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orb of immortality
A VN contact team stranded in Loop Hero
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Somewhere, there is a village.

It's small and dim and ramshackle, built on hard grey ground without much to recommend it. A cluster of crude huts surrounds a small campfire, which is somehow warmer and brighter than all the lights in all the rest of the village combined. Beyond the huts, a patch of grain fields is faintly visible in one direction, and a long row of trees in another, and here or there a watchtower looms above the thatched roofs; above all that, there is only darkness, without sun or moon or star to light it.

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Nelen Utopia and his team were not supposed to land here.

Not that it doesn't look like it could kind of use it, but they were aiming for somewhere else.

"- everybody okay?" he says.

"Check," says Cassiel, and "Yes," says Natsuko, and "Fine," says Zanro, and "I seem fine" says Tarwë.

"Tarwë, write it up. Nobody light anything up, I want to let our eyes adjust and avoid startling people. Stick together," Nelen says.

He gets affirmative murmurs. Tarwë writes and unlocks a status report without looking at his computer.

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A grubby little face, of indeterminate age and gender, peeps around a half-open door at them.

"You've all got names?" the kid says suspiciously. "Where'd you dig those up?"

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"- I'm not sure I understand the question," says Nelen.

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The kid frowns at Nelen in mutual confusion for a few seconds.

"...like, you're new here," they attempt to explain, "but you have names, and you act like you know each other, and stuff. And you look—I dunno. You look different."

It's true that the team are, collectively, much less dim than their surroundings. It's sort of subtle and hard to spot, because the light here is very low; but the five of them do seem to catch the glow of the campfire a little more firmly than even the stones that encircle it, or the dead tree a few feet away.

The kid, leaning out a little farther around their door, asks with increasing suspicion, "Are you... real?"

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"Are... a lot of people you meet not real?"

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The kid's frown deepens severely, and they pull back behind their door and shut it with a muffled thud.

Distantly, their voice can be heard yelling: "GET THE HERO, GET THE HERO! THERE'S REAL PEOPLE BY THE CAMPFIRE, WITH NAMES!"

At this, a general bustle begins to stir. For a minute or so, though, nobody shows up to confront the team directly.

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They stick close together, forming a sort of circle facing nervously outward.

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Before they can even hear her footsteps, the Hero's arrival is visible in the way the scenery brightens up ahead of her. She doesn't glow, but the light is brighter when it's near her. Sounds are clearer, and there are hints of scent in the world that it didn't have before. The edges of objects are sharper, crisper, less vague and dim and blurry, in a way that doesn't entirely have to do with the amount of light shining on them.

She rounds the corner and strides into view, wearing a red-orange cloak and a mask that looks like it belongs at a masquerade, blonde hair escaping the hood of the cloak in untidy strands. And she, more than anything else in this place, even more than the newcomers themselves, is real. The whole world seems somehow to orient itself around her. Realness radiates from her, and the huts and the campfire and the stones and the dead tree all bask in it.

"First things first, safety rules," she says. "Don't leave the village. Don't even walk where you can see the edge, if you can help it. Stay where you can see and hear the fire, until somebody has the time to show you around. Latrine's that way," she gestures, "if you're real enough to need it." She squints dubiously up at the team; she's a little on the short side, for a human of her age and gender. "I'm not sure the rest is going to apply, but just in case: don't put anything down for now if you ever want to pick it back up again. If there's stuff in your pockets you're keen to keep, double-check that you've got it every time you remember. Every time, not 'oh, I just looked a second ago, it's fine'. If you're not touching it and it's not in your sight, it might not be there next time you look. With me so far?"

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"I think so," says Nelen, as they all take various items out of their pockets and redistribute them more visibly. "Thank you."

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"Good. That'll do for now even if I'm called away. Now I would like you to explain how you came to be here with your names and your stuff and your memories and all."

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"We're not sure. We were trying to visit a different place, and either it reacted to our approach, or this place intercepted us somehow, or some third event occurred which diverted us. If people normally arrive here missing their names and stuff and memories I don't know what excepted us."

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"...so you came here from... somewhere else? Somewhere far enough away that this," she gestures vaguely at the sky, "hasn't happened to it yet?"

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"- yes. This, uh, happens to a lot of places?"

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"All of them that I know of, but maybe you know more than I do. I didn't have my memories when I showed up here. I just remembered... bits and pieces of reality being swallowed by the dark, and me not wanting them to. And sort of a vague smudge of a life, before that."

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"How big is the area known to be affected by the unreality?"

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"...well, it's sort of hard to tell, what with nobody remembering much. We know there's a lot that's been lost, but we don't know how much there was of it before that happened. How big is a world supposed to be? Because this one's down to," she makes an encompassing gesture, "pretty much what you see."

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"- ah.

They're supposed to be pretty big."

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"Well. Welcome to the camp," she says wryly. "...how did you come here, and in the place where you were before, was there a dark spot in the sky that shouldn't be there? I... couldn't fairly ask you to try going back, in case you land in that," she gestures upward, "and are never heard from again. But if you can somehow move through it without getting even a little bit dinged, then it's possible you could bring people here before it ever touches them..." She chews her lip thoughtfully. "Feeding and housing them all would start to be a problem fairly shortly. I'm the only one who can expand the camp, or add to our supplies. I don't know, it's just a thought."

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"There are many hundreds of worlds," says Nelen. "Most of them have many planets in them - a planet is a sphere of earth and rock and metal in various proportions, so big that you can't tell it's round when you stand on it - and most people live on planets. We're from an organization that governs a lot of peoples in a lot of worlds. We were about to contact a new one. This isn't it. We were teleporting, and if we were even near where we were supposed to be, we'd have been extracted by now."

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"...hm," she says. "So—if there are still planets, that's the word, somewhere in this world, that haven't been swallowed yet, you've never been there and wouldn't know where to find them? Is that about the size of it?"

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"Yes. It's - not impossible we could figure something out? - mostly Natsuko could figure something out."

"Augh," says Natsuko solemnly.

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The Hero blinks inquisitively at Natsuko.

