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Kalunu Altpoof explores the outer wilds.
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"Magic! ...As in like, seriously, I have magical abilities that include teleportation, among other things. Do you guys have places you'd really like to visit?"

(Ellume is tempted to reveal conjuration and offer conjured gifts, but holds off for the second at least.)

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"Brittle Hollow sounds super cool. It has a black hole in the center," says Tephra.

"I'd like to visit Attlerock. It's where everything got started," says Galena.

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"I want to go everywhere but especially Giant's Deep. There's hurricanes that fling entire islands into space."

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"Sounds neat! I think I'd have to work out a solution for black holes, I don't have one right now that would work for you guys unless you want to watch from far enough nothing much black-hole-related would happen normally. Hurricanes, a lot easier. In what sense did everything get started on Attlerock?"

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"The black hole is safe to look at you just don't want to jump inside."

"It's the first place we visited when we started exploring space."

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I notice that I am confused. Is that how black holes work? I feel like that is not how they work. Something something gravity? More information required. Maybe they just mean watching from beyond the gravity well? Argh.

"Makes sense! Is Attlerock dangerous in any way?"

(They prod the Ring for comfort.)

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(The Ring sends wordless reassurance and gently warms some of the air nearest Ellume's skin. If you need a pause...)

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('M fine now. <3)

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"No more than anywhere in space is... you just need to be big enough to carry the heavy oxygen tanks and finish all the training before they let you go. You also have to wait for a spaceship to be ready. Syl's is basically finished now so they'll be leaving soon."

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Ellume is tempted to show, or maybe show off, their rebellion against the aesthetics of ordinary non-magical space travel, but that would - disturb something, they feel, without proper leadup, so they tamp down on that impulse, instead aiming for offering magical assistance within the existing assumptions.

"I think I can help you guys out with this in general. There's a few simple ways to reduce the weight of something with basic magic, and even if I don't have one already, with some prodding I can probably get you a glyph that anyone can draw that will apply an appropriate upward force to an object to make it lighter. That doesn't solve the problem of mass, but it probably makes carrying things a lot easier."

They totally already have a glyph for that but it's true that they'd wanna tweak it.

"Maybe I can even look stuff up and compare materials science, but honestly on average you're shorter than us, so there might not be anything suitable. Maybe reduce costs or risks on spaceships, depending. We'll have to look into that too."

(They ask Ring to start planning out the avenues here.)

"But even forgetting that," - I am a Kalunu and this amount of rebellion seems like it would bring more fun than dissonance, so - "I can totally give brief, safe joyrides. If someone wants to explore someplace longer than, like, 15-30 minutes" - this is translated by conveying the felt sense of roughly how long that takes, rather than unit conversions - "at a time, I'll probably be up for doing that once in a while, but for longer stays you might want to have a backup plan that works to be safe and get home without me." 

They grin, "Sometimes when I'm in space for too long, I get bored. You could say I... space out?" 

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"That was weird... you said [personal pronoun] [region beyond the atmosphere] [region outside the current boundary] but somehow I know you meant you get distracted. Also it doesn't sound very safe to go places with you if you might get distracted and just leave us there."

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"That was just the set up for a pun, it's kind of like a word joke. It works by having two words or phrases that mean different things but sound the same, or similar, in a language, so that when you say one it reminds you of the meaning of the other. - Anyway."

They put a hand on their forehead. "As I said, it was a joke. What would actually happen is that I will stay with you for a time, then very clearly announce that we're going back, and if you have no equipment I would take you back even if you wanted to stay. The part about having backup safety and backup going home plans is only if you want me to leave you there after I want to go. Even if I plan on checking back in and fetching you home after a day or something, I would feel very anxious if you had no backups available. I wouldn't actually forget, though it would be valid of you to not entirely take my word on that. I would just rather not need to panic if, hypothetically, I did, or something else came up. I like doing nice things for people, I don't like feeling obliged to do additional nice things after having done one nice thing with the risk of someone dying or suffering if I don't." 

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"Oh, okay. Do you still want to go to the museum? I bet Slate would know how best to use a magic symbol like you talked about. They build all our spaceships. They're probably up on the launch tower tweaking Syl's new ship."

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"Yeah, up for going places and meeting people, whoever's closest first, unless Syl's leaving very soon, in which case them first."

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"There's a loop that goes from the launch tower to the museum and back but it only works in reverse if you have a jetpack so let's keep going. Tephra, Galena do you want to come to the museum with us?"

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"Will you come find us before going to space? We already saw Gabbro's Statue and none of the other exhibits were new."

Ellume might notice that it's already twilight. It seemed to be noon when they arrived.

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They she could make a jetpack but she won't. Low power aesthetic. Good. She imagines patting her brain.

"I will totally come find you guys." Ring, please note this down. She has perfect recall but this doesn't mean she wants to remember all possible relevant things in a single moment and handle them in working memory, in order to plan next steps, she wants to be able to ask Ring to give her a ready-made plan when it is needed. What else is having a magical assistant who is a ring for? "See you later!"

She waves.

"Wait, is it getting dark already? What the heck?" Is it a time effect or is it... day length... Probably the latter, given the aesthetics, but she wants to see how the local responds.

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"Does the planet you're from have longer days?"

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"Probably? My planet's day length is 24 hours," which is sort of hard to parse the time-feel of because it's a rather long while, so she continues, "so, somewhere between half the time and double the time from when I arrived up to now, multiply that by six and multiply it again by twenty-four and that's at least the right order of magnitude for our days."

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"Wow... it must stay dark for so long." Mica continues leading the way to the museum.

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She follows.

"Yeah, it does," and nostalgia flashbacks to staying up all night, back when that was still a very relevant concept that applied to her. "How often and how long do you guys sleep? Do you sleep?"

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"Most people sleep for thirty minutes out of one hundred twenty usually all at once." They walk behind a waterfall and then start up a long wooden ramp built into the side of the crater wall.

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"Neat! Humans, that's my species, sleep for 7-9 hours on average, although there's some people who need less and some who need more." 

She's going to get into the Woz and polyphasic sleep topic, isn't she. "There's this one guy who writes about sleep and memory and learning on his personal wiki and he says having a shorter sleep around 6-8 hours from waking up helps him shorten his night sleep, but he thinks some other people's ideas about just doing 30 minute naps at precisely timed intervals around the clock doesn't really work, so it's interesting that it works for you guys. It's probably a biological difference though. But it would be interesting to study random stuff like that. The differences between two sapient species."

(She metaphorically pats herself on the head for saying stuff that probably gels with the aesthetic.)

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"Wow... that sounds like sooo long to be asleep. Wait you always sleep during the night? That must be weird never seeing the stars at midnight when you can see them easiest." They've reached the top of the ramp. There's a fenced off area directly in front of them with some strange crystals and Mica leads the way left past a sign that points to the entrance of the "Zero-G cave" which looks a bit like an old-timey mine entrance.

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"Most people tend to sleep roughly at night time, yes. I'm "supposed to" always sleep during the night, technically, but in actual fact I like reading or chatting or doing loads of different things at night, even way, way past midnight, occasionally all the way to dawn. And then I'd sleep during the day. This is something people get sort of judged for, not as much as other things but definitely some, but I'm magic, so I don't have to care anymore."

Ellume looks around curiously, particularly at the plot-relevant crystals and cave thing but also just in general.

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