Minaiyu wakes up, and his first thought is relief.

He feels so much better today! His fever has finally broken!

Of course he shouldn't do anything remotely strenuous yet, not so soon, but he's looking forward to being able to focus on that history-of-rubber book he tried to read earlier this five-day and had to set down--

--wait, hang on, what's that sound? What's that smell?

He opens his eyes.

A low hum pervades the soundscape. It's not the hum of a ventilation system; it's more organic than that, it ebbs and flows. The smell is of unwashed human, beeswax, and sheep, all quite strongly. 

He appears to be in some sort of hexagonal capsule hotel; a faint beam of daylight at his feet shines in to provide a bare minimum of visibility. He's lying in a pile of sheepskins and other furs. 

...what??

...so, on the one hand, he has absolutely had a bunch of fever dreams this five-day. But this doesn't feel like the fever dreams did. Those felt like believing something while also, simultaneously, knowing it to be false (something which is, if anything, even more unpleasant than it sounds); this feels straightforwardly real.

Just in case, he reaches blindly for the place where the emergency call button would be if this is secretly his convalescing bed, and presses down. If he's fully lost in delirium, his family can send in an appropriately-hazmatted tripsitter to keep an eye on him and determine whether to call an ambulance.

Is there enough space to turn around, or is he going to have to shimmy out feet-first if he wants to get a better look at things?

His hand lands on some kind of wooden object that is certainly not a button of any sort. 

He has just barely enough space to turn around. 

He wonders what the wooden thing is, but he will start by cautiously poking his head out of the capsule.

His capsule appears to be a few meters off the ground, and open into a roughly circular room made of wood and daub construction, the walls of which are lined with similar capsules. The central volume of the room appears to be filled with several enormous honeycombs, swarming with bees. Many of the bees appear to be about the size of a sheep or large dog, but not all of them; there are regular sized bees around, as well as at least one enormous bee larger than a horse. As well as the bees, beneath the honeycomb a number of sheep are sleeping on a pile of hay. 

The only source of light is a vent in the ceiling through which the morning light streams, the comb parting in places to allow it through, and even that vent seems to be largely clogged with bees.

Marcus appears to have woken up and started to get out of bed without noticing it, which is hardly unprecedented, but he appears to have done it wrong, which certainly is something he hasn't done since he was maybe six. He goes to reset his position to one where his feet will be able to reach the footholds in the wall properly, and it doesn't quite work. 

Almost reflexively, he pulls his head and torso back and away from the possible attention of the giant bees what the fuck, and ends up lying in the capsule like a dog, with his arms out in front of him.

His arms are now visible in the light, and...those...aren't his hands. That's not what his hands look like.

...oh. He didn't make it.

His leg tries to move, and he instinctively halts it, then realises that wait no that's a terrible idea actually.

He flails around a bit mentally, and manages to get himself into a position where he is, not not fronting exactly, but not actively interfering with his host's motor control.

What the fuck. Why did he flinch back from the bees, like they were spiders or something. 

Oh. There's something in his head that's not him.

It's not, at this second, controlling his voice. 

"Hey, I think I've been enchanted!*" He shouts. 

*This is a single syllable and extremely shoutable word. 

What a concerning thing to have a one-syllable word for!

This is a fucking demon world, isn't it. Fuck.

(Or, you know, a world that believes it's a demon world. He suspects that demons per se aren't actually real and are just mangled rumours of malicious walk-ins, but right this moment what matters is what his host society parses him as being.)

At least he can understand what the guy is saying.

"I-- I promise I don't mean you any harm," he says hurriedly.

He doesn't fully take command of the body (and he'll get out of the way if his host tries to move something he's using), but talking does bleed over into making facial expressions. He looks scared.

Yeah right. Fortunately whatever the thing is doesn't seem to be controlling him very well, so he's going to flip himself around and get out of his cell, because if he's going to be tied up or something, he'd rather not have to be literally dragged out of bed to make that happen. There's a trick to getting down to ground level elegantly, but he can manage it in his sleep. 

He thinks for a moment, and leaves his belt knife and bow here. Not worth the risk. 

Marcus's father and one of his cousins will meet him as he gets down. 

"What's all this about then?" 

"It can speak with my voice. I don't know what it is." 

That's the most important thing to communicate. 

Well, he knows what he is.

As for how to convince them of the truth, he has no idea, but he can at least give them his side of the story.

(He really hopes he isn't going to get his host killed.)