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"Nelen and Cassiel and Tarwë and I all have different magic," says Natsuko, "and my kind is the kind that is most likely to be possible, with just the five of us, to turn into a way to get to any uneaten planets that might be in this world. Or adjacent ones. I don't think it's actually a good idea to do that unless Vanda Nossëo hasn't grabbed us in a few days, because my mana most likely won't recharge here - if it does that would be a lot of information about where we are all by itself, though not very useful information - and I'd have to get all of it from other people, who also won't recharge here. Not good development conditions even if I were a research wizard, which I'm not!"

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"...what's 'mana', more specifically? What magic do you all have?"

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"Mana's the energy I use to cast spells," says Natsuko. "It only regenerates when you're adjacent to a particular set of worlds and this most likely isn't one of them, and even if it is, that isn't helpful, because those worlds aren't safe to travel through. I'm a wizard - I can make buildings and heal and fly and stuff - but I shouldn't do any of it if I can avoid it, since the mana I've got is probably all there is while we're here."

"I can sing magic songs," says Tarwë. "Though they work recorded as well, and there are recordings on everyone's computers."

"I can change stuff into other stuff," Cassiel says.

"I can teleport, heal, turn people into birds, and make illusions," says Nelen.

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"When you said you could get mana from other people, does that mean just people who are from the right world like you, or could you get it from people here, too?"

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"People from worlds where mana doesn't recharge usually still have some," says Natsuko. "It just doesn't come back if it's used or taken. But it doesn't look like there are a lot of people here."

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"There's not a lot of people here but one of them is me," she says. "Does it hurt, or do anything bad to people, to take their mana? Because if not, you should try taking mine, and then I should go for a walk, and we should see if I have it again when I get back."

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"It doesn't hurt or do anything bad to people under ordinary circumstances but this world is very very strange," says Natsuko, "so I don't especially want to try that in the first fifteen minutes of our being here especially without a good model of why you think you might recharge."

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"Eh, fair enough. You should have some time to settle in. Just—if you can find a planet that hasn't been eaten yet—planets are big, you know?"

She shakes her head.

"Anyway, the reason I think I might recharge is partly because I come back to life when I die out there, but mostly because I'm pretty sure every time I take a walk I reconstruct a little piece of the world from scratch. If anything in this world can bring back a part of someone that's not supposed to be renewable, I'm it."

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"Well. I'll try it if we run out of better options, but this early on, I think better options include 'wait'," says Natsuko.

"What do you mean about reconstructing a little piece of the world from scratch?" asks Nelen. "Is this a problem that can be fixed by adding more stuff to the world, Cassiel can do that and she doesn't run down a resource like Natsuko."

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"Stuff doesn't—actually, back up just a little. Am I successfully getting across that I don't know whether, right now, there's a whole planet out there, full of however many people are supposed to be on a planet, which I'm betting is more than a couple dozen, that won't be there in fifteen minutes?"

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"- that had not come across, no," says Nelen.

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"Okay. Well. I don't know that. There might be one. There might not. There might be no planets left anywhere, or there might be a million of them all safe for years to come, I don't have the first clue and I don't have any way to find out except if you guys come up with something. But that's why I want to try things instead of waiting. In case waiting loses planets. I don't even actually know if there's any way to safely make this camp big enough to support a planet's worth of people, but, you know, I would rather have the problem 'we found a planet and it's in danger and now we have to figure out what to do with it' than have the problem 'we don't even know if there's a planet to find', even though the first one's harder. Because if the planet's there and in danger, it's there and in danger whether I know about it or not. And even if all we can save from it is another couple dozen people, that's a couple dozen more survivors than it would've had without me."

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"- our people have resurrection," Nelen volunteers after a beat. "I don't actually know if the state of the art will work on people from here, because here is weird, but a universal version is in the works."

"Maybe I should take a tiny tiny bit of your mana, just enough that I'll be able to tell if it grows back," says Natsuko, "and not enough that it appreciably reduces how much there is to work with - I'm holding as much as I can, right now - maybe I could offload more onto Tarwë first, he might not be holding his max -"

"Go ahead," says Tarwë.

She attempts this. "- okay. I made a little room in my capacity and I can take a little off you now. Do you have a name, or -?"

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"I'm just the Hero. I haven't tried to figure out what my name used to be or pick a new one. Go ahead and grab a little mana from me, and we'll see if it comes back after I go for a walk."

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Natsuko tries tapping the Hero for a leeetle bit of mana.

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A leetle bit of mana is certainly available at this address, and plenty more besides. If tapping someone for mana is the sort of action that tells you how much mana they have going, Natsuko may observe that the Hero has, like, a lot - definitely more than one person's worth, plausibly more than five.

"All good?" she says.

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"- yeah. You have a lot of mana for someone who isn't actually a wizard."

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"Somehow I'm not surprised. —there's been some hints that I am actually three different people merged into one, on top of all the other weird bullshit. Anyway. I should go for a walk. Do you guys need anything special while you wait? Somebody'll probably come by to feed you in a bit."

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"We should be okay - is it all right for Cassiel to turn some of the air into stuff -" says Nelen.

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"...some of the air? I'd be a little concerned. Uh, one sec, let me grab you something we've got plenty of."

She ducks into one of the nearby thatched huts, and comes out with what looks to be a small bundle of firewood.

"Will this work?"

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"Yes, that works fine," Cassiel says. "Also I can turn the air into more air, if you're low on air, it's just most places aren't." She starts turning a piece of firewood into cloudfluff and then expanding it into a larger amount of cloudfluff.

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"I'd be cautious about that if I were you, in case something about you turning things into other things breaks whatever makes them stay real," she says. "I don't have any reason to think we're running out of air, I just also don't know how I'd notice if we were, you know? Anyway. If you're fine for now, I'll head out. I should be back in a quarter hour or so."

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"Thank you," says Nelen. Cassiel slows down a bit on turning the cloudfluff into more cloudfluff but still slowly goes about making a bench for all of them to sit down on together.

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The Hero waves and walks away; the world dims in her wake.

Cassiel's bench is maybe a little dimmer and more faded than its surroundings, but it's solid to the touch and does not collapse if sat on.

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"I'm writing as fast as I can," murmurs Tarwë.

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About five minutes later, the kid from earlier returns, carrying a loaf of bread in one hand and a hunk of cheese in the other.

"Hey, real people. You hungry?" they ask, holding up the food.

