A clear moonless night, lit before him by a cauldron on a scaffold, tilted and pouring out a thick glowing orange liquid, fire surging over the ground. People with perky pointed ears and long tails are silhouetted. Hammers pound. The air trembles with a constant sparkling roar, pierced by curt yowls:

"Less air!"

"Cold at roller 8 - Bardo, come here!"

"Tilt steady - tilt to finish - tilt stop."

The ground is smooth rock, perfectly flat. Beyond the scaffold, larger people with floppier ears haul on long chains, and beyond them are fields of leafy plants lit by flickering light.

There's a small explosion- More noise than force and accompanied by a burst of red/blue light- And a human kid, very young, falls three or so feet to sprawl on the ground with a yelp, somewhere reasonably open. He's young- Maybe seven or eight. Wearing plain but nicely made cotton clothes slightly too big for him in browns and greens, with neat little hide boots and a tiny belt knife and a waterskin and a cloth-wrapped chunk of cheese and jerky that has fallen open. He sits up and looks around in awe.

He did it! He's away- He can feel the burnt husks of his points, but that just means it worked.

"What was that?"

    "What?"

"Something exploded!"

    "Just great! Chill the turbines! Telemi, Calsa, Waret, check the slab with me."

        "Thank the catmother it wasn't the pour."

    "Don't be so sure."

"The light came from out there."

    "Check the slab first, and the crucible. Then we can look around."

A minute later, a person with grey fur and cat ears plods out in switchbacks towards Nico, with a yellow flame flowing from his outstretched finger.

"Hey, there's a kid here!"

   "What?"

"There's a human boy here, I don't know him!"

The human boy looks kind of intimidated! And surprised! He says something and stands carefully still. Then he holds his hands up at head height, clasped together and looking focused.

The grey cat-person backs up, hands spread wide (one of them still with the flame). "Calsa! I think this is your problem now!"

    "What?"

"Just come here!"

A smaller orange cat-person comes out, extinguishing the flames on her ears as she gets close to the grey fellow.

"Oh. Fine."

She kneels ten feet in front of Nico, palms on the ground. "...Hey kiddo. It's not safe here."

Something something something.

Something!

He winces and pulls his hands apart. That's half of his two entire white points used up and he can tell it's awful. He's definitely missing something.

"Hi. This not time big, this- Will not be long-" He slips out of understandability for a moment. "Haha, funny mouth noises, ow. I lost."

She smiles and nods at him.

Huh. Not human, then? It's pretty fucked up to abandon a human boy old enough to walk, but that does happen sometimes. A species she's never heard of, out here? Maybe he came in from the dark?

She clasps her hands together like he did, spreads them, and looks around with exaggerated puzzlement. She touches her ears and then looks him over??

"-Ears? That's green. They look good. My hands, I did a white thing. To talk. Not much white left. I am lost. I leave on purpose. I did-" Something something something. He scowls. He points at her ears, then gives a thumbs up.

Nod! She gives him a thumbs up with a flame on it.

So. He's a refugee. She takes her cup off her belt, mimes drinking, and gets up to slowly walk away, looking over her shoulder...is the 'white' kid following?

This place is kind of scary but maybe he's only scared because it's dark. It's also cool so far! And he's already learned that he can't just run out into the woods. It's awful out there.

He picks up his bundle of food and his waterskin (squished open when he fell) and brushes dirt off his pants and follows.

She leads him down a wide flat road, past a row of roofless stone houses, to a clearing surrounded by buildings and piles of bundles and boxes. A ramp rises off to the left to form a stone wall twelve feet high and eight feet thick - there's not as much light in that direction but it continues straight into the dark as far as a human eye can see.

The air here is colder, and just as dry. Her breath fogs.

She turns right, to a pillar wrapped with a C-shaped trough and offering a long handle. On the side without the trough, at her shoulder height, there's a large empty hole and a small hole dangling a chain. She reaches into the large hole and flames flicker around her arm, which she then removes to pull sharply on the chain. A loud whine starts up and rises in pitch.

She concentrates for a minute - the flames on her ears go out - and then water streams into the trough. When it's full, the whine and the fire inside the pillar stop without any apparent action from her but coinciding with the return of the flames on her ears.

She dips her cup into the trough and drinks deeply, then hands it to him.

"How does that work?" He wonders, in his unknown language. "It's a well... Magic well? Or powered by magic fire? It's like the sawmill! Bzzzz! I guess you're all really good at fire..."

Is the water warm? Is the thing still making noise? He tries to climb up and peer into the big hole.

She nods enthusiastically at 'bzzzz'.

The water is lukewarm - one of the spigots into the trough steams as water trickles out and the others don't.

She stands ready to catch him if he falls and dabs a fingertip of flame onto the edge of the hole, showing it to lead upward to a metal fan, gently turning with a soft grumble. As he watches, it stops and the pillar falls silent except for water dripping into the trough.

"-Oh! Oh! That's amazing! Hot air rises, cold air sinks! Dad told me never to camp in a bowl valley! It gets really cold! And that's why!"

He jumps back down and then jumps around. They have MACHINES! Too excited to hesitate, he claps his hands and twists his last remaining piece of white into the much more familiar pattern for dancing glimmers of light in the air. Red and grey lights- And a little collection of orange ones to represent a campfire- Red ascends in a column and turns grey and scatters, grey goes into the fire and turns red and goes up.

"Hot air rises, cold air sinks!" Bounce bounce!

Yes! Hmm. Sort of.

She flashes a small flame once and moves her fingers in the same pattern above: hot air expands and cold air contacts... does he follow that?

He makes the dancing lights mimic the pattern, at least? Red, expand, up. Grey, contract, down.

Okay, now she uses her hands to outline a sideways tunnel that constricts in the middle. She blows through it - fingers compress and expand again.

She blinks a flame in the narrow part and blows again - fingers compress tensely and zoom out the other end.

Back to the hole in the pillar. She puts a small flame on the bottom of the cavity, frowns, and snuffs it. Catches his eye and then sticks her finger through a small hole in the middle of the fan and lights a flame above it, nods with a smile. And then she mimes the constricting tunnel again with the flame at the narrowest part, taps the fan and blows.

........If hot air is bigger. And there's already a lot of air trying to get through. And then it gets even bigger...?

He scrunches his face up in concentration and expands the illusion. Air goes past the narrow part and gets hot and gets bigger, and in his illusion it goes back down, as well as up and out.

Unless there's also something about tunnels? Horns are tunnels that make air do funny things. And flutes.

His illusion fades slowly out while he thinks about it. Then he snaps to attention and un-fades it.

Brassy colored sparks in the vague shape of a large bugle?

Nnnooo, the air doesn't go in a loop. She taps the fan and waves her finger in a circle, and then with her other hand points to the very top of the pillar and circles in synchrony.

Fire - upper circle - lower circle - blow (she crouches to blow directly upwards)

Fire - blow harder - upper circle - lower circle - blow softer

Fire - blow harder - upper circle - lower circle - blow softer

That's the loop. She's not sure how to convey the abstract idea of a loop that distinctly isn't a physical thing moving in a cycle. Hopefully he'll notice the repetition.

Hmmmmmmmm!

...This is hard, actually.

He constructs the moving illusion slowly, bit by bit: Column walls, narrow then wide. Fan in the narrow part. Fire above the fan. 'Air' sparks moving slowly up past the fan. 'Hot air' sparks moving quickly up, above the fire?

-Oh, the fast air goes over another fan, doesn't it? He starts adding another fan to the very top.

And then all the lights wink out at once. "Agh!!!" He stomps the ground in frustration.

Yes, two fans! The first fan is in the wide part and the fire is in the narrow part and -

"Hey, it's okay, we can draw at home -" she mimes scratching the shape of the tunnel on a horizonal surface.

In a nearby alley a black-and-white cat person has a food cart. After a quick conversation with Calsa, he toasts a large brown disk between his hands and gives it to her, and she holds it out for Nico. "This should be safe for humans, and whisshoppers, if that's what you are..." She'll be keeping a close eye on him as he eats it though!

It's a chewy bland vegetable fritter.

He squints his eyes shut and takes deep breaths.

And drinks some water.

And then tries the food? It's not bad. He cheers up after a little while.

What happens next? He doesn't know much about - orphans or whatever - this person seems nice - 

Seems. They're definitely not his parents. Most people are probably nice? At least at first? And she taught him how the firespinner works!

He sets the fritter down on the stone basin for a moment, and formally bows in the polite way. Right arm to left shoulder, feet straight, forty five degrees. "Thank you for teaching me, and for the food. My name is Nicodemus."

Un-bow. ...And point to himself. "Nicodemus. Nico."

And picks the fritter back up and resumes eating.

That was a lot of words that he knew she wouldn't understand, so some kind of ritual? She bows back, ears forward and tail low, and points to herself. "Calsa."

Home is next, but she hates eating while walking so, just in case he does too, she'll wait until he's done.

Hm, he might be getting cold, even in the middle of town - human fur is pretty thin, and his clothes look decent but he should have something warmer if he wants to walk around without catfolk nearby... She boops a fire onto the ground and sits next to him.

And then home? Her house is a few blocks away. Stone like the others, about 20 feet by 60 feet, but hers has a roof: a tall smooth dome. She steps through the open doorway and checks if Nico is following her in?

He is following her in, a bit cautiously and keeping his distance.

Inside, there is:

A large box, with a curtain on the front made of what look like bricks.

A shelf of flat stone plates.

A tray of white sand on a low table.

Another table piled with bowls, a knife, fabric, purple squash, and wicker baskets (one has a woven hand sprouting from the top).

A shelf of stone jars and a big roll of cane.

A pile of stone scraps: curved blocks, chain, gears, a broken plate...

A chamber pot with a lid.

Calsa pulls up a trapdoor and lights a fire under the ground. From a different trapdoor, she pulls out a vegetable patty of her own, darker and smelling fermented.

She sits by the sand table. Nico is going to love this! First, she draws the pillar mechanism: a J-shaped hourglass with several fans in it in two groups, below the fire and above, connected by a shaft. At the top, the shaft has a flywheel and gears with another much thicker shaft that goes into the ground. The chain connects to the flywheel by some sort of hooks, and she sketches another chain going to the big handle.

And: a stick figure with pointy ears - "Calsa" - a smaller plain stick figure - "Nico" - a larger stick figure with claws - "Merta" - and a figure Nico's size with round ears and a long pointy face - "Siki".

Nico is paying much more attention to the mechanism sketch than the family sketch, muttering under his breath and following it with his finger.

He traces the ground-shaft further down and draws the sawmill's mechanism. The rack-and-pinion, that turns spinning into back-and-forward-ing. The pitcher pump at the well works on back-and-forwarding so this seems reasonable. He also draws a pitcher pump and lines going to the mechanism. And a '?'.

No, the bottom of the shaft spins another fan... She doesn't know more than that, but - point to water fan, blow, just like with the air fan?

Merta will know better, and she'll be home soon... Calsa draws a Merta figure drawing on a table by a Nico figure.

Sure?

"...Merta? Huh. Calsa, say things? I want to learn." He tries to replicate some of the things he said earlier, under the spell. "Hi? Lost?"

Ah! "Hi!" She tries to remember things he said...

She holds a double handful of sand. "Much." She drops it and sprinkles a thimbleful. "Not much." 

"Much sand. Not much sand." She gets a large pitcher. "Much water." In her cup: "Not much water." In the sand: "No water." 

"House. Much house: town. Town: Kef." She draws a couple squares, a straight line, and a couple more squares at the other end. "Town: Archer's Tabard." The straight line keeps going - "Much much houses: city. City: Argolake. Much cities: Sota. Um. Allheart Alliance." Does he recognize any of those polities?

She points to herself. "Green. Catfolk." Him: "White." And looks at him with exaggerated puzzlement.

He is... Also puzzled. And doesn't seem to recognize any of the names.