"...uh, hi?" he says tentatively. "My name's Minaiyu. I'm a--" he is disappointed but not surprised that his host doesn't have a specific word for this, and he is definitely not calling himself a demon or a god "--dead soul from another world.

I'm very sorry about all the trouble, I don't get to decide who I possess, it just happens."

He is sufficiently embodied at the moment that he not-quite-consciously puts their hands up in what is hopefully recognisable as a placating gesture.

"All right whatever this is I want to deal with it outside." says Marcus's father. 

"Volta! Run and fetch the witch! Tell him it's urgent!" 

He will gesture for Marcus to move towards the smaller of two doors out of this room. A gaggle of concerned looking people and bees are going to follow them out. 

Minaiyu might at this point notice that the crowd, while generally appearing to consist of human people dressed primarily in wool and sheepskin, have a bit more variety in their appearances than you'd expect. Most people have normal human colours, but there are two people with neon pink hair (a father and a daughter, possibly) and one person whose skin is the pale green of new shoots. 

Marcus is going to gesture for his bees to stop following him. It would be terrible if they decided to follow Minaiyu's orders instead of his in a fight, and also he just generally doesn't like the idea of trying to interact with them in this state. 

That gets them out into the cold only with the bees which aren't his following the crowd, where he gets to have the fun experience of being interrogated in freezing weather. Well, at least it didn't snow anymore during the night. 

"How, exactly, does a dead soul come to escape Foundation's grasp and start possessing someone?" 

"Ghosts are a thing, I think." Says his father. "An intangible sort of resentful dead." 

The hair could be dye, but he does not know how you would end up with skin that colour. It's less weird than the giant bees, though.

"Uh, if you have a system here that 'grasps' souls and prevents them from ending up in otherworlders' bodies, that would help explain why possessions are comparatively rare when death is so common? If you're not, like, contributing to the pool of potential souls.

We don't have a system like that at home, though."

"And where exactly is home?" asks Marcus's father. 

("Is that what happened to people who died before Foundation ascended?" asks someone in the gaggle of onlookers. "No clue. Maybe?" says another. Several people start petting giant bees with various degrees of nervousness.) 

"We call it Rekka, in my language. I don't, uh, have a multiversal coordinate system, or anything.

We only have small bees there.

I live..." he makes a face "...lived...in--" he does have a coordinate system for this, but he refrains from using it: it won't mean anything to them "--a town in the grey area between temperate and subtropical, on the east coast of Tashay. Bluecoral Bay, it's called."

(He translates the name of the town. Place names are usually concepts: it's not like they get accustomed to being called by a particular string of phonemes.)

Minaiyu has not touched anyone in six days. Minaiyu did not know, when he hugged his kith-uncle goodnight seven days ago, that it would even be the last time he hugged anyone that five-day, let alone the last time he ever hugged anyone he'd ever known.

He is having some sort of emotion about the people petting their giant bees, which it really does not seem like the time to unpack.

The father makes a face. "Some kind of heathen then. I don't know what I expected. What sort of place was this Bluecoral Bay? A trade port? A fishing village?" 

Marcus is keeping quiet. He's grown up on the same adventuring stories as his father, and understands what he's doing: when confronted by something strange and powerful, keep it talking. It might reveal its nature by accident, or even if it lies with every breath you're still getting evidence with which to disprove those lies, and either way we stall it on killing us all for a little bit longer. It's not like they can make a decision until the witch gets here. 

He hopes the witch gets here fast.

He sure is a foreigner who doesn't have whatever relations with spirits this culture considers proper.

(Are the bees spirits? Are they beloved of spirits?)

"It's not a great harbour: usually you'd want to go three hops north to Greenport if you want to ship something by sea.

We're not very specialised, though we export more than our fair share of fish and amaranth--" he breaks off, and looks thoughtful for a moment.

("Amaranth" is a suspiciously long word. They've heard of amaranth, but it sounds like it isn't their staple crop.

He wonders what the foodways here are like. He wonders if he'll live long enough to find out.)

"--um, it's not a great location to put a thing that people would come from hops around to visit, since there's nobody to the east. Like, we have a small medical centre for routine things, but the big hospital I--" slight pause as he catches himself on the tense "--worked at is two hops west."

It feels like a slightly odd question for the man to ask, at this stage of getting to know each other. Like...like it's a question he would ask a foreign visitor from his own world, underestimating how alien Minaiyu's world might be. Or like...it's a proxy for something else? Alien subtext?

Maybe the man is trying to get at what sort of role Minaiyu played in his society?

"I worked in emergency medicine," he clarifies.

