The person coming through the door now carries herself like an adventurer, watching the room for danger as she enters, with a revolver and a cavalry saber on either side of her hips. She's wearing a slightly battered naval uniform, white undershirt and dark blue vest and pants with two rows of shiny buttons and gold trim and heavy boots. Stains dot the uniform and one sleeve is singed.

"Ah, Milliways! I need the break, praise be."

Her soul is, to those who can see such things, brighter-bigger-more in the way that Adventurers' souls get. It's also- Quivering? Tense? There's some sort of pressure or imbalance, at least. It also seems to be leaking slightly.

She looks around the bar to take in any current patrons.

While there aren't any patrons, Griffie's location in the infirmary is less than 60 feet away from the door and there aren't by default warded or lead-lined walls between the infirmary and the main bar area. Thus, Lenora sees a concerned-looking short plant person in leather armor darting out of the infirmary. "Ma'am, your soul appears to be leaking, please come to the infirmary!" the person says.

"-Oi, isn't that a bit personal talking about my soul- Ahh, fuck. Look, I know what that is, it's the Scorn-Fluke wound, it's not gonna kill me. Immediately."

"There's nobody here but me and Bar, being embarrassed about Bar seems unlikely and I'm currently the staff healer. If you don't want immediate medical attention that's your choice but I would recommend getting medical attention before you leave, the landlords apparently pay for it here."

"Depends on what you're going to do to my soul. It's kind of important to me you know! Your souls might work differently than ours!"

"Get out the good instruments, have a better look than I can do by eye? I have some raw life energy I can often get into the right shape to patch things but I'd of course be careful to figure out what that shape even is and whether the energy is safe to apply first."

She mutters something about buying her dinner first under her breath.

"Yeah so where I'm from the two ways to heal the soul are pretty much relaxation and rest and safety or going to a Devil or someone aligned with Devils, which makes me kind of hesitant."

"Well, Bar can certainly offer plenty of the first, and I promise I am not a Devil or aligned with same. If yours recovers with time that's good, in my world souls degrade over time, so I seem to have made an unfortunate implicit assumption about yours. Anyway, Bar can vouch for my track record as an employee and can likely also get you records that indicate I'm with the Upper Planes Alliance, which is very much against Hell."

"Probably not the same Hell either! I'm going to at least have a beer first. Sorry for being a grump but, you know, long month." She waves with somewhat forced cheer as she pivots left towards Bar.

"It's fine, people assuming a situation is more urgent than it is is a really common cause of grumpiness. Enjoy your beer." Griffie heads back to the infirmary.

Not very long later from Griffie's perspective, she knocks on the door to the infirmary in a new, clean uniform. Her soul is still pretty much the same. Slightly more settled, maybe.

"Hail the medic! I'd like to talk some before we get to healing if that's amenable to you, [polite word for a person whose preferred form of address you don't know]!"

"Sure, I can do talking."

"So where I'm from souls are... Ehhhh. Tricky business. They can be extracted, merged, burned. Fairly nasty stuff. And they're sort of not fundamental to a person? You can lose or sell yours and still be recognizable as the same person. Or have it radically altered and the same. Sometimes, at least. Some intelligent species don't have souls, just brains, and generally the bigger your soul is the more powerful you are. And of course there's lots and lots of non-humans most of whom have souls, brighter or better-crafted ones than ours, all the way up to the [stars/gods]."

"…okay. It sounds like the thing you're calling the 'soul' and that I'm seeing is … not how I would want things to translate … though really that's my native languages' faults for not having good enough case coverage. In my world, a body with a brain and no soul is just totally inert, and souls are the site of personal identity, it sort of sounds like yours are just … some kind of organ that does things but not personal identity things? And souls can be extracted and merged and burned in my world too, I have a merger of a bunch of not-really-soul-level nature spirits as part of mine, nature spirits are fluid enough that they don't mind."