"...No white. I not much white, I-" He clasps his hands and makes wiggly finger motions. "No white." He mimes a pillow against his head and shuts his eyes for a moment. "Not much white." Wiggly motions again. "No white. I not much green?"

He looks around for examples of the other important colors: Black, blue, and red.

White means - energy? Willpower? Something that is expended by doing his thing, and recovered by sleeping.

"I green? I white?"

She notices him looking around and lights sconces on the walls, and a chandelier that she has to climb on a box to reach.

The water pitcher is white with blue painting: pointy trees, an enormous wolf, a torn rope, and all the remaining spaces filled with raindrops.

The rock is dark grey, and he can eventually find a black chunk in it, smoothed into the rest.

There don't seem to be any red objects in the house. The flames are dark orange at the tips?

Explaining this would be hard and frustrating. He barely remembers anything about how to talk here from the horrible bad attempt at shoving white at something it's never done before. It's always bad the first few times, like the first time you swing an axe or the first time you hold a knife or the first time you climb a tree. But he barely got anything out of it, and it lasted like... Ten seconds.

Learning a whole new language sounds like the kind of thing that gets you more white, though...

This place is weird. It's not just that they're all red seekers, specialized in only fire. She'd know what white and green mean already. Also. He liked having secrets from his parents. They couldn't tell him not to play with light because he just never did it when they could see. And he's getting - frustrated, uncomfortable, he can feel the burnt points hanging out next to the ones he still has and it's almost itchy but not the kind of thing he can scratch-

He shakes his head and mimes confusion and frustration.

"It's okay."

He must be tired and overwhelmed. She pushes aside the brick curtain on the box (they're lighter than bricks) and sits on the edge. There are blankets inside, see?

"No, [say more things. Blah blah blah!] Green. White. Much. Not much. Water. Sand. Houshe." (He mispronounces it drawlingly.)  "Much [blah blah!]"

"Okay! This is a huddlebed, this is fire, that's a table, that's a bowl, that's the floor. The table is on the floor. The huddlebed is on the floor. The bowl is on the table. This is my hand. The fire is on my hand. The fire is in my hand. I am in the huddlebed. The fire is not in the huddlebed." Because the blankets are flammable. "I'm going to the table. I'm not in the huddlebed. I'm under the table..." And so on for taking things and putting them down and moving from and up-to and past and in-the-vicinity-of, and liking and disliking things. She's using proper grammar now, not foreigner talk.

"White, green..." She burns pinches of powder from jars - "red, orange, golden, yellow, blue, violet, teal, chartreuse."

"Ah! I need to pee!" She turns her back to him, hikes up her skirt, and pees in the chamber pot.

The word Nico's society uses for themselves, lost to time, originally meant something like 'many colors'. Thus: Their name for themselves will be translated as Kaleid, not human.

He repeats her sentences in mutters, thinking hard and trying to absorb as much of it as possible. It's only polite to try hard when someone's trying to teach you. He's not going to pretend to ignore it, like with Dad.

He has a headache, he's kinda tired, he's kinda scared, he wants to learn more about machines and he wants to not get in trouble.

(He looks away. Not doing that is a thing that gets you in trouble.)

At length: "You are a catfolk. Catfolk do fire [magic]. I am a Kaleid. Kaleids do color [magic]. You have colors in you, and you do magic, and the colors are less, and then later they are more again. Red blue green white and um - not not white. Catfolk [only] do fire. Kaleid do very many [magic], but not much."

Yay verbal communication! "I am a catfolk! Catfolk do fire magic. You are a" she repeats his word "kaleid and kaleids do color magic. Not not white? Uh, white - not white is no color? - not not white is past that? The opposite of white is black. The opposite of under is over. Yes, catfolk do one magic, fire."

This is making sense! Kaleids are an uncontacted species living in the wilderness. Wow. How do they survive the cold without cats? Oh, duh, they must be able to warm themselves with color magic.

Do they know of any other species at all? He thought her form was a magical effect, so that would imply no, except he looks so much like a human - maybe there are other species that look just like him and can only be distinguished by magic?

She holds up one finger at a time: "kaleid, catfolk, ...do you know of any more?"

Oh! Maybe the five colors are different species, but they can hybridize! That explains how Nico has both white and green, and maybe why he resembles a human! "Or white, green, red, blue, black, fire, any other kinds of magic you know?"

A large person with salt-and-pepper fur and thick blunt claws slips in the front door, retrieves a food disk, kneels on the floor, and knee-shuffles to Calsa's side, staying a nonthreatening distance from Nico.

hug

"This is Merta!"

"Hello Merta?" He frowns. This person is big, but - somehow not as scary as that would usually be?

"...I heard about more color magics? Golden, violet, um, not-seen-fire-color, other-not-seen-color. But I not see them. None us see them. Kaleids talk about them in much much past. I heard about [gods] who are color magic but much much much much much much much more. I heard, [gods] made color magic. But also none us see them."

"Hello, uh - "

"Nico."

"Nico.

Your new stray."

"Yep! He calls himself a kaleid. We were just talking about his species, or perhaps family of species. I've seen him do illusions and translation but he's out of magic now, he uses a resource for it that gets depleted and then replenished when he rests. I've never heard of anything like that, have you?

Golden, violet, more colors - that's fascinating, Nico. Maybe [gods] are humans, since they're the only thing we know of that makes new magic. Or maybe something else is going on with your combination of magic? You look a lot like a human, maybe there's another species out there that does that."

"I have not!

You should talk to the Magistrate tomorrow."

"She's not going to give me a stipend, he must be at least four years old."

"She might, if he's a new species that's been living in the drydark all this time! And it might be just for a few days, if we're trying to get him home."

"He said he left on purpose."

"Then you should definitely talk to the Magistrate; that could be a diplomatic nightmare."

Sigh.

"Is Siki working late again?"

"Yeah, he said he'll sleep at the watchmaker's, but he's hoping to finish the job tomorrow."

He frowns slightly and listens closely to the conversation, brows furrowed. He is not following it, which is not really a surprise but is not fun.

"I don't think [gods] are humans. I think they are - illusion? You can't meet a [god]. There aren't any. Is new magic very very - [wow! bright!]- liking it?"

"Oh, just a story, just a thing to talk about? People sometimes say the sun is a great catfolk hero - a catfolk with a very big fire - who left to watch over us all, or all catfolk at least. It's not true. The sun was there before catfolk existed."

"...yes, that's what new magic is like. Time to sleep! Tomorrow will be a busy day! Do you need the pot?"

Here, he can have his own nest of blankets in the huddlebed!

Suspicious!

...He will use the pot, and then take off his little hide boots, and grab that random rock he saw earlier, and then curl up in the weird bed and think.

He can't just assume everything is going to be fine now. It's all weird and - it sort of makes sense that if everyone can do fire, they build things that do cool things with fire, but - he has no way of getting more food or learning to talk around here other than Calsa and Merta, and they are not his parents, they're strangers. He has to remember that and be on the lookout for... Something.

What magic does he have? He has 3 1 red, 2 0 blue, 1 green, 2 white, and 2 black. (The burnt points continue to be ??ITCHY??. It's annoying, verging on uncomfortable. Maybe he'll get used to it?) He knows how to make sparks and do a powerful swing with an axe or blade, as far as red goes. He knows how to break sticks or strip bark off of wood with blue. He knows how to magnify scent for a bit with green. He knows how to do illusion-sparks with white, he's not counting the translation at all even though translation is also a white thing because he's going to have to think about it more and figure out how you're actually supposed to do it instead of just asking white 'how do I say things'. And he knows how to stick the sparks or a bright light onto a rock for later, if he has the red or white to spend on it.

He does still have a bit of red, despite the dramatic burn that brought him here. Which is what he does, careful carefully. It takes a while, of patient even breathing and feeling the way the ink spills into the rock, like a gooey cage or basket. He can do this much at last. There. A rock that will make a little burst of fire, if it hits something hard enough. It goes in his pocket.

It was morning when he left, and it was night when he got here. But it was still a long day, kind of. Zzzzzzz.....

It's good for kids to play with rocks.

Merta and Calsa curl up in the other end of the huddlebed, trying not to touch Nico.

Footsteps and conversation drift though the open doorway, and the occasional shriek of the water pillar. No wind, no birdsong.

He has a nightmare about running away from something through dark woods and someone's yelling at him and he lost a rabbit from one of the snares and can't find it and he fell into the river and-

He doesn't scream or cry when he wakes up. He caaaarefully quietly goes outside and looks up at the stars and around at the dimly or not-at-all lit city for a while.

Calsa's fires are gone, so it's colder outside the huddlebed and colder still outside the house.

The streets are dimly-lit as before. A few houses have groups of small flames by their doorways.

A white catfolk pulling a cart nods at him in passing.

Distant voices sporadically echo.

"Chill!"

    "...open my eyes and he jumps back..."

        "A toast!" Something explodes.

  "Agreed!"

      "... I like sprinting to the pumps actually..."

Enough stars get through the mild light pollution to tell that they haven't moved much since he arrived.

...He should have realized this sooner but the stars are different from the ones at home, aren't they? He wasn't paying attention, before. But just how far he's gone... He won't be able to tell what direction north is anymore.

This realization, and the increasing cold, shakes him enough to go back inside and try to go back to sleep.

Yep, different stars!

When he wakes, Calsa and Merta are grooming each other and talking quietly.

"If he's a sort of hybrid, I wonder if he's a hybrid of a whisshopper, among other things. In other words, there's not five new species, or nine counting the ones he hasn't seen, there's only one, that somehow makes hybrids."

"There are no whisshoppers in Kef. Obviously his species is older than this town, but using it as an estimate of what species are around in the drydark... Can we make any predictions to test this theory?"

"I would imagine the five 'colors' include catfolk and werewolf, just because we're so common... Maybe drake?"

"Or something aquatic. Who knows how many uncontacted species there are in the aquifers!"

"Yeah. Wow. And we're just on the edge of the drydark here, on a planetary scale."

"There aren't any animals here bigger than insects, that we didn't bring ourselves... Maybe the aquifers have some kind of volcanic energy source?"

"Or maybe it's just bugs. Like whisshoppers... Humans, ew. A frogold's mouth fits all -"

"That's racist."

"Not all humans!"

"Oh, that too, but I meant the remark about frogolds."

"It's a figure of speech!"

"Then it's a racist figure of speech. How would you like if people went around saying that you can't trust cats, they burn everything they touch -"

"- which is true of kittens - some kittens - and the same goes with frogolds. The only ones you need to worry are outright hardened thieves, and taddies who don't have hands yet. Frogolds despise thieves just as much as we do, and the comedic character of a yokel frogold who thinks anything not marked is for public use doesn't exist, if it ever did. Maybe it happened once and people thought it was so funny..."

"... Sorry."

"No, you're right. The point of the Allheart Alliance is supposed to be treating everyone well, right."

"In theory. It's really just about making peace between the elves and everyone else."

"That just means we have to do better ourselves.

It's good that you stick to your principles. I like that about you."

"I shouldn't snap at you.

I don't want to make excuses... but it's been complicated at work, involving frogolds in particular, and stuff I can't tell you about. But. I still shouldn't snap at you."

Sigh. "It's okay."

Lick?

Yeah sure they can go back to grooming each other. Grumpily.

He was awake for some of that and trying very very hard to be quiet and still, and make sense of it.

Catfolk. Whisshopers. Human. That's about all he recognizes aside from connecting words like 'I' or 'the'. 'Alfheart Alliance'-- Maybe? It was a big, important-sounding word for this place. Calsa was asking him where he's from. So they're probably talking about him, and he can't tell what they're saying, aaaah... And 'work'? That's why the last person Calsa drew wasn't here. He can guess what it means.

He will 'wake up' after a while. And unless interrupted go climb out and go to the sand table, and doodle a little log cabin and the circular weave-y basket shape that holds magic for later.

"He's up. We should get up now too, to visit the courthouse before work, so you can tell the mill how long you'll be gone."

"Mm."

They rise and dress - the same clothes as yesterday. Calsa lights the under-floor fire and a sconce. They munch on disks.

