The interior of the house feels even more cramped now that most people are awake. People sit on the edge of their cells, or are still lying inside their cells, as they eat breakfast and get ready for the day, but the corridor isn't even really wide enough for two people to pass in opposite directions without having to edge past each other, and Marcus has to stop to reassure each person he passes that no, he's fine, the witch took care of it, life can proceed as usual. Bees constantly flit through the air and land on people, and everyone takes care not to squash them. A small child is antagonising a sheep and needs to be dissuaded. But eventually Marcus finds the cousin who is making breakfast. 

Breakfast is unleavened rye bread with honey. To drink, they have room temperature water. The bread is frankly stale and even before it was stale, it wasn't exactly the best rye bread, and stone-ground rye is hardly the prince of grains, but the honey is very good honey. 

Minaiyu lets his host take point here. It's not like he knows his way around this place.

(This also carries the advantage that the body then doesn't flinch when bees land on it. Presumably he will get used to that eventually, but not yet.)

He's torn between the part of him that is unnerved by the giant bees and the part of him that kind of wants to pet one. He wonders if there is a trick to petting them in a way that they like. He really would not want to upset them.

It's a big breath-bond, especially if you count the sheep. Not a big enough group to sustain internal circulation, but a lot of opportunities for someone to carry something home. And the bedrooms are very much not distinct airspaces.

He wonders whether magic makes this less of a concern: perhaps plague cures are a less niche and expensive product than anti-possession ointment.

he wishes he had magic plague-curing ointment

He tries at one point to ask about Marcus's schedule for the day, and while he is still shaping the first syllable, Marcus clears their throat and hurriedly greets the next upcoming passerby. Between that, and the phrasing and tenor of the reassurances, and "if you two need to get away from this lot", Minaiyu is starting to wonder if the 'move somewhere nobody knows them and pretend to be twin-souled' plan is in play after all.

He's not very fond of the flavour, and it certainly isn't the comforting familiarity of amaranth porridge, but it will do. And it is good honey.

Upon reflection, he thinks they are not skilled enough (yet!) at fluid co-fronting to converse while eating, so he will not try regardless of what privacy level they have.

(He pokes at possible internal communication a bit, but it's not immediately clicking, and this isn't really a good time to practise.)

Marcus has no idea that internal communications are even possible!

Externally, he's going to communicate to his siblings that he's had a change of plans and is going to be spending the morning going and looking for trees to log and bring back and maybe do some hunting if the hunting seems good. The subtext of this is that he wants to sneak off to his personal lean-to and sulk for a bit, as is a normal desire for the middle of winter, especially given the morning he's had. 

And then, he's going to dress up warmly and get his bow and knife and one of the good axes and one of the good saws and various other essentials, and call over his hunting-bees, and head off into the forest. 

Once he's far enough into the forest that he thinks his voice won't carry back to the house or the fire-shed, he will turn himself mentally towards his guest and say:

"... Once again, I have to apologise for the poor treatment I've given you. My family will worry until we can give them an explanation of why - this isn't just mysterious and confusing for everyone. It's like a wedding. People will want to bicker and give their input until it looks like a completely settled thing and then they'll just sort of deal with it. So we need to work out how to work together. And then you can talk to them without having the interaction being you being a mysterious confused heathen constantly, like a houseguest eating my brain. And I think that will be a much better first impression of - you as a person - than this morning has been." 

Unfortunately, he is a confused heathen.

"I forgive you. I thought demons were a myth before, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe you did the right thing on average, and it just happened to be wrong in this case.

Hmm. In terms of roles I can fill, I would be very glad to share my medical lore. And other lore: some of it my people taught me specifically so that I could teach people in future worlds. We have unusually good technology where I'm from, and it's brought a lot of benefits to our lives, and...fundamentally it's because of a dead otherworlder who gave us what she knew, and who made us realise that it was possible for things to be better than they were. So we want to pay it forward."

(He worries that he is going to do a much worse job of this than Amethyst did. He has nowhere near her aptitude for politics (and it doesn't seem like Marcus is in a good position to pick up the slack), and she wasn't facing the uphill battle of a culture that assumed possessing spirits were evil, or even one that had no prior history of receiving useful technical imports from otherworldly walk-ins.