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"Do your people need the food? We'll be all right without, and Cassiel can make food," says Nelen.

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"We've got enough. She'll probably bring back more than this from her walk. Suit yourself, though," shrugs the kid.

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They didn't land hungry. They will sit and wait, occasionally exchanging murmured remarks of concern. Cassiel makes and passes around almond brittle.

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The kid munches on bread and cheese and peers curiously at the almond brittle.

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"Do you want some?" Cassiel asks.

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"What is it?"

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"It's candy. Almonds and sugar."

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"...sure," the kid decides, not without some hesitation.

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She hands him a piece.

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They have to juggle their bread and cheese a bit in order to receive candy, but as soon as the candy is in their hand it is eagerly snarfed.

"Wow!!! That's really good! I'm telling everybody!"

And they're off at top speed toward some more distant part of the village.

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...Cassiel will make a big pile of almond brittle to hand out in anticipation of more people.

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More people do in fact show up, in a hesitant trickle of ones and twos with minutes in between.

One in particular, a scarred man wearing an apron, tastes the candy thoughtfully and asks, "How is this made?"

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"I made it with magic - I can make other things too, if you want more variety -" She pulls a handful of cloudfluff off the bench and grows it back to replace what she took and turns the handful into an apple. "But it can be cooked, too, though I don't have a recipe."

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"Oh!" he exclaims, surprised. "Now there's a trick. Can you tell me the ingredients, at least?"

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"Sugar and almonds!"

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"Hmm!"

He nods thoughtfully and wanders off still nibbling his almond brittle.

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"The Hero returns!" calls a familiar voice, laden with cheerful irony. Even the sound of her voice seems to brighten the place up a little. She strolls into view around the corner of the hut where she got the wood earlier, and leans in to toss a handful of pebbles into a bucket on her way past it.

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"What are the pebbles for?" asks Nelen.

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She shrugs. "I picked them up on my walk. I always bring back whatever I pick up; it's the only way to get more stuff. I assume there'll be a use for everything eventually."

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"Is there anything to - walk on, out there?" wonders Natsuko.

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"There is for me. Anybody else tries to step off the dirt and they just disappear. When I head out, though, there's a path." She kicks the dry grey ground. "A little like this, but more faded."

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"And... pebbles. Is there anything else?"

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"Mhm. How's my mana, though?"

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Natsuko gets up and goes over to her to check.

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She's full up.

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"- yes, it's back. I'm still not a research wizard but I guess neither was Boots way back when, so I can try stuff, and can use the spells I already have. Can I try to make a house for us?"

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"Hmm... so, yes, but when somebody's new here we usually want them to sit by the fire for at least their first day or so, and," she gestures around at the huts, "there's not much room for another house here. I can go make some room at the edge but then your house will be at the edge, which isn't exactly comfortable or safe. I guess I could go make a lot of room at the edge, maybe put something else up just to shield you from it..."

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"What does the fire do?" Nelen asks.

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"Keeps things real. Usually all you lose if you leave it too early is bits of your clothes or the ends of your hair or all the stuff in your pockets or whatever, but back before we learned to be cautious, a couple of people got pretty badly sick because they went exploring the edge out of sight of the campfire right after they showed up and they faded a lot. One of 'em died. You're technically safer with me than the campfire but I can't stay to watch your house all the time, I have to be out on the path gathering supplies as much as I can."

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"How do you... work differently from everyone else?" asks Nelen.

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Big shrug. "That's a very good question and I'd love to have an answer but I don't really."

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"How did you find out you work differently from everyone else?" Zanro asks.

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"...well, I showed up on the path, and when I looped back around to the start of the path, the camp was here. Nobody else wanted to try stepping into the dark on account of how that's terrifying, so I just went back out. When I bring stuff back it stays real, in a way that stuff that comes along with people when they show up often doesn't. When people have stepped into the dark, nobody's heard from them again."

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"Where's the food come from?" asks Cassiel.

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"Well, we've got wheat fields and vegetable gardens now, so there's that, but most of what we eat is stuff I pick up on my rounds. I can carry a lot of stuff these days. The path... it's hard to explain, but the more I walk it, the more it - grows? Anyway, I can pick up a lot of different things there."

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"Okay. We don't want to inconvenience you insofar as what you're already doing, we're just from a very different place and confused," says Nelen. "Please don't let us keep you from going for walks. We'll sit here and keep writing to our people back home and Natsuko can start sketching out some ideas." Natsuko is indeed already doing this; she has produced her computer and is assembling all her old school notes.

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"Okay. I'll get a spot cleared for you to set up your house in a little while, and I or somebody else will let you know when it's probably safe to go there. Sound good?"

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"Yes. Thank you."

"Is it all right if I sing?" puts in Tarwë.

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"...sure, don't see why not."

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Tarwë sings. A bit loudly. It's ugly here.

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The Hero looks mildly impressed, but doesn't comment.

"Is there anything else you want to use your mana for, so you can grab some more before I head out again?"

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"Uh, nothing right now," says Natsuko, "if there's no room for a building and no one is injured or anything - even if they were Nelen's heal is better than mine."

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"All right, I'll see you later then." And she's off.

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Cassiel keeps making snacks for unreal locals, and Nelen puts up some colorful illusion lights to cheer Tarwë up a bit.

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Locals drop by for snacks; the kid, once they figure out that Cassiel can make multiple types of candy, keeps asking for new varieties and then circulating reviews on the rumour mill which then lure in more consumers. That guy who wanted a recipe for almond brittle is their second most frequent visitor, after the kid. Occasionally someone will throw another few sticks on the campfire, but it's unclear whether it needs it; even with a very inconsistent feeding schedule, its flame remains steady and bright.

The Hero is in and out a few more times over the course of the next while, stopping in to deposit wheelbarrowsful of assorted items in the nearby storage building and asking the team if they need anything before she heads out again, on trips that seem to last several hours at a time when she's not cutting them short for testing purposes. With no lights in the sky, it's hard to discern the length of a local day, but there does come a time when the lights in the huts start winking out one by one and a villager comes by to ask the team if they'd like to be brought bedrolls so they can sleep by the fire.

