Arithnu laughs a bit "All right. I'll get you a blanket. Any other items you want? As you saw from the containers collection, we can fabricate a lot of things pretty quickly."

"Paper and pencil, or an image tablet that doesn't connect to things? A pencil that actually draws on the paper. Not a tool for poking tablets that is pencil-shaped. Oh. And maybe dice and a clock."

Griffie would like to have some samples more useful for research, but it probably is the wrong time to do research. And randomization should hide some timing information if it's necessary to hide timing information.

Arithnu sends over all of those things.

The image tablet is simple to use, with some buttons and a help button that explains things in Sylvan.

The pencil has an extremely good eraser.

The paper is very pure white, like the fanciest alchemically cleaned papers Griffie has seen.

The dice are six sided, with dots to count by.

The clock contains both Griffie's units of time (with corresponding numerals) and the units of time used by modern humans and mercurials (with corresponding numerals).

Well, their technology is very good.

Griffie gets under the blanket and, using the pencil and paper and the light of their Continual Flame necklace, starts diagramming a spell somewhat like Life Bubble that can target objects. It doesn't need to create an actual atmosphere at some desirable temperature and humidity, just maintain the elemental fields. It's probably going to be useful for experiments.

Arithnu talks some about his favorite human media. He prefers Star Trek to Star Wars, but thinks the Star Trek with the 'Prime Directive', before they added mercurials, was deeply disturbing.

He talks some about history and subspace developments.

Mercurials and humans classify societies as being in one of two categories: pre-jelly and post-jelly, referring to contact with the jellyfish-like aliens they haven't managed to initiate communication with, but got subspace technology, the technology they use to travel between stars, from. Mercurials and humans classify lifeforms as 'intelligent', 'animalistic', and 'pre-animalistic', and classify planets as either not bearing life or by what the most behaviorally advanced lifeform on them is. They've only found two planets with native intelligent life, the homeworld of the mercurials and the homeworld of the humans. When the mercurials and humans encountered each other, both of their civilizations were post-jelly.

The only known way to begin subspace technology development is to find it. Some star systems have large quantities of the raw materials needed for subspace technology. The jellies used to not guard these fiercely, but after mercurials tried colonizing a star system the jellies were occupying, the jellies developed weapons and now guard star systems rich in subspace-relevant materials fiercely. This incident occurred when humans were pre-jelly.

Subspace travel is really tricky, but Arithnu doesn't know the full details, he mostly follows Silvia's directions. Griffie would need to ask Silvia for the full details. "After security is set up, maybe?" Arithnu awkwardly notes.

The details of whether subspace travel is easy, difficult, or even possible are determined by structural features of subspace, which the jellies seem to build and manipulate, using technology neither mercurials nor humans understand. The mercurial and human homeworlds are very far away from each other, in separate collections of collections of stars. Arithnu frowns and calls this a terribly uninformative translation. The collections of the stars have about 2 to the 36th power stars in them. The collections of collections of stars have about 2 to the 6th power to 2 to the 10th power collections of stars in them. The closest star to the mercurial's homeworld's sun is about 2 to the 46th power miles away. If it weren't for convenient subspace routes, it would be very hard for mercurials and humans to find each other, but by subspace for a standard transport ship, their homeworlds are about 140 to 320 hours' travel apart. The Stopping By Crashing Into Rocks is faster, though, and can take more and better shortcuts, and could make that trip in 8 to 40 hours. 

Griffie wonders whether they could communicate with the jellies. They have a very powerful version of Speak with Animals that works on many intelligent beings, at least a little, and worked very nicely with the Frogs of Bythasilon. Though admittedly the frogs didn't have weapons and only complained when Griffie was accidentally rude.

Actually, the people on the ship have a concept of tears in space. Do they have a concept of tears in time? If their time tears, do the poor frogs fall in and rapidly disintegrate? At least Griffie's managed to get the ball rolling on having other people make contact with the frogs, because Griffie sure won't get to follow up on it anytime soon.

Griffie pauses in their diagramming to roughly convert the powers of 2 into familiar numbers. Wow, that's a fast way of travel and that's a lot of stars.

Leonarda returns, security set up.

"All right. Griffith, everything here will be kept secure. Art, you can stay or leave, your choice, but you won't be telling people about things for now. I'm sorry I couldn't arrange things ahead of time to give you the choice to simply stay out."

