"That does seem lucky! And here I've been taking air for granted all my life."

"It's really relatively very rare, in the universe at large.

"Anyway, the trip from that planet to here would take thousands of years even on our very fastest ships so everyone aboard a ship got put into a frozen sleep that kept them from aging and dying so that they could just wake up here without having to wait."

"...huh. Useful trick. How well does it work?"

"Held up for the requisite thousands of years and everyone survived, so I'd say pretty well!"

"...well, everyone survived the trip itself, that is."

"That sounds like there's an upsetting story somewhere in there."

"There is, yeah. My equivalent of the destroyed continent. Let's not get into too much detail about that."

"Suit yourself."

"The ships crashed onto this planet, the majority of humans died, various emergency systems had to be deployed out of the ships that didn't get turned to rubble to make the air breathable. Humanity was nearly completely wiped out, on this planet, I think they were at the thousands, maybe low tens of thousands post crash and lots of people died shortly after that because of the conditions we were all in back then."

"Yikes. Wait, wasn't this a place without poison air? Was the air still kind of shitty?"

"Yeah. It was almost completely nontoxic, but still not good enough for people to live in long term, it took a while for us to get the air to stabilise into a perfectly breathable version."

"Bizarre to think air could be so delicate a thing..."

"I don't know how it was where you're from but back where humans are from here it was because of plants and algae, they were able to recycle the toxic parts of the air into breathable air so it was a stable cycle. Actually one of the ways in which humans cursed that planet was in fact by messing with that cycle. And this planet doesn't have any plants or algae at all."

"...does that mean you still have to do fancy stuff to make the air keep being good and not bad?"

"I... am honestly not sure? I haven't kept up with it since we managed to stabilise everything and people weren't dying of asphyxiation left and right anymore but I assume there must still be something making sure there's enough oxygen in the air for everyone."

"...concerning. But all right."

"It's been a hundred and forty-eight years since the ships crashed. Humanity's been trying to rebuild since then. With... mixed success."

"Mixed how?"

"I really don't know how to answer that question in a very accurate way. Some places are very large and now have hundreds of thousands of people, some are... like the place we're going to. Which isn't like that. And there are some, ah, people who have been making reconstruction much harder than it would otherwise need to be."

"...all right," he says, not sure how to interpret this answer but not really wanting to push.

"Sorry, I realise that's really unhelpful. I, ah, haven't been to most bigger settlements in decades—really, I mostly don't visit the same place twice at the time scale of a few decades, people start noticing I always look the same."

"I suppose I'll start having the same problem once I've been around that long."

"Anyway! That's an abridged history of Gunsmoke. Your turn."

"...the empire my father ruled was called Isettavar. I grew up there expecting to rule it one day and being annoyed and impatient that it hadn't happened yet. We had... air to take for granted, and cursed cities to avoid, and I'm pretty sure my father was good at ruling it though I suppose I don't have much idea of what being good at ruling an empire should look like. Smarter people than me knew things about how the sky works but not nearly enough to get up there and fly through it. Anyway. Then I fucked the whole thing up, the end."

"Do you want a hug?"