She calls through the portal: "Hannah! You can come in!"

And Hannah steps out of the bathroom, walks over to the bed, and sits down, still holding the apple and the knife. She smiles. "Hi, I'm Hannah. Let me just stow this..." 

She takes the apple and puts it in one of her coat pockets, leaving her coat just as flat as before. The knife goes in a different pocket. 

"There." She claps her hands. "Pleased ta meetcha, Thorn's told me all about you. I'm a former Thorn, or... I'm one thing you can get out of a Thorn after a few hundred years of living." 

She finishes push-ups and stands up.

"Nice coat. What's so different about you, then?"

"First off I'm in magical research and development, not world-scouting. Doctor of Metaptropi, which means I'm an expert at the magitech of dimensionality. I enchanted the coat myself. And..."

She pulls the apple out again, this time coated in cinnamon sugar, and with a twist of her wrist the apple expands to twice the size. 

"... I can do little tricks like that all day long. Personality-wise... I'm a little reckless. Kind of obsessive about stuff I like. Have trouble focussing on stuff I don't like. I'm the kind of girl you come to to plan surprise parties. Hedonistic streak a mile wide. I would've gone for the "visceral" option on Titania pretty much immediately. Your Thorn's more hesitant, she hasn't learned exactly how badass she is yet. Some other lines of us might disagree that that's something she should learn. Personally..." She shrugs. "It's always fun to watch a Thorn bounce off stuff, honestly. And while I'm rooting for another in my line, I'm going to do my best to help her develop however she wants to. 'Cause listening strongly to her wants is how she ends up like me." She winks.

"Can I get something like that? Could come in useful. Or maybe I should just stick to stuff from the catalog. Well, hesitant means you last longer. I'd like her to last longer. I was going to go out in some kind of blaze of glory eventually before, but with Ka I have a reason to be careful forever. It's great."

"A backpack enchanted like this coat is pretty standard and ought to be in the full catalog. I can make you an actual coat like this but custom work like that won't be cheap. As for the recklessness thing, we're going to be around forever either way. The crystals catch us, they're a custom-tailored immortality; the first of us threw herself into the sun - not your kind of sun, but similarly ridiculously-lethal - just to make sure her solution worked even in the harshest conditions she could imagine. Well, and a few other reasons like "stopping fighting over who was the most original before it started" and "just wanted to see what it was like", that kind of thing. But yeah, we got her crystal back from the heart of the sun and one of the Clematises is giving her therapy for the latent suicidal urges and she's doing fine. Sisters don't let sisters die." 

"If anything here could break into your crystal and fuck with it, it would be a Judgement. They're basically gods. Also, I'm still not super clear on how earning OTC works except by hurting yourself. Helping out with the contact is worth stuff, I suppose?"

"Yeah, I'm in no hurry to fuck with a Judgment. As for making money, helping out with the contract is probably the best way for you, you'll be credited a major chunk for securing those maps for us. You can sell things to the OTC - we'd be especially interested in Hours, they're elemental, we can't do a synthesis for them - and we'll pay fair prices. You can take on more contract work, and there are contractors who'll pay you to learn useful magic so long as you swear a binding oath that you'll use that magic to make them something - you could be commissioned to make Heward's Handy Haversacks, or something like that. Essentially serving as cheap magical labour - that's what's up with the hurting yourself, by the way, you're providing the sacrifice for a magic that would normally leave its user in incredible pain, but we parcel the pain out over many people and it becomes bearable. Same principle. You get the scutwork because you're from a disadvantaged world, but it lets you get stuff from our worlds for reasonable prices."

"Nnnnot a big fan of binding oaths. Hours are pretty easy to get, honestly? Might not be that way forever, since we are mining them. Eventually we'll run out, like Old Earth did with coal mines sometimes. They're just too useful not to dig up. Maybe someone will figure out how to make more, but they might be a Judgementy thing."

"Yeah, but for now you're sitting on an unrefined Chron mine. Those are scarce; magic that can do time control is rare in the wider world. So milk it while you can."

"We should go to Lustrum when we get an engine, Thorn!" She shouts. "If Hours are worth much OTC at all that's our money problem solved for a while and lots of bonuses!"

Thorn comes back through the portal. "Yeah, sounds like a good idea."

"What took you so long?"

"She was fetching me." 

Clematis is wearing a snuggly sweater and a long dress. She curtseys to Lenora. 

"Clematis. I'm a healer, what a Thorn becomes if she listens to her generous impulses. If Hannah is Thorn's sister, I'm more like her mom. Pleased to meet you."

"Hello. You're making me want to start making recipes. Twenty percent impulse, forty percent charity, ten percent spite, and thirty percent adventure..."

"We do that for fun sometimes, just call up a new us to enjoy. You could call it masturbatory; I'm like "and since when is that a problem?""

"Because there are people who don't have all the time in the world. And even we have to work to live."

"Yes, mom."

"And Thorn is making herself useful by exploring the High Wilderness, so she's perfectly alright?"

"Essentially yes. She and others like her earn us the OTC it takes to keep all of this up and running - the personal immortality is OTC's health plan for fulltime employees, but that doesn't cover all of us much less all the forking and merging we do. I do healing and sponsored charity work, Hannah does commission work with her specialities when she can be bothered, Thorns do scouting."

"You know, seems like someone could probably live a decent life just making Takarash once in a while, if buying food and stuff is pretty cheap in OTC. I did the math and a ka is something like twelve hundred, and one Takarash hurts about like stepping on a loose nail, split over five years that's stepping on a loose nail less than once a day for eternal youth. It seems... Nice that there's more options, even if you do still have to do something. People could use that."

"Yeah, the basics are easy, it's the logistics that are a nightmare. Now that you're contacted you can look forwards to developing a post-scarcity society within the next few centuries: people like me get commissioned to help with that in cases where it's really needed. Your world is not one of those cases. Not sure whether that's fortunate or unfortunate."

"Unfortunate that the worst cases are really, really bad. Fortunate that we're not suffering as much as we could here. I think we're going to do something about the Workworlds once we're a bit more used to working together."

"I'd get involved with that if you start taking it seriously. OTC pays for anti-slavery charity work quite well."

"It needs doing. Just... Maybe not quite yet. I'm not used to what OTC does, and honestly, I... Don't quite trust it."