Huh. She asks a lot of questions about electricity and particle physics in the meantime.

It's just this side of visible to the naked eye, some kind of... Actually, it's just very very weird. It has mass and weirdly-behaving atom-like things, at least.

Amazing. Greens want to look at it for as long as it is safe with everything in the lab.

It's safe as long as she's within twenty meters of it... And alive. Apparently she exploded last time she died, which is embarrassing. She'll do various magic exercises as repeatably as she can too, as long as they're answering her science questions.

How do people normally get information about their past deaths like that?

Greens are thrilled about this arrangement.

You can seek out specific people you knew or get lucky and have a glorious death in battle and have songs composed about you. In her case she didn't have to look very hard, it was quite the explosion since she'd just figured out the energy crystal thing that incarnation. So all the stories of Ullumar's rampage included her exploding at a climactic moment. Embarrassing to be so famous for an accident.

Ullumar?

"Oh, just another warlord-emperor who decided to try to make the whole world his and eventually died of it. Nasty magic though. Are you familiar with water-jet cutters?"

"Yes, they're useful for various industrial purposes. He had a magic one?"

"Indeed. With considerable range. But those who rule with force don't know how to stop fighting and tend to die by force. Thus why I don't try to rule."

"Reasonable of you. Science is more fun anyway." SCIENCE

SCIENCE!

Stoneheart doesn't bring up reds again. She has a vague disquiet about them and - hasn't actually talked to any, which feels annoyingly incomplete, but it's also a thorny and political thing. Nobody wants to talk about them. Exactly the sort of thing she tries to avoid because it inevitably turns into a massive headache.

She identifies several troublesome city-factors, especially with farming practices, and constantly advises that they'll have slack to ignore her more inconvenient recommendations, she's just not quite sure how much. It's moving along, though.

The planned Dwellin tourism eventually comes to a close with everyone having had a grand time. Oh, and Stoneheart will secure the things one needs to grow a Well of Souls at the start of this autumn (their autumn which is about half a season away), by the way greens.

The botanical greens appreciate that!

The Dwellin are fetched home.

Things proceed as normal. Lots of trade. Some more tourist visits. Dwellin are a violent bunch and frequently bug the Amentans for help against their enemies. One set of them manages to blow up a shuttle by secretly tunneling and burying a huge gunpowder bomb under the customary landing point.

...There are suddenly kind of a lot of alien babies around, when their fall comes around. Even the locals think this is weird! There's a lot!

Uh! Weird and confusing! Would the locals like condoms in case they were previously relying on their mysterious fertility control feature!

They're mostly pretty happy about the baby boom, if confused. They seem to think it's because the Amentans showed up. They'll take condoms if they're on offer, most of them anyway. It's not clear how consistently they'll use them.

The Amentans will make getting condoms SO EASY. Why would Amentans showing up cause a baby boom????

Dwellin theologians are pretty sure that nature decided there ought to be more Dwellin to match the Amentans but disagree on the why. They think that magic-animals are having a baby boom too.

How does that work??????

That gets a lot of questionable philosophical reasoning. Who can truly understand the gods' work? They more observe results and then try to figure out the reasons for them than look at the mechanics.

Okay. Amentan scientists would like to study the Dwellin reproductive system. A lot. It seems important.

Fine? They can get volunteers by paying them. But Dwellin don't need population control like Amentans do. This is just a short term disturbance probably.

Yeah but what if it's not.

It'll happen because Nature would react if they get populous enough to disturb the surface like Amenta's is disturbed, and Nature prefers gentle adjustments to drastic sudden changes, so it'll stop the baby boom once the baby boom's purpose is met. And if it's not then wars will just get deadlier but that's honestly fine, it's not as if they can really threaten Amenta.

...well, they still really want to know what's going on but they will try not to panic too much about it.

It'll be fiiiiine!

The scanners on some of the newer satellites seem to have found... Some sort of major underground complex? Or at least large voids. Caverns, maybe. City sized. There's a couple dozen of them, fairly evenly spread, though all on the main continent and not undersea or on islands.