There is a long pause as the crew looks at Cornelia.

"It sounds like your inventions have taken a very different path from ours. I'm sure our researchers will want to learn a lot from you. Are you familiar with these creatures?"

She taps her tablet, and images of what look to be jellyfish with many different kinds of tentacles on each creature and what at a glance look to be more tentacles but actually look closer to trails of often glowing gas. The creatures are against backgrounds of stars.

"I'm really surprised that you don't know any spells at all, even the kind that you draw on your own power for, but I actually don't know how hard that kind is to invent on your own. I don't have the right tools for teaching you that kind either. Maybe we can figure it out with worse tools, but it will take a while."

"The creatures in that picture look like jellyfish, a category of unintelligent creatures that live in the ocean, and Sky Dreamers, which live in the sky near ley lines and are usually asleep. If you don't know about spells or deities you might not know about ley lines either? There aren't any in space. I could try explaining but I'm not sure that's actually important. I've never seen a jellyfish or Sky Dreamer with so many different kinds of tentacles on one body, and I've never known of one that could go into space and survive."

"You would be the first pre-jelly intelligent species we have discovered then. You drew what looked like pictures of how you got here, could you describe what happened?"

"Your picture shows the creatures in space. I have never been to space before this incident. Nobody I know has been to space either, I think. It's illegal to go very far away from the planet."

"Yes, those were pictures of how I got here. I experienced something which was like catching on fire, but instead of fire there was Positive Energy. It started tearing a hole in reality. I told my friends what was happening, but they couldn't get there in time. I ended up on this side of the hole in reality, not the side with my garden. I noticed that I was falling apart because there was no air-field or fire-field or earth-field or water-field, and also that I was suffocating due to lack of air. I cast the spell 'Life Bubble', and it created a bubble around me and my possessions with all of the fields, and air to breathe, and a bit of water for moisture and fire for warmth. But by the time I was done casting the spell, the hole in reality had closed again, and I was on this side of it."

"Those things you mentioned there not being, they are related to… one moment."

Cornelia taps on her tablet a fair bit, then text appears: "The elemental fields, are they related to elemental planes? We do not know what these are. We believe your word 'plane' may correspond to a thing we know of two of, one we call standardspace and one we call subspace. Standardspace is where we are right now. We detected what we think you mean by 'hole in reality' and came to investigate. Many of our concerns were that more might be created and destroy our ship, and that you might be the cause of them."

"The elemental fields are closely related to elemental planes. I don't know what the relation between 'standardspace' and 'subspace' is like, but it sounds like they might be planes. If you want to know, you should tell me more about what subspace is like and how something could go from 'standardspace' to 'subspace' and back. I don't know if more of the holes in reality will happen. They don't usually happen where I come from? I am not the cause of them. If I worked very very very hard for a very long time, I might be able to figure out how to do something like that on purpose, but I don't know how to do it right now, and if I was going to do it I would either tell you or be far away from you and your ship. And it would be a safer kind. I might be able to figure out how to ask someone from where I come from for help, and then maybe they could do it for me, but that could cause a lot of problems for you, so we would need to talk about it a lot first."

Griffie pauses.

"It might also cause problems for you if I took myself home, though if I somehow figured out how to take myself home, maybe I would also be strong enough to conceal your existence? I don't intend to take myself home, or ask people to take me home, unless I have talked to your people about the problems first or there is an even bigger problem and I don't have time to talk to you."

"Our navigator might be able to figure out where your home planet is if you can tell us about the stars you can see from it. We cannot travel fast everywhere, but we can often find paths to particular places if we know where to look. We could–"

Art stops turning over the alien's words in his mind, and stands up from his chair, drawing his sword.

"–you said 'illegal' to go away from your planet. Not 'impossible'. As in, it can be done, but someone prevents it, correct? Someone who entraps an entire planet of people?"

"That's Axis, the Plane of Law. I don't usually consider that 'entrapment'. If I had a good reason to go far away from my planet, I could probably talk to them about it and work out a way to do it with their permission. They would want to know lots of details about the plan, and they might require that their constructs observe me during it, but I could probably figure out a version of the plan that they would agree to, or they would tell me that my plan would make things unstable, like you were worried the hole in reality would do to your ship. And they also consider accidents, like the way I got here, to be a reason not to retaliate against the victim of the accident."

"But normally it is illegal for people to go far away from the planet, so when an accident took me far away from the planet, I tried to contact them and ask them to take me back to the planet and figure out what the accident was."

Arithnu relaxes and sits back down, putting his sword away.

"So, has your planet even begun to colonize the other planets around your star yet?"

"What do you mean by 'around our star'? If other planets were as close to us as the Sun is, and going around the sun, I think we would have seen them, and at least the astronomers and the deities and Axis would know about them. We have telescopes. Everyone I know thinks there is only one planet. But apparently there is another one very very very very far away, far away like the distant stars? I don't know how we would have seen 'Mars', much less colonized it, though."

"Could you draw a diagram of what is around your star and your planet, and what stars you can see? It might help us figure out where you are from."

"Can you put a grid like you would put on the inside of a sphere on the tablet I write things on?"

Such a grid appears on the tablet.

Griffie draws a star chart. There are no galaxies and no large patches of anything, just little points.

"I am trying to draw a recent star chart. I'm not including the moon, it's pretty close to the planet and it isn't a light source so it'd probably be hard to see from far away."

"And what is your planet's orbit like?" Cornelia asks, frowning a bit

"That's a strange question. I can draw a diagram of the planet and the sun and the moon?"

Cornelia looks at Griffie, a bit perplexed, then says "All right."

Griffie draws an orbital diagram. The planet in it has visible continents drawn, is labeled "Planet named Suaal" and has no orbit drawn. One sphere, smaller than the planet, has an elliptical orbit around the planet, and is labeled "Moon". A larger sphere, much further away from the planet, has a circular orbit, and is labeled "Sun". Lines with arrows on both ends go between the point where the moon's orbit is closer to the planet, the point where the moon's orbit is furthest from the planet, and from the planet to the sun. The lines are labeled with lengths. The planet, moon, and sun also have notes about their diameters. (The diagram is not to scale.)

Cornelia asks Griffie to say how long a sample object is, how long a sample duration is, and how much a sample object weighs so they can translate units. The dictionary they scanned was able to tell them how to convert between different units, but they still need a starting point.

Griffie gives estimates of these, stating margin of error.

"And you were taught that… everything goes around your planet?"

Art looks tense, and is looking between Cornelia and Griffie.