"That sounds... Accurate, probably? Souls do also seem to be partly you, like, I almost get the impression that the brain has some of a person and the soul - hmm, loanword - the 'aether' that we call souls has the rest, depending on the person. You hear stories of like a body and aether fighting each other for control, or of parasitic aether-replacements, or of parasitic body-controllers being fought off by your own aether, sometimes. I'm not exactly an immaterial scientist though, I just know the stories. My best skills have always been fighting things and common sense."

"Fighting things and common sense are pretty good, I normally do those but right now I've been taking a long break from the fighting because Bar would rather I work here than Security. If you're good at nonlethally getting people into cells without being on-call for that disrupting your recovery you might be able to stay here a while just working Security, though. And loanwords are good, you can call mine a positive-energy-soul if that works."

"Yeah, I take Security shifts sometimes." Sigh. "I'm sort of wondering how much of a mess your world is compared to mine. I don't get Milliways that often, but... Hmm, how to put it... The High Wilderness is complicated in ways that a lot of other peoples' worlds don't seem to be, I guess."

"There's a lot of weird stuff in my world, some of which isn't secret. Of the nonsecret things … there's an ongoing war between the Upper Planes and some evil divine factions, namely Asmodeus, Charon, and the Abyss. Ah, none of our gods are stars that I know of. Anyway, of these, Charon seems most concerning, he wants to kill everyone, he's the cause of the thing where everyone in my world ages and with some exceptions dies of it, and he seems to be escalating a lot in his plans. I'm staying in here until I get strong enough to fight him and the other evil gods, because if I come out of here with an advantage that isn't enough to win I will definitely be attacked and lose. And I can stay in here forever because someone else in the infirmary was able to stop my soul from aging, and I can fix my body, and I can work here."

"Oof. The Judgements - stars - that's another disambiguating name since I'm not totally sure these are the same kinds of things - stay far away from each other and only ever come into conflict by proxy, as far as I know. And from what I'm getting about 'planes' I'm pretty sure we don't actually have more than one. The darkness between the stars is either freezing cold or primordial chaos. And the Judgements are also responsible for aging, the old bastards. Not that we little people can't murder each other either, but at least it's not dispassionate harvest."

"The gods in my world normally try to keep themselves to proxy conflicts, but things are heating up again. And they keep to proxy conflicts because the first godwar shattered time, destroyed some concepts, et cetera. We have several planes, but we don't go into the darkness between the stars, do you? And … the Upper Planes Alliance is an alliance of gods and of mortals, they take our advice and work to protect us, and I'd rather have a godwar than have the gods all agree on wanting everyone but them to die. I suppose I look pretty pro-godwar from here, plotting to start and finish one, but I understand that it's a really serious cost, just … if I were you I'd consider trying to start one anyway."

"I'm sure somebody does, there's a lot of people out there, but the darkness between the stars is pretty damned inhospitable. As for god-wars... That's so far above my pay grade I could be exploded just for thinking about it, to mangle a metaphor. Even with my soul so..." She grimaces. "Murgh. It seems probably bad for my health to get involved in that, you know? It might sound selfish but if I die on some crusade there's nobody to protect convoys and hunt down pirates and grave robbers and all the other nasties. I kept trying to find great quests in my youth, and they kept turning into massive disasters. And- It's important, I get it, but... I've seen two or arguably three human wars and just those contained such a vast amount of hate and suffering and pointless atrocities. To take that to the kinds of power the higher beings use... Don't think messing with the affairs of the stars is likely to do anyone any favors in the long run, without a massive game changer, the kind my time in Milliways keeps not giving me."

"Is 'exploded for thinking about it' part of the metaphor, because if not Bar might be able to get you something to cause short-term memory loss if you ask her right now."

"Mostly a metaphor. I know I've forgotten and made unthinkable something. But not what it is, obviously."

"…alright then. I'm glad you don't have to wipe your memories of this conversation too. I'm not going to call you selfish for working within your capabilities, it's good to know your limits, and war is awful. If we can patch whatever causes you to age, though, maybe you can stay here long enough to get a massive game-changer, by working Security shifts?"

"The world is broken and we live in the cracks! Gotta make the best of it, and maybe make things a little better. And I do have ways around aging, though they're expensive to run. As for some soul tinkering, maybe maybe. I'm sort of trying to feel you out with this conversation, you know. Kind of obvious but, yeah."