"Can humans have meat? I know he's not a human, but his physical form looks pretty human..."

"Yeah, humans can eat meat, but I think they don't require it. Whisshoppers too."

Calsa breaks off a small piece of her disk and holds it out for Nico. "What do you think of this, kiddo?" (It has a faint meaty smell and is soaked with something salty and fermented.)

"Ooh, what are you drawing?"

He has also drawn a rabbit sitting still and a mean looking stick figure with big diagonal-slashes of glaring eyes and a beard and an axe.

"House. Um... Magic? [Rabbit. Dad.] I don't like him."

He sniffs and makes a face but says, "I eat that. But it's [sour]. Like the other thing."

"Merta, is there a reason to make a house look like that?"

"It's a fun texture! Something with light maybe? But he's from the deep drydark..."

"If you don't like him then I don't like him."

Convenient that he prefers the cheaper entirely-plant food.

"Is the sand magic? Or is it a drawing of magic?"

Should he answer? Should he keep secrets? Magic is very very oooooh shiny. Which is kind of scary.

He shrugs and starts drawing a tree.

"What? It takes time to process trauma, and we need to know more about his magic and his people now.

Nico, let's get you some food that you like more, okay?" Merta gently tugs him toward the door.

Fiiiiine he will be tugged. He reaches into his pants pocket for his Sparky Rock. It's still there. He feels a bit better. He holds on to it.

"I want to hear things and say things."

It's still a clear moonless night outside. A different subset of houses has small groups of flames by their doors.

"This is the house where Merta and I and Siki and you live. That house is where my friend Talia lives. My friends Meld and Tessidy live in that house." She does not say that they're planning on kittens and that she thinks they have a good chance of a litter but might be biased because she likes them, as that is not appropriate for a kid Nico's age, especially one who's been abused. "Talia works at the mill, same as me. The mill is where I came up to you for the first time. We make steel at the mill. Steel is a metal. A hard thing like rock, but werewolves like Merta can't do magic with it."

"Yesterday, I bought a burger for you from Basilio. He sells burgers. Burgers are a kind of food made from beans and squash. I gave him three money-of-Kef and he gave me a burger. Well, I didn't give him three money-of-Kef. I told him that he had three more and I had three less and he will remember that. He will know that he has three more money-of-Kef. If he wants me to do something for him, maybe dance for him and his friends, he could tell me that I have more money and he has less. Money-of-Kef comes from the Magistrate of Kef. When I work at the mill, I get more money-of-Kef. When I live in a house in Kef, I have less. If I did my work at the mill badly and broke something, I would have less. If I say to Basilio that he has three more money-of-Kef, and he gives me a burger, and then I say he didn't give me a burger and I still have the same amount of money, he and I would go to the Magistrate of Kef and she would say how much money I have and how much money Basilio has."

And here's the cart. "Hello, Paulo!"

   "Back with the human kid, I see."

"He's not actually human! He's a kaleid. I don't know exactly what his magic is. I would like to buy a burger from you, paying you three money-of-Kef."

    "Yep, that's the price."

"I wasn't expecting it to be different, I'm just trying to help him learn the language!"

    "Hah, okay. Hi kid. This here is the best burger cart in all of Kef, you know? Almost tastes like real meat, for only three!"

"How is Basilio?"

    "Pa is fine. Can't shut up about the fancy spices he wants to try importing from Archer's Tabard. How's your little mouseling, Skio was it?

"Siki. He's really busy with his apprenticeship, to a watchmaker but around here that means he makes navigators as much as anything."

"I'd like to get to the courthouse early."

"Alright. Bye Paulo!

Oh yeah, I told Nico you would show him how a water pump works."

Merta finds a rock in a corner and holds it in her hands for a minute while she walks, leading the way past the ramp and along the side of the thick wall.

Is Nico okay with eating while he walks?

The rock slowly deforms for another minute, and then she holds out the pieces for Nico to see. There's a part like a snail and a part like a swirly star. "As this part spins, water comes in the hole in the middle and goes around and goes out."

He is used to walking and eating, and walking and talking, and walking and working. And walking in general. Woodsmen do a lot of walking, and woodsmen's sons follow them all day long.

But: That's not how money works! And he doesn't know how to say what he wants to say. He's tempted to burn the one white that's come back so far on translation, but resists. Saving your magic for when it's most useful is a point belabored to him early and often.

"...There are so many people. So many people say 'Magistrate, Faris take my food so I have some of her money! Magistrate, Suki gave me all his money before he left! Magistrate, I say Faris gave me money and Faris say I not know things I said before much so I have the money.' Money is golden metal or white metal or blue metal."

He does seem interested in the pump model, and will grab it and play with it a bit if permitted. It makes sense, sort of? At least as much as the firespinner does? And it's definitely simpler than a spigot pump connected to something else. "Catfolk are good at spinning things..."

He can play with the pump model as much as he likes.

"Elves can learn from each other's memories, and elves have been around a long time collecting memories, so they know a lot now about how people say things and do things. The Magistrate is an elph - Magistrates are almost always elves in the Allheart Alliance - so if you try to lie and say 'Faris took my food' and Faris says that's wrong, the Magistrate will look at you and look at Faris and know that Faris is telling the truth and you're lying."

"Is there something you want to spin?"

"...White magic can say 'you're lying' too. Big white magic. But many people lying lying lying. So metal is money."

To Calsa: "-I not know. Don't know. There was a thing near home I like. Spinning and bzzzzz-" He holds his hands together and then pulls them apart. "One thing, one one thing. I like the fire spinner, I like the pump."

"A cutting tool? You use it to cut things onto pieces? What kind of things?"

"Rich people - people with a lot of money - and people who go a lot of different places, use metal for money. Or spices or perfumes - things you put on food or on yourself to improve the smell, so you like it more."

If he's part elph, could that explain the translation? Maybe he remembers a language that went on to become both his language and Sotalese. But it sounded like he was saying that white magic is different from elph magic... maybe the translation works on reading thoughts? Not like an undine though, she certainly wasn't thinking about 'green' or 'white' before he said those words. Good thing they haven't lied to him about anything, but it's still kind of uncomfortable to imagine.

Okay, that makes sense, it's more like favors. He nods, accepting it.

"[Logs]! They're, um. Um." He frowns thoughtfully and looks around for any signs of wood. "...Why is it still dark?"

No wood is nearby. The wall looms on one side, scattered houses on the other. Maybe some of the plants in the distant fields have woody bits?

"We haven't walked far enough to see the sun. We would have to walk for, um..."

"About a hundred times as long as it's been since we got out of bed." She counts her fingers. "Ten, and a hundred is ten tens, like if each of my fingers were two hands."

Calsa holds up her hands touching each of Merta's fingers in succession.

"You'd have to sleep three times, if you were walking all the time you were awake. And that just gets you to the storms, where the sun's light is in the sky. To see the sun, you'd have to walk that much again."

She points at the wall. "An equartier can go there and back here twice before sleeping, but they'd be pretty tired. They usually only do it once."

That........ Doesn't make any sense? The sun comes up and down every day.

"...I'm lost."

...Then again, he ran away really really hard.

He kind of misses home now. A little bit. Just a teensy bit. And just mom.

No! He left and he's not going back! He can run away again if he has to.

He noms the remains of the food thoughtfully. "One... Two, three, four, five... [It's going to be cold all the time...] What kind of things do you make Merta? I like making things."

If he's from deep in the drydark, they probably have tales of the distant lands where the sun shines. And that's true! Just, the world is bigger than it seems when you have to actually walk every step of the way.

Up ahead, a distant steady rumbling approaches.

"I made the house and the tables and the huddlebed and the sand table and the sand in it, and bowls and slates... When Siki was small I made him balls and tops and dice and pick-up-sticks." She mimes each of these. "In the past I made molds - you make metal hot so it's like water and put it in a hole in a rock and then it gets cold and hard and you take the rock away and have a metal thing. I made a little bit of the equartier path." She holds up two fingers to show thin horizonal layers of the wall.

"Now I only make slates, to write things down. People talk to me and I draw what they say and then I or other people, especially the Magistrate, can look at the drawings and know what the people said.

What would you like to make?"

"Ooh, ooh [Mom] told me how to [write]! We use, black uhhhhh, black water on white [paper] and white sand not sand on black rock. I saw a [book] that said how magic once!"

"White [paper] is thin or thick? Stiff or flexible?" with mime "Sand-not-sand... You put a thing like water on a black rock, like black water - ink - but not black, and then put white sand on top. When the water is dry there is still a thing that holds the white sand to the rock?

Is a book made of [paper] or rock?

What kind of magic?"

...clomp clomp clomp clomp CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP 

A person with flared nostrils and a streaming mane and heavy boots wait no huge hooves runs by them on top of the wall, back the way they came, holding a giant moth in a bridal carry.

CLOMP CLOMP clomp clomp clomp clomp clomp...

"That's an equartier holding a wroth. Do you know what they are?"

Wow. They must have some REALLY good green mages here.

"Black magic! Making things magic! I like it more more. [Paper] is thin and flexible. It's... Foods that don't walk. And [chalk] is like sand, it's not wet. It's a little bit wet? It's [chalk]. [Books] are made of [paper]. [Chalk] is for telling how things, like the sand table. [Paper] is for books. No I don't. Catfolk werewolf equartier wroth human elves whissopers Kaleid, um, Siki... NINE! No, TEN!"

"Mouseling, gnomunk, boark, frogold, kappa, undine, drake, liefling, tengu, drider, scoblin, bixee, apple?" Not that she really expects him to recognize the names.

And here's the courthouse. It has steel ribs and plates of stone, and an energetic fire on the top. A path from the wall slopes down to the ground and back up.

Merta leads the way through the open doorway.

Inside, the stone roof glows - the fire shines through the thin stone panels, which are engraved with images of caves and water and catfolk and werewolves and plants and gears and... Also some have angular calligraphy.

There are four sand tables. A dias at the far end.

Merta rings a bell by the door with her knuckle.

A tall solid person with a bald head, floppy ears, and an even floppier nose plods in a side door. "Hi Merta. You're early."

"Hi Meika. I have business with the Magistrate."

"Ah."

She climbs up the dias (apparently there are stairs on the back) and stands firmly.

"Merta, my faithful subject. What is your business?"

(Without moving, she pulls on her memories of Merta's lover... ah, Calsa Tabby, works at the mill, came in the second wave, adopted a mouseling pup.)

Wow, this place is pretty and impressive. Are courthouses [temples]? To all the different kinds of people, instead of to the colors? That fire must cost so much Red or a ridiculous amount of artifacts or fuel or- No, Catfolk exist. It's still amazing.

He gawks, at least until this person starts seeming like an Important Person. Then he stands behind Calsa, completely failing to be subtle about it. (He also pulls out his rock and thumbs over the spot with magic invisibly inscribed, as a comfort thing he doesn't really notice that he might not want to do.)

"I'm sure you've heard already that a child was found by the mill at the end of the last Breath shift. Calsa has taken him in. He's called Nico and is not human, despite his appearance. He does not speak our language, but we're teaching him. Calsa, you've been around him more, how would you describe him?"

"Nico, short for Nicodemus, is shy but eager to learn. He says he ran away from his family on purpose, which fits with other signs he's shown of past abuse. He likes machines and I'm confidant that he could learn a trade even if he was a human boy, and with his magic, including translation, I fully recommend him as a citizen of Kef."

"And that leads to the reason I'm bringing this to you so urgently. While we don't know exactly how he got here or how far he came, possibly using his magic, he's probably from deep in the drydark. Unless he came from Lacrimos or deep underground or something.

I presume that Kef is well-positioned to lead the diplomatic contact with his people. But I think it would be unethical to return him, and his people might not want to contact us anyway. That is the matter I set before you.

Calsa and I speculate that his mixture of weak magics and human-like appearance are both because he's the result of some other magic that produces hybrid people. He says there are five common magics. The only one we're sure of is whisshopper."

The elph stands silently.

