Then Nue will leave Lintalai to her business and see her tomorrow, for their next session.

Lintalai divides her time between practicing the local language, stretching in the sunshine, meditating, dunking in the nearest river, researching political science on the Amentan internet, and quizzing her magical oracular skull about her people of origin.

Her magical oracular skull tries its best to help!

There's another storm, of course, on the regular schedule. Everyone at the not-hotel spends a day cooped up inside, mostly talking about the wizards' progress. There has been some progress in spell development, but nothing that anyone is confident enough in to try on sending objects to Amenta yet, let alone people.

Daernir wants to hear about how her war-gymnastics training is going! He'll also ramble quite enthusiastically about all the spellcasting he's getting to observe.

Lintalai is happy to tell Daernir about her progress and get his perspective on whether various postures are lawful good or not.

He has a lot of helpful input on this! Certain things being lawful good is really annoying because it means if you don't want to be evil (which he doesn't, at least until he's a powerful wizard), you have to have the right combination of facial expressions, postures, and other non-verbal cues...he's not great at giving off friendly cues, so he mostly aims for neutral.

He can identify the ones that work for Lintalai given a few minutes of staring at her while she tries them, even though the whole thing is very silly, in his opinion.

She practices in front of a mirror. She can stand very still in one posture for hours and meditate that way, possibly because she's a plant.

She doesn't detect any changes to her senses or any other sudden magical upgrades.

During their next few sessions, Nue talks her through what she should expect. At fairly low levels, zodja take up the study of certain skills which their war-gymnastics assists them with. This does not feel like anything, but they are able to learn more through the intensity of their training than the average person who hadn't honed their body this way could do given more time. Nue also explains some of the training practices zodja use to train their discipline. Typically, they gather together in zodzama to study and practice together. Nue understand that Lintalai intends to be somewhat busy with her government, so they will likely only get up to lower levels of the discipline.

Upon consultation with Lintalai, she agrees to supply her with instruction on arcane theory and magical traditions, rhetoric and persuasion, the legal institutions and social/historical context of Arcadia, and planar metaphysics. Nue herself does not know- most of this- so she adds it to the list of consultants and teachers they'll need to bring in. On the more practical side, Nue focuses on adding more postures, fine-tuning the meditation process, and (hopefully) attenuating Lintalai's boredom with the act of meditation itself through exposure.

It's still pretty boring but the idea of getting to do magic is very motivating.

After a few days of this, Intrepid contacts Lintalai after she has gone to her room for the night.

Lintalai? May I interrupt? I have news.

Yeah, what's up?

The queen of Mandible will speak with you now.

I understand this to be more a summons, less an invitation.

Well, that's not terribly polite but I'll come anyway.

Yes. This is one of the risks of interacting with formians- they are rarely as polite as the rest of Arcadia. I have tried to explain to countless formians why politeness is best for everyone, but they seem to consider it an unnecessary cost with no advantages they can identify. I suppose it would be more helpful in a Prime world than in Arcadia, where they will make few enemies regardless.

Intrepid will be there for Lintalai to clamber onto. The wizard who will teleport them to Mercantus looks annoyed to have to help a child climb onto a ki-rin, but doesn't complain about this indignity overmuch. There's a lot of sighing, until Intrepid looks at the wizard and she stops. The wizard teleports the three of them to the city, which is dramatically more quiet at this time of night- above the surface. Most of the formian activity presumably takes place underground, in Mandible proper.

I will not be very free to move in Mandible, but I can follow you as far as they allow me. If you feel unsafe, call for me.

Okay, thank you!

And she descends.

There are some formians early on that hold themselves in a readied stance, suggesting potential hostility, but they all stand down by the time Lintalai passes them. As she continues through the network of tunnels, there are various formians who lead her through. They do not communicate, barely acknowledging her presence. They simply lead her in. There are no buildings here, as she would recognize them, just manually-worked earth with various side tunnels and offshoots leading into darkness. Perhaps the formians live further down those.

Formians of all castes (except the queen) surround her on all sides except above and below, and otherwise, there is nothing but the curving, twisting tunnel and a horde of formians for quite some time. Finally, the tunnel lets out into a large cavern. There are thousands of formians in this chamber, climbing the walls and galloping throughout with great urgency.

One of the formians separates from the throng and speaks up.

"Lintalai. Welcome to the queen's chamber."

"Thank you, it's very interesting."

"I am the queen's foremost myrmarch. I speak for her, until the time comes for her to speak herself. That time is nigh. What have you to say to her majesty?"

"I appreciate the opportunity to meet her and look forward to a productive friendship between our peoples," says Lintalai, a little blandly.

There is a general murmuration at that.

One of the other formians steps forward, and it speaks. Its voice is no different from the others, but as they speak, several of the formians around them speak simultaneously.

"Welcome to my city, Lintalai. You wish to live as our neighbor, yes?"

"Yes, I'm hoping that having native Arcadians close by to learn from will help Amentans adjust as they colonize the plane and having Amentans nearby will help formians learn new technologies that may be useful to you."