"…Captain."

"You can stop your search, Silvia. I apologize for the wild goose chase."

Leonarda turns to Griffith, and taps her tablet, causing various stellar diagrams to appear below her on the screen.

"Our species used to believe that our planet was the center of reality, and that there was a distant dome with stars painted on it, or similar. This was because in reality, our planet rotated, and if you have a lot of objects which are more distant than they are fast, and you're rotating, it looks like that. This meant that they appeared to rotate at a uniform speed, all together."

"When we grew up, we realized that the way things actually work is that we lived on a spinning object that was orbiting around our star, while our star orbited around a giant collapsed star. Stars, as we know them, are the result of massive, massive pressure crushing ordinary matter until it gets indescribably hot. They can't simply wink out. They are amazingly distant from each other, with only a tiny number of exceptions that it took us a long time to be able to figure out were even multiple stars, because the distances between star systems are so vast compared to the distances within. When you were floating in space and looking around, that's what you were seeing. Those swirls weren't stars in different shapes. Those were collections of stars."

"But whatever you experienced back home … I don't see how it could be like that. We've tried to fit things in as you being lied to, or misled, or confused, because a lot of what you believe sounds a lot like what we used to believe, before we learned better. But it doesn't sound like that's your problem, because when Cornelia examined what you called 'elemental fire', it wasn't an oxygenation reaction. When she examined what you called 'elemental water', well, we're still working on that, but I don't think it's going to be the closely-bonded combination of gases that we call water. That's a weird translation, but close enough. Our reality, everywhere that we know of, doesn't have some grand center for things to go around at different speeds. There are orbits, but none of them are enough to handle what you're describing."

"I think wherever you're from is more distant than that. It's not anywhere we know how to get to, even in principle. Before we discovered subspace travel, we knew about the other stars, but it would have taken too long to get there. But when we discovered subspace, not only could we get to the distant stars, we also learned a new place that we hadn't understood before. I think where you come from is more like that than just a distant planet. Somewhere so distant that it isn't even a distance as we understand it. Someplace weirdly and confusingly familiar, but different from our old beliefs. Where you have souls and an afterlife and deities, that look kind of like what we imagined long ago, but aren't. Where you have dragons, and spells, and things are based on what we now call the 'classical elements', all of which aren't how … I guess they are how things work, sort of, but not for us. A place where our mistakes … well, maybe not all of them, but … I don't understand how this is possible, but I don't understand how the mercurials share our expressions. Something … I don't know what, makes these line up weirdly, but I don't know how we could get you home."

"I don't have solid reason to believe that those prewar swirls weren't collections of stars, I suppose. The only person I know who might have known and who would cooperate with the question is Kenchlo, and he was murdered. For reasons like that."

"I don't know what to say about your world's stories. For what it's worth, when I first heard about humans experiencing senescence I thought it would be more of a technological problem and less of a social problem."

"As for the distance-beyond-distance … my world has similar phenomena to varying degrees. It sounds entirely plausible to me, though the exact difficulty of transit with my capabilities and yours together, as well as the exact difficulty of transit in the other direction, is of extreme importance to determine."

Leonarda nods. "Perhaps we can figure out something with further study. We did crack early subspace with just part of the remains of a jelly, and you are both functional and explaining things. You don't seem to be causing any issues for the station, and the subspace distortions here are reducing our options. Would you like to come aboard?"

"It's possible my friends would try to look for me at the location I arrived at. If we're going to move me could we maybe put something informative where I was?"

"Of course. We have a great deal of experience with attempting to design beacons for those without even a shared language, we can design one with you to use your language to direct them about how to contact us, along with leaving some technology to help them do so."

"Let's do multilingual. The first language I tried using with you is cross-culturally recognizable in my world, and let's throw in a language I haven't shown you yet that one of my friends likes that's good for technical stuff, too. And … might be good to give it the capacity to destroy itself, depending on what we decide?"

"We can include a remote detonator and remote monitoring, but both will be at the whim of subspace and… right now at least subspace is far from cooperative. Which is the primary reason I would like to move away from here. That 'hole in reality' did a number on things."

"I do dislike being stranded in the void forever, so … beacon or no I should probably join you."

"All right. You can get on the shuttle Cornelia and Arete, and we will convert the place into a beacon. I want you to stay quarantined, and to expose some animals to–right, need to make sure they don't make evil deities. I'll add friendly animals to the list. Those… may be trickier than plants."

"I can stay in quarantine. Maybe one where people can get closer to the outside of the space, though? And in my opinion we can wait a while on the positive energy exposure tests, unless you're concerned about wanting it tested so it's a potential backup option for injured crewmembers? I'm not leaking very much positive energy."

"Hm… I do want to get you out of quarantine, but I don't want any evil gods or indestructible plagues. You said you could cure diseases. Can that apply to other things? I would want to test it on… hm. A healthy sample, a sample sick with one of our diseases, and a sample sick with one of your diseases. Plants and then animals."

"The disease-curing spells are actually also based on positive energy. It might be better to do tests with the spell 'Diagnose Disease', it just checks whether a thing is diseased or not and doesn't heal it at all. Sometimes clever diseases can hide from it, but yours shouldn't have had any pressure to develop such an ability."

"I see. Oh, speaking of plants, how would this work with modified plants? Would something domesticated be more friendly to us, or make some sort of mutating things deity?"

"You're really overstating the effects of one plant's soul worth of quintessence. For domesticated plants that were modified to be more friendly to you in a way that isn't hostile to the plant's genetic line … that should produce friendlier to you quintessence? To the extent that mutating-things would be involved it'd be friendly mutations?"

"Do you have the concept of an 'invasive species'?"

"Yes. I've done containment procedures when growing plants from distant environments before."

"Are you confident that just because one weak deity forming where there are lots of competing deities couldn't rapidly rise to become a major power doesn't mean that they couldn't in the absence of any competition?"

"I give off orders of magnitude more quintessence than a plant. If there's anything forming it should be from me. A deity of communication and carefully staying in place and conserving resources and warning people about things, haha, which … I really think we would notice if it existed?"

"…fine. I'll have them send in the current chamomile version. Do you want to be moved to the ship before or after that?"

"Before? I like people."

Griffie is transported via shuttle to the ship, staying in quarantine the entire time.

"Wow, that's one impressive ship. Your people seem quite good at building things without magic."

"Thank you. I'll pass that along to the engineers once I've figured out secrecy."