"I need to know more about his magic and where he's from."

Calsa turns to kneel in from of Nico, still shielding him from the Important Person. "Nico, what magic do you have? Uh, red, black, green, white, blue. [book] to 'book' -" she wiggles her fingers with tiny flames popping on and off in an imitation of his fire-and-sparks illusion "- and you came here and made red and blue light...?

The place where you came from, is there light? Can you see the sun? Does water come from the sky? Is there a sky?"

He glares slightly and fidgets with his rock.

"...Do you like the Magistrate?"

"I don't really know the Magistrate... Merta likes her and I like Merta.

I like living here in Kef. The Magistrate likes when people... so, Merta works for the Magistrate. In some towns, if I said 'Faris took my food' and I was lying, the Magistrate would say I was lying, but if Merta, who works for the Magistrate, said Faris took her food, and was lying, the Magistrate would know that Merta was lying but say that Faris was lying because the Magistrate likes Merta. The Magistrate of Kef - Meikalani - does not like that. What she says to Merta, she says to me."

Fidget fidget fidget.

Should he lie? Should he just not say anything? If he lies maybe they're mad about that. It sounded like they wanted to find his home though and he DOES NOT WANT that. But Calsa likes the Important Person, and Calsa seems nice.

(So far!) He reminds himself.

"It's red, blue, green, white, black. Not black white. White black. Ummmmmm. Magistrate lying is very very bad. Um. I don't want to see [dad] again. I won't go home. I did- What do I say to say a thing was food and then fire and now it is black? I did that to my magic to run away. Boom! I can't do it again. I can't go home and I don't want to!"

"It's okay, it's okay. You're here now." hug?

"Red, blue, green, white, black." The order matters? What does that mean? "You ...toasted your magic? Used a lot of it and now you hurt? And you don't know how to go back, and nobody there knows how to get here?"

He goes completely stiff at the hug. Definitely doesn't hug back.

"Yes. I tell magic, run away away away! I know how but I can't I don't want to."

He changes cadence as if reciting something. "Red, for fire and not cold is [life]. Blue, for umm new things places is [life]. Green, for food and [health] is [life]. White, for know things is [life]. Black, for make things is [life]."

Oookay, no more hug then.

"You're here now. You ran away, you're very far away now.

You have white. You have red and blue, yeah? Do you have green or black?"

"No blue. I toasted the blue. Yes, I have green and black. I get more red blue green white black when I am big maybe."

He destroyed part of his magic?!

"Hm, 'toast' might be the wrong word. Toasting is when you put food in a fire to make it black, and then it's black food. You burnt your magic. Burning is when it's not food anymore."

"That's enough for now. I will pay you to take care of him until he is grown... twenty per cycle, plus the services of a guard on a different shift, who I want you to pass off as another child."

That's twice as much as she makes at the mill, although now she'll really be working two shifts per cycle, so it works out to the same rate, which is the same as her stipend for Siki... that's probably deliberate, so it looks like she's getting a normal stipend for 'both children'.

"Merta, send a runner to tell the mill that Calsa Tabby won't be working for a while.

Calsa, stay here with Nico while I fetch your guard."

The Magistrate steps down and leaves.

Nico probably has a lot of questions and is feeling stressed. But no hugging. Hm. Calsa turns to the nearest sand table and 'idly' draws some squiggles.

Red is catfolk. Green is drake? White does translation. Blue is whisshopper? That's the wrong order. Red, blue, green, white, black. Catfolk, whisshopper(?), drake(?), undine(??)... "What do you make with black?"

No, he's not very happy right now! But nothing terrible has happened yet. They're not even yelling at him.

He follows over and carefully gently sets his rock in the sand. "Don't touch that." He draws the same circle with two triangles inside it from before, very deliberately and neatly. Outer circle first, then one triangle, then the other triangle, very deliberately. He makes a dot in the middle. "Put fire here."

Boop.

Sluuuurp. No fire here! She can feel that she's pushing out fire, if she gets that kind of feedback, but the little circle slurps it all up. If she maintains it for more than a couple of seconds, the fire will appear normally, though. And then a little wavering candlelight-flicker will appear over the dot when she stops.

"Amazing." Not something he could fake with his own 'red' magic, not that it's likely he would try a complicated deception - even if he put a tiny flame on the dot and then grew it afterward, she would have felt him pushing back on her fire, a sensation she hasn't had since she was a kitten playing with her siblings. "Does the magic drawing make you have less black? Does holding my fire make you have less black?" If only the drawing costs him, every non-catfolk household in Kef will want one under their huddlebed.

"Drawing it makes me have less black." He touches the outside edge of the circle carefully. "The magic is burning a little little bit. But it is not burning the black in me. Only the black in the sand. I won't burn magic again. It will break if the sand moves. I think changing the sand to rock is magic, and it eats magic, so I don't know. I only saw the black magic book once. I need to do it a lot and see. I won't go home. I like doing things I want with magic."

She stopped her fire on the dot... If she pushes at it again, can she make more fire there? In other words, is the fire still her fire? If not, if she touches the dot (slowly, watching to see if Nico objects) can she snuff it out as if it was another cat's fire? Is it still catfire, or regular fire that she can't control at all?

"You're not going home. You're here. You're far away from there.

If you draw a magic drawing in sand, and then Merta makes the sand into one piece of rock without moving it, will the drawing still be magic?

You can do lots of things that you like doing with magic here! All the magic you want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone.

How big a drawing like this can you make? How much fire can it hold? Now, and when you're big?"

The fire is still her fire. She can make more, without actually touching it again. For the first instant she tries to bloom it, it gets sucked in a bit, like a cup with a slow leak being filled to the top again. She can also snuff out the small visible flame, though it takes continuous effort. She can't seem to touch whatever's in the 'cup', and it keeps slowly leaking out.

"Merta making rock is magic! This holds magic! I don't know! I like seeing how! But um. The Magistrate- Not talk loud, but I still don't like? Lying? Not saying things? I like you. I don't like Kef maybe. I don't know don't know."

If the drawing is consumed, it might be more expensive to fill a drawing then to just hire a catfolk to keep a fire for you, oh well. Maybe there are contraptions where a pilot light would be useful? Even the huge turbines for the pumps have the flames stuck on the end of rods that you pull out to light... You could leave a beacon in the dark? Could she refill one while being carried past by an equartier?

"The Magistrate doesn't lie... but yeah, she's not saying things. If she does things you don't like, we can leave Kef.

You're... you can do a lot of things. New things that we can't do. The Magistrate wants you to be in Kef. If we go to another town, the Magistrate there will want you too. Meikalani might be the best Magistrate for what you want. Doing a lot of magic that you like."

And all of them will want to breed him, which is happening over her cold dead body.

"I wanted to say I can not do things. But that um. Magistrate very very loud when I can do things later."

He doodles in the sand. "Not doing magic," he mutters. It looks like some sort of unfamiliar script.

"[Mom] said I'm so little I don't know what is good and what I want sometimes."

"Mm. If the Magistrate wants you to do magic, you will do magic or we will leave Kef. Meikalani will give you money for magic, if you want to do the magic and if you don't want to do it the same amount of money. Other Magistrates might not give you money.

I think you know what you want. The thing you want might not be a thing you can have, or it might hurt you, but you know what it is.

Do you want the people in Kef to speak your language? That's work for a lot of people, and if we leave Kef there will be more people who don't know your language. So you have to speak our language, even if you don't want to. Or if you're sad and want to not talk to anyone, want to not have anyone near, and you want to go away into the fields. The fires there are small, for light, and you will be cold and hurt. So if you want that, I'll say, make a black magic drawing and I will put fire in it so you are not hurt. And then you can go, but you have to make the drawing first."

"I learn how to talk and write in Kef. I talk so much and get more white. I want to go away sometimes. I want to be ooh shiny sometimes. I want to do magic magic magic. I want - not tell me do this do that do this do that!"

He slumps and knocks his head against the edge of the sand table. "Why does Calsa like me?"

"Maybe when you are big you can go out very deep into the drydark. You will need magic for fire and food, but when you are big you will have a lot of magic, right? Then no one will tell you do this do that."

She flinches forwards when he hits his head but pulls back before touching him when he seems okay.

"I want to like everyone. I want to make sure no one hurts you. Or anyone, but you need my help more? I, uh, like being with you more than working at the mill?"

"If I do color things I will have a lot of magic. I want to- Do food and [life] things, so I get more green magic. Green magic does foods when they are on the ground and not food yet."

...It doesn't count as on purpose if he flops and happens to end up leaning against Calsa as part of the flop. Definitely not.

Flop.

"[life] things have to do with plants, like in the fields around Kef? So, you want to put little bits of plant in the ground and watch them and when they're food, you have done a [life] thing? Does it give you more green magic to use green magic, or more green magic when you do food and [life] things and don't use green magic?"

She carefully doesn't respond to his flop.

"Yes, plants are [life]. Plants and also foods that move. Bok bok bok?" He makes chicken noises. "I don't know how to say how to get more magic. It's hard to say things. I am trying but I don't know."

Calsa has never seen a chicken but she can tell he's imitating an animal and not pulling out an exotic racial slur. "We can get a food that moves! I will say more things and then saying things will be less hard later.

I've been here once before, when Merta started working here and said the courthouse was amazing and I had to see it. When I came to Kef, I walked along the equartier path, but the courthouse was smaller then and didn't have the steel and the drawings and the flame..."

Meikalani returns.

...accompanied by a person Nico's size with green skin, round golden eyes, and a mouth that takes up most of the space in her head. She runs up to Calsa and bounces.

"Hiii! Are you my new mom?"

".....Yes! I'm Calsa. What's your name, child?"

"Lin!

...I'm a girl."

whew

(Her smell is uninformative.)

"This is Nico. He's new to Kef. How did you get here, Lin?"

"Some big scary Boarks took me from my family in Argolake. The lake, not the city. Argo Lake. They wanted me to steal things for them. Stealing is wrong!"

He jumps and snatches his rock back into his pocket the moment the Magistrate reappears. And - stands up and walks around the table so he can see everyone at once, actually.

"Hi. I'm Nico. I not talk good, I ran away. City is many many house? What's a lake?"

Lin has been briefed and is not going to pretend to have a child's inability to adjust her language. "Yes, a city is many many houses. A lake is a lot of water on the ground. My family lived among the plants where the water was only a little. Is there water in your house?"

"Not now, but we can get water and put it in our house."

"Nico, do you like water?"

"All us like water. Water is food."

"It is! Not much food in the water here in the drydark, but lots and lots of food in the lake!"

"Calsa, who else knows that Nico is not human? What magic has he demonstrated?"

"I told Paulo - he sells burgers near us, dark of the square. So probably half the catfolk know by now.

Nico made an illusion in the square yesterday. I don't know who witnessed it. He only used magic translation once, at the mill, and I think everyone else was glad to leave him to me... Fuzzer might have heard, uh -"

"I know who you mean." Jake 'Fuzzer' Stirling, foreman of the Breath-shift rollers, part of Meikalani's original expedition to found Kef. "He'll keep a secret if he gets to be in on the fun, and he's a useful person to bring in anyway."

"And Nico just showed me another thing he can do, absorbing my fire into this drawing he made in the sand and letting it out later."

"Okay, that doesn't really change anything. For now, I want you to keep him from doing magic in public other than illusions."

"Ma'am... his previous family controlled him a lot, and I just said to him that he could do any magic he wanted as long as he didn't hurt anyone."

He will play vocabulary games with Lin when they talk!

-Until that last part. "I'm not [stupid]! Magic is [ooh shiny]. Everyone very loud if I do magic. I do not want loud. Maybe I not say anything, but I like Calsa!"

That was a much better response than she was fearing. "How long, ma'am?"

"Two deci-years."

"So we'll sleep three tens and an eight more times, that's ten and ten and ten and eight. And then - if you do magic here or at the mill or by the water pillar, the Magistrate will not be loud. You can still do magic in our house now. Okay?"