He can probably do better than nothing, though? And...maybe people here have less to lose, if dying doesn't strand you away from everyone you've ever known; and doesn't land you potentially anywhere, in any of the wide variety of horrible situations that are out there.

He would still rather that no one else ever have a miserable five-day dying of influenza, even if they know where they're going.)

"But I don't have a good sense yet of what your people have already, nor of what they have perfectly good magic for instead. And...I'll need to know more about what your life looks like currently, before I can know what our life together could look like."

"I was also apologising for stopping you talking to my cousins, which I suppose I'd also do if I had brought a friend home who they wouldn't get on with but which is still very rude." 

"It would be very good if you can put your knowledge towards the benefit of clan and god." The two concepts are very nearly the same thing in his mind. "But." He hesitates to say out loud what everyone in his family knows without being said. "I was going to be an adventurer. And most people who leave to be adventurers don't come back." 

He considers clarifying that he hadn't actually tried to talk to Marcus's cousins yet, and that Marcus had ended up answering his aborted question before too long and giving an explanation of how the ~closeting isn't permanent not long after that, but this next bit seems rather more important.

"...'don't come back' in the sense that they die, I take it?"

(Marcus's tone seems pretty indicative, but Minaiyu has not completely ruled out the possibility that it's "if we leave too soon, it will be some other place that gets the benefits of your knowledge and not my childhood home, and I feel conflicted about this", and he would feel very stupid if he allowed the death interpretation to stand without checking and it turned out to be the other one (or a secret third option!).)

"Nobody I've ever talked to has ever talked to anyone who thinks that less than half of the people who try die. Fewer than that come back, to our clan in recent memory. I suppose in principle that some of them could have made it and be living it up in some lowlander city or something rather than ever visiting their family again." 

So, it's very dangerous and also this society is bad at keeping statistics.

(Or bad at making their statistics accessible to people who live off the train grid in especially rural areas? His father did mention, earlier, something about them being unusually poorly off.)

(Some households are terrible, and often their children leave and never return!

But it would be very insulting to imply that Marcus's household is one of those, on so little evidence. And anyway, there's still the part where it's more than dangerous enough that you don't need to keep statistics to notice.)

"And what do you gain, in return for that risk?

Or, maybe I should ask first what sorts of things adventuring entails here. Maybe that makes the gain obvious, once I know."

"Adventuring is a pretty big category. You could say that it's all of the work which involves - stepping out of the everyday and doing risky and interesting things? Tomb raiding, monster hunting, mercenary work, bounty hunting, protecting people from raids or rescuing them from slavers. That sort of thing. I was thinking of starting out with monster hunting and work my way towards the lowlands, but it depends a lot on what opportunities for work I find and who I end up in a party with. It's profitable work and the best way to get stronger. Or at least the best way I have access to, I hear that in the east some people can go to university if they have a lot of money. The reason why my family has its own hive is because my father's parents were adventurers." 

Huh.

(Tomb raiding seems...he's not even sure what to make of that. Rude? But also they're not using the stuff anymore, and maybe it's the tomb-builders who are being rude by locking something-valuable-enough-to-be-worth-stealing in a place where nobody would ever make use of it again??

The rest of it sounds...like it suggests concerningly weak and uncoordinated social contracts, but given concerningly weak and uncoordinated social contracts, maybe reasonable?)

He feels like he's missing something in "best way to get stronger": surely it can't mean muscle strength. Political power?

Put a pin in that.

So, on the one hand, money can be exchanged for goods and services and cloth factories, and he has a very bad feeling about trying to convince somebody to give the mysterious otherworldly spirit venture capital.

(...maybe especially a mysterious otherworldly spirit who is used to stronger social contracts.)

On the other hand, if he dies, who will even know to try to build the cloth factory? Or, hmm...

"...I have multiple questions there, but I think my next most important question is: what is it that you're risking, when you risk your life? The ability to-- do things and complete projects that require 'being in the land of the living' or 'having a human body' to do, I assume, and that's pretty serious in its own right, but...what's heaven like? How are the lines of communication between there and the land of the living?"

(Maybe Marcus is a bad person to ask about this. This particular area seems like a place that maybe has poor lines of communication with the town four hops over, in a way that might not be reflective of "will there be anyone alive who is in a position to read his posthumous tech-bootstrapping advice".)

(Minaiyu is such an optimist, assuming that Marcus and his family has good lines of contact with a town.) 

