share information unwillingly or do bad things with the collected information?"

"There's no chance of someone creating a hostile version without being noticed. Implementing the administrative instances was a civilization-wide effort. Those only cover a few hundred light-years in the universes immediately adjacent to MidChilda's, though. Right now we only have the Mononoke's local instances running on conventional, mundane hardware. Which means thaumtronic quantum processors interfaced with optronic neuromorphics, if you were curious."

"To answer your question... the only way to 'hold off' would be to... destroy the entire dimensional cruiser very thoroughly the moment it detects your fleet, and then dimensional transfer us the rest of the way using only my own magic? We could... accidentally surface in the correct universe by complete chance, power down the ship completely, and go looking for your fleet in nothing but our Barrier Jackets? I don't think you really appreciate how ridiculous what you're asking sounds, given that you are not also demanding we gouge our eyes out or erase our own memories, which would be ridiculous in a different way but at least logically consistent."

"There must be something we can do to accommodate a case of civilizational scopophobia! Maybe we can minimize the impact if the Mononoke immediately drops us off and then leaves? We'd... have to leave our Devices onboard, though. I'm not sure if..."

("Over my dead body," Homura opines calmly.)

"Yeah..."

"We know what does and does not block human eyesight.  If our walls weren't sufficient, we'd either have built walls that could block them or not have developed a concept of privacy that expected to block them.  I'm not saying that the taboo is reasonable.  Cultural things generally aren't, and need to be updated to reflect new technology or situations.  And it probably will, given time. 

"The best way to proceed probably depends on what goal you're going towards, and how much you think making people angry and scared will interfere with it.  And how much you care about people not being angry or scared as a valuable thing to try for, in itself.

"What would your society consider proper behavior if I'd fallen into a bedroom where people were being intimate, instead of on a public bridge?  Or if I'd had some kind of uncontrollable telepathic ability that made me read everyone's mind on the planet?"

"I don't expect you to just ignore your taboo. I'm just concerned that you're still... imagining wrong the ways in which it is, in fact, threatened. Like how you're so focused on the sensory apparatus specifically. To use your example, it wouldn't be like building thicker walls at all. It would be like disguising that what you were building was even a house, because one can infer by seeing an inhabited house that its occupants spend time inside it doing various things, without directly observing any of those things."

"Mm. Our goal is simply to give your fleet more options than they currently have. We're a tiny drop of hope in an ocean of chaos, is what I think, which means we can only help where we happen to be. But if basic facts about us are going to scare your people and make them angry, they might choose the harder path, and deny themselves this chance for a better future!"

Madoka takes a breath.

"And um, if you fell into a private bedroom while something intimate was happening, that would be the same if you fell into any private room where you weren't supposed to be? There isn't, um, a specific custom. As for uncontrollable telepathy... that sounds like a really unique situation and I couldn't predict for you how it would be handled, because that would depend on the exact details."

"I'd meant more emotionally than legally, with the hypotheticals.  

"If you can't explain it well enough for me to understand the difference, you won't get most people in the fleet to understand it either.  I can infer that something is a house, and that house things go on inside of it, but only after my eyes detect things that my brain can go on to interpret as doors and windows and other things that I know houses have.  That, or being told that it's a house by someone, which I sense with my ears.  Then I'd still need more information to know which house-contained task was being done at a given time inside of it.  Even ralts or hatenna, with their unwilling empathy, are still sensing emotion, or dopamine levels, or something, because information exists out in the world and it must be getting to their minds somehow so that their brain can interpret it as emotion.  We just don't know how.

"Though, that would probably be a good comparison to make.  Hatenna, I mean.  They're stuck feeling the emotions of people nearby against their will, and no one can figure out a shield yet, but we aren't going to lock up thirteen year olds for settling so the culture has an exception carved out for them.  Admittedly, I still have no idea why your system was set up like this by a person on purpose, or why someone would make anything without an off switch, but it's... well, it exists that way now."

"It makes perfect sense to me but I am out of explanatory metaphors. Or wait, no I have one more. You're thinking of the system as, like, a tool, being used against you. It is more like an artificial law of physics, or as close as we can get to one."

"Could you tell me about Hatenna? About the shape of this exception?"

"Hatenna is a daemon that automatically picks up the emotions of anyone within about 7 meters then feels those emotions themself.  This isn't a pleasant situation for either the daemon or the people being read, but we've tried methods of blocking it and haven't found a solution.  