"I can only do a little magic until I am big and I'm not good at it yet so okay. I want to learn so many things instead."

There is lots to learn! Starting with the language, since that will make everything else easier.

She gets him a fur coat; quilted scraps of fur with no recognizable body parts or distinctive patterning.

She takes him to walk through the fields.

She brings home a vase with four mice. Merta makes sand for them to dig in and sprinkles in crumbs.

Lin plays with Nico with unchildlike diligence. Maybe she's lonely.

Siki comes home to sleep but stays aloof.

Meikalani sends an invitation for human women to come to Kef, at any age from current peak fertility, down to Nico's age so he might fall in love as they grow up together. To obscure her intent, she also invites a drake and a tengu and orders a jar of gold wire, which she genuinely wants, and invites a kappa and a drider as randomly-selected distractions.

Nico is uncommonly focused for an actual eight year old. There are still moments of genuine distraction, dejection, or playfulness, and playfulness sneaking into the rest of what he does, but a somewhat uncanny amount of his time is spent doing something purposefully. He says the same things over and over, only occasionally skipping into his old language. He practices writing in the sand table for an hour or more at a time, as long as anyone will teach him, and re-doing old work if they're fed up. In the fields he carefully inspects the soil and the plants for what kind of crop they are, what kind of soil it is, does it look wormy, does it look weevily, any insects or other pests? He - risks magnifying his sense of smell out there after bracing for it, the one Green trick he knows, to learn the way the field smells and compare it to a forest at home - he should have paid more attention to Mom's gardening lectures.

...He practices using his magic to exhaustion of it every day, inside the house (mostly), pushing for getting better at the tricks he already knows, extending them. A candle-sized flame or showers of sparks for Red, nothing quite yet for Blue though he can almost feel a third point coming in, the scent-boosting for Green and trying to interpret more than 'this person was here recently' with it, playing with sparkles of light for White (and always making illusions of complicated machines with lots of moving parts), and drawing slight variations on magic circles with his Black, in sand, scratched into rock slates. He gets Calsa to help test them as safely as possible, with him standing far away in case of explosion. And at least one does explode- With Calsa's fire, which she is immune to. But he manages bigger ones that hold more. He also manages a switch after a week's worth of attempts, a separate White-Black combined pebble that turns the 'leaking' on or off, and is excited and animated for the whole rest of the day.

...He is slightly obsessive about caring for the mice. They have to mostly stay in the vase because they would get into the food and the bed but these mice are here because he asked for them without really thinking about it, and now they're his responsibility and it's kind of terrifying. Are they too warm? Are they too cold? Are they bored or scared? Are they hungry or thirsty? Does their sand need to be cleaned? Do they like scratches? ...He tells Calsa he doesn't want any more pets what if he hurts them but isn't going to get rid of the ones she already found.

He thinks Lin is kind of weird. Something about her just doesn't seem quite right but he has a lot to think about and aside from vague disquiet he ignores it. And she's patient and good at talking, which is helpful. He doesn't find Siki strange at all, keeping to yourself is an extremely understandable thing to do, this house is getting crowded, though it's disappointing once he learns about Siki's work. It sounds fascinating.

Calsa will spend all her waking hours teaching him if he wants, with breaks for errands.

The soil is sandy and dry. It has worms and mites and the occasional tiny spider. The crops are mostly squash and beans, and some hay. It smells less than the forest, and faintly putrid.

With practice boosting his sense of smell, he can tell the  age and sex of random catfolk and werewolves, and whether Calsa and Merta are tired or stressed or happy.

Once, the giant moth walks down their street, waving antennae through all the people and buildings.

The mice are cold when not actively warmed. They are hungry and thirsty and scared, but not bored. They like their sand to be changed whenever it's at all dirty. They love scratches once they get used to him.

When Nico's Sotalese improves, Siki is more interested.

"Hey kid, you like machines, right? Here's a watch I'm cleaning." He opens the case on a clear spot on the floor.

He takes a hand-sized humanoid figure made from tightly woven reeds out of his pocket and puts it next to the watch, where it lifts out each tiny gear. Many of the parts are smooth black stone like Nico's pet rock.

"This watch is for a mining foreman, so it doesn't show anything fancy like the moons of Lacrimos, just minutes, hours, and cycles in a deci-year. Here's the mainspring, which I won't take out right now, it's a pain. Made right here in Kef. The spring doesn't pull with perfectly equal force at every point, so there's a cam here to adjust for that, but I'm trying to figure out a mechanism to adjust to whatever the force of the spring is without having to know it in advance..."

Complete immersion, extreme dedication, and having the kind of child's brain that absorbs language like a sponge absorbs water combine to get him rapid progress in Sotalese.

Pretty dry... But whoever is planting these probably knows more about these particular crops than he does, and running the water turbine to them all the time would probably cause some sort of other problem. All the eternal night already means they're pretty different than what he expects. He wishes he'd paid more attention to gardening... Making them fruit right away would be pointless... They're probably fertilizing it with manure... Maybe Green can tell him what a plant needs, or just make plants healthier? If he's going to wander eventually he needs to be able to make food on his own. But he decided not to try all sorts of new kinds of magic right now, just subtle things, because that would make everyone go crazy even more.

He asks Calsa what magic various species have after the moth incident! Every species has exactly one except him? That's still so weird. He makes a heat plate for the mice and puts their vase on top of it so the sand at the bottom will always be nice and warm. And then worries that it'll get too warm and carefully tests it to make sure it's okay. He gets a second Green point soon, he was probably close anyway, and starts using it on what the book called diagnose- Just a simple probing query: What's wrong with this creature? Is it a little hungry? Too cold? Is there a teeny scratch on its tail that is bothering it? If he has mice that are depending on him he is going to keep taking paranoidly exquisite care of them.

"So tiny... So the spring pushes less when it's mostly loose? And it has to push the same speed no matter what?"

The mice:

- have sore paws from the sand

- feel exposed without stuff to make nests with

- don't like the smell in the vase

- don't like the smell of predators everywhere else

- love the crumbs of nuts

"The mainspring pushes less as it unwinds, yeah, which means it pushes the wigwag less each wig, so it wiggles slower. The way this watch works, the correct amount to push is the smallest amount, and when the mainspring is pushing harder, this other spring here pushes against the cam to drag it slower. As the cam rotates, it gets lower and the other spring relaxes and drags less on the movement of the mainspring.

Fancier watches have a different mechanism that doesn't drag the watch slower, but you still need to know in advance exactly how the mainspring gets weaker. In practice, it's not that hard, it's almost linear - er, how well do you know your numbers?

But I think it would be neat to be able to swap out the mainspring with a completely different one and have the watch still keep time without any manual adjustment.

How about this: if you come up with an idea for that, I'll pester my boss to let you see the shop, okay?"

(He thinks the mice need a slightly bigger place to live, and some actual dirt instead of just sand 'cause it's softer, and maybe a couple of teeny caves or overhangs to make them less scared and bored, and he will offer to do Merta's chores or do magic or something in exchange for helping with that. ...And then wash it with water because now it smells like Merta and they don't like that. And maybe buy or borrow some rags or thread and dead straw and fallen bits from the field for nesting! If these mice are here because of him he has to be good to them. He will be So intent and So careful with them. And they are kind of cute.)

"I can add and subtract and mul-tip-ly. I don't know if I'll have any ideas but I will try. This is interesting. Do you know about my magic? A watch that touches a magic pebble to something once a minute might be useful. Maybe if the mainspring spins something and then has to un-spin it? It would spin faster but also slow down more when the spring is strong?"

Merta is happy to expand the mouse enclosure and does not demand anything in return. What magic does he think she would like, though? Does he happen to have a method of making someone happy in a way that temporarily impairs them? She's heard of lieflings able to do that.

"This is already dirt like we use here... in wetter or windier places I suppose they have dirt just lying around, is that what you mean? I could make the grains have smoother shapes? Or you could grind them with a mortar and pestle."

He'll have to buy any organic matter he wants, but it's cheap.

Siki gives him a simplified talk on functions and the kind of shapes they make when you graph them.

"Like a beacon that only lights once a minute, and lasts for days before a catfolk needs to come by to refill it? What else can your magic switch on and off?"

"You're thinking of storing energy in a spinning wheel, taking energy from the mainspring when it has excess, and giving it back later when it runs down?"

(Lin is watching this exchange, visibly bored.)

He will - ask to do some sort of chores or make a magic plate or something, before just assuming he gets an allowance - and then walk around with Calsa for a bit to shop for bedding for his mice, looking for cheap stuff nobody wants. Maybe woodchips or straw will suffice instead of grinding down the sand finer?

To Merta: "I heard of that but I don't think I can do that yet. It seems silly to me. But Green magic can help with being tired and hurt, Mom did that for me sometimes, so I could try that. Maybe on the mice first. I could make you a warm plate like the one for the mice. But Calsa would have to refill it sometimes."

To Siki: "I will have to try lots of things. You can put magic in drinks so it happens when you drink it. You can move things with magic. We had magic lights and magic tools... There was a beacon I was supposed to break if I was in trouble and it would call Mom. There were talking mirrors you talked through. There was a water cleaner, and the um guard rocks, that keep strangers out... That's not what I was thinking with the watch. The mainspring has the energy... Big watches use a swinging thing going back and forward, right?"

Too bad Lin is bored. But she could always go do something else.

"Each species has one thing, although it might have several parts? Like I can make fire and put out any catfire and I'm invulnerable to all fire, both catfire and the hungry kind.

The wroth was paid by the Magistrate to look for disease. They go intangible to smell people's insides. They can make their whole body intangible, not just their antennae.

You’ve seen elves, which stick memories places where any elph can read them later, and boarks at the mill, who can’t be hurt by anything, pretty much. I think they can get sick. Gnomunks are kind of like elves but for physical objects, which is useful for storing things so a frogold can’t grab them. Equartiers can run really fast in straight lines, and smash things up if they charge into them.

Drakes make things grow and change, but that's not always a good thing, and they can’t stop doing it, so there aren’t any here even though they’d be useful for the fields. Whisshoppers make illusions. Kappas make air and water. Scoblins make you hate things. Undines read thoughts. Lieflings make medicines and stuff. Tengu have like a bunch of bodies? They're good for sending messages. Driders are good at thinking. And humans made all the other species.”

"Is that a normal thing, to pay kids for doing chores?"

"Sure, and I think Meika would want us to."

"Hm."

"We're in her town, and it seems to be going pretty well. Why should he be counted as a unit with us?"

"Look, he's not my kid, and I want to pay him to make me a fire plate for when I need to sleep at work, okay?"

Straw is available, and ragged clothes, claw trimmings, and teeth. No wood chips.

Fur (shorn, from werewolves) is cheap, since it's not very good for weaving, only compost.

Fur (shorn, from catfolk) is almost as cheap.

Fur (on skin) can be had, although the tanner gives him a surly look and will only sell finely-shredded scraps of pelt.

Merta does not press on wanting a pleasantly impairing drug, and expresses curiosity about things to make people less tired instead.

Talking mirrors sound useful! How long does Nico think it would take before he's grown enough to make mirrors or emergency signals?

"This watch has a thing like that too, see here?" His reed figure flips it back and forth, a stick with paddles that stick into a gear. "You're thinking it could be heavier? Then it will move slower overall, and still move slower when the mainspring pushing on it is weaker.

Spinning... like it's connected to gears that spin another wheel really fast back and forth? That makes it act like it's heavy when the wigwag pushes on it, but doesn't weigh the watch down as much. I wonder if you could make the effective weight change?"

Lin mopes and taps her fingers in rhythm. She must really like being around other people though.

(He did some chores at his old home, and then could do extra chores for a few copper pennies. It feels better to earn the things the mice need instead of just asking for them. If Calsa and Merta don't have any chores he can help with, he'll work on a warm plate for Siki but it will take a day or two.)