"Sure is broken, alright, just gotta go forward from there. And you can also just go ahead and ask me a bunch of personal questions if that helps, there's some secret information I won't share but I don't think any of it is really relevant to my personal character or trustworthiness as a healer."

"Geez, now all I'm thinking of is simplistic surface-level philosophical questions you see fancy college people debate at fancy college parties. What is beauty. Would you murder one person to save ten. I've found a great way to get to know someone is to swap stories or nerd out at each other about something each of us is interested in... Though I also sort of feel the professional context is a bit awkward here, since I'm pretty friendly by default and, well," she gestures around the infirmary vaguely. "You get off shift eventually, right? Maybe I should just go sit by Bar until then. Then again, professional conduct is more relevant to soul doctoring than personal bond or whatever... I'm rambling on you. Sorry 'bout that. I'll get out of your face for a while."

"Yeah, I'll be off-shift soonish. See you at Bar!"

She wanders around outside for a while. Does her stretches and exercises.

Comes back in and asks Bar for an English breakfast and some light reading about Griffie, if any's to be had. She has newspaper articles about her, at least, so there's probably something.

Bar is happy to offer a good English breakfast! Bar can offer some documents thanking the Resolute Reclaimers (an adventuring team including Griffie) for rescuing multiple small towns as well as their "very generous donation to New Redwoodbury Friends of Trees for urban health", and a note reading "If you're wondering where I am now, I'm a member of a mortal adventuring team, the Resolute Reclaimers! They helped uncover some really bad stuff Curdime was doing and are otherwise doing good stuff, and I wanted to do something heroic, so I'm joining them! —Liel, transcribed by her sister Felice the Joy of Sharing Books". Griffie's also mentioned in the Healing Hands records of volunteers as soaring high in the ranks on correct disease diagnosis ever since ey got a pair of magic disease-screening glasses. Would Lenora like anything heavier than this?

Yep, good press in newspaper clippings... Ish. She checks to make sure the healing hands is a charity hospital or whatever and asks for something about Friends of Trees.

Healing Hands is a medical charity, though they often get patients in and out without them ever seeing a hospital bed. Friends of Trees is an organization of people who are friends with the gigantic sapient trees that in the Temda region who allow people to hollow out and live in their cores because they like hosting cities. They take the term 'urban health' very literally.

Wow cool! It's like Traitor's Wood except in literally almost every way!

She gets distracted for a while reading about tree cities.

You might think that tree cities would oppose wood products, but Temda trees actually need to get rid of wood to have apartments, so the region is a net exporter of wood.

As for the method of organization … it's not anarchic, but it is decentralized. Neighbors will often hire different defense organizations which enforce different restrictions on their members, and defense organizations are often linked to guilds and fraternal orders and such. Temda is one of the rare regions where paladins (champions of the lawful sort of Goodness) and demon cultists (practitioners of disorderly Evil) can openly live side-by-side without being in a state of total warfare.

Unlike some cities, the landowners in Temda are the trees, and they are very much in favor of there being more of their kind of trees. Rent prices are thus pretty low.

Temda cities use engineered plants for things. The trees themselves have an incredibly powerful circulatory system that gets used to provide apartments with running water as needed, as well as operate hydraulic elevators. They also choose to host parasitic/symbiotic bioluminescent plants that draw on the host tree's sugars to provide indoor lighting, though it has a distinctive yellowish hue. Sewage is handled via a pitcher-plant-like system (of which lesser versions even exist in the wild) which even offers toilet flushing, but other forms of garbage cannot be flushed and must be removed manually. Perhaps less excitingly, the trees also host breadfruit grafts and similar.