"Oh? What circle were you?" He's not quite managing to sound unsuspicious. 

This man is definitely treating him too much like a foreign visitor from the same planet.

"I...doubt our qualification systems are directly comparable?

Uh, late apprenticeship, but I don't know what your medical apprenticeships look like and that might mean something pretty different in practice."

"So you haven't even managed to cast cantrips, then?" 

...it sure does mean something pretty different in practice.

"...do you have magic learnable by humans here?

I am, uh, not a medical mage, because we don't have those. I mean, like, in theory you can use magic to tell whether a comatose body still has a soul in it or not, if you can find a spirit and convince them to check for you? But that's not very feasible these days, they're pretty reclusive, so we pretty much just have to make our best guess; and sometimes care for bodies we're mostly sure are empty, just in case."

did his heart stop in the night, or did they find his empty vessel when they noticed he'd dropped out of contact, and how long did it take them to give up on him still being in there

If humans have magic here, with a broader variety of effects, it's possible they have exorcism methods that work but don't kill the host. Maybe, just maybe, he will not get anyone else killed if this goes badly, just get kicked out of this world as if he'd happened not to land here.

(On the other hand, maybe he can become a medical mage, if he survives.)

Should he--

--probably he should not ask yet what they are planning to do to him? He desperately does not want to come across as hostile if he can possibly avoid it, and he's not sure there even is a way to ask that question that doesn't make it sound like he's trying to formulate a plan for how to fight back, given the likely expectations of people who have this prearranged distress-call system.

He will just have to wait and see what happens when the...witch, who is almost certainly very literal, arrives.

(He wonders for a moment if he should be fronting less hard right now, see if he can avoid rudely inflicting the somatic effects of nervousness onto his host-- no, he'd be shocked if his host isn't also nervous, it won't help.)

Marcus would be very good at suppressing visible signs of his fear thank you very much. 

"So you're saying in your world you have no mages? So you're trained to do what, sheep medicine to people, because there isn't any alternative? Heh, not often we hear about people worse off than we are." 

"...I mean, I don't know what your sheep medicine looks like, but maybe.

We have pretty good tools, though. Like, we can do surgeries without it being a desperate last resort, because we've figured out medicines that can keep people unconscious for a few hours fairly safely so they don't feel the pain, and how to keep the operating theatre clean enough that they reliably don't get sepsis. Things like that."

It is probably not the time to give a full tutoring session on medical-tech bootstrapping. He doesn't have a good sense of what they do and don't have already though the sheep dung in the house seems like a bad sign, nor what gaps they're already filling with magic. And you'd really want people to be able to take notes.

...also they think he's a demon and probably won't listen to him.

Marcus's father sure does look like he's a man who is taking mental notes to the effect of 'demon thinks drugging people and cutting them open is sound ethical practice'. 

"I'm glad we don't need any of that sort of thing around here." 

He reserves judgement on whether they need any of that sort of thing around here!

He nods, going along with it for now.

Marcus's father is going to allow the conversation to lapse into silence. It's not like he can make a judgement call here. 

The gawkers are mostly going to head back inside. It's freezing out here, after all. 

Elsewhere, a witch has been awakened from his slumber. It's urgent, so he casts Longstrider, and about halfway there, he also decides on a Bear's Endurance as well, and between them manages to get down a forest path in nearly the same time as it would have taken the nice young lady who ran to get him. He dresses lightly, as though snow and thorns and cold winds and tripping roots were problems that happened to other people, and his cane is green with fresh shoots and green leaves otherwise unseen in a stark landscape of snowfields, dead grass, and conifers. 

Nonetheless when he gets to the house where the problem is happening, he has the immediate urge to lean against the wall of their great hall (a great conical building of thatch and wood and wax, large enough to hold 27 humans, as well as all their bees and sheep.) and slump to the ground. He's not the man he was, and running is not something he has in him these days. Presumably one of these nice young people will be along soon to get him something to sit on, but for now the ground is fine. 

"What's all this then? I've been told there's some kind of urgent enchantment situation?"

"Yes, honoured one." starts Marcus's father. "Marcus appears to have been possessed by - well it claims to be a well-meaning spirit that's gotten lost on the way to heaven. Some kind of student doctor from a land without magic. I don't know what it is." 

Marcus would like to force his way to the front here. 

"I would like to clarify that I appear to be capable of over-ruling the spirit on its control over me. At least sometimes." 

