Keep the favor -- you know I'm always happy to help with the important stuff. Let me see ... it is West Southwest of me, 241°6'23''. I'm at the Musée Lumière in Lyon. I'll hop on the A7 and let you know when I have a second bearing.

Thanks, Rose. You're the best!

Hey, quick update -- I just pulled off the road about 2/3rds of the way to Valence. There's no longer anything called Weeping Cherry. The last heading before it disappeared was 241°48'19''.

Do you think somebody else got to it first?

Huh! Yeah, must be. Keep an eye out and let me know if it reappears, okay?

She reaches over and taps her other self on the shoulder when it looks like she's at a good stopping place.

"So on the one hand, I have no idea how to turn this into something practical. On the other hand, look at this," she says.

'This' turns out to be a patch of ocean water that is completely frozen in space.

"Huh!"

She checks the forb's temperature readings and sees that the water, despite being locked in place, is still acting as though it's the same temperature as the surrounding water.

"... huh," she repeats. "How did you do that?"

"Magic!" she exclaims, wiggling her fingers at her. "But no, actually, I just figured out how to make something spin temporally. So that it remains in the same general place, but because it's spinning, forces acting on it behave strangely."

"Clever! Is some of this water going, uh, clockwise and counterclockwise because of conservation of angular momentum? Actually, how are you even defining your rotators ..."

They work. They experiment, they research. They propose novel theories that are wrong. They propose novel theories that they can't prove are wrong yet. They connect to the internet from various open wifi networks and cell towers, never staying long in one place.

They spend time relaxing. They catch up on their to-read lists. They play chess, and tie almost every time, until Yew manages to eke out a narrow victory.

They wander across the floor of the Atlantic, admiring the occasional spots of bioluminescence in the otherwise total darkness.

And then they feel the brush of another fixity field.

"It's not, though. It's got the same underlying structure, but I think it's ... folded wrong?" she peers at the readout