"You already know what I would have chosen."

"So. Griffith. I'm told Arithnu told you some things, but now you can ask questions. Might help you explain your strange things to us if you have at least basic post-jelly knowledge."

"I want to talk about categories of information first, actually. There are several different categories we need to discuss."

"One category is the category that lots of people on my world know, and you could find out about if you went to a library. The elemental fields are in that category. If this category is a hazard to your civilization… that's bad."

"Another category is the category that very powerful humans and humanlike-people and deities know, and that you could find out if you were powerful and did research, or if someone told you. If this category is a hazard to your civilization, that's still bad, because if some of the powerful people could use that information to hurt you, they maybe would."

"Another category is information about my personal capabilities and the capabilities of my friends. I'm going to give a false example now. 'I can create a blade of fire like that only twelve more times' would be a false example. We will need to discuss this for making plans, but I don't want it to circulate."

"And another category is information that's hard to share, so very few people know it, and even some very powerful people don't know it. Like, information where if you try to say it, the person hears a different thing, or forgets the conversation. We probably need to discuss stuff from that category too, but I have no idea how difficult this is going to be. And because it would be bad to remember the wrong thing and then tell lots of people the wrong thing, I would need to talk to someone about it who, if I tell them to not mention the subject again, won't mention the subject again, even if it sounds important."

"Oh. Also there are some even weirder categories than that, but they're probably less urgent."

Leonarda blinks "That last category… we have a word for it. 'Antimeme'. It is fict…ion…al…" she trails off.

"Uh, at least I thought it was fictional. I am now wondering if we also have antimemes here as well, and I just don't know about them. So… you definitely have them?"

She blinks some more.

"I get the categories though. I can think of cases for us that fall into all the categories except the last."

She pauses, and puts her hands in her face.

"But then again, you might hear me say that even if I was saying I knew things in all the categories, so my words aren't even… someone go get me writings on this. Ideally someone's… possibly random but now that I think of it… ideally papers on the concept, but even fiction that is known for very well thought out portrayals will do."

She turns back to Griffith "You are a little ball of horrors, I want you to know that. You seem nice and friendly, and I think you might even be nice and friendly, yet you… you…"

"You have writings on the concept of 'antimeme', and lots of people know that the writings exist! That's great! It seems like a good sign. And you're making productive-sounding meta-level statements too. Good work there."

"And, uh, I'm sorry about the horrors. I also used to think there weren't quite so many. The surprise is unpleasant."

Griffie pauses, and looks unhappy but determined.

"You know, your civilizations appear to be very large and doing quite well. I have reason to believe you may already be entangled with some of the horrors. But it seems like not very much? There … is probably a moral argument that you should try very hard to clean up anything people could use to follow me here, and maybe have me work with people who are good at keeping secrets to archive a lot of knowledge and … have human-guarded libraries on the mercurial homeworlds in case of emergencies? This argument probably implies that you should kill me and destroy me and my possessions very thoroughly, so I really don't like it. I don't think it's true. I don't actually have the relevant population figures for my side of the equation, even as powers-of-two with no mantissa. But you ought to consider it."

Arithnu is up and pointing a sword at the captain.

"Things are only statistically urgent, not about-to-explode-tomorrow-and-get-dramatically-worse urgent! You don't need to threaten the Captain on my behalf!"

"Okay, this is a new situation so it might metaphorically explode tomorrow. But still, I’ve been here for days, the next minute is not privileged! So you have time to talk."

"Stand down, Art. I'm not planning to anyway. Ignorance is rarely helpful, and while obscuring any passages here might be wise, I don't see how killing Griffith would help."

Arithnu stands down.

"Regarding the helpfulness of ignorance: One time my friends and I met someone who wasn't very strong, but he knew a lot of history and other facts about the world that most people don't know. He was in an isolated place, but I talked him into coming home with us. The deity who wants to either kill everyone or do something worse than that spent a lot of resources on making sure the person was dead and his body and soul were thoroughly destroyed. If the person I had met had instead refused to listen to me and had either sided with someone who was trying to kill me, or had just refused to go home with me, he would still be alive. Another time, I met someone who was working at a library. Someone payed them to copy a book out of the library. Then the library noticed that they had information from the contents of the book, and so the librarian hurt them a lot. That person had made a paper copy, but the library also had tools for noticing information in people's heads that they didn't write down or tell anyone about. I do actually think you should know more things, but I think you need to account more for powerful bad people knowing that you know things."