"I think that needs some blue and then a bunch of experiments. Like, a whole bunch. And I only have a little bit of magic to experiment with right now. And yeah, that's what I was thinking of... It spins back and forward... But since the mainspring is pushing it every time it's the same problem. I was thinking maybe a spring that pushes back more the more it gets pushed? So a little push and a big push take the same time? But I don't think that works. I guess I will think about it."

"Are you bored, Lin?"

"Oh, you want to put a spring on the wigwag? Huh. I don't know if that will keep steady time the way you're imagining, but I'll make a tiny spring and try it and see... And I'll pester my boss about letting you observe, or I'll do the experiments at home.

Is there something I can do to get you more blue? ...Is these something I can do to get you more blue that Calsa can't do? Does going to lots of places help? If you were a mouseling I could take you on a epic journey across the floor... I don't know if that would count if it only feels like a huge distance, but is there a way you could see what I'm seeing?"

"I'm fine. Hey, want to skip stones on my pool?" (Merta made a ledge around the top of the huddlebed to hold a shallow pool of water.)

"Um I never explained it right before. The book I read said getting more colors is about what kind of things you do and also how you feel about it. Red is for sports and hard work and doing things you don't like 'cause you want them to be done, like carrying rocks to build a house. Blue is for seeing new things and taking shortcuts by knowing, and being clever, like getting the wind to grind a mortar and pestle so you don't have to. Green is for learning about plants and animals, and for helping plants and animals and people, and for um knowing in ways you can't write down? White is for learning new languages and doing art and practicing talking, and for wanting to understand and say things to people. Black is for making things that last a long time and for being very very careful and for planning, like building a house in a direction so the wind won't batter it and making sure the ground is good. I don't know how to skip rocks, that sounds fun to try!"

"So you've got to have the right feelings? Bleh.

See you, kid."

"Here's some rocks, see how they're flat but still a bit rounded? If you throw them so they're flat, and give them a spin, they'll bounce off the water. I'm trying to bounce them off the near half of my pool and get them to stop as close to the far end as possible without going over the edge."

Plish.

Plish.

"Have you ever met a frogold before?"

He watches how she holds and moves her arms. Throwing rocks probably has the same principles as an axe swing, right? Exactly how you hold it and move is important.

"No. Just Kaleid. It's very different, people who can do only one thing but do it all day. Even important people can't do magic all day! What do frogolds do?"

She tosses a stone in the air.

Gulp!

It vanishes... and she spits it out into her hand. "Don't worry about losing stones over the edge, I can get them back without climbing down."

"Ooh, that's good for throwing things! Can you get stuff over the wall or up a cliff like that? Or get tools without standing up? Or catch fish?"

He will go ahead and start trying to skip stones! They have to spin, and they have to mostly go flat.

Toss. Sploosh. It sinks. Toss. It skips, but way too far.

Gulp. She spits it into the water.

"Yeah, I can grab any loose object that fits in my mouth within the width of this house or so." Twenty feet. "If it's in the water:" gulp, and the rock is replaced with an air bubble. Spit. "Or if I don't give back any air:" she tosses the rock and it vanishes with a sharp pop.

"You're a good" kid "friend. Most people think first about how we're going to steal all their stuff."

"I also thought of that but it's not like you actually did it. Calsa could burn me or Merta could cover me with rock or Siki could... Spy on me?" He shrugs. "Can you do it through glass? Make a jar with no air in it? I remember hearing that some craftsmen use places with no air, but I don't know what for. Maybe so they can heat things and not burn them."

"Siki could sneak knives into your blanket, or trip you off a cliff... he won't. Catfolk and werewolves and mouselings and gnomunks and most mammal-derived species just don't hurt people. They do steal, though. And frogolds aren't bred to be friendly puppies who want to please everyone, we don't smell like you, firmlanders don't meet us often... so it's easy to worry about us even if you don't worry about catfolk.

Oh yeah, I could grab the air out of a jar. Glass or stone. If you find a use for that, I want to do that!

I miss my mommies and daddies, but I don't really want to go back to farming fish in Argo Lake. Stealing is wrong. Merta wants me to be in a team of doctors, which, just, ew. Blech. No.

What does Merta want you to do?"

"...I dunno. What the Magistrate wants me to do, probably. Make a lot of money for Kef? Make guard rocks? And that is okay because Kef is paying Calsa to take care of me. It's fair. I kind of think Calsa and Merta want me to think they're Moms. But I don't. Calsa is nice and Merta is okay but I have a Mom already."

"It would be nice if everyone had fire plates and didn't have to fear bandits... not a big problem in Kef yet but there will be more. How big can your magic get?

Calsa and Merta don't really seem like mammal-derived Moms to me either, but I wouldn't know. What do you want to do?"

Splish. "I think even important people don't get huge magic. Maybe a hundred times what I have now? They mostly get better at using it. I know there's a trick to make magic things stay magic..." Splish. "...I want to use magic with machines, like the turbines. Those are amazing! ...Why is the mammal thing so important?"

"Which mammal thing? I guess we're all half mammal, since humans are mammals, but there's a clear difference between, say, catfolk and frogolds. 

A sharp sense of smell, and producing body smells with reliable meanings, is shared by most mammal-derived species. If you just use your eyes, all species smile and glare and cry the same, but the puppies don't always use their eyes.

Mammal moms really like to take care of you. They get attached. My first mommy picked my egg out of the water because it was pretty, and her boyfriend, my first daddy, started paying attention to me when I showed him I was smart. By the time my fifth mommy taught me to skip stones, my first had moved on to another pretty egg. A lot of eggs and a fair number of taddies don't grow up. It's okay - by the time we're people, we're safe.

Some mammals, not all but including catfolk and werewolves, have litters. Like frogolds have lots of eggs, but instead of picking the best kits, they pick who gets to have a litter and give one kit to each other family. Because they get attached to kits. So the way they pick who actually makes the litter changes what the species is like, as the choices add up, litter after litter, year after year, lifetime after lifetime. That's why werewolves are so friendly and catfolk are so sharp and smart.

Can you make water? Can you make a rock that keeps making water?"

"...That's weird." Like they're dogs or cats for real. And babies not being people yet??????

"...That's really weird. Um, yeah, but the turbine is way easier. Making magic things per-man-ent, that's called making an [enchantment], I don't know how yet. Just what the book said about it. About pulling on the place under the world."

"The place under the world?

Can you cool things down? Can you store water in a plate?"

"I dunno. Probably? I only get to try like one thing every day. I guess you probably want to get water without needing a catfolk."

"Yes, and in the drybright it doesn't matter how many catfolk there are; there's no water to pump up no matter how deep you dig. Water comes through pipes or it comes from kappas, or a tiny bit from ents. If you could put a town's worth of water in a plate and carry it there, a lot of people would be very happy."

"I read stories about people exploring, um, drybrights." Desert adventures, oases and ancient ruins. He wanted to see them some day. "Pipes would be better. It'd be like a big bowl, not a lake. Not even this pool. Or maybe some day a [portal]. There's one between Kelos and Remii that Rulaan of Kelos did. You can just walk through and be there right away."

"Wow. Is a [portal] a thing that water can flow through? Or do you have to carry it? - that would still be great.

Can air go through a [portal]?"

"I think it's just like a door. I never saw it but I heard about it."

One of his skipped rocks lands close to the edge. "Yes! This is fun."

"I wonder if wind would blow between the hot and cold parts, like it does in the sky. You might need two [portal]s, one for each direction? But you could put them anywhere! One deep in the drybright, one deep in the drydark. Make two places newly inhabitable.

The 'drydark' is a silly name, isn't it? It's not dry. Deeper in, I hear there could be mountains of ice."

"[Portal]s everywhere! But if it were easy there would have been more back home... Why doesn't the sun rise and set like it's supposed to?"

Plish plish plonk.

"Maybe it's easier here? Like how a catfolk here can fill a fire plate for you?

Okay. You're from a different world where magic works differently, right, even though the grownups don't want us talking too much about that? Let me go slowly to make sure I don't make any wrong assumptions. Your world is a big big ball of rock, flying along in a even bigger loop around your sun, right?"

"...Yeah. I went really far from home. The world is a big ball, you can tell because of how far away things disappear bottom first. And I think that sounds right about the sun."

She thought that was because of mirages, but she's not going to argue. It doesn't really matter whether he's correct about the nature of his world.

"Great. So I'm guessing that your ball wobbles or spins so that in some places the sun is visible part of the time. Our ball doesn't. Lacrimos spins, and I think most of its moons spin, so it's possible on this world. Just, most planets - balls - that people like us can live on, are close enough to their sun that a complicated force I don't understand pulls them until they stop spinning." She totally understands and can work out the formulas herself, but it's not common knowledge for a child.

"...Oh. So there's no [night], because it's always [night]. That means... Oh, the drydark and drybright make sense now. That's so amazing and also kind of sad and scary. Wow, I can't believe there are plants that grow even on the edge of it. I'm gonna explore the drybright and drydark some day. I want to show everyone my home but ummmmm."

He thinks doing a permanent portal is the kind of thing done by burning some of every color and knowing exactly what you're doing. And the idea of going home is scary, even if he imagines being a legendary hero like Rulaan. 

"I can't. I don't like being a secret. But-" and he's quoting someone- "Things you don't like happen all the time, you can complain or you can be strong."

"Yeah, having to hide is awful."

Plish plish.

Plish plish phish.

"Will you take me with you? I don't know what I can be useful for, but I want to see what's in the drydark and the drybright. I want be there when you make it a nice place to live. I want the world to have so much water that frogolds can live in peace everywhere."

"...I dunno. It's probably going to be hard. And then you are going to say 'I don't care', yeah yeah... I won't stop you following I guess. I'm not going soon anyway. I need to figure out [enchantment] and make a bunch of those first."

"Fair.

Are you alright?

I mean, like, no matter what, there are plenty of frogolds to do my job, whatever that turns out to be. You're the only kaleid in the world. If anything happens to you, or even if you just have trouble building the right color to do whatever you need to do, people will be sad. I know, 'Things you don't like happen all the time, you can complain or you can be strong'. If you want to be strong, be strong. But tell me if I can help, okay?"

"...It's not supposed to be... Dad got so mad when people think he's not strong or smart. Mom was worried about what the neighbors think of me. I don't like that. I wish I was all alone forever sometimes."

"Hm." Frogolds who feel like that don't usually survive to personhood.

"So you don't actually want to be alone, you just feel like that sometimes... You want to be around people who don't want anything from you? You want to have friends who are loyal to you? Are you more worried about people you like using your feelings unfairly, or people who need you trying to make you do what they want?"

"I dunno. If someone needs my food or my magic it's still mine. I don't like it when people say you should be nice." It usually means 'give me something' or 'do this chore' or 'let us make fun of you and don't even get mad'.

"Ah, because that's a threat. If they say you're not nice often enough, you'll get hurt. They're not even saying something smart, that other people could argue about. The meaning of the word has nothing to do with actually being nice.

Frogolds have variety. Puppies like to agree on things. But if, say, a mommy wanted me to be nice, meaning that I should follow her particular rules about which taddies to feed and never pick up eggs, and I thought it was more important to be loyal to my household, I would be able to find another mommy who cared about loyalty. Something like that actually happened: My first daddy wanted me to be smart, and told me about shapes, and I could imagine the shapes in my head but he couldn't. So he didn't trust my visual thoughts and thought I was stupid to trust them myself. So I stopped hanging out with him and found my fourth daddy instead.

What does nice mean to you, if you got to decide? Suppose you make a nice place deep in the drydark. What people would you bring there? How would you decide what magic to do? Would you rather be the only kaleid so that people are afraid to say bad things about you, or would you rather there were lots of kaleids, doing lots of things for lots of reasons, and no one would want to say bad things about you?"

"Yeah. Saying I should be nice was always just saying I should do what they say. I dunno. I wouldn't bring many people. They could hurt me or mess with things... Being special is scary because everyone will be looking, but I also kind of like it... Maybe the second thing. But it's just me."

"Oh! Humans could make more of your species.

