"In a lot of ways they did well for you - you have backups, and we don't - they knew how to terraform and anyway all of this was long ago, if they're still around they must have somehow forgotten about you, maybe they didn't intend to leave you this long -"

"The backups are a kindness but- But you're right about it being such a terribly long time."

She tells the system she wants to call for help.

"-It says waveshape link destroyed."

"...maybe we can find and reconstruct the waveshape link."

"Or tell it to fix itself, it seems like there's a lot of self-repairing in here..."

"Which itself might or might not still work, but it sounds like it's worth trying."

She digs through the manual and finds an application-of-sorts that does maintenance.

"-It needs live magic animals or magic-users," she concludes after transcribing relevant sections, "Because that makes the - tiny machines - smarter, somehow, having figured out how to use your magic and worked with it, is how I understand it."

"Tiny machines! Oh, I'm losing a bet," murmurs the magic green.

"Tiny machines, I am pretty sure this means. Not - just that, I think, there's something about subspace here, but-"

"Tiny subspace machines, that's so cool," the magic green says, practically vibrating.

"Wonders of the gods indeed. I need to know if it's safe to leave and come back, I can probably convince people to sacrifice their magic to the restoration of the gods' legacy, especially if I put it like that..."

"We can start larger-scale hunting for magic animals," Kiki says, "they've been holding off, but we can do it."

"Live capture. I can only imagine that being - incredibly difficult, for some of the more extreme species. It might need other things too..."

"Live capture?"

"Either live magic animals, or live magic people. I think. It's giving me the option to take yours. I won't unless volunteered." She brings up the transcribed description. "It's hard to follow but I think this means the magic has to be 'integrated' to be good for repairs, and 'integration' decays quickly. Maybe bodies work if they're relatively fresh?"

"Maybe we can - charge people to eat rocks, and then pay them more than that if they don't want to keep their power, to have it donated to the project."

"I want more rocks, myself, I feel naked without it. I think that would work. And there are magic Dwellin who are old and dying or willing to sell, I would bet."

"We can pay them too. This is big, this is worth funding, I'm sure we can."

"Very big. Possibly as big as Amenta finding us in the first place."

"If it pans out in either of tech we can copy or meeting another civilization, absolutely."

"Now you can experience the same stupefaction I did at skyscrapers and computers. Less so electricity, I had a frame of reference on that, magic and all- What's yours, incidentally?"

"Glass shaping! I was surprised."

"People often are surprised. Mine was frustratingly abstract at first... In terms of getting tech out of this, I'm excited about the hints about backups and cloning I'm seeing."

"Yes, it would be pretty neat if we could figure out how that works! Maybe there are even backups of your creators here," says Kiki, "so if we can't contact them wherever they are now, we could still talk to them."

"It has the potential neatly solve reds, as I understand it, which has been bothering me." Not that she's ever met one, which feels hypocritical, but she's good at appearing politically correct, "Back them up, create a clean body, restore. We can solve slavery and have electricity, and you can solve pollution and have robots."

"Huh. I guess that might work - I didn't take any theology in university," says Kiki.