"My proposed mechanism of action for how killing me would help is that there are spells for seeing people from very far away, and if I am dead it's a lot harder to use them on me. I don't know how much my disappearance has been escalated yet. My friends and I only know a relatively weak version, a spell called 'Scrying', but other people have much, much stronger versions. A friend of mine compared one of the stronger versions to 'Improved Discern Location'. Uh. That probably doesn't mean much to you. Anyway, my friends will definitely have used the weaker version, but it almost certainly hasn't worked. If the strong versions can find me, and powerful people decide to use them, then probably someone can follow me, and … this is likely to be helpful people or at least people who don't want to hurt you first, but they probably can't keep something like this place a secret forever? I guess if they had the capacity to do things like that I might not have heard about it, though."

"…I've been working on stabilizing the elemental fields for longer than 10 minutes for, say, containers and not just me. Now that there is gravity and I am working on that I might be able to demonstrate the 'Scrying' spell."

"…I stand corrected. Art, I would like you to not point that sword at me just yet, as both of us are well outside of what we are used to, and I do not believe you are in a position to quickly judge honor or dishonor here."

"…point granted."

"First question. Given all of this, would killing you even be a significant benefit, or would it only stall. Enough stalling might be worth it, but… Secondly, you used quite a few terms there that I would like you to explain in more detail. Thirdly, I want information on these enemies that might decide to hunt us down."

She taps her tablet, and the sylvan words "Deity", "Soul", and "Spell" appear.

"Some of the bolder heuristics are comparing these to some words we have, but you treat them as actual things, and I don't want to repeat the fire issue. Here is what some of our systems are suggesting."

"These all seem tangled up, and tangled up with other words, to an extent that we do not know how to handle."

Deity

Supreme Being above all others

Creator of all reality

A very powerful being that controls or rules over some aspect of reality such as fire, rather than something like a country

A powerful being to think thoughts at in the hopes of getting a response

Soul

The immaterial essence which animates people

That which defines a person

The part of a person that survives death

Spell

An method to made things happen just by saying words in a way different from using those words to motivate people or trigger devices

An method to do the impossible by words or gestures

"If the process that sent me here is reproducible, killing me would likely only be a stalling tactic. If it isn't reproducible then killing me wouldn't be necessary."

"There's more than one deity and none of them credibly claim to be supreme above all others. Deities have created parts of reality, like kinds of metals, or trees, or diseases. Deities claim to have put the world back together after the really big war, and there's a lot of evidence of this. They have confusing stories of creating the world which might instead be about putting it back together after the war. A deity is a very powerful being that usually has a lot of power over aspects of reality like fire, not aspects like countries. They usually wouldn't have complete control over an aspect as broad as 'fire'. Also they fight over who gets the aspects. Also if you think thoughts at them it sometimes does things but usually you don't get a response. If they choose you they might give you spells or talk to you more though. …I'll explain spells after souls."

"Souls are complicated structures of Positive Energy, which is a different substance from the four elements, or whatever your metal and glass and sphere-constructs are made of. My soul animates me, and animals and humans where I am from have souls that animate them but it's possible to animate things without souls, like your sphere-constructs. But usually if someone is a person, and moving because they are a person, the process requires their soul? Souls contain people's memories and personalities and such, but you can also find evidence of that in their brains, and for that matter in their notebooks if they use them. Souls … mostly persist after death, but portions of them are destroyed on death, and they fall apart faster after death than they do before death. Sufficient damage to the brainstem makes the soulstem stop existing and so the soul falls into multiple pieces. Some people can make artificial soulstems though."

"A spell is a method to make things happen by saying words, making gestures, using foci, like holly and mistletoe, or other materials, and drawing on a power source. It is different from using words to motivate people or trigger devices. 'Do the impossible' is kind of a weird question to ask about something I can do and I'm not sure how you want me to answer it."

Leonarda taps her tablet "Hey, Cornelia?"

"Yes Captain?"

"Those really weird translations the system kept generating? Take off the block for them, just… how about we try just assuming the system is right, even if it looks like nonsense."

"For which group? The deities, the magic, the souls…"