"...that's such a specific expression but I suppose so is 'hold a gun to my head'." He finds Ava Lestern's book on his corpus.

The page design looks . . . glittery.

October 40:

   Affinities:  Enjoys sculpture and cleaning, good with animals, trusting, very sincerely focused on doing right by the people in front of them.

   Enmities:  Anxious, flakey, and socially prone to overthinking; alternatively, bravado-filled and underthinking-prone.  Either way, impulsive.

   Oddities: Their names tend to break down into pronounceable letters!  Ex. Ariel (REL), Casey (KC), Ciel (CL).

[Translator's note: the octal digits are constructed slightly differently than the decimal ones, though not to the point where one couldn't naively assume it was a weird font thing.]

"That sounds way worse than whipping!  I think even firing squads are usually off a ways, here."

"This book looks suitable, thank you. Is corporal punishment typical?"

"You're welcome!  I mean I've never had it."

"Yes, I mean, like, as a formally deployed punishment for things."

"Well sure."

"It's not where I'm from, is all."

"Huh!"

"Yeah, I keep running into stuff like that. I'm not sure how to systematically find everything that might be important."

"What other sort of stuff?"

"Different afterlife situation, the birthdays, the cats, the fact that Jesus is a moderately famous living person instead of a long-dead world-renowned one, the timekeeping, the world being flat."

"Wow.  What's it instead of flat?"

"Spherical. Goes around the sun. No cold thing at the North Pole."

"Weird!  What's gonna happen when you run out of room?"

"There are more spheres! What will happen when you do?"

"Like, not the sun or the moon; spheres you can live on?  We can just dig."

"Only so much surface area is covered by sunlight, if you dig far enough what will you eat?"

"Uh, keeping in mind that I'm way more into the like, aesthetics and warm-fuzzies of cylinder exploration than the practicalities, I think the stars have some sort of plan?  They might make more suns or something, I dunno."

"I guess that could work. Anyway, I'm here to solve material scarcity so y'all can dig to your heart's content."

"And we thank you very kindly for that!  Hm, I wonder if you can prove that it's actually infinite; we already know it is cause the stars say so but there are still skeptics.  I guess they're probably still likely to be skeptical about conclusions from an interuniversal magical traveller, aren't they."

"Most likely." Scale model of the cylinder-slice forty billion parsecs down?

An uneven, slightly hole-filled little patty with swirls of dirt and stone and iron and puddles of water some of which drain onto his hand appears.

"It is at least really really really tall."

"That's so cool!!  What happens if you aim for the bottom?  That's like a saying here, for when you think something is really really unlikely; 'Oh, yeah, that could happen.  On the bottom of the world.'"