So, you know how humans made mouselings out of mice? If a human tried that with a mouseling, the result would be another mouseling, not a third new species. If a human tried that on you, there might be another kaleid because you're already a person like a mouseling, or the human magic might consider you to be a kind of animal and make something new. Or it might fail, that happens sometimes." Sometimes horribly.

"Humans are secretive about how it works exactly. You'd have to hold their hand through a hole in wall."

"...I didn't know that was how! From real mice! Green magic to look like a catfolk or a wolf or or or a mouseling or something, or an [angel], that's, some people have that, and they can hear really good, or smell really good, or fly with their real wings made of meat and feathers, but their magic doesn't change!!!"

"No one's magic changes! Not even like how you get stronger in each color as you do and feel things. After doing the secret magic part, the humans grow a baby, a totally new person, over the course of a year and a half, just like with regular human babies. They can't turn a mouse into a mouseling, or replace a mouseling with a new person in the same body, killing the old one! No. Humans don't change magic. They just copy or create it."

(Author note: At this point, Nicodemus is pretty sure that his species, and the local 'humans' that he just happens to look like are entirely different. The word the color-magic society uses for themselves, lost to time, originally meant something like 'many colors'.

Thus: Their species as a whole is called Kaleid. Kaleidic, Kaleidian, or Kaleidish. Plural Kaleids.)

"...So their magic is making new kinds of magic. I guess maybe they tried a bunch of different things to make catfolk and frogolds and everyone? It's scary that it's a secret. What if it hurts but actual mice and cats and things can't tell? What if it goes wrong? I've only heard of like... Twenty kinds of people but there's MILLIONS of kinds of animals. I think."

"I'm pretty sure it doesn't hurt, when the target is a person, because it's been done plenty of times to copy from people, sometimes against their will and they've complained about it plenty but didn't mention it hurting.

Usually rare kinds who don't get along with others of the same species, for example aasimar, or really useful ones, but also sometimes a human and a werewolf get married and use human magic to produce children who are related to both parents, which is otherwise impossible between different species.

I think it fails pretty often, and every attempt is costly. The creator of catfolk died from it.

There are still plenty of humans who would be happy to try to copy from you, out of desire to help the world or simply because they're getting paid a lot."

"They died? I don't want to talk about this any more."

He wants to throw the rock as hard as he can but temper tantrums get you in trouble so he just drops it in the pool. He hasn't been in trouble here yet and doesn't want to see what that looks like.

And no way can he maybe kill someone by accident.

Well that's just great.

Plish plish plish.

Plish plish.

Plish plish plonk.

(Author's note: Calsa's summary of all the species she knows is retconned in at https://glowfic.com/replies/2021700#reply-2021700.)

Calsa and Merta return from whatever they were off doing together in private.

slowblink

Merta nuzzles the top of her head.

"Hi kids. What do you want to do today?"

"I dunno. Maybe running. I don't want to get slow and weak and useless. Or illusions in the square. I want to make them last a whole hour before I run out."

"What's Siki been saying to you? But sure, we could run to the courthouse."

"- or maybe running out in the fields would be easier. But why running? I think practicing kaleid magic is a better way to be useful..."

"Running to escape.

But that is how you grow your magic, right? Blue for travel? Or, no, red for exertion!"

"Um, if I went running to escape I would die in the drydark? Yeah. For red magic. And for being healthy. I'm already practicing magic as much as I can and running out every day."

Huh. She thought he was worried about people wanting him, but if he doesn't realize how valuable he is, there's no reason to scare him more. "If you run into the drydark with a fireplate and make it blink on and off, someone will see it and rescue you. How about we run first, and then go to the square to do some illusions? Do you think you could make an illusion stick to me as I move?"

(Oh, he is. He has just heard of the idea of subterfuge more than the average eight year old.)

"I think illusions would be brighter than a fireplate but okay. That will be good practice, I'll try it! Okay, I'll do stretches! I hope my spring idea I told Siki helps him."

Stretching! And running! Both of those things are not thinking about the vast scary wall of being the only one who can do some things, and weird baby magic to change that!

A group of catfolk stand around the edge of the ramp of equartier path.

"A drake is arriving soon, going right where you're standing and then turning left out to Pieta's field."

"-A drake is a kind we can't be near, Calsa? Because they change things? That seems sad." Blue can do magic suppressant...

"Yeah... it's not that bad; once the drake is settled in to their house we can visit them. And we can watch now as long as we stay outside the ring of fire - the issue is touching air that the drake just breathed, so they won't be talking now, but you could show them an illusion? Let's move to the side."

...clomp clomp clomp clomp CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP CLOMP

The catfolk split into two lines parallel to the equartier path, with tall fires on their outstretched inside arms. The equartier sets down a shimmery teal reptilian person in the middle and jogs out the other opening (with quiet footsteps). The catfolk close the circle.

The drake stands and looks around.

"Oh! Dustlife! Like grows in food if we don't put it in things and boil the things!" Bounce bounce!

He will throw up a shimmery rainbow swirl of drifting sparkles, in a big circle! Red gold green blue violet red. And wave!

There is a faint breeze blowing toward the circle.

The drake waves back!

The catfolk who spoke before calls out "one two one and go" and the circle shuffles away in awkward synchrony.

"Pretty!

I don't know if it's a 'dustlife' issue! I think it's safe to touch the air after an hour? Maybe that's long enough for the dustlife to die... Want to follow them?"

Lin tries snatching a sparkle.

"Woah kid that was awesome!" exclaims a passing werewolf. "How big can you make those things?"

The sparkles are completely insubstantial. They'll shine out through her hand, faintly, if she waves through one.

"I could go pretty big! But I'd get tired faster! I'm practicing instead."

The flowy circle of sparkles breaks into a rainbow line and snakes past Lin and the werewolf's head, then forms up into a five pointed star.

"I'm Nico!"

"Ha, nice! I'm Pavel, the quiet one. That's not a joke, Loud Pavel is even worse, hah hah! 

Can you do like a straight line and be sure it's straight? Not that a little pup like you needs to worry about mining stuff, just a thought popped into my head and out my mouth!"

"Hmmmmmm!"

What if he controls two points of light and has the rest line up between them?

The result is very... Wobbly? Like a taut string moving back and forth fast, between the red and violet fixed points.

"Hmm!"

"Neat! Now try with your eyes closed!"

"Of course!"

He closes his eyes and moves the endpoints around. To where he thinks Lin and Calsa are.

The points of light between them are following a rule about where to go. White is good at that. They take a bit to settle though.

"Is it working?"

"It's still buzzing like a viol string, but, yeah, it's working. ...Better now!

Can you do that a thousand feet long and hold it for five seconds? With your eyes open of course! And then we can knock back early and party the rest of Breath shift, with you as the guest of honor!"

"You want to take him into the mines?"

"Just for a tiny moment, and of course you're invited too! Ah, where are my manners today!"

"Hmmm...."

He has burnt through about a third of one white point. It's dimming, but not done.

The lights go out. 

"I think I can do it. But if I'm saving you so much work maybe I should get paid."

Blink. "Of course, my friend, of course! I'll need to talk to my foreman... You've got spirit, though, kid! You've got the Kef spirit."

When located at the main entrance in the werewolf part of town (all the houses here have roofs), Pavel's foreman says that actually they'll need some circles and lines, at least 5, but 10 would be nice, held for a minute each. The figures are all less than 50 feet across, though. "And that will save us all an hour or two, so let's make that a square fifty today, and another hundred to do the exact same thing 10 cycles from now, if you can do it when the whole room is filled with turbine parts?"

"I'm not sure if I can do circles. You should test it if I can." He probably can. Keep the same distance but wobble side to side, that's a rule.

"That seems fair, and thank you for letting me try! You don't actually know if I can do it yet after all, and you're going out of the way to try it anyway. I might not be able to do it all today... But I'll try! What are all the big turbines going to be for?"

"Of course, kid.

Just one turbine today! It's for pumping and heating water, once the new aqueduct is done."

The foreman takes the team in through the main entrance and down several flights of stairs to a mezzanine. Though an arch, branching left, down some more stairs and into a long straight corridor. If Calsa weren't there it would be pretty dark. "This is actually the new aqueduct we're in now!"

After a lot of walking in the dark, they reach an active team. Werewolves roll table-sized disks of stone into a slot in the wall.

     "Is Breath early or am I just that energetic today?"

"Hey Flesh, Breath passing you on the side, look out. We're early to try an experiment on the turbine chamber! If it works there'll be a party at my place when you wake up, featuring our guest of honor, this kid Nico!"

        "Aw, we don't get to watch?"

            "If it works we'll all be doing it until we're sick of it."

   "You don't have to shout, we can all see the cat with you!"

        "Oh hi Calsa! I know you! You're Merta's kitty!"

     "Yeah, Nico! Right on!" says someone who has never met him.

They follow the empty-handed werewolves, staying away from the ones rolling the disks. The tunnel narrows up ahead, where werewolves are slowly pealing disks off the walls, and continues beyond that, single-file. After more walking, the tunnel widens to a chamber up ahead, but before reaching it they turn to the right into a nook, up stairs, and onto an elevator hanging in an open shaft, suspended by metal chains. "Stand clear, hold firm! Unlocked!" The elevator lurches, and then smoothly descends, picking up speed as they go. "Stand clear, hold firm, wait!" It plops to a halt surprisingly gently. "Locked!"

"Okay, kid, this is going to be the turbine chamber! See this cone above us? It needs to be exactly the right shape. Normally we'd wait until the shaft is in the middle, then set up a whole contraption with a bunch of strings and rods, and then shape it. And then remove the whole mess.

But with you here, we can get all the measurements now. It will take a few minutes for us to get ready, but let's start thinking about the first measurement now." Which is a horizontal circle 15 feet above the ground, 10 feet in diameter.

This is sooooo cooooool. Aqueduct! Giant turbines for the whole town! Amazing!!!

"I need someone to point exactly where the center goes and where the edge should go..."

"...Waaaaait. The way I was thinking of doing it would make a ball, not a circle."

He holds his hands up. Two sparks appear, then a bunch more, flickering around as if on a sphere. He drops it quickly, to conserve his white.

"Yeah. Ball. I can't just tell them to stay this far apart from the first one..."

The werewolves climb up the wall to the needed height, hanging from inset rungs, with the exception of the foreman and one carrying a folding tripod draped with equipment.

"Daneia, would you drop a plumb line down the center?"

    "On it!" She lays her tripod on the ground, runs to the elevator, pulls some levers causing thuds from above, and ascends.

  "If we extend to the ball across a band a hands-breadth wide, I think that should work? Even if we can't tell where the exact farthest edge is, the wall doesn't change that fast and we can smooth out the narrow parts later."

"Good thinking, and if we had a couple hundred balls, yes, but we don't. If we're going to hold up bits of the template against only a few measurements, they have to be precise. It's not just a smooth curve, it also marks where to put the stators."

        "Say, why haven't we been getting a whisshopper for this all along?"

          "Ooh good point! I guess it's not really a whisshopper's style so no one thought of it?"

      "Can a whisshopper guarantee the measurements?"

          "I don't know!"

    "If the floor was flat and level we could measure the heights later with rods?"

  "That sounds like more work than hanging the template."

    "Maybe we could measure from the bottom of the shaft, or the center of the socket?"

  "So then we don't have to level the whole floor!"

"Nico, could you do a couple hundred balls if you only had to hold each one for a second? If not, I think we could make a few balls work, if you hold them for several minutes each? It's okay if you can't."

    "We could make the rods now, and a thing to hold their base to the center of the socket, and use that to find the right height to mark on the edge of the ball!"

  "Anyone good at square roots?"

       "Or put Daneia on the socket watching the bottoms of the vertical measuring cords we already have to make sure they're level with where the base of the shaft will be."

  "Oh, nice and simple! I love it!"

Lin can calculate square roots pretty quick, but she's relieved not to have to choose between straining her cover and letting the project fail!