"They say in heaven you're in constant communion with God, who is - like the voice in your head asking you to be your best self, the thing which is hard to hear on earth. You don't have to work, they say, unless you want to. They say it's better for a strong soul to be in heaven than a weak one. I don't know what heaven is like for heathens. Northerners try not to go there, because they hate the gods, but in the south or the east they do even though they believe in different gods." 

"We can talk to God sometimes. If you're particularly holy or visit the temple of the gods or take the right potions. The dead can return if you anger them, somehow? We don't have much contact with the afterlife. Powerful healers can raise the dead and powerful wizards can summon shades or angels or demons to bind them or talk to them. Even more powerful mages can travel between the world of the living and the world of the dead."

Those rumours sound mangled, but he has no idea how much. It could be almost any mix of truth and falsehood.

"You need to take certain medicines in order to talk to this spirit" is normally a huge red flag that the "spirit" is a dream-figment (and then, if you fucking die of disruptor poisoning, they claim you "angered" the spirit or that it "called you away"); "the spirit is like a part of you" is if anything an even bigger red flag.

But also, he can't just filter everything through his pre-existing lens on how the multiverse works, because translation magic is real and he has somehow acquired some.

(And people back home already suspected afterlives might exist! Only about 1 in 30,000 people are hosts because they keep statistics on this, despite the sheer number of departed souls you would expect to be out there! They have to be going somewhere!)

can he declare that the appropriate remembrance ritual for him is wearing masks around non-breathbondmates (yes even outdoors, learn from his mistake), and he can come back and yell at them if they don't do it? it is how he died, after all, at least the first time!

"Strong" soul in the same sense that adventuring makes you stronger?

Why do northerners hate the gods, and is it justified he's clearly not going to get a straight answer out of the locals (or possibly anyone) for that part, and probably this entire thing is a very delicate topic for a heathen to ask about.

Do they know more at the temple about what heaven is like for heathens? Marcus did say it was a temple of multiple gods, while his people had a relationship with one in particular.

Fundamentally, he can't start an industrial revolution from a "little hive in the middle of nowhere". And there's only so many people here that he can teach about medicine and sanitation practices.

(And if heaven turns out to be a myth, he will just have to try and help someplace else.)

"Right, uh. I have enough questions that it's hard to know what to ask first.

I don't know what timeframe you were looking at, but I think we should start by learning from each other, get me more grounding in this world--" at least the parts of it that they actually understand, although if he and Marcus end up pretending to be twin-souled on their travels it will be useful to know what bullshit to claim to believe "--and give your people more understanding of what I know. I can write down some reference materials and guides, get people to make multiple copies, so that perhaps--at least to some extent--others can pick up the torch if we fall. And I can help you make...the small things, the things that a household can make on their own.

But a lot of the things I know how to build will take much more resources than a household can muster. I think we're going to need profitable work.

Though maybe there are ways to get enough resources to build...a set of cloth-making machines, probably, we can probably become cloth merchants from there and use those profits to build other things...with a higher success rate, I don't know. I do expect it's going to be expensive, with a lot of complicated metalwork, not to mention inventory and workers. And I'm not getting the impression that this place has strong systems for connecting inventors with funders, let alone connecting otherworldly idea-exporters with funders."

"I certainly wasn't going to leave until the summer, so we have time to plan and practice and learn to work together. Writing things down could end up being quite expensive. I don't know how much you have to write down." 

Becoming a cloth-merchant somehow seems like it's substantially more terrifying than hunting spiders bigger than a horse. 

"It's true that inventors won't be able to get funding. I'm not even sure how that's a thing people would do. People would certainly never loan money to adventurers. I think mostly that kings and merchant princes and that sort of person get to take loans?" 

"...yeah, this does seem like a place where writing materials would be expensive, now that you mention it.

I could go on for a while, but I'll think about how to be efficient with my use of paper.

I suppose kings and merchant princes have a hard time quietly disappearing with the money, in a way that it sounds like most people here wouldn't."

"That is one reason. Basically impossible to tell if someone skipped town or if they died somewhere obscure and will never be seen again. But successful adventurers have often acquired a lot more power - political power too - so they can be difficult to collect on loans for. Even if you can reliably collect, the collecting process is difficult, if they choose to struggle." 