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"I can make us mattresses," says Cassiel, "thank you." She turns her cloudfluff into a less glowy similar substance, and Nelen and Natsuko and Zanro go to sleep; Cassiel and Tarwë sit up, her drinking coffee and reading, him continuing to write down everything they've observed for their report.

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Cassiel and Tarwë may note that the Hero does not appear to need sleep, what with how she keeps showing up on the same approximate schedule this whole time.

 

After the village has woken up and people have been coming round for candy again for a few hours, the Hero gets back from her latest excursion and she's... different. Her face is the same shape, at least all the parts of it that were visible under the previous outfit's mask, but she's paler and her hair is straight and white instead of dark blonde and messy, and her outfit is totally different.

"I've got a place for you set up near the edge," she says. "Managed to get it blocked off from the real edge by a farmhouse and some wheat fields. It should be big enough though I guess I don't know how big the houses you make are. I think it's probably safe to go there. How are you all doing?"

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"We're okay," says Nelen. "You look different, is that normal?"

"I used a bit of mana cleaning us all up since we don't have showers here," says Natsuko.

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"Yeah, you remember how I said there's been some hints that I'm three people merged into one? This is part of what made me think that," she says. "I have three different... faces? They're the same face, but also," she gestures at her hair. "And I can switch between them and get, not exactly different skills, but different, like - aspects? I'm lighter on my feet when I use the mask, I can do different magic when I'm like this, I don't go back to my first face much anymore because I don't like it but it had its own stuff going on. Anyway! Want me to show you to your house spot so you can see if you can fit a house there?"

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"Yes please." They will all get up and follow her; Cassiel drags the cloudfluff she's made.

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It's just a short walk away; the village is really not very big. The cleared space of bare grey dirt is big enough to fit a small house comfortably, or squeeze in a medium-sized one with some difficulty.

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Natsuko will make a house. She doesn't bother trying to make it matchy, since the existing architecture is so bedraggled; instead she makes a cute cob bungalow that doesn't stick out but also won't make Tarwë sad.

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"Nice house!" says the Hero. "Anything else before I head out again?"

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"I think that's all!" says Nelen. Cassiel drags her fluff in and starts furnishing the place.

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"See you later, then. I'll check on you between walks in case you need anything. Stuff in your pockets should mostly be fine by now but it's still best practices to keep your attention on things you care a lot about keeping, and my best guess is that any new stuff you make probably needs to be kept close and watched over like it's a new arrival for a little while before it'll be stable enough to survive being ignored."

She leaves; the world fades in her wake, to a dimmer state than the surroundings of the campfire. The house is mostly fine, but if they don't keep a close watch on any glass windows it may have, they'll find the glass to have vanished out of the frames in short order.

Soon after the Hero's departure, the kid comes by to ask for more candy. They ooh and ahh at the prettiness of the new house, and bounce excitedly about how cool it is that you can do that.

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Cassiel will fill up the shelves - Natsuko's basic floor plan includes places for them to bunk if that's called for but is still mostly a shop - with candy and other things that they might like that she can make, in lieu of a shipboard inventory.

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After there's been a little time for the rumour of Things On Shelves to spread, the cook comes by to see if any of the Things on these Shelves are ingredients he could cook with.

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They are! She's got meat and spices and sugar and flour up there.

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"How much of this can I carry away before someone begins to yell 'Stop! Thief!'?"

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"- you can have as much of it as you want, I don't mind," says Cassiel. "We just don't have much to do while we're stranded, so I'm making stuff for people."

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"Much appreciated," he says, and grabs some things off shelves—sugar and spices and especially meat. "Will you want to taste the results?"

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"If you like! I don't actually need to eat," says Cassiel.

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"Lucky!" he laughs. "Well, you can follow the delicious smells, or if you don't trust yourselves walking around town yet, someone might come by with a few extra portions to give you in thanks for all the candy."

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"Thanks!"

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Another villager comes by. This is one they haven't seen before, a woman with her hair in long braids and an old scar crossing one eye.

"So," she says. "What is your story, all of you? I heard something about other worlds, but I'm not sure I believed it."

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"We're an envoy team from an organization called Vanda Nossëo," says Nelen. "We were trying to go somewhere else, but had a teleportation accident."

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"Envoys? What kind of envoys? Envoys to where?"

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"Diplomatic envoys to newly contacted places! Of which this certainly is one, just not the one we were aiming at with the rest of our colleagues."

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"And what do you do in your newly contacted places?"

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"We tell them about their multiversal neighborhood, and open up trade and transit, and invite them to join Vanda Nossëo."

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"How's that work out for them, generally speaking?"

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"- well? It has some unavoidable cultural disruption effects, there's really no way to do it without - we could go slower but that kills people, going slower with access to healing and food and so on, so we go fast, and it destabilizes things and we try to be as gentle about it as we can without actually compromising on letting people self-determine. Sometimes there are idiosyncratic issues with religions or similar but delaying still kills people."

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She takes a moment to try to wrap her head around this.

"...you're so - so much - that just not talking to you fast enough leaves people dead that wouldn't be otherwise?"

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"- yes. I can heal anything short of death with a touch. If I show up an hour later, anyone who was going to die in that hour, or the hour before people trusted me enough that I got access to patients, or whatever the critical hour is, dies instead of being saved. Healing is a lot cheaper than resurrection and not every kind of person can be resurrected yet."

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"...huh. Did you tell the Hero that?"

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"- that I can heal? Yes."

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She shakes her head. "No, no—it's all the rest of it. The—mindset. I think she'd find it familiar."

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"She's mostly seemed to be too busy to chat about mindsets, so I don't know how much of it came across in what words we did exchange."

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"Well, you're right that she's busy. I'm not sure she's slept in the time I've known her. People'd die, y'see, and she hates that. Seems like a place where you have some common ground."

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"We have a lot of common ground with anyone who hates that people die."

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"Yeah, I'm getting that sense." She nods thoughtfully. "What'd you mean about 'issues with religions'?"

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"Do you know what a religion is?" Nelen asks.

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"...let's say that I don't."

