"Fine by me," Tarinda tells Dara.

So they can settle down for the night, Need on the floor at the foot of Dara and Tarinda's bed. 

Vanyel yelps a few times in the middle of the night again, enough to wake Dara, but nothing that pings Page as important enough to wake Tarinda, so she can have an undisturbed sleep. 

She sleeps very soundly! And pops up in the morning ready to go.

Vanyel is not a morning person nowadays, and needs to gulp down his herb-tea and then his usual cup of chava before he's ready to hold a conversation, let alone pack up to ride out. They can be on the road by a couple of candlemarks after dawn, though. 

Jkatha is a lot wetter than the Plains, especially in spring. They are caught in a couple of brief but torrential downpours before lunch. 

Tarinda braids her hair about it but is otherwise undaunted.

Dara cheerfully asks more of her questions about Tarinda's body modifications and about body modifications in general back in her world. If they build Sing will everyone here be able to get them too? Dara would really like the ones that make Tarinda ridiculously fast and coordinated and good at dance-fighting. 

Yes, everyone here who wants them can get them once Sing is running! It will need to build things before it can hand stuff out trivially so probably people who are currently old and stuff will get to go first but only by, like, a day or two.

Neat! Dara is very in favour of building Sing at this point! 

The afternoon is sunnier and uneventful and the Companions can move pretty fast on paved roads, which Jkatha has, and so they can cover nearly fifty miles before sundown, more than halfway to the border with Rethwellan. 

"What do I need to know about Rethwellan, since we'll be there tomorrow?"

"They're prosperous and have lots of mages and lots of immigrants from other countries and they hate shaych people," Dara says cheerfully. "Er, shaych means being attracted to the same sex. It's literally against the law in Rethwellan." She glances over at Vanyel. "Shouldn't come up, Van doesn't usually sleep around except that one time at the Midsummer party in Kata'shin'a'in." 

"Dara!" Vanyel turns bright red. 

"Gosh, okay, I guess I'll pretend Cory's a boy if it comes up."

"–Oh, right, you have a girlfriend. Is that considered pretty normal and fine in your world, then?" 

"Sure. People used to be variable on it back when Cory was first alive? But not recently at least anywhere you'd normally go."

"Oh, good! I hope Sing can make our world like that too. Most places aren't as bad as Rethwellan but I think parts of Valdemar still aren't great." 

They can rent a room at another inn and have a hot meal and share a room again for the night, and then get back on the road and ride for the Rethwellan border. 

"I don't think Sing can do it directly, it doesn't mess with people's heads, but it can help you avoid people who're going to be bad about it and maybe it'll make sure they run into the most convincing arguments or something? I'm not sure, it doesn't talk much."

"I'd been curious to hear more about Sing's strategies for changing things," Vanyel says. "If it mostly doesn't talk to you - which sounds like our gods, honestly - what is it actually doing in the background to make everything nice? I guess it can maybe just solve the problem of there being enough food and clothing and houses and all, and that by itself is a lot, but - I don't know, I think some people would find excuses to start wars anyway, how does it prevent that?" 

"Uh, it can talk, my understanding of why it doesn't is that it sort of fundamentally cannot help but be really manipulative when it talks? Because it doesn't have person stuff going on underneath, it is not a person, and it thinks it's bad for people to spend time having conversations with something like that. But it can suggest things to spirit guides, there's that, and it can make lots of stuff so people can do whatever we wanna do, and also - hm - there's a soft metal Page doesn't have a word for, it's pale and bluish if you cut it but goes dark grey in the air, very heavy..."

Dara frowns for a while, thinking. "Lead? Um, what does that have to do with things? We use it in building things, I think, I don't know that much about it." 

"Well, it's poisonous. In small amounts it won't usually kill you but it does especially if you eat it as a kid make you more violent and impulsive and antisocial. Next time we stop I can draw you graphs of the crime rate and how much lead was being used in things at various times - there's an eighteen year delay for the kids to grow up and then - anyway, lead is really dramatic, which is why the graphs would be interesting, but if you're as smart as Sing a lot of things are like lead, and some of them don't have an eighteen year delay and some of them are really subtle so it doesn't make people feel manipulated if Sing changes them, and it can just find all those things and change every one of them, and then pay more attention to whatever's left and kind of micromanage it."

"Huh. That's really interesting to know. Also seems hard to figure out - was it Sing who did or had people guessed before that?" 

"We knew before, that's why the graphs are so dramatic, you can watch the crime rate go up and down depending on whether it was legal to burn stuff with lead in it to make machinery work eighteen years before or not."

"Wow. Well, I don't think we burn lead so maybe we're not as badly off." 

"I had wanted to ask - what are spirit guides? Is that the thing Page is?"