Temda can be pretty confusing to interact with, especially for outsiders, who may make lethal mistakes! Civilized people will adhere to the rule of three questions and let you ask three questions before they, say, retaliate if you behave in a socially inappropriate manner. It is advisable to have the first question be "What do I need to know for talking to you?" or similar. Norms vary wildly between groups within the same small geographic area, and the rule of three questions is intended to allow you to either discern those norms or notice you've failed to back off. Many reputation-tracking organizations exist. Spark Connections distributes accurate information about other organizations people might be interested, Reliable Markets makes a few guarantees whose absence gestures at the presence of really, really weird market systems, et cetera. Additionally, multiple 'path' organizations exist which provide information on safely navigating a city, implying that members of different factions may experience a physically different set of connections between locations while within the same city.

Amazing. It sounds like some insane mixture of Pan and Eagle's Empyrean and the Blue Kingdom's bureaucracy, foreign and exotic and full of dream logic and alien rules and strange peoples.

She wonders how they'd get along with scrive-spinsters, the sixty foot wooden animated librarian-statues.

...With hypothetical non-insane scrive-spinsters whose celestial library was never destroyed in the first place.

She wonders what they'd make of Bronzewood, that wonder material found growing by the acre in the jungles in the Reach. As far as she knows the trees are not sentient.

What's the deal with this odd emphasis on order, chaos, good and evil? Well, that's something she can ask Griffie when his(?) shift's done. Or maybe Bar has an explanation?

Bar does have an explanation! According to Quintessence Made Simple, when people do things, they produce quintessence linked to their actions: rice-ness from farming the stuff, compassion for community when sharing it with members of the community in need, legible governance when they honestly pay taxes with it, profit-seeking and xenophobia when they overcharge foreigners for it, et cetera, to go with one example that's familiar to many. And then the quintessence groups up with more like itself, and to places it's naturally drawn to, and that's probably where gods and similar powers come from, and they use it to form various creatures. And forces like compassion-for-community and hospitality-to-strangers and collective-truthseeking and such all tend to join up and support each other forming the Upper Planes, which hosts the Good gods, while forces for ordered tyranny are essentially all under Asmodeus, and pure Law and Coordination is less hierarchical but does all join together to form Axis. "Evil" thus ends up referring to the factions the Upper Planes oppose, and the Upper Planes generally opposes factions because they're interested in mass murder or torture or both. It does form a fairly natural quintessence category it's possible to create a Protection spell against. The Lawful components of the Upper Planes form Heaven and, due to their cooperativeness, do not oppose the Chaotic components of the Upper Planes (called Elysium), but otherwise it's a decent approximation to say that Heaven, Axis, and Asmodeus (and his realm Hell) oppose Chaotic quintessence factions, who are known for making things very disorderly.

Well that is... Something. It probably makes perfect sense to someone smarter than her, but it looks like the main point is that good and evil and orderliness and chaos can be semi-objectively measured where Griffie's from. It sure does seem plenty technical and consistent. She'd say that the Judgements are super duper Lawful, and obviously the anarchists and the darkness are Chaotic.

Hmm. What next...

What's next is that Griffie exits the infirmary and waves to Lenora before taking a seat near her and ordering a recommendation from Bar, which is some kind of glowing liquid in a reflectively-walled metal cup.

"Hiya. I did some reading. Have you got a believable way I can check your lawness and goodness? I'm curious about mine too if that's something that you can tell when I'm pretty sure I don't run on quintessence. Also I realized I never got your name, I'm Lenora Lovejoy."

"Nice to meet you, Lenora, I'm Griffie. It takes magic to inspect quintessence emissions and they're fakeable, you'd really just need to look at my history and such. If you want I could make guesses about yours based on history too, but even if you did emit quintessence I wouldn't be in a good position to measure it."

"Let's skip that, mostly idle curiosity. You seem positively referenced and you're part of a charity hospital group that Bar says is legitimate, so that's probably good enough for me once I have a bit more time to unwind in here, medically speaking. We could swap stories, though."

"Stories are cool! Unlike other people who check on me, you seem like you haven't read the really long report about the Rhoswen incident, so I can tell you the story of it instead."

"So, we got invited to someone's wedding because we rescued his sister from slavers. He was actually a retired adventurer, and said he'd give us job advice if we attended, so we did, it was a good offer."