He wonders if the specific form of magical appearance for the cane carries meaning, to someone familiar with the types of mage around here. It could just be personal taste in decoration, but he does feel a little like he is looking at a sign in a language he can't read.

Oh, they are willing to tell him his host's name (or some sort of handle, anyway?). He hadn't dared ask for anyone's name, in case they thought name-magic was real and that he was trying to obtain weapons against them.

(...or, uh, come to think of it name-magic could be real for all he knows, though the name is now providing some evidence against this.)

Minaiyu will get out of the way when he feels Marcus try to say something.

...Marcus's phrasing suggests that he does not think Minaiyu has been deliberately getting out of the way. Minaiyu is not going to clarify, because Marcus will definitely take 'you can move because I allow you to' as a threat.

(Also, like, Minaiyu does not actually know who would win in a battle over control. But he has no intention of finding out!)

"Um, hello," he says. "I'm Minaiyu, I'm the spirit. I'm sorry about all this: I wouldn't have done it, if I'd had a choice.

I wouldn't say 'lost': I think we just don't have a heaven, where I come from."

(Wait, hang on, is their soul-catching system going to catch him now that he's here?

He hopes it's nice in heaven.

(Well, also for their sakes, but right now for his.))

"...forgive my ignorance, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to call you 'honoured one' or not."

"Well, that depends on if you intend to offer me honour and respect, doesn't it?" says the witch, with a voice that seems to indicate sarcasm and good humour. 

This person probably gets to decide if he lives or dies or possibly enters "Foundation's grasp"! He is hardly going to ignore or spurn the power dynamic!

"...yes, honoured one?

But we don't have honourifics in my native language, so I don't have good instincts for where to include them. I apologise in advance for any errors."

"Very fair, very fair. Who can truly expect honour and respect from heathens and strangers? But making the effort is much of the matter." He nods firmly. 

"Since we're showing each other respect." He pauses. 

"Oh ancient ghost, who visits us from beyond the veil of death, what is your desire? What wrong keeps you from sleeping the long sleep of ages with your ancestors?" 

"Uh, I...did sleep the long sleep of ages?

And then I-- well, I wasn't conscious for this part, of course, but presumably-- my soul happened to bump into Marcus's brain as I drifted through the worlds, and it was compatible enough for me to lodge here. I think the body was asleep, when that happened: when it woke up, so did I."

Was there supposed to be an honourific in there somewhere. He does not know.

"But there isn't something in particular that's got you up in arms here. No murder to avenge? No buried treasure to report to your loved ones? Not even a little annoyance that your grandchildren aren't leaving flowers on your grave and resetting the traps anymore?" 

"...no, honoured one?

I...wouldn't expect to be able to avenge my death or report to my loved ones from a distant world, in any case. And I don't have any children."

How would he even know whether people are still performing remembrance rituals at his grave?

(They're probably not. It's very rare to get enough information to even hazard a guess at how long you were in the sleep-between-lives, but it's not completely unheard of to land in the same world you left, or meet people from your world who landed faster (and are thus from later in the timeline) and can provide a lower bound. From what data points they've managed to get...centuries at least, millennia, maybe longer.)

"Hmm. Well, for the benefit of everyone here, let me lay out a few possibilities. You could be some kind of mad restless dead. Ghosts are often not entirely clear themselves on their own nature." (someone in the background gasps - "Wait, ghosts are real!?") "You could be an evil demon possessing the body for some nefarious purpose and lying to us about that so we'll let our guard down about it. You could be an evil wizard* acting out some esoteric plan which I cannot help but summarise as 'fucking with us'. Marcus here could have just gone entirely mad. It's hardly without precedent. Lastly, he could be telling us the truth, and will presumably tell us the truth about how to get rid of him."

"Now, let's leave aside the possibility of possession by ghost or demon for a moment. If you are an evil wizard, why are you doing this? Possession is no mean feat, and the sort of wizard who is good at deception is not the sort who is good at possession. So to suppose that a wizard is possessing Marcus, and carrying out some elaborate and convincing bluff, we have to suppose a very particular wizard - perhaps the only such mage alive in all the west - has decided against all common sense, to use their unusual and valuable skill-set to come to this little hive in the middle of nowhere, and achieve nothing more productive than making us all doubt our own sanity. I'm sure in the full breadth of history wizards have done such things, and felt they were acting rationally at the time, but it stretches plausibility, to me, without any additional evidence to that effect." 