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"So, basically everyone has a culture, but sometimes an aspect of a culture includes kind of - extra stuff? Usually in humans it's about beliefs about supernatural entities of some kind, gods or spirits or something, my species is different there but you seem like humans - and about what those entities want them to do. And sometimes they have decided that these entities, who may or may not really exist in the first place, don't want people to use magic, or don't want to eat food that wasn't grown and processed according to specific rules, or don't want anyone who isn't following all their instructions to exist at all, and we run into issues like that now and then."

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"Huh. All sounds a bit abstract," she says, with a thoughtful frown.

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"I think so too, my species doesn't have this tendency very much - though it does have some things that are more like that than like anything else, sociologically speaking."

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"What I remember about gods isn't much but it... didn't feel abstract like that. I think. Not sure."

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"Well, maybe yours existed, sometimes they do."

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She shrugs. "Hard to say. Anyway. Take care."

And she's off. The people of the village leave them alone for a bit.

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Cassiel is tempted to try throwing surplus fluff into the nothingness but doesn't do it without heroic permission.

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The kid from earlier drops by with the cook's promised delivery of a few portions of meat stew. It's hearty but plain, if anyone tries it. The kid scampers off in short order either way.

 

And then the Hero comes back again, wearing her white-haired face. She looks... frazzled. Discomfited. Out of sorts.

"Hey. How are you all holding up?"

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"- fine?" says Nelen, swallowing a mouthful of stew. "Are you all right?"

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"It's pretty weird out there. I'll be fine," she says. "Just—I dunno."

She glances around the house in search of somewhere to sit, then shakes her head irritably at herself and stays standing. "...out on the path sometimes I find... people, or something like people," she says. "And I always try to make peace and they always try to kill me. It gets to be a bit much sometimes. Anyway, where are we at on maybe someday figuring out how to see if there's any planets still standing?"

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"Nobody's come to get us yet, or managed to send any messages," says Nelen. "Do... the people say anything?"

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"Sometimes, yeah. One time a harpy told me she wanted to feed me to her young. I'm not sure her young were even real. She said saving the world is stupid and I'd be more use if she ate me."

And yet somehow the Hero seems more comfortable relating this macabre anecdote than she was when she walked in.

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"...wow."

"I was wondering," says Cassiel, "if it's a bad idea to throw stuff out over - there -" She points. "This isn't like anything we've ever seen before but there's a planet with magic that disappears stuff, and it slows down on that if you feed it."

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"...can't think why it'd be a bad idea, if it's stuff you won't miss," she says. "I'm sort of curious if anything interesting'll happen if you try it."

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Cassiel turns a bit of cloudfluff into something conveniently throwable and hucks it into the dark.

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The dark swallows it without a ripple. The Hero blinks after it.

"So much for 'anything interesting'. Anyway, so you're holding out hope for your people to come fix you up, and they haven't yet, is that about the size of it?"

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"Pretty much," says Nelen. "Natsuko and I are the only ones who can teleport and she has the mana limitation. All of us except Zanro can be resurrected even if totally annihilated, though. - I guess we can't be sure about Cassiel."

"I have an immaterial soul," Zanro explains.

"I'm indestructible so there's no prior art," Cassiel adds.

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"Well, I'd like it if you tried to figure something out for finding more planets, but I can't force you if you don't feel like it. Even a long shot could be worth a lot, though, if no one's coming. And in my experience, waiting for rescue is a pretty doomed endeavour."

She looks around the house again. "People keep telling me there's delicious candy. Still got any?"

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Zanro grabs her a bagful.

"I'm thinking about the problem but it turns out it's really bad for my concentration if any time I remember I'm supposed to have an object I have to stop and touch it," says Natsuko. "Even if Boots were here - she's one of the most accomplished research wizards in the multiverse - they say it takes her about a week to invent a new spell and that's if she has something good to build off of in prior art."

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"Fair enough," she says, digging into the bag for some candy to munch. "I'd offer to keep your stuff in my pockets but that only works as long as I don't die, and that's much less of a guarantee than I'd like."

As she turns away, her clothes shift and a mask melts into place over her face. It's slightly unsettling to watch, but it's over in a moment, and she's back to being blonde with a mask and a hood. "I'll try pushing farther on the path. Maybe I'll find something out there that can help."

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"Is there anything it would help to bring along with you?" Nelen asks.

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She pauses. "—huh, maybe. Like what?"

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"I can't make anything too terribly complicated," says Cassiel, "but if - the next harpy might be happy with some meat to bring to her nestlings, or something, I could make some for that."

"They all have computers that only work for them but mine's different, if you wanted to borrow it and have it play a magic song as you walked or something," Nelen says. "Cassiel can't replace it if it gets lost but there's nothing that needs me-specifically to have a computer here besides my having something to read."

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"I'll try a sack of meat for the harpies if you can make that happen quick," she says. "Might try a magic song later. You can tell me all about 'em when I come back from this walk, how about."

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Cassiel makes a sack of meat out of her cloudfluff and hands it over.

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"Thanks," she says, slinging it over her shoulder. It's pretty hefty but the weight doesn't seem to bother her. "See you in a while."

And off she goes, looking much more chipper than she did when she arrived.

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Tarwë sings. Natsuko attempts to be a research wizard. Zanro and Nelen play cards. Cassiel makes stuff.

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A handful of villagers come by to express their appreciation for the existence of meat. Otherwise it's mostly quiet until the Hero shows up again.

"Giving a big sack of meat to the harpies did not work," she announces. "Also I met an awful man with dogs made of stars. Tell me about magic songs."

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"Dogs made of stars?" murmurs Natsuko, and then she taps all her belongings and goes back to frowning at scroll notation on her computer.

"There are songs for healing, crop growth, weather control, slowing all or some things down in an area, constructing buildings, traveling faster on water or in air, creating illusions..." says Tarwë.

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"Mostly doesn't sound that useful. Healing maybe. I don't have a boat, or... actually how do you 'travel faster in air'..."

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"If you can fly," says Nelen. "If it would help anything I could turn you into a bird but it's easier to learn to fly with telepathic help and we don't have any to hand."

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"...turning into a bird can be an experiment for another time. For now... I don't wanna take your fancy artifact out there yet, I just died and I'm likely to do it again the next time a piece of the night sky bites my face off, but maybe when I'm being less ambitious."

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"If you can sing well, you can learn the songs without needing them recorded," says Tarwë.