"We went to the wedding. There is a tradition in the region, called the Box Social, of auctioning off desserts the bridesmaids made. The dessert comes with an opportunity to eat it in the presence of the bridesmaid, and the proceeds go to the couple. I decided to attend it because human courtship rituals are interesting. Several rounds of this went smoothly, with the winning bid being up to 10 gold. But when it was time to bid on the gnome bridesmaid's dessert, a partially-bleached male gnome druid – ah, gnomes don't just age, they also have a secondary soul decay issue caused by extreme boredom and such that makes them lose their color – started bidding really highly for it, the bridesmaid looked uncomfortable, I messaged her and she said he was an unwelcome admirer, so I, uh, got into a bidding war with the male gnome and ended up outbidding his life savings. I could afford it but it was kind of annoying? And then afterwards I talked to her on the 'date' – I don't date people who it'd be easy to use as hostages against me and I don't eat most foods and I wasn't otherwise attracted either – about her unwanted admirer, and he seemed to be going kind of insane, but before we could go grab him he ran off into the woods. We talked things over with the couple to be married, and while we were concerned we decided to go ahead with the wedding anyway."

"And then the mad gnome druid attacked the wedding, and we fought him off and won, but not before some weird fog he said we would choke on showed up as well as some spriggans. And I took the warning about the fog overly literally and had people take some crude anti-chemical-weapons precautions, but actually it was an effect of our area being disconnected from the rest of the world and getting stuck in the seal of Rhoswen's realm, which was partially unsealing, because the mad gnome druid had been tricked into unsealing it. So we couldn't call the Upper Planes or Axis about the incident because the same force that was supposed to be trapping Rhoswen was now trapping us with her."

"Ah, there was a thing that was a bit funny, a guest's culture had a tradition of wearing war paint to weddings to indicate willingness to defend the wedding from attackers, and he did not actually expect this to come up! He sure defended the wedding honorably, though."

"Anyway, we did some searching for information, we fought and captured a group of Rhoswen's minions and they turned out to predate the Sealed War of Aiquzall and thus all of known history, it was really interesting and distracting from our original interrogation plans but we, uh, couldn't really get them to give us constructive answers to much stuff, they were very loyal. We found someone who had information but was currently possessed and got the possessor out, we got more information about Rhoswen, we went and retrieved the 'wardstones' that needed to be reassembled in Rhoswen's realm to keep her contained. During this we had another encounter with the mad druid, he had to fight us because Rhoswen told him to and she's really scary but he seemed not thrilled about it."

"Anyway, we and a team broke into Rhoswen's realm, and the mad druid attacked us again, but we were able to talk him into surrendering and going home. He, uh, thought we'd killed some of his Awakened bee swarms, uh, bee swarms that were people and very loyal to him and that he'd attacked the wedding with, and he was really relieved to hear that we'd just disoriented them a lot instead, we try to go for nonlethal attacks whenever possible. So he gave us information useful for getting into Rhoswen's palace. Which we followed, and we were kind of bad at stealth in her castle. But we got caught by the court artist Kenchlo, and the court artist was sufficiently into the thing where actual people who weren't just Rhoswen's crude creations genuinely liked his art, and he said he wouldn't report us and that if we lost to Rhoswen we should tell her he wanted to keep us. Which would, uh, have probably been a significant favor, Rhoswen is normally quite cruel to her enemies. We actually did manage to beat Rhoswen in a fight, though it was quite difficult, and get her resealed, and then we raided her palace for everything valuable-looking and also brought the helpful artist back as well as a bunch of her prisoners who she kept shapeshifted into nonsapient birds."

"And we got out of Rhoswen's realm, and we were like 'yay, we have books and a Kenchlo and such and we saved the day, now we'll wait around until we can call the Upper Planes, and scan some books and hang around and recover and such'. But actually, a bunch of daemons, omnicidal creatures formed from deaths, were hanging around in the area the whole time and ambushed us. They tried to edit our memories and our books and kill everyone but us who had really good information about the incident and stealthily curse the birds' souls. But we tried really hard to hold them off, and had the amazingly good luck of summoning a Jubjub Bird to defend us when normally our summoning spells would not have been powerful enough, and their strongest fighter focused entirely on Kenchlo and then left with Kenchlo's soul instead of sticking around to kill us all. Thus, they managed to kill only one of the people they wanted to kill for having too much information, though Kenchlo was in fact by far the most useful information source, and edit our books not as much, and it was easier for us to figure out what they did to the birds. Specifically, they'd cursed the birds with aging, to hide that before the Sealed War, aging didn't happen to everyone."

