"There's time! I'll come back tomorrow, though. In a nerdy nerd mood. This place have an address or is it portal access only?"

"I have a realspace apartment in the city, I'll give you my address for that." She looks over. "Do you have something for notetaking in there?"

"Eva. I have a whole entire computer in here, spreadsheets and all. About the only thing it's not great at is heavy BD editing."

"Right, yes, sorry to forget." She runs a hand through her hair. "What's BD editing?"

"Ooh... Braindance. Full-immersion VR-ified recordings of someone's experiences, often edited a bit. It gets put to all the uses you'd imagine, and then some. It's especially good for immersion, for coherent storytelling and the like books and flat movies are often better, for interactivity proper games are better, but BDs definitely have their place."

"Sounds like my memory crystals!" She pulls out her pendant. "This holds a BD of my entire life, basically. And that's used as the data to reconstruct my mind if this body's destroyed. Like a stack, but not."

"Neat. Everyone should have a stack if they want one- And there are better and worse kinds, and you can transfer, it's just copies that don't work right. I don't know what the state of the art on reconstructing people is beyond 'not great, because quantum'. Maybe some kinda magic can fix that. I know there's some frozen heads and half-fried stacks in vaults here and there..."

She suddenly snaps her fingers.

"I could miss the concert if I stay here much longer at this rate. Address?"

"Fifteen quillgrove lane northeast. We have proper resurrection magic but it takes the attention of a hardcore reality warper like Aura, and their time is worth hundreds of millions. I won't keep you from your concert; go have fun!"

"Can do will do! Expect me to stop by tomorrow sometime for nerdery. Meanwhile," she looks at Hannah, still in the stands. "We've got a concert to go to. Don't worry, I'll be a catgirl again in a few~"

Hannah comes down from the stands and nods. "This you is pretty cool too. Eva, a door?"

Eva gestures, and there is a door.

Hannah heads out into the street.

"Yeah but she's getting bored now that the fight's over. If I weren't hanging out with someone cool I'd go back to mer, she's patient." She snorts.

And heads out the door, and looks around at the sky-city of Arcbright around them, whistling.

"Damn. What a great big world out there. It's only really hitting me now. Only so much frontier to explore in Sol, and my other option was hopping on a one-way trip to some other big ball of burning gas that takes decades or centuries, which, nah. But now... You ever feel something like that?"

"Yeah, once. When I first got access to the selftree. It's a hell of a thing to see all the other selves you've been and could be. Kind of hard to live up to, which is why I called the whole thing a mug's game and stepped out."

"Hmm. It's a nice feeling for me, the - sense of infinite possibility. Oh, stepped out? I don't have a great understanding of how the Eva tree works, what did you step out of - sharing memories with each other?"

(The horns and ears and black scales are definitely shrinking down.)

"Yeah, I opted out of the memory-sharing gig after a couple years ransacking it for the best stuff."

Shrug. "There's something a little pathetic about living your whole life in BDs but that doesn't mean shutting them out entirely either. And I sold BDs for a while. Eh... Not sure what point I was trying to make, doesn't really matter. What's learning magic like?"

"Depends on the type. Mine is all about learning to visualize and manipulate complicated hyperplanar topology, but there are people who learn magic songs, or how to express their innermost heart through magic, or how to connect to natural sources of mana and animistic spirits - and that's just scratching the surface. Artificery magic is most common, I am technically an Artificer because I am only magic because of my tools. Artificery is basically a way of recording other magics for playback later, sometimes with a limited reservoir of internal power like most wands and sometimes just permanently like with most other enchanted items."

"Magic songs sound more my speed. The first thing sounds like a mathematician's wet dream. Is most OTC stuff artifice then?"

"Most of it, since 's how you make stuff tradable. Some stuff like the skylimes and sinflower just naturally grows that way."

Her horns are now visibly starting the slightly face-misshaping process of retracting. The black scales are showing gaps too.

"Well, you guys are going to make a moonful of money off us, and vice versa. Set up an Earth-Mars teleporting train and it'll be packed full for decades to come at just about any ticket price you care to name. And tech's repeatable too, I should buy stock in a 'stacking company when I get back right away 'cause I bet they'll boom."

"Yeah, I'll be telling a few of my friends about this quietly so they can get in on the ground floor, for sure. Always good money in a new Trade world."

"We heading to the club these guys are playing at now or what? I kinda want to eat a skylime real quick and see what it's like first if we've still got a few."

"We'd better hurry over now, we're starting to cut it a bit close. Fortunately we're right by a teleport station here, it's just over there -" She points. "Let's go."

To the teleport station she goes! She fidgets with her fidget tesseract.

"Really looking forward to this concert but more long term... What I should do, aside from nerding out over magic and tech, is get some instruments later. Flute, guitar, harp, keyboard, maybe a violin or sax."