"I don't think I can hold a huge ball for minutes. That's a lot of sparks compared to a circle. There has to be a way to make it a circle instead of a ball." He is peering at the tripod. Just asking for a circle probably wouldn't work. You have to be sneaky. "I just need to... Tell it where the flat is with more dots maybe? I can do betweens and closer-tos and far-away-froms..."

She can't resist. "If you have two distances to two points, can you put the sparkles everywhere that's the correct distances to both points? The second point doesn't have to be at the center of the socket. It would actually be easier to have the second point 3/4 of the radius away from the first point, wherever that falls along the plumb line, and then the second distance is 5/4 of the radius."

"Umm... Tell it to be five-fourths away from this one and four-fourths away from that one, you mean?"

Sparkles appear between his hands. Two, one above the other, and then more that settle into a wobbly circle. "...Wow. Why does that work?"

That's awesome. She wishes her first daddy male parental figure could see this.

"Well, the whole thing is defined by the two points and the three distances, with nothing else going in any other particular direction, so the result has to be round. A circle or a ball or a bunch of circles or something.

If you think of each point-and-distance pair as defining a hollow ball, the result is that the sparkles follow the rules for both balls. Depending on the sizes and positions of the balls, that might be nothing, a point, a circle, or a hollow ball.

This circle is special: it's the biggest circle you can have using the first ball. It cuts the first ball in half at its widest point. That's special because it makes the top slice of the ball the same as the bottom slice. If you put the second point above the first point and kept the rest the same, you'd get the same circle.

Let's imagine that you move your illusion so the two points are on the wall - a smooth vertical part of the wall. You can actually do it if you want. Remember, the shape has to be round, so we don't need to worry about all of it. Whatever points are exactly on the wall already tell us everything about the shape.

So, here's the first point, the second point, a point on the circle to their left, a point on the circle to their right, and we could have gotten this by putting the second point above the first, so let's imagine another 'second point' too. Now, there are four triangles which are all identical in shape although some of them are flipped around. See how they all have a squarish angle, where they meet at the first point? Since they're all the same shape, that angle has to be the same in all of them. Four of them make a complete turn around the first point, so the angle is exactly a fourth of a turn. That's what makes this work.

Any triangle with a square angle at the first point would have worked. The fun part is that a triangle with lengths of 3, 4, and 5 of whatever - fourths of the radius - has a square angle and has lengths that are easy to measure out.

To prove that, we're going to need several triangles like this of different sizes. The shape of all of them is the same, just the size is different. The first one is five times bigger: its sides are 15-20-25 instead of 3-4-5, but it's still a 3-4-5 triangle. The 'something' in 'three somethings' is five. Five something-smallers.

Now, we draw a line from the square point of the big triangle to the other side, so that it makes two square angles against it. That gives us two smaller triangles.

This one has the narrower angle of the big triangle and it has a square angle, so it has the same shape over all.

This one has the wider angle of the big triangle and it has a square angle, so it also has the same shape.

How big are each of these smaller triangles? This one has its 'five side' pressed against the big one's 'four side' which was 20. Twenty is five fours, so it must be measuring in fours.

The other one has its 'five side' pressed against the big one's 'three side', which is 15, five threes, so it's measuring in threes.

The question is, does this diagram actually work? There's two lines which we can measure two ways. Do we get the same length both ways?

The inner line is four threes, which is twelve, and also three fours, which is twelve again.

The 'five line' of the big triangle is five fives, which is twenty-five, and also four fours plus three threes, sixteen plus nine, which add to twenty-five."

If Nico points out the circular argument, he can probably follow a more rigorous proof, and if not, that's also fine.

He lets the circle fade again; White's burning away. He listens raptly. And bounces slightly. He doesn't think to question the proof. Some things just are. And he's not quite picturing it right, maybe? There's no sand table to draw with here, and Lin can't do sparkles to help.

"Wow. You learned this when you were little, right? This is the kind of thing I wanted to go to the [temple school] for, but they wouldn't let me! Yes math is useful, Dad, you can do shape magic with it! I want to hear more later. I think I'm confused by some of what you just said. Like if it wasn't quite three fourths up, the bigger invisible ball would... Push the circle where the two invisible balls meet down and smaller? ...But right now I just need to make a circle."

He turns to Quiet Pavel and the foreman.

"Can you measure something down here to make sure this works right? Or should I just try when the plumb line is ready? Umm, fifteen feet off the ground, and then also fifteen plus three quarters of ten, so... Twenty two and a half feet up, too. Right?"

"Fifteen, and fifteen plus three quarters of five, which is eighteen and three quarters. Hey Daneia, you hearing this? Can you mark the points for the first five circles?"

    "No problem!"

And soon they're all ready. The werewolves can shape a smooth circle all the way around in about a minute, and will happily continue until Nico is out of white if not stopped.

Once, a faint rumbling thud trembles through the floor. The mining crew ignores it.

He holds out a hand towards Lin for a fistbump!

Well, if they're not worried, he's not worried... He has QUESTIONS about turbines and digging, if there's any major lulls, but they seem really efficient, so there probably won't be.

The last few circles are thin and faint, tiny sparkles spread almost foot apart from each other and moving quickly clockwise. And eventually he does run out entirely. He doesn't seem tired at all but insists there's no more illusions to be had until tomorrow. The magic's just not there.

Um okay, fistbump.

There's a pause of a minute between each circle, and more time ask questions as they go back to the end of the aqueduct that's still being dug out, where the Shift of Breath team takes over for the Shift of Flesh team. They can talk while they work though, and they do, bantering with the foreman about the party he has to throw. The visitors are welcome to stay as long as they like.

If that's as much as Nico can do without rest, they probably won't need him again until the next turbine. "I know I promised you another hundred to do it again later, but the circles would have to be really bright, six of them, and you'd need to do it without looking at all, while the turbine is spinning and has some fire in it. Sorry kid. Did you make any plans counting on having that hundred?"

Yeah, fistbump!

"That makes sense- What's it for, checking everything over?- I'm supposed to get better at it and stronger, but maybe not in just a week. Without looking at all... Maybe something weird with triangles could get all the right dots in the right places, but I don't know. And no. I just want to earn money for later, mostly. It's never bad to have some. Though Lin and Quiet Pavel deserve some of mine for figuring out this is possible! Even if you didn't pay, it would have been worth it to see all this amazing stuff and learn about circles!" Bounce! 

(Is Calsa still around?)

Calsa is right behind him, keeping a watchful eye.

"In this turbine, there are several layers of blades, alternating with 'stators', which look just like the turbine blades but they stick out from the wall instead of the shaft, and they're made of stone instead of steel. We pull the mass of them out of the walls as we put the rotating parts in, and do the final shaping hot -

Huh. It just occurred to me that we could separate those steps if we could make the stators precise from the beginning. The normal way is to send catfolk up the inside of the shaft to look at how close the stators are to the blades, instead of hanging a whole new template for each layer. But if you can guide us with circles, just regular circles like today, while we put the stators in, we can skip most of the visual inspection.

We'll be wanting you again after all!"

    "Aw kid I didn't do anything, just admired your show."

"You had the idea! That's important. At least want a hamburger or something! Maybe I can make... Uh."

He turns and frowns at Calsa. Then back forward. "...Some kind of tool with string and angles to help with doing circles and things."

...He impulsively hugs Calsa around the legs. Briefly.

And then has more questions about why turbines work!

Hm? What was he just thinking...

Hug.

    "If you squish the air before heating it, it expands with more force..."

        "But takes force to squish. The point is that the upper half works better when the pressure is a lot higher in the middle, and that's worth making it complicated."

    "Works 'better'?"

        "Like, more of the energy goes into the spinning."

  "But we're not trying to spin anything, we're trying to move the air?"

        "Right! Flame by itself would make the air really hot, but only move it a little. The turbine sucks in a lot of air and blows it out under pressure, and raises the temperature somewhat."

          "So if you only wanted the heat, you wouldn't need a turbine?"

        "Right! The turbine can't get you more heat out of the same amount of fire. "

  "Oh! I've seen catfolk making glass jewelry that way! Just a long tube of fire."

Quiet Pavel will accept a burger. "You're going to be at the party, right? End of Breath shift."

Nico is happy to hang out in the area for the next little while, cheerful and glad to have 'been blue', which he clarifies means 'working smarter, not harder' and plays off as just a saying. He doesn't wander, and treats the workplace with seriousness, staying out of the way and going patiently quiet when asked. (He has IDEAS: Turbine on a wagon? Pump water up high and let it flow down again for people to use or through another turbine when catfolk aren't around, at his old house they had a water tank on the roof- Or is that what they're going to do anyway? Do they know about balloons?), but then wants to return to the sand table to talk about MATH with Lin. Math is cool and Lin is so amazing for knowing so much of it!! And he will also buy something small for Lin if she wants it!!

He doesn't stop talking about the mines and turbines and circles all day, even when he's taking care of the mice and practicing the language with Calsa. At the party later, he talks more than he roughhouses, about the power of circles and how awesome the tunnels are, and can't show off his illusions any more because he's been playing with circles all day whenever he got any capacity at all back. It's nice, though. Everyone being loud and having fun and eating together.

Days pass.

He hangs out in the square doing illusions, and helps with any more turbine work he can, and spends the money-of-Kef the foreman gives him on little bits of werewolf fur that he washes and then dries to try and make them less smelly, for the mice. And diligently grinds down some of the sand into something softer and less abrasive. He tries, tentatively, taking a point of Green on one that has the worst sore paws. This is classic Green work that everyone can do, right? Specialized healers exist, if you're sick, if you're poisoned, you can hurt yourself worse doing it if you're very thirsty or hungry, but anyone can just do a little- Get-well-now.

It feels weird, but seems to work. Its paws don't ache anymore, He reserves one green point for Diagnose and one for Heal on the worst-off mouse every day. He makes Siki's fireplate, and then tries to experiment with proper [enchantment] from what he can remember from the book, but nothing works. There were all sorts of complicated shapes and runes... He talks a lot with Calsa, practicing his words and grammar and telling her everything he's trying with magic, and almost as much with Lin, and some with Merta and Siki. He tries to learn to write, too.

He doesn't get any more points in the next week or so. He tries not to feel impatient about it. You don't get points every moon.

Promising ideas! There's not really anything to see from a balloon out here, is there?, but hmm... A turbine the size of a water pump on a wagon sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but somecat tries a smaller one and soon it's a popular game to putter around on it.

The big pumps are for sending water to Argolake, where it joins an older aqueduct that goes all the way to the drybright.

Siki takes him to his workshop and shows him the watches and clocks and gyroscopes and the mechanism for an orrery. "It will get decorated in the city." The planets are, from the sun outward, Equim, Vulpim, Kappim, Ansaf (where they are now), Viridios, Lacrimos, Astros, and Dallekos.

His illusion practice in the square is popular, with many making a point of showing up every cycle.

Lin doesn't need anything small. Can he make a 'potion' or something to give other people the ability to make sparkles?

The mice love the bits of fur. The ground sand is kind of dusty though.

And then, he comes home from practicing on the square, and there's a nervous crowd around the house. Inside, Merta is lying in the huddlebed, her legs encased in rock, with Calsa holding her.

The workshop is amazing and he us exquisitely careful not to disturb anything, in case he gets in trouble. He's more fascinated by the gears in the orrery than outer space.

.........He can, after a couple of experiments, make a potion that sparkles for about an hour when exposed to air, out of a teeny pinch of charcoal and water. It makes pretty paint? And Lin's ability to make airless bottles came in handy to stop it from going off right away!

His first impulse when people are hanging out near the house is to hide and listen for a bit. Only then does he slink inside and go quietly up to Calsa. He doesn't say anything, just looks worried.

"We should give them space."

    "This is the obvious place to go to talk about it. Where would you prefer, the courthouse?"

        "Not the courthouse!"

"You're worried about getting in trouble?"

        "It looks bad. I don't want to make the Magistrate twitchy."

            "It's her fault. Using a wolf to do an elph's job."

  "So you'd have Kef violate the ratio?"