"And then we investigated the incident more, and realized that there were a lot of suspicious death-themed coincidences setting up the whole mess, and we had the Jubjub Bird and ourselves and such guard people because some of the daemons had gotten away and might come back, and we rushed really hard to make a report to the Upper Planes as soon as the seal was down enough for that, and we managed it. And then eventually there was a big hearing, which Bar apparently has a copy of the report of, but this was the exciting part."

"That really does sound adventuresome. There's lots of stuff I could ask for expansions on in there - I don't think those bee swarms are going to be much like Chorister Bees but I still had the thought - I think I'll reply with a story of my own to set the conversation, one from the early... Well, earlier days of my story."

"So some basic background. Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God - they insist there's just the one - of the far too many titles, once ruled a kingdom on the Surface of the Earth. She sold London to the Echo Bazaar, and they took it underneath to the sunless sea, a place of far more chaos than the Surface, though not quite the same chaos you know. There's quite a bit of history after that, but she eventually decided they'd reneged on her deal and gathered the finest occultists of the Sunless Sea, opened up the magic gate to the celestial heavens and declared the place she found British, renaming it Albion in the finest imperial tradition."

"The High Wilderness is the place she found. I don't really understand the logic of it, but it's sort of half a different plane and half not, working under rules only the stars know. There's air and floating islands of stone and vegetation and debris, but the light of distant stars is baleful, it risks insanity and mutation unfiltered. Thus we travel in flying steam locomotives lined with stained glass, pushing through the sky and keeping the cold at bay with the endless cheap coal Hell exports, using gunpowder and steel to fight the hostile things living in the sky. But of course Albion is not the only center of civilization. The piece of the High Wilderness we found was devoid of civilization but not life, and by now all the colonies Albion have declared their independence. Following so far?"

Griffie writes down "ask about: chorister bees, hell exports coal?" and then nods.

"When I was young and stupid, I signed up for the Navy. Eventually I figured out that we were the bad guys and deserted and while I could have gone and joined up with the Tackety independence movement, instead I kind of just existed miserably in a big city for a while. Eventually, though, an old friend met me in a bar and asked a lot of probing questions about my views on the Establishment. I said they were cruel rent-seeking capitalists but a war would just hurt everyone more, and that the Tacketies were cruel firebrands resorting to violence out of fear. I said I'd rather fight unambiguous monsters and he said, well, you're in luck because I'm going to Hybras and I need a good gunner."

"Hybras is... A thoroughly unpleasant place. A small outpost deep within entire section of sky utterly overrun with fungi of various kinds, where the light of the stars is blotted out by clouds of spores and any landing is made on suspiciously squishy ground. The kind of place you don't leave the ship without a Sky-Suit on and a damned good reason. It was a week's journey to get to the region at all. Sky-sailing gets almost hypnotic after a while when it's just your duties and mealtimes and watches over and over. At the best of times it's long periods of busywork punctuated by occasional bouts of sheer terror. In worse times replace the busywork with mounting dread and anxiety. Anyway..." She fidgets a bit.

"I had never been in the fungal wastes before. I was just glad we were in a nice sealed locomotive and Captain Wheeler had sprung for a thing that mounted the air intakes straight to the furnace, so anything trying to get in was burnt up. But watch duty was still nerve-wracking, because almost everything looked unfamiliar and potentially threatening. I must have called in half a dozen false alarms - bubbling regions that it turns out don't explode or anything, formations that are actually just harmless hallucinations - magic or something - suspiciously wobbling spines. So on. But I'm very glad Wheeler runs a tight, disciplined crew, because when I called in 'fuck I dunno, a bunch of cantankeri fused together or something'... They didn't believe me, but we went to battle stations anyway."

