:I'm not picky, sometimes for a long time I'll eat historically accurate food because I'm trying to set an atmosphere for some piece I'm doing and it's that sort of thing:

Vanyel hands her a fairly generous portion of very dense hard bread, and some sort of meat jerky, and a little bit of dried apple. He refills his waterskin from the well and offers it to her. 

She chows down. "Thanks!"

Dara is quiet for a bit while they're focused on eating, then keeps asking questions. What does their science know about how trees work? She's always been really curious about trees and how they manage to grow so big.  

Tarinda can explain trees! She doesn't know if they have all the same kinds here but the general tree concept was evolved more than once on the planet her people are from, it's a good concept.

Trees are a good concept! 

After humans and Companions have both had some food and water (they're carrying grain for the Companions, since there isn't yet very much spring-growth grass for them to graze on, and they have a portable water trough that Dara fills from the well), they mount and keep going, this time with Tarinda up behind Vanyel.

Dara keeps asking questions. It doesn't seem like she's going to run out of questions anytime soon. She's onto geography now. Does Tarinda's world have lots of little kingdoms, like theirs, or one big empire, or something else? 

:There are lots of countries, kind of? Uh, some of the things that make countries important aren't things any more. They often can't collect taxes or go to war or enforce laws, or at least they can't do those things in any situations where the people they're doing it to aren't happy about it, because those people can always be like, 'hey Sing, actually I'm kind of done with this whole country thing, I don't want them to take my stuff or shove a weapon in my hands or put me in jail' and Sing will - not directly, it almost never directly talks to people, but it'll be like 'yeah then they can't do that'. So countries sort of exist but they exist a lot less. On Earth there's more country stuff because there were already people there during the Quiet War. On Mars we're a lot more self-conscious of them being kind of made up and it's all for fun and people wouldn't keep seriously doing country stuff if anything else came up. Like, I'm friends with a Martian Lord, and this just mostly means that he thinks it's tremendous fun to dress up in fancy clothes and pretend to be evil and bossy, and there's a chunk of Mars nobody else was using when he decided he wanted to do that, because when we're playing through a story we sometimes need an evil lord for a villain in the story so I can swordfight him. But like, then we have an afterparty and whoever he was dangling over his shark tank will be laughing, right, it's all for fun:

Dara is finding it mindbendingly hard to wrap her head around that! "That's so strange! Is...everything...like that? People playing pretend with things that used to be real but now they aren't anymore because of - I guess Sing is the very very smart machine who won against all the others?" 

:Yeah, that's Sing! It's kind of a pun in the language it's from, it has other names in other languages but I like to call it Sing. Not everything is pretend though, that's just kind of how my hobby shakes out. My job isn't pretend, when I'm working - and I mentioned my girlfriend? She was really depressed around the time of the Quiet War and one of the smart machines, they're called AIs, was letting people get frozen because a smart enough machine can get people back from frozen. And she wrote a little note to anybody in the future who might want to unfreeze her and she wanted a bunch of stuff to all be taken care of so she wouldn't have to deal with it. So I ran around and dealt with all of it for her and made the world one she'd want to be in and woke her up. That was real:

Vanyel, in front of her, tenses up slightly. She can't see his face, of course, but Dara notices the flash of longing followed by resignation-disappointment, and gives him a concerned look. Neither of them says anything. 

:Are you okay? I usually have Page help me make sure not to say anything insensitive when I'm working with people who lived before Sing but it needs more words:

"...Van, can I tell her? I think we should tell her." 

"I don't - think - even what Sing is could - fix it," Vanyel says dully. "But. Sure. If you want." 

Dara takes a deep breath. "Van had a lifebonded partner who died a long time ago. Probably your world doesn't have lifebonds? It's - sort of like how our Companions bond to us, but - even more - people usually don't survive if their lifebonded dies. He's still very sad about it. But probably even Sing can't bring someone back from the dead." 

:Not unless they're frozen. Not yet. There's a couple things it's still working on that we don't know if it'll ever crack. I'm sorry:

"No, it's all right," Vanyel says tonelessly. "You don't need to be sorry." 

:It's not okay for people to be dead! That's why I need to build a Sing here as soon as possible!:

Vanyel doesn’t answer. 

“How long did it take in your world for people to figure out how to make things precisely enough that you could make a Sing?”

:Uh. About five and a half thousand years after the first time a civilization invented writing? I'm not sure what benchmark to give you here:

“I assume it’d take you less time to show us how,” Vanyel says. His voice is still flat. “Since you have a smart machine that knows all the relevant facts. Assuming that things even work similarly enough here. It sounds pretty different if you don’t have Gifts and magic at all.”

(The existence of another world should...probably feel more surprising and significant than it does right now. Mostly he feels tired and confused.)

:Page still works, so I can probably build something that will hold Sing, but it could be complicated some way and will definitely take a long time if nobody is already doing precision manufacture:

Vanyel nods. He still seems deep in thought about something. 

Dara cheerfully keeps asking random questions about science - does their science know why there are different kinds of rocks? What do they know about animal species? Do they know things about the ocean? (Dara has heard of the ocean but it's quite a lot of kingdoms away and she expects never to see it in her lifetime.)