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"Huh. ...can I hear the healing one? I don't know that I've ever sung but maybe it's time to learn."

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"The recordings are mostly too fast to make out and have accompaniment," Tarwë says, "I'll sing it for you -" He does.

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The Hero very quietly hums along once she thinks she's got the idea. Her voice isn't bad but it's clear she's unpracticed.

"I'd need to hear it a few more times to have much hope of singing it myself but I'll try it on my next walk anyway, why not. Thanks."

Off she trots, humming under her breath. Persons with excellent hearing might note a very strange sudden-fadeout effect as she steps out of the village into the void.

 

Half an hour (and one brief visit from a candy-seeking child) later, she's back.

"Got my face bitten off by the star dogs again," she reports. "Nasty business. Can I hear that song another couple times? I couldn't tell if I was getting it right enough to matter but I'm pretty sure I wasn't."

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Tarwë will sing it as many times as she likes, with the caution that most humans can't sing well enough to make it work without a lot of practice.

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She listens to it a few times through, paying close attention.

"Still doesn't hurt to try," she says.

She's singing as she walks away, this time, and she's not there yet but she's not half bad.

 

Most of the village settles down to sleep. The Hero stays out there for nearly a full hour this time. When she gets back she's pretty grumpy.

"Maybe I should try another face or something. Can I hear the song again?"

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She can hear the song again.

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She paces back and forth as she listens, impatient and restless; then she settles down and actually sits down, for the first time since they met her, to listen through it a few more times.

On the fourth repetition she gets up again and sings along, and while her voice is definitely still an untrained human's, for an untrained human it's remarkably close. Singing seems to brighten up her surroundings even more than her voice and presence do by themselves, too.

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"- that's much better," says Tarwë.

"The healing song isn't ideal for combat use, it's slow even when sung sped up on a recording," says Nelen. "If that's what you have in mind."

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"I'm thinking between combats; it's never fun when I get beat up and then start the next fight already half dead. In-combat would be nice too but it figures I'm not that lucky."

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"- in principle," says Nelen, "you could take my necklace, and learn the spells I have. The healing is much faster. But it takes days to learn one by reading it."

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"Days," she says, unsettled. "I'd hate to stay still that long. I always worry that if I go to sleep I'll wake up to find somebody's died. But for healing that works fast enough to keep me on my feet..." She shakes her head worriedly. "What's the trouble with giving me the necklace? What's it do exactly?"

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"It does eidetic memory. You wouldn't have to learn it all at once but if you lost the necklace we can't replace it."

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"I definitely shouldn't take your irreplaceable important magic stuff out there. Sorry, what does it do to your memory exactly?"

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"It makes it so you can't forget things?"

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"I guess something that takes days to read is probably pretty easy to misremember," she muses.

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"It also doesn't make the least bit of sense by itself, so it's not just long, it's meaningless."

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"Wow. No wonder you need magic to remember it. The songs seem more convenient that way," she says. "I guess I could read a little of your healing spell at a time while I'm here, just in case? If I put the necklace on and take it off again, does weird stuff happen to my memory, will I forget the spell-bits and then not remember them even if I put it on again later?"

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"The one I have isn't retroactive, so yeah," says Nelen, "which also means I'd need to re-learn the spells if you gave it back."

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"Oof. I'd better not, then."

She nods to them all and then leaves. The first few notes of the healing song are audible before she exits this reality.

 

Usually, when the Hero leaves an area, her effects on the world take a fairly short time to fade out, something on the order of a few minutes. This time it's much more gradual; the dimness and blurriness of the little house take almost half an hour to return to baseline.

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Huh. Zanro takes a timelapse video.

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And she's back!

"Forgot to try putting a new face on. Got eaten by star dogs again," she says. "Hard to tell if the healing song is helping, I might just not be good enough at it yet. I can keep working on it."

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"The thing where it gets less bright and solid around here when you leave was slower this time," Zanro tells her.

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"...was it really? Don't think that's ever happened before," she says, blinking. "What was different this time... it wasn't you throwing stuff into the void, right, that was earlier..."

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"Can't rule out the singing," says Zanro. "I took a video in case that's useful."

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"Took a what?"

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He shows her.

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"...huh. That's... really good, actually. I wonder if I should just walk all the way around the village singing the song for a while. Most things aren't worth doing when I could be on the path instead, but that might be. Maybe just the places where people aren't sleeping right now, though..." She chews her lip distractedly, then shakes her head. "Right, can I hear the song again?"

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Tarwë will sing it as many times as she likes.

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She sings along again, for a couple repetitions this time, and she seems to have hit diminishing returns by now but she is still improving. It's not out of the question that what she's got now might work, though it's by no means a surety. The noticeable brightening of her surroundings when she sings might be a little stronger this time, too, though she has her eyes closed in concentration and probably hasn't noticed it.

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Zanro continues recording.

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"...huh," she says when the song is over, "is it brighter in here or is that just me?"

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"It's not just you," says Cassiel.

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"So probably the singing, then. Good to know. I think that makes it worth wandering around singing before I head out again, if I keep to places where I won't wake anyone up."

She starts into the song again and walks out of the house, trailing brightness in her wake.

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The envoy team waits.

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The sound of singing recedes into the distance as she circles the edges of the village. It'd take a pretty sharp pair of ears indeed to hear her all the way on the other side.

 

In a few minutes she comes back around. She looks thoroughly disgruntled under her mask.

"Think I've got a new face coming in," she says. "Feels like having something stuck in my teeth, but without the teeth. Like needing to sneeze and not having a nose."

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"Oh, no, how long will it take?" asks Cassiel.

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"Dunno. I'm gonna go for a walk and hope that shakes it loose; that's what did it in the end for both the others, but this one took only a couple of trips, the white-haired one took days. I'm hoping it won't be days."

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"Good luck," says Zanro.

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"Thanks."

She walks out.

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And ten minutes later, she's back. The new face has paler hair in a fancier style, and a nicer dress, and what appears to be a harp slung on her back.

"Good news! I'm great at singing now!" she says. "Bad news: singing does very little to stop things from killing me. Honestly I'm surprised I got as far as I did."

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"You can learn more songs," says Tarwë. "Some of them are useful in fights, if you're good enough at it. Can you play that harp? Accompaniment helps."