"Daemons with uncontrollable abilities being ignored and allowed to walk freely was a major political issue around the time the fleet was being put together.  On the dead world, they were expected to live somewhere with space, like a farm, and avoid going into public areas.  For the fleet, which doesn't have that kind of room, they were originally planned to be forced into a seperate hall.  It took years of civil rights protests and forced desegregation to make our ancestors change their minds.  Now, it's just an accepted fact that people can't be restricted from public areas or denied services."

"It sounds like that was a difficult situation for everyone involved, especially if having the ability was truly such a burden on the individuals with the ability even without the social effects. Unfortunately, I think it is probably unwise to draw parallels between our systems and persecuted minorities. I've learned the hard way that most peoples are unsympathetic to the hardship of being cut off from the technological parts of ourselves that their own society is not accustomed to..."

Madoka pauses as she has an awful thought.

"Um. I hesitate to suggest this; it is almost certainly not commensurate or fair. But how might your people react if asked to imagine meeting a society that was horrified at the idea of... of hive minds. Because they've been horribly abused by a hive mind and overgeneralized. And consider human-daemon pairs to be hive minds, and consider your bond an... an on-going human rights violation..."

It only now occurs to Verity that Madoka might be much older than she looks.

"No one would be eager to emigrate there," she considers.  It sounds like a decent analogy to her.  "They'd be worried that the other group would show up and try to do something to force people to accept their 'help' or punish them for being born with two bodies.  Probably wind up polarized into pro-hive-mind in general, accepting immigrants from that society who want to develop artificial hive minds, even though we don't have any prior consensus on hive minds and I think if we ran into a hive mind first we might have wound up the other way.  Differences being magnified, and all.  We only spend about as much time on information safety as fire safety, yet I've had multiple conversations here about privacy and none about how much we agree that being on fire is bad.

"As for our actual difference... after thinking about it for a while, I've been thinking of my discomfort with being recorded as an issue with me rather than with the system.  Something that I'll have to adapt to, and haven't yet.  Though, other people aren't going to necessarily think that.  Many will consider their opinions to be objectively correct and mass surveillance to be a problem.  I'd expect most will want to live on their own planet outside of your range, like I said, and offer immigration to anyone fleeing from it.  Hopefully whatever polarization happens won't erode the exceptions protecting daemons with abusable abilities.  Though, if the system really is unhackable and not sapient and not a privacy issue as claimed, once our programmers get a good look at it, it probably won't be an issue for that long.

"Though, the talk of empathic daemons did remind me of someone.  If he were here, he'd probably mention that, since the problem is people's perceptions, making a huge deal out of avoiding putting the ships in range to be recorded would probably make people more leery of it.  It would imply that it is something to be concerned about.  Which," she tries to think.  "Which is just another complication I have no idea how to deal with.  There's a reason I wasn't happy with being expected to lead people."

"We could simply not tell them," Homura suggests blandly. "Until after we deliver them to their new planet."

Someone had to say it.

"That could work, if you can do it quickly.  An hour or two isn't going to be worse than five seconds, and that's unavoidable.

"So, a plan might be to find them, immediately go back for a tow ship if needed, then drag them into orbit of some out-of-the-way planet.  While doing that, we can ask for someone who can be a diplomat, a rotom, and a few skilled programmers.  The gathered team and the Mononoke can go back to your territories where people are already under the system regardless.  

"I could stay there for a while, if you think that's useful, and tell them about other things while the diplomats are with you.  I wouldn't mind a few more years of fleet tech as long as we eventually either determine that your system is safe or your side invents a shuttle that doesn't bring your system along, or limits it to a reasonably short range."

"If you think that's best," Madoka says earnestly. "Knowing the possibility, we did come equipped to transport your fleet."

Eelesia feels like she's falling down on the job, that Verity still doesn't understand. It is starting to shake her confidence.

"If you want a shuttle without sensors, we can make one, probably with this cruiser's own fabricators, even. But as I've been telling you, a lack of sensors wouldn't matter. What you're actually asking for is for whoever has contact with your fleet to create a permanent, artificial gap in their history. Even if they go in naked in a pressurized steel can, that segment of their history will be reconstructed afterwards. And it would be horrifying if there were a button we could press to prevent the... healing, of that gap."

"How far would that radius go, regarding things that didn't affect the person being... How does this not count as being able to view the past?  If someone visited us without bringing technology, walked down a street, then returned to your part of space, would the system be able to tell what the strangers in the houses they passed were eating for dinner that night?"