"The possibility of madness is of course, difficult to disprove, unless you have spells or abilities of your own to - " 

*for those following along at home, the word here translated as wizard connotes "mage whose power far exceeds their sense" without implying membership in a specific spell-casting class

At this point Marcus' father interrupts. "When it was talking about its ... profession, it used words I hadn't heard before. If you know those to be real words, which Marcus hadn't known, that would prove my son was sane, yes?" 

"I rather suppose it would, yes. Oh dead one - what did you have to say about your profession, that you practice so far from our home?" 

Minaiyu feels much more respected by the witch using person pronouns for him than by the "oh dead one" thing. The "oh dead one" thing seems kind of sarcastic, or at least insincere; the noun class seems candid, a signal the witch maybe hadn't noticed he was sending.

...well, that's not going to work to prove Marcus isn't...delirious? Is that what that word means? It feels stronger than that: did setting up the soul-catching magic accidentally strengthen people's brain-soul connections and make them capable of remaining in delirium for longer?

Anyway. Minaiyu only speaks this language as well as Marcus does, since he's getting it from Marcus's brain. Maybe his housemate--father, apparently--hasn't happened to hear some of these words, but Marcus clearly knows them.

(Maybe it would be for the best if Marcus gets declared delirious? They can pretend to "recover" in a couple days, and Minaiyu can remain closeted thereafter. Maybe later they can move somewhere nobody knows them and pretend to be twin-souled, if this is one of the demon-world cultures that accepts twin-souled--

--no, that isn't going to work. Marcus won't go for it. Maybe if he were the sort of person who would rather attempt to quietly tolerate being possessed by a demon than suffer the consequences of being outed as a host, but he clearly isn't: if he were, he wouldn't have made the distress call, at least not right away (before trying to figure out whether Minaiyu was the lesser of the two evils).

(And Minaiyu definitely isn't going to hide his continued existence from Marcus: he could maybe deal with being a secret voice in someone's head and fronting only when no one could see them (or perhaps, eventually, in circumstances where he was confident he could fake being Marcus), but--even if you ignore the frankly horrifying ethical issues with spying on someone all the time--being a silent passenger for decades sounds sufficiently torturous that he'd rather they killed him.))

The note of distaste on "profession" suggests the man is thinking of the part about surgery, which he seemed rather put off by.

"Uh, it doesn't work like that, I get my ability to speak the language from him, but--

--I talked about how we've compensated for not having magic by developing good non-magical medical tools? And how we can do surgeries now without it having to be a desperate last resort, because we've invented medicines to keep people unconscious during it so they don't feel the pain, and we can keep the operating theatre clean enough that they don't get sepsis?"

Sepsis? Is that what Marcus's father hadn't heard of?

"Ah, sepsis, yes. No, people around here would just say that a wound was infected without technical specificity, wouldn't they? I wouldn't expect anyone around here to know what an operating theatre* was, either. I only know because of my misspent youth in the lowlands. Do say more?"

*Lit: "vivisection dungeon" plus the same linguistic drift in meaning that keeps earth claiming we do surgery in theatres. 

Minaiyu does not say more, not immediately. He's standing there, brow furrowed, prodding at the vocabulary.

There is...kind of a lot of technical jargon in here, actually. There are words in here for things he only knows about from medical training. He doesn't get results for everything he looks for, and some of the terms are just taking the obvious roots and connecting them in the obvious manner, but...

"...Marcus, do you know what an ossicle is? What about an aneurysm?"

"... No. Why would I know what an ossicle or an aneurysm were?" 

"--because they're in your head. I reached out for your words, and they were there."

"They're not in my head. Except in as much as you have brought them there." 

Also he's not entirely happy with the idea that the demon is stealing his words but what's he going to do about it. 

"Then where did they come from? I didn't speak this language before I got here!"

He turns to the witch, looking lost. "Does this make any sense to you, honoured one?"

"Well, you could be a demon with the ability to speak in tongues and a bizarre agenda for deceiving us all? But assuming you're generally telling the truth? No clue. Not even sure why you're so certain you can read his mind, really." 

"Not his mind, just his language.

It-- normally, when you lodge in someone's brain-- it doesn't always happen, sometimes you have to learn the language the hard way, nobody's sure why-- but sometimes their language sort of bleeds over to you, and you can share their ability to speak it.

But it's always their language as they understand it. If they don't know a word, you won't either."

But also bees can't grow that big and humans can't do magic, so really, what does he know!

"Well, clearly you misunderstand something about your own nature. It happens to the best of us." 

"The important point, though, is that we're all convinced that Marcus going mad and obtaining inexplicable knowledge of medical lore in the same moment seems rather implausible, so we can assume that Marcus is sane and you're a real entity?" 

