"Don't mind him," Marilla advises the alert-looking creature - person? Herald? "I suppose we had better send this, and I'm afraid you've got to explain what's going on yet again, which you've probably already done at least twice. Consider it practice for when you're explaining it to whoever assembles at the White Fountain for your expedition?"

"Okay.

I'm a species called ferryshaft, which is native to a magical island - at least an island you can only reach by magical transport - called Lidian, and which species to my knowledge hasn't ever gone anywhere else. Except literally me, I think.

I'm here because - there used to be humans on Lidian, a lot of them, and we were their primary allies there, as far as my research partner and I were able to figure from old half-eroded cave paintings and stone tablets; they taught us to read and write and lent us some of their craft, and in return we carried them on our backs, presumably faster than they could go themselves.

At some point all human-made records just stop, like they left suddenly without leaving explanation. The chances of their disappearance having been voluntary and, uh, frankly, nonfatal, don't look good, but that was a hundred and a half years ago at least and I don't know of anyone living who remembers the reason. There are other sapient species who could have been the cause. One of them, the creasia - they strike me as very capable of it." (This coldly.) "The creasia - big cats, at least half again my weight and often twice - we lost a war with them, a few generations before I was born, and their idea of a treaty was that we stand by and allow their death clutters to kill several tens of us a year, and that the adults among us keep strictly silent the arts of reading and writing, as well as anything true and meaningful about our herd's history, and in return they allow us to continue existing.

I was hoping that if ferryshaft are in fact useful to humans, then maybe whoever lived here would be interested in setting aside whatever happened to the last ones, and helping us turn into creatures that could be worthy allies to humans once again."

"...yes, I can see why that had him excited. Let's send off your message, then maybe we can sit down and compose a pamphlet to hand out, so you don't have to repeat that twenty more times? We've got a small printing press and should be able to run off enough copies for interested parties at the citadel."

Marilla starts heading through the corridors, glancing at Tollee as if she expects her to be following. Shortly thereafter, there is a tightly wound set of spiral stairs.

Tollee Concentrates going up (down?) the set of spiral stairs, but ferryshaft are climbing animals and she gets it done.

"What's a printing press? It can copy messages? Like - in written form?" That sounds - better than magic, actually? If Tollee hasn't vastly underestimated what magic does for the humans. Actually, she doesn't see the disadvantage in just asking. "Do you think you'd be worse off if magic disappeared, or if that disappeared?"

"Magic, but we are the nation that uses magic for pretty much everything; if you asked a Leaguer it'd be a closer run thing. Although they'd probably claim they could just reinvent it."

The stairs go up the Big Tower and there are quite a few of them; the small child who was attempting valiantly to tag along is scooped up by Aelea as she starts to lag behind.

"We'd just go back to having ushabti write them out, which isn't as efficient but would work fine for us."

"Ushabti?"

Tollee, too, is starting to get exhausted - on the inside, for all that she is worth not on the out.

Marilla pauses on a small landing to catch her breath a bit. "Sorry, it's quite a step up! Ushabti are non-sentient magical constructs that can do things for us - if you'd been in the canteen much longer you'd probably have seen one replacing some of the dishes. They only work in high magic areas, though."

"How common are high magic areas? You can't ride any of the ushabti very far?"

"Not all that common - although it's possible they might expand with our national boundaries, we haven't had the chance to find out for a while.

Most ushabti are too weak to carry a person - they can carry babies, but even small children is getting a bit demanding. Some people have the knack of making them solid enough for essentially powered wheelchairs, but I don't think I've heard anyone managing to make one that will climb stairs carrying someone, much less carrying people over rough ground. They're quite delicate - people occasionally manage to build a few that hold up better, but generally the secrets are lost shortly thereafter..."

Hm. Secrets.

Tollee makes a little noise of acknowledgement.

Internally she wonders if they'll be to the top soon, and prepares to keep climbing.

Eventually the top of the tower is reached!

This is a rather... interesting room. It's still in the monotonous white marble with green highlights, but there are huge windows with white-painted wooden shutters, one of which open, giving a lovely view across an awful lot of dense, poisonous-looking jungle; nearer the Spire there are some cleared fields and vineyards, surrounded by high, solid white-painted fences with soot on the outer face and a burnt area beyond.

It also has a giant glowing crystal in the middle, and a bewildering array of gleaming mithril mirrors and smaller glowing crystals. There is a bored-looking beige-robed human with a few patches of green scales on his face and yellow, slitted eyes like a snake, sitting on a chair next to it, by a writing table; he looks up guiltily when they arrive and tries to hide the very elaborate doodle he's been doing on the stack of notepaper.

"I'm just going to start up a calibration sequence so that someone's definitely ready to receive," says Marilla, essentially ignoring the resident technician and heading to a set of switches that turns out to control the shutters, which all fold open, leaving the space really quite exposed - at least it's not much of a windy day...

Not ignoring resident technicians, Tollee decides while Marilla's busy, is going to be her new specialty. Unsure how much of an explanation is appropriate given the military nature of this operation, she nods at him and utters a quick "Hi, I'm Tollee." Then, "I've never been to the top of one of these things before; what do you do, generally?"

The technician glances over at Marilla, but she's not frantically miming instructions to not talk to the obvious herald she's brought up with her, so he answers. "Send and recieve messages - sssomeone has to be up here at all timesss in case someone wants to sssend us something." He also turns out to have fangs and a slight lisp.

Her shoulders raise and her hair stands on end betore she thinks to check whether he also smells dead.

He does not smell dead! He barely smells at all, he's very clean and mostly smells of mildly floral soap. 

Now she notices his eyes aren't lishty-green and luminescent, either, and the fangs aren't the right shape, and he doesn't look dead.

" - sorry - if you're not in fact a lishty - you looked a bit like one for a second, my home has no other things that look like one, and they're nasty. Usually trying to bite you and turn you into one of them, and all that." Having to give even that much info chafes and worries her, but her reaction sort of turned it into a necessity.

He seems strangely unperturbed by Tollee's threatening behaviour. "What's a lissshty? Soundsss like some kind of Varushkan monster, they do that kind of thing. People around here look like all sorts of thingsss, you really can't judge by appearancesss."

She looks at Marilla pleadingly - might as well make it explicit. "How much can I say?"

Marilla looks confused, as she starts paying attention again on hearing her name. "Whatever you want to say? We don't have any inconvenient guests at the moment, everyone you'll meet here is a Spire member."