"The glorious life of adventure, eh?" Pause. "You mentioned the Upper Planes, those are the ones made of Good, right?"

"Yeah, they're pretty great. All the Outer Planes have a sort of … background pressure to them? Axis's makes you walk in straight lines in a way that's well-coordinated with everyone else such that the traffic naturally forms into lanes, the Abyss makes it hard to coordinate even on the basic level of walking in a group unless you're forcing people into it and whispers ideas of how to hurt others into your head, and the Upper Planes is nice. It tries to make sure people run into people they'd benefit from meeting, and it just … feels pleasant. Safe. Relaxing."

"We skyfarers don't have much reason to like or trust mind-affecting auras, but it does sound better than the alternative."

"I could avoid the Upper Planes, but it's a friendly mind-affecting aura, and it is also full of people who are combat-capable and agree with me about things, so it's a good place to vacation since I'm worried about being attacked. And it's not opinion-warping? I liked the Upper Planes before I went there, it's in accordance with publications about it and such, and going to the Abyss didn't make me more violent, nor did going to Axis make me more Lawful. Anyway, I can talk about the non-aura features."

"Mmm. But - ugh, fretting about this isn't going to do any good. Shutting up. Vacations, eh. There aren't a lot of great options for that where I'm from. There's a college I visit sometimes. Or just my apartment is like a vacation after a long voyage. I'm resisting the urge to throw out tons of place names you won't have any context on. Anyway point is, the High Wilderness is wearying, that's whence all the cynicism, really."

"…yeah. Adventuring can really get to you. I think Milliways is a decent vacation spot even if I'm working but I do Infirmary not Security, it might be more draining that way. A lot of my past vacations were mostly spent studying and working anyway, just not the kind of work where people try to kill me."

"At some point the idea of a 'vacation' stops even making that much sense. There's so much... Just, out there. Like it'll never stop."

"The fact that it won't stop is kind of why you need breaks. If your world's problems were just going to last two years, it might make sense to not take any breaks, but since they'll persistently be there, you need to not burn yourself out."

"Yeah well, tell that to whoever's in peril this week, eh. Luckily this is Milliways, and 'week' loses all meaning - particularly since I have the Hours to de-age myself when I go back."

"The culmination of 'tell that to whoever's in peril this week' is Vildeis. And there's a place for Vildeis, but I at least recommend taking time off when you're seriously injured, and at that point we've agreed that adventurers should take any time off and we're negotiating over duration. And Hours?"

"Who's Vildeis? Light is Law in the High Wilderness, and Hours are the crystallized light of time, which can get pretty wobbly and are also incredibly useful. I've picked up the basics there."

"Vildeis is a goddess known as the Cardinal Martyr. She, uh, doesn't cease in her fight with evil, and is typically portrayed as covered with bloody bandages. I'm surprised that you can deage yourself with just time light without memory loss, though I guess if aging is itself light-induced that makes sense?"

"Also, being a powerful adventurer helps, though it also tends to expose you to a lot more, ehm, risk factors. A lot of stuff where I am from is soft around the edges like that. Sort of conceptual."

"Seems somewhat similar in my world. More risks, more defenses, it all adds up to a lot of weirdness."

"Let me tell you it was sort of disturbing the first time I realized I was reloading impossibly fast. The gun's parts don't even move that quickly kind of impossibly."

"I think it's perhaps less weird if you're doing magic from the beginning?"

"I suppose it would be. But enough about work for now."

"That is very reasonable!"

Griffie pauses and smiles. "Care for a game of cards? There's this one where the rules change as you play which I think is neat. It's hard to do too much strategizing so it's good for talking over."

"New card games and the like are always fun. It's always weird to me that other places don't have the same suits- Rats, Bats, Cats, and Hats."

“Those sound like more complicated silhouettes than the suits I’m used to: tiles, candles, fans, cups.”

Griffie gets a deck of cards out. “I actually decided to get a fairly fancy deck because the trappings of civilization can be remarkably useful in diplomacy … right, not talking about work. Anyway.”

Ey shows Lenora the cards. They form a 52-card deck, with numbered cards 1 through 10 and face cards being the Page, the Knight, and the Lord. The numbered cards feature, not just stamped silhouettes, but artful drawings of the appropriate quantities of the relevant items, with patterned tiles and fans in multiple styles. The face cards feature creatures of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water (with tiles, candles, fans, and cups as appropriate, for clarity), with the Pages being small humanoid creatures with bat wings and horns, the Knights being relatively featureless but combat-ready looking blobs of an element with crude 'arms', and the Lords being noble- and humanoid-looking genies.

"Huh, we do two-ten-jack-queen-king-ace. Those are some nice looking monsters. Well, probably they're people actually."

"I think there are some games that treat the singletons of each suit as a bigger deal than the lords but not all of them? And … yeah, all of these are people, but these," ey points at the horned figures "are the type of people who aren't that bright and are also more interested in hanging out in a cave-or-such and occasionally harassing travelers than, say, interacting with society, and these" ey points at the blobs "are … well, being much smarter than the usual sort of Air doesn't make your behavior all that different from Air if you have the same goals, though you might be more purposeful about insisting on keeping a particular entity in your whirlwind, but usually they're either acting kind of like unintelligent materials or being bossed around by someone else. …often one of these," ey says, pointing at the genies.

"Regrettably, most of the things that threaten locomotives tend to be pretty smart. Aside from fungus and infested wrecks of previous locomotives, I can think of... Cantankeri and Chorister Bees both aren't that bright, sort of like your, uh, blobs, I think. Or actually, there's a few nasties in the Blue Kingdom and Eleutheria - Shutting up now, sorry."

"Anyway, I got out this deck to discuss card suits, but the game I was originally thinking of uses a special deck doesn't really have suits at all, though the cards do mostly divide into New Rule, Action, Keeper, and Goal cards."

"Sure, I've seen a few barcard games like that. They printed stylized weapons and soldiers and monsters and even warships in the back of books and had a weird set of rules for building a deck and fighting 'em. It was neat. Something like that?"