Earthling![REDACTED]-and-co. is portalsnaked to Dreamward and proceeds to !!DO MAGIC!!!!!! -- What? She's doing science instead? Bah.
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...What, and humans won't?

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They don't like it. It's suitable for emergencies or traveling or dire poverty, and accordingly nobody is literally starving, but you wouldn't want to if you could avoid it.

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...but why?

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It tastes worse. You troport the flavor and the flavor is technically there but it's just worse, somehow. A lot of cheap food uses troported food as filler but has some real stuff in there so it's less noticeable.

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She's suspecting something about not copying the aromatics is involved.

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They don't seem to have ruled that hypothesis out.

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...How the frak do they have sufficiently industrialized food for there to be troportation sawdust bread equivalent, anyway?  Or...no, military provisioning.

 

...She is really having a devil of a time figuring out what the heck this society is like - where she should analogize from.

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She could do another deep dive into random things, but what she wants to do is take a step back, and look at the structure of the library; see what's given focus, see what has the most books, the newest books, the most prolific books...

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They have a lot of copies of the dictionary, a particular book of poetry, and some popular novel series. One book in the novel series appears to be new.

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...Why, of all things, is there a surfeit of dictionaries?  How does everyone have novel-reading time?  Is she just in a 1920s that doesn't guns?  No, they had electric lights by then, albeit shitty ones.  She is so very confused.  She's half-tempted to look for evidence of past isekai protagonists.

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None of them have left a signal for her in this library.

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...If she actually received that answer as the result of her search, she would immediately have started looking for signals hidden in other places, but she didn't, so she hasn't.

 

What's the novel about, anyway?

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The series is about the survival adventures and romantic drama of a bunch of people expeditioning to found a new city further rimward. There's porn in it. The latest installment sees them building a raft to cross a big lake.

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...rimward?

 

...there's porn in it?

 

Not that porn being in it is bad, but...she's surprised it's just sitting there!  ...Though, with you-can't-leave-children-unattended being a whole thing, she's less surprised.

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There's porn in it! It's just sitting there!

They don't have cardinal directions; instead, since civilization is in a loose ring shape, they talk about hubward, rimward, clockwise, and counterclockwise.

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She'll have to see if compasses work.  Or if navigation by the direction suns travel does.

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There is no findable mention of magnetic north being a thing or of suns traveling in any reliable direction.

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...what, they just go every which way?  What's astronomy like around here?

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It isn't. There are basically always suns and even during the occasional "longdark" there aren't stars.

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...she meant to be looking up how the heck suns work, but that's neat too.

So how do suns work?

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They don't know. They have no way to go up and poke them and have not figured out much from just looking. They come in lots of colors and sizes and speeds and altitudes and warmths and other details.

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...but do they have specific directions, have they ever observably recurred...

...what, they don't have hot-air balloons?  Not even a little bit?  No flight whatsoever?

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They don't know if they recur because it's not that weird for suns to look similar, but they are generally seen to be going in straight lines so it's assumed they continue to do that forever and don't circle back.

They have hot air balloons (though they are not in common use) but the suns are higher than that.

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...Higher than that in...what way?

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Hot air balloons can't keep going up forever, and when they have gotten as high as they have been known to go, the suns are still above them.

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