"It takes what I think you would consider a shockingly small amount of data to accurately extrapolate events on the level of human perception. That's vastly less fidelity than knowing the complete physical state of a past moment in time. And the system certainly wouldn't be able to tell what those strangers were having for dinner immediately. It's in theory possible that it might not ever derive that particular detail. There is just, by design, no way to promise or ensure that it won't, because the power to tamper with history is far too easy to abuse for it to be allowed to exist."

"I agree with that when it comes to large-scale history.  A great deal of our history would have been easier if knowledge couldn't be lost or rewritten by later groups, and I'm entirely for the preservation of that sort of information.  Information intentionally recorded and made public as news.  We make a distinction between historical fact worth putting into textbooks and which shoe someone puts on first that you still don't seem to understand, and we don't have the same distinction between something being accessible from the internet and being publically accessible to everyone.  Again, it's going to feel to everyone in the fleet like you're going to make recordings of every person inside of their own homes - while they're bathing, sleeping, dressing - and publish it to everyone. 

"You also can't promise or guarantee that the system is entirely unhackable, because you aren't at the end of all technology that can possibly exist.  There's an effectively-infinite amount of time and space to discover or invent things in.  Even if rotom can't do it, something else one day will.   The benefits probably outweigh the costs, but not everyone is going to be swayed by logic.

"At least deriving the gap requires physical information that leaves the houses, which means it's theoretically actionable against with soundproofing, air filters, and other security.  It would mean we could have some level of contact, enough that people from one side who want to move to the other can do so, instead of needing everyone to immediately pick whether to join or leave, and leave anyone who doesn't want to be watched on their own planet never to be seen again, or drag people against their will into somewhere they'd be miserable.  Even if they'd be happier overall, they are - most of them - adults, who should be allowed to make choices even if they're not logical."

"We'd never dream of refusing an individual's right to choose," Madoka affirms. "And we will do our best to provide the information and the means to make that choice meaningful, independent of any ongoing contact. Unfortunately, that is the best I can honestly promise."

"You could also say the same thing about the universe itself. If true post-cognition is possible even in theory---and even if it isn't I'm sure there're exogenous past-watchers out there somewhere---then the very fabric of reality is constantly recording every instant of existence and is vulnerable to hacking and no one in the history of life has ever had the faintest shred of privacy, technology or no technology."

"True.  Then I guess we'll just have to deal with the things we can deal with as they come up."

Araeneve expands on that, finally speaking after having stayed silent for a while.  "Hypothetical distant or far-future people feels less threatening.  It's not just them knowing, but the chance of the information being used to hurt us."

"I honestly predict that the chance of exogenous past-watchers hurting you with private information is higher than the chance of a malicious actor from your civilization 'hacking' the Administration. My point was that the universe itself is easier to hack than our systems are, and has none of the safeguards against misuse."

"And my point was that there's a difference between something actually being true and people believing in it being true or acting like it's true.  People not being reasonable should be taken into account.  It's one of the weaknesses of a democracy.  A good explanation can help, but... I think that might need to wait on the fleet engineers taking a look at it and making a report.  No offense, but you seem to believe too axiomatically that it's good to come up with explanations that anyone will find convincing."

Well, yes, when she puts it like that...

"None taken."

Madoka pats Eelesia's shoulder.

"Verity, the planet your fleet is already heading toward. How much do you know about it?"

"As much as anyone on the fleet does," she says, then starts to explain.  Much of it is what she'd already put on the star chart.  That she isn't going to spend her entire lifespan unable to reach it has gotten rid of her usual bitterness towards the subject.  

"There are four planets in the system.  Only one is habitable straight-off, and the other rocky planet has large quantities of ice.  No moons on either, though both gas giants have several.  Similar day cycles and year lengths to what they use on the fleet, only 15 minutes shorter per day and 7 day longer years, and gravity that is 94% of the fleet's.  Also the gravity here," she says, then rethinks.  "Assuming that there isn't some kind of personalized gravity thing that's automatically adjusting to what people are used to, or something."  She trails off, not sure what is relevant.

"The cabin gravity is passive; it's not an active system. Safer that way if the cruiser takes significant damage."

"Mm. How was you destination chosen? I mean to ask, is it ideal in some way or was it only your first acceptable option? If the former is true, the fairest course may simply be to transport your fleet to their intended destination sight unseen, and leave formal contact for later."

"It was the closest available planet habitable from the start, though also seems pretty nice for our purposes.

"What would the benefits to waiting be, and how long would waiting take?"