They head out. Hoset comes back in a minute or two later with parchment and ink and a feather quill.

Kyeo is quite baffled by the feather quill. He writes with it badly, going much too fast and changing direction in ways it won't accommodate, and eventually figures it out, only to scratch out all his writing before he's gotten more than a few words into a sentence.

Eventually the man casting the scry looks up at him. "It worked. I can convey a message for your father, and convey responses, for the next ten minutes."

Kyeo has a few notes jotted down awkwardly. He switches to Ibyabekan, stammers a little over his notes, and finally manages, fluidly enough to be copied, to speak a few sentences.

The man whispers them over his pool of still water. A world away they can be heard like someone is whispering in Kyeo's father's ear.

Suor Sebe Luk startles, checks some nearby devices to see if they made a sound, looks around the room. Kyeo goes on for another sentence, much like the first.

Suor replies. They go back and forth, it's a bit repetitious. Kyeo doesn't seem to want to look at the scry.

Well, not all father-son relationships are uncomplicatedly happy ones. 

The pool goes back to being a normal pool of water when the scry runs out.

"I think he's - I think he will pass the report up."

The man smiles at him. "Thank you. I'm sure you did your very best. Should we leave you be, now?"

"Yes - please." The world is ending and he would prefer it do that in privacy.

He leaves. The world can end in privacy at least until lunchtime.

At lunchtime he is mostly all right again and able to eat.

"Are you going to need a followup scry later?" Isavel asks him. "Do they have any way to get in touch with us? Should we be looking for a ship?"

"They don't have a way to get in touch with us. This being the wrong galaxy, even if they knew exactly where it was it would take weeks to get here, and they don't know exactly where it is. There aren't radios on this end. I'm not sure if my ship is nearby and the captain's capture was before the magical event, or if I was the only person affected."

She nods seriously. "Well, we're more than happy to have you here for as long as it takes."

"Thank you, I appreciate that."

"Did you want to - tell people about Ibyabek? Hear about different concepts of Good? Take a break until we know more?"

"What is it you'd like to know about Ibyabek?"

"I guess I'm mostly curious ...what it's like to live there? At what age do you marry, what are your holidays, what are special occasions like, what do children want to grow up to be..."

"People marry when they're perhaps twenty to twenty-five, depending, men sometimes a bit older and women sometimes a bit younger. We celebrate the Day of Revolution, the Eve of Revolution - those aren't next to each other, the Eve is when it started and the Day is when it ended, months apart - and the Glorious Leader's birthday and his predecessor's birthday and their wives' birthdays and the anniversary of the first landing on Ibyabek. Those are the major ones. There's a lot of singing and some people get the day off work and there are holiday-specific details for each one. Children often want to be things like pilots or firefighters or architects, though of course a lot of them wind up in less glamorous positions."

"What's a pilot? There's a job of fire-fighter?"

"Pilots direct ships - or airplanes or helicopters, it's the same word but different skills. And yes, there is a job of firefighter, to respond quickly to fires. This is important especially in cities where they may spread to other buildings quickly but also in wilderness areas where they may get a lot of fuel and become very big and fast-spreading."

"Huh."

"Is your world mostly at peace, then?" someone else cuts in. "Here children mostly want to be great warriors."

"We are not at war right now. We do maintain a large standing military to police the border, which requires more manpower at planetary scale and in three dimensions. I'm in military service myself."

"But it's not - aspirational?"

"That's probably healthier."

"Yes, I'm not disagreeing, just - hard to imagine."