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"I have a harp?"

She pokes at the case on her back, twists around, pulls it forward, and extracts the instrument from within.

"Huh. I have a harp. I think I can play it but I'm not totally sure what to play, to go with the healing song, I've never composed music before in... my life..." She trails off with a doubtful frown, chewing thoughtfully on her lip. The gesture comes across more gracefully with this face on. "...I think this me has composed music before, actually. Let's find out."

She gets the harp into position, strapped in place and balancing against her chest, and starts to play. That's the healing song all right, and it's being accompanied in - a different style than an Elf might use, but by no means a worse one. Her singing is miles better. She could give concerts in Valinor, with the voice she has now.

The whole house lights up with firm solidity, more than it ever has before. The Hero has her eyes closed and doesn't notice.

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Tarwë is so happy. Nelen sways a bit to the music, smiling.

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She's smiling too, tentatively, when she finishes the song.

"I... don't think this face is for combat," she says. "I can't really use the harp and a sword at the same time. I think it's—"

She touches a wall, presses her fingers into it. It doesn't have that slight give to it, that uneasy not-quite-thereness, that everything else she's ever touched has had.

"—I think it's more useful in here than out there? You should teach me more songs, though, lots of them. And then I should walk around and heal the whole village as soon as everyone's up."

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Tarwë nods. "Do you know how to read sheet music in - this format or this one -" He pulls up an Elf standard and an Earth standard sheet.

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She squints at them both, then shakes her head. "I guess whoever this face used to be didn't write music the same way, sorry. Or it didn't come through right, or something."

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"All right. I can just sing, then." And he runs through more repertoire. Song to walk on water, song to run through trees, song to light up darkness, song to grow plants, song to build walls and fortresses out of stone -

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She's picking them up on a single repetition each now. Most of them she doesn't practice on the spot, but she repeats back the song to light up darkness to make sure she has it right (she does), and when he's been through a bunch of them she suddenly goes "wait, I can use a song to walk on water!" and sings that one from memory (beautifully).

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"Oh, where is there water?" asks Zanro.

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"Sometimes when I'm on the path I see a river, or parts of a river. If I can walk on water then I can step onto it when it's close enough."

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"Rivers are a bit trickier than still water, so ideally you'd have the grace song still helping when you stepped onto it."

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"Maybe I can find enough water to practice on before I try the river, then. In the meantime, what else can I learn?"

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He sings more songs - this one identifies anyone telling a lie, this one slows down everything but you, this one gives you more oomph, this one does accelerated perception -

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She soaks them up like a sponge, but eventually, reluctantly, she says, "I have to get out there and walk again, I need to keep our supplies topped up. Though..."

She looks out at the remarkably unfaded house.

"...maybe it'll be better now that I can sing things real? I'm always worried that if I don't keep us going we'll run out, but... Maybe it's time to rethink that." She shakes her head. "In the morning, though. And if we find another planet I'll be grateful for every rock I drop in a bucket between now and then, to build houses to put people in before they disappear, and land to put the houses on."

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"Should I be making more rocks?" Cassiel asks, from where she's restocking the candy.

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"...I think so. I think it makes sense now to be trying to make more stuff out of less stuff, maybe a lot more, where before I would've told you to go slow and keep an eye on things and not trust anything you let out of your sight. I think the song might make enough of a difference. I do still think you shouldn't rely on things that way if you've changed them around a lot since the last time I sang at them, though."

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"All right." Cassiel starts making rocks and putting them out the window of the house.

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She sings at the rocks on her way out, though she pauses at the border to put the harp away and change her face to a more fighty one.

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Cassiel can just go on making rocks indefinitely, though eventually she has to toss them instead of just piling them up under the window.

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The effects of the song fade so slowly this time that people are starting to wake up by the time things look noticeably dimmer. The Hero is in and out during this interval, mostly out; she complains about dying to the star dogs every time she reappears, usually in her white-haired face.

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The kid comes by in the early morning wanting to see what weird new foods they might have available for breakfast.

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How about pancakes and bacon?

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Whoooooooa.

The kid scarfs down their meal and immediately races off to excitedly tell everybody about the COOL NEW FOODS.

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Cassiel will serve up pancakes and bacon all morning if they're popular!

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They're a pretty big hit.

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The Hero comes back from her latest jaunt mid-breakfast, pokes her head in, and says, "I'm gonna go sing to the campfire now, if anybody wants to come. I dunno what it's going to do but I bet it'll be something."

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"I'll come," says Tarwë.

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She puts on her bard face and straps on her harp. A couple of curious villagers follow them into the middle of town, where the campfire still flickers.

The Hero takes a deep breath and sings the healing song, accompanying herself masterfully on the harp. The villagers are a little shocked to see her making such beautiful music.

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The campfire brightens. Its light carries farther, and it's warmer, and it smells properly of woodsmoke in a way it never has before even with the Hero standing right next to it. In its strengthening glow, everything and everyone seems to get realer. The villagers hug each other and tear up a little, and then run off to grab their friends, and within a few minutes everyone is packed into the vicinity, some of them abandoning their breakfast mid-pancake.

It's hard to tell for sure. But it almost looks like the campfire and its immediate environs are... really real, now. Real in a way that's not being constantly sapped by the encroaching void.

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"Whew," says the Hero, lowering her hands from the harp. "All right. Wow. Hey, everybody. You all doing okay?"

The villagers mumble their assent, some wiping tears from their faces. The Hero smiles awkwardly.

"I... think I'm gonna eat breakfast," she decides. "And then I'll wander through town singing for a while, to make sure I got it all. Or, hmm, should I do a bunch of expansion first and then sing it all in...? I'll figure it out. Breakfast first."

She puts the harp away, but keeps her bard face on as she heads back to the newcomers' house.

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Cassiel is happy to get her pancakes and bacon!

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She starts out eating kind of listlessly, accelerates once she's had a few bites of bacon and scarfs down her first portion inadvisably fast, then slows down again and methodically works her way through three more plates a bite at a time. Like, perhaps, someone who has just realized that their life is less of a screaming emergency than it has ever been before in living memory, and wants to enjoy some pancakes and bacon about it.