Never mind tomb raiding, that is definitely rude.

"Because their...souls are stronger? What does it mean, for a soul to be stronger?"

"... I'm not clear how you could have souls and not be aware of souls getting stronger? Like, lots of people don't bother noticing or manipulating their own soul but it's not like you can - oh this is probably related to why you thought magic was impossible somehow isn't it?" 

"The short version is - your soul is like the fire within you that makes you yourself? And as you - strive and achieve and survive and push yourself to your limits - that fire burns higher. Doing powerful magic requires you to have more of that to ... feed into whatever spellcasting is, exactly, I'm not a spellcaster so I don't know." He's not resentful of this fact at all. Really. "But even if you're not a spellcaster, having more of that - it reinforces you. Makes you better at your skills, makes you harder to kill. If you get good enough you can do things that seem impossible. Be so deft and agile that you can dance on the tip of a blade of grass, or so good with a sword that you can parry fire. And if you're a spellcaster, you get spellcasting instead of that, mostly. Very powerful spellcasters still get a bit of toughness and skill as they get stronger. There are a lot of special cases and variants to this concept, but that's the core of it." 

"Huh.

Yeah, I've never heard of that. Something weird about the fabric of your world, maybe?"

Can his soul strengthen, or do you have to have formed here?

He'll probably find out.

"I wonder if it's enough for either of us to grow as a non-spellcaster, to make our body harder to kill, and maybe I can provide magic to the team without holding you back on that. Do you--

--actually, I have been meaning to ask, how does this culture treat people who were born sharing a body? Is it fine, or side-eyed but largely tolerated, or are the twinned souls all pretending to be single people so nobody thinks they're demons? I was wondering if we should pretend to have been born like this to people we meet on our travels, but if that's also stigmatised then maybe it wouldn't help. And then you also wouldn't know what happens with the physical parts of reinforcement when a body's souls have different specialties."

"Maybe it was something the gods did, before the Fall. They said they did many things to change the nature of the universe in those days. That's purely my speculation." 

"I don't ... think people would have an issue if two people were born into one body somehow? But I've also never heard of it happening so maybe I'm wrong and they're all hiding. I don't know how foreigners would treat us. I think generally people are much less concerned about a stranger having something deeply weird going on as long as it's clearly their problem and not your problem. I wouldn't be surprised if there were places in the lowlands where being obviously possessed by a demon was merely the sort of thing that got side-eyes. Like, if a travelling merchant showed up and they had a habit of discussing everything with themselves like we are now, I don't think that would be the strangest travelling merchant we've ever bought stuff from." 

('The Fall'?

He's putting a pin in that one too.)

"It's about one in a hundred bodies where I come from, but maybe that varies, I'm not sure.

Well, all else equal I would prefer not to have to maintain a web of deception, to the extent possible.

And-- uh, to be clear I expect this to be a skill worth practising even if we don't hide-- but with enough practice we can probably learn to talk to each other mentally, so that nobody can eavesdrop. It varies a lot how intuitive it is--I already checked, we're not on the high-intuitiveness end--and the exact form it takes, but people can generally get the hang of some form of internal communication eventually."

"I think if it was that common, I'd know about it, even if it was normally hidden. I think I've heard stories about more than a hundred different Name-level adventurers and people put up with much worse idiosyncrasies from the great Names than that." 

"Being able to communicate internally would be extremely useful. Do you have any sense for how people manage it?"  

is that a bad sign for their survival chances, if none of the very strong adventurers are twin-souled

"Sometimes it feels like...thinking words very deliberately at someone, or pushing concepts at them, or like grasping something in the back of your head to hold open a link.

And if you-- oh, it's usually also learnable to...detach yourself completely from awareness of the body, and build a little lucid dreamscape that you can go to, to give each other privacy. And sometimes--especially if your internal communication tends to be verbal in general--you can talk out loud in there and the person controlling the body can hear you, though they'd still need some mental motion to reply the same way."

"I'll try now, then." 

A few minutes later, and every time he thinks he's getting anywhere, he sees something moving in the forest or has to duck to dodge a branch and is immediately shocked out of it. 

"... Maybe we should try this when we get to my shack." 

"Agreed."

It is kind of hard to focus on experimenting with mental motions when there is so much else to take in, even when he's not the one ducking.

"About how far away is it, would you say?"