Thorn nods to her from a distance. She's not sure if now is the time, or if it's still too raw.

Bys waves, finishes her drink, and walks over, arms crossed without really noticing it.

"So. Hey. I don't resent you or the captain over this or anything. I just..." Sigh.

"Yeah. I hate it too. Sometimes rough justice is the best you can get, sad to say."

"When you can make people immortal, consigning them to death is so much more tragic..."

"Yeah. But when you consider what's at risk..."

"Yeah. I still hate it. But choices must be made, huh?"

"Yeah. Can we cuddle?"

"Yeah, let's. I like what we have."

"Same. I hate being on the opposite side of an argument from you. It shakes me."

"We're not the same person, we're going to disagree sometimes. All we can do is handle it like adults."

Hug.

Hug. 

"Yeah, but the point is I trust you to be both intelligent and good, so when we disagree on something like that... I wonder if I have the right of it after all."

"That makes sense, but there's no one 'good' either. I have a certain perspective, you know? I don't want to be like... A religious leader, always so certain that my way is the only way. Maybe I'm leaning too far into that, huh?"

"Nah, it's good on you. Confidence in the right is valuable too. There's a quote about that... I can't recall it." She snuggles in pensively. 

"...Let's go lay down in a cabin instead of hugging right in the hall."

She leads Thorn by the hand to put this idea into practice.

Thorn follows willingly with her smile restored a bit.

The next day they reach shore again and start heading upriver. There's a minor incident where an octopus-shaped monster starts shooting rocks at the boat, and Abyssia nails it with a shotgun slug so that it practically explodes.

"See that little floppy thing floating on the water? Can you telekinesis it over?" She asks Thorn. "I'd say it's mine, and those gasbags are worth like six copper. We don't even have to give the Guild a cut since we're not on a mission with them."

Thorn kines it over for Bys.

And she examines, then pockets it. It's a small fleshy balloon-like thing.

"I'm still nervous about the city. What are cities like?"

"Crowded. Big enough for most everybody to find people like them. Wether that's scholarly types, Fischers or criminals. They usually have better specialists and experts - even if you're one in a hundred thousand, there'll be more than one of you in a big city. Most of the rest falls around the implications of that."

"A hundred inns? Ten thousand strangers? Dozens of scrimshaw artists, a hundred kinds of fish? That kind of thing?"

"That kind of thing, plus a bunch of stuff that can only happen in cities."

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

"Like newspapers. Machines or organizations that are complicated enough to operate that it takes fifty people all with specialist knowledge to keep them running. That mostly means research and really cutting-edge art."

"-Big organizations like regional governments, or Guild headquarters? Big libraries?"

"Collaborations between master craftsmen. New kinds of gun, innovative dyeing techniques, magical research and new kinds of enchantment, that sort of thing. On my world we have machines that build things - like a mill grinds wheat, but for weaving fabric from thread or turning out glass bottles or what have you. If you have any of those, they'll be in the cities."