"Right," she says at last, heaving herself to her feet. "I'll make one circuit singing at everything, build a whole bunch of expansions and sing at those, then go for another walk. Keep an eye on how fast things fade out, okay? And... probably at this point you don't have to keep such a close eye on your stuff. Though I'd test it first with the things you cared about least, if I were you."

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"I'll keep the recording going," Zanro says. Cassiel makes a little glass figurine, puts it on a shelf, and does not stare at it.

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"Thanks."

She deploys her harp and heads out singing.

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With everything in such a state of elevated reality by default, it's going to get easier to notice that every time Cassiel transforms something into something else, the reality level of the transformed object is less than the original. Maybe reduced by very roughly a quarter, to something in the vicinity of 60-80% its original amount of realness? It's hard to estimate this just by squinting at things as they get blurrier. The effect does also seem to repeat with every transformation, so that cloudfluff turned into pancakes turned into toast will have about three-quarters of about three-quarters of the cloudfluff's realness. Further experimentation might yield more data if they care to try things and see what the results look like.

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Cassiel will go ahead and turn a hunk of fluff into a series of different things experimentally once demand for breakfast dies down.

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The "each thing has about three-quarters of the realness of the previous thing" principle is consistent through arbitrary repetitions as far as she can tell. Eventually, after a few dozen iterations starting from the realest cloudfluff available, the thing will just straight-up vanish mid-transformation. The number of iterations it takes to destroy something is not fully consistent, but seems to have some relationship to how drastic the transformation was, with more-transformed things fading out faster. Very roughly speaking, increasing something's mass by transmutation seems to 'spread out' its reality so that overall it has less, and decreasing its mass seems to 'concentrate' it so that overall it has more.

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(The Hero is now well into her circuit of the outskirts, having expanded the whole village what would have been a wildly reckless amount in the less hopeful world of yesterday.)

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Cassiel continues her previous pattern of expanding her supply of cloudfluff every time she takes something from it and preferentially pulls from that instead of repurposing preexisting objects.

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Repeatedly expanding the supply of cloudfluff will degrade the expanded material's reality level over time, but also, when the Hero passes by with her song, all existing cloudfluff is refreshed to full reality.

She finishes her circuit, changes her face, pokes her head in just to let people know she's heading out, and goes for another walk.

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Zanro keeps the video running, sometimes walks the camera around. Cassiel makes rocks and foods and such. Natsuko attempts to do research wizardry. Tarwë takes diligent minutes about all the events going on, and sings, switching to new songs when the hero is by so she can expand her repertoire. Nelen keeps track of his objects and plays computer games and paces.

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The fade rate is dramatically slower now; even their neglected statuette looks about the same, an hour later when the Hero has been in and out twice, compared to its initial appearance.

She settles into a rhythm of taking a couple of walks, singing to the campfire though it looks just as good as it did last time she sang to it, then taking a couple more walks. Haphazard explorations by the villagers reveal that even the very farthest reaches of the very newest land, right up against the void where everything should look like it's liable to blow away in a stiff breeze, the rocks are still rock-solid.

Also, the villagers spend much of the day wandering around in a daze of sudden hope, hugging each other and crying. The cook obtains ingredients from Cassiel and makes an enormous batch of meat stew, and people congregate by the kitchen for lunch, then go back to processing their feelings.

The Hero misses lunch by more than an hour, out on an unusually long walk. When at last she comes back she reports, "Finally got past the dogs."

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"Congratulations," says Nelen. "What does that imply?"

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"Mostly it implies I get to keep going until I meet the next fucked up person who tries to kill me. The hunter with the star dogs was definitely the worst so far, but I'm betting the next one will find a way to be even worse than that. Still, every time I get past something, the path gets... Bigger? Longer? Has more stuff? I don't really know how to describe it but making progress is good even though sometimes it just feels like getting killed by the same fucker over and over just so I can eventually start getting killed by the next fucker instead."

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"I might be able to make a gun," says Cassiel. "Or like, a sword, if that would improve on what you've got."

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"What's a gun?"

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"It's a tube with explosive in it, and the explosive propels small hard objects really really fast," says Cassiel. "I couldn't make a very complicated one but even a simple one could conceivably be better than whatever you're doing now."

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She squints suspiciously at this description. "What does it usually look like, can you show me?"

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Cassiel pulls up a picture of a rifle.

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"The hunter might've had one but I'm not sure. I could try it. I do find weapons out there, but not always as fast as I'd like."

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"I can make you something with fewer moving parts, to start, and work on getting a functional gun while you're on your next walk, if you want."

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"That sounds good. Thanks."

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"Do you want a sword, or a spear or something, what can I get you?" asks Cassiel, pulling off some fluff.

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"Hmmm..."

She switches to another face.

"What kind of a sword can you manage?"

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"Basically any kind, they're not complicated like guns are." She pulls up a visual dictionary of swords.

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She asks after some likely-looking ones and eventually narrows down to a single favourite based on swordy characteristics like weight and balance and durability.

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Cassiel whips up one of those and hands it over for checking-over.

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She picks it up, hefts it, studies it from several angles, gives it a very careful swing in a corner facing a wall so nobody's in range to accidentally get hit. "Great, thanks. See you later."

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"See you."

Cassiel starts working on a rifle.

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The Hero heads out armed and armoured to see what comes next after the Awful Star Dogs Man.

She comes back half an hour later to report that she lost her sword but it was pretty handy and she'd like another one if it's not too much trouble.

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"Sure." Cassiel makes another sword and also shows her the rifle, demonstrates its action.

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She squints suspiciously at the rifle. "How hard is it to learn how to, uh, be any good with it? I'd probably need a place set aside for target practice, like I would if I was learning archery, right?"

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"Target practice will help but guns became popular originally because they're much faster to get acceptably good with than bows are," Cassiel says.

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"Huh. Okay. I'll take another walk or two while I think about how to set up somewhere for target practice. In the meantime, thanks for the sword." She grabs it and goes.

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Cassiel makes a backup sword in advance and then switches from piling up rocks to firewood in case that's useful to anyone. Lunch is chicken noodle soup and caprese sandwiches and brownies.

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The villagers are delighted to partake of this bizarre foreign lunch.

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Oh good. It's nice to have things be relatively simple sometimes.