"It was a horrible thing, cantankeri aren't very smart but they're not animals, and the fungus had... Controlled them or something. That was a nasty fight. We kept having to maneuver hard to dodge the globs of acid it was spitting at us, and we went through something like two thirds of our ammunition before it finally destabilized and exploded. And then... AND THEN...!" She smiles and shakes her head. "Cook tried to send me out to gather up some of it! Absolutely insisted that it was edible. We all refused, of course. We did paw through the mess for salvage, but there wasn't much, just some rusty metal."

"Good story. Good for you for not working for bad people, it can be very hard to notice that and quit and I congratulate you for doing so. And yeah, it's easier when you're fighting unambiguous monsters. Or you have really, really good nonlethal weapons. Or both."

Griffie pauses. "Actually, you have non-brain souls, if you're up for it I should try punching you while using my handflowers of merciful fists and you should tell me whether it makes you feel a bit exhausted or doesn't feel like anything, and if it does I should get you the blueprints to see if anyone in your world can use those. Anyway, what are Chorister Bees, and what's your world's Hell like?"

"Thanks! It's pretty nostalgic, remembering that far back. Chorister Bees are dog-sized bees that fly around making hypnotic songs that sound kind of like church hymns and some say are beautiful and sublime with their wings. They make a very valuable mind and voice altering honey, but they also eat people and especially brains, so kind of a bad set of neighbors to have. It's not really clear how peopley they are but, well, they act and get treated about the same as bands of pirates." She shrugs.

"Hell is the realm of the Devils. They're not... Aligned? Somewhat lawful and somewhat evil but they vary and we don't do the thing where those are distinct phenomena, really. They care about souls and almost nothing else. They wouldn't torture someone just because, only if it would somehow improve their soul, or cause them to give up their soul. There are Devil therapists and Devil charities. Rare, but. Almost nobody's allowed in Hell, almost nobody has clear information on the place and they work hard to keep it that way. Now, it's real hard to get confirmation on stuff like this, but what I think is... I think they build Laws in Hell. Whatever Laws they want. When you see a devil with an impossible weapon, a trumpet that sounds darkness or a music box that dissolves bones, it's because of whatever they do with souls. There's probably huge fields of infinitely regrowing coal somewhere in Hell, and, uh, honestly Albion and the Reach are both pretty dependent on cheap fuel by now. We don't really have great nonlethal options. As for weapons testing or whatever... Probably but later?"

"Those devils are really different from my world's! In my world, being known for those impossible weapons would be stereotypically Chaotic. It's … nice that they aren't made of evil and have the chance to do good work? The Awakened bee swarms were physically like regular bees, just collectively forming an intelligent being. And weapons testing can wait, no problem."

"Bar's translation can be curious at times in what it maps to what. Well, Milliways', not Bar's. Say, is getting dumped into different realms by an awakening Power's creepy fog a usual sort of thing to happen? There are a few places in the High Wilderness where space itself becomes your enemy like that, but they're pretty rare."

"This particular incident was in fact really unlikely to happen by chance, and definitely orchestrated by Charon. If you're asking if I expect that kind of thing to happen to me again … well, it feels annoyingly plausible."

"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?"

"The goal of this one is to meet some arbitrary criteria printed on a Goal card, often having a specific pair of Keepers in play, it's less conflict-y. Here, there's an intro version."

Griffie gets a box with cards and a rulebook from Bar. The box features an ant, a ladybug, a round red candy, a chocolate chip, and a thin black rectangular prism with numerous silvery 'legs' extending from the sides and text reading 'CPU' on the top.

"So, by default, you draw one card and play one card. The New Rule cards can alter that, or mess with how many cards you can have in your hand. In the bigger game, there are more types of New Rules. Actions let you do special one-time actions, and Keepers and Goals seem fairly self-explanatory. This game only has five Keepers, and each possible goal involves a specific pairing. …the 'computer chip' is a piece of a really fancy machine for doing math, I actually bought one of those myself, really expensive but very, very useful."

Griffie shuffles the deck and deals 3 cards to emself and Lenora.