He looks pointedly at the onlookers and receives affirmative gestures from them. 

"Then, we have to rule out that this is a deceptive possessing spirit of some sort. Fortunately, this is a solved problem! I can't cast the spell, but I have here" The witch rummages around in his bag to retrieve a small container. "An unguent whose effect is to temporarily suppress possession or other mental influence from malign beings. I would be happy to contribute this towards the benefit of your family, here, but this stuff isn't cheap, and I'll have to demand compensation for it."

Marcus's father sighs. "How much?" 

"Three sheep." 

"That's highway robbery! Do you want my family to starve?"

"I have to buy this stuff from Old Blacktooth upriver! It's not cheap!" 

"I'll give you one sheep. It's that or nothing." 

"You'd pay two sheep if I was selling a potion of Cure Light Wounds for your son on his deathbed." 

"And you wouldn't charge that, because you'd have spell slots open. I'll give you a sheep and a jar of honey." 

The witch sighs dramatically. "Very well. A sheep and a jar of honey, and I'll use this unguent to drive any demons from your son." 

This is giving him snake-oil vibes, but again, what does he know.

(He still can't use the snake oil as an excuse to pretend to go away, not without buy-in from Marcus that he doesn't expect to get.)

"...drive, or temporarily suppress?

And, uh, does it work on non-malign beings?"

would they be able to tell the difference between it driving him off and it rendering him a silent passenger for decades

"Temporarily suppress! But there's a second half of the plan you don't need to know about. All of the things it works on would be doing the possession intentionally." 

He's not actually going to stop the process of dragging himself out of a sitting position in order to give a hypothetical demon a chance to talk its way out of this. Have some weird-smelling goo on your face (and relatedly, +2 to AC vs. attacks from demons.) 

...yeah, that's fair. Minaiyu really can't blame him.

He wrinkles their nose at the smell.

"I'm still here," he says.

(He is still kind of wondering if this is even a real medicine. But if Marcus and his household end up with a justified true belief that Minaiyu isn't malicious, well, he supposes he can make that work. All he really needs at the moment is for them to let him have the chance to prove with his actions that he's a mutualist and not a parasite.)

This witch is wishing he'd bought those mix-ins that let you add glows and sparkles and fizzes to your potion effects if they don't have them natively. The things we do to save money. 

Urgh, that's a terrible smell. 

"So. Now what? You're not a demon or an enchantment, apparently? How do I send you on to your rightful destination?"

"...well, that's not...normally what happens is that the dead soul stays with the host for the rest of their life, and when they die, the two of them--separately--wake up in new hosts somewhere else. There are people back home who have been through this several times.

I'm...not sure what it would mean, for a destination to be rightful. Although, well, there isn't anyone back home who's done it dozens of times, so maybe eventually they all end up in worlds with heavens and stay there."

He sighs. "I'm sorry. I know this is all very disruptive. I'll make it easier wherever I can."

It's very disruptive for me too, he doesn't say.

Marcus is silent for a bit. He's considered the problem of making friends with things other than animals and family members but has not yet had a chance to put theory into practice. 

"Well. We've been terrible hosts for you. We should all go in and talk over breakfast. It's not right to keep an innocent guest standing out in the cold."

That last bit is addressed at his father, whose reluctance to let this situation go on without Doing Something is only overcome by the horror of possibly being seen as a bad host. 

He nods, smiling a little awkwardly at the self-deprecating apology. Some warmth would be nice right now, as would some food (though the anxiety and general turmoil has been largely drowning out the false-tiredness).

He turns to the witch and gives him an acknowledging nod. "Thank you, honoured one."

(It doesn't seem like this person still holds the power of life and death over him, at least not actively, but it's still best to err on the side of being polite.)

[People may have noticed, by this point, that Minaiyu's voice is a bit different from Marcus's. It's subtle enough that if you weren't expecting two people you wouldn't catch it, and even then it's still entirely plausible that Minaiyu could pretend to be Marcus if he actually tried, but it's otherwise pretty doable to tell who's speaking.]

He holds the power of life and death over everyone here! He's the only person in two hours walk who can cast Cure Light Wounds! But you can't go pointing that out to people too much. They get resentful for some reason. 

"All is well that ends well! If you two need to get away from this lot, my door is always open. ... metaphorically speaking, even I don't want this weather in my house." 

He's going to hike off before he is overcome by the desire to sit back down again, because that would the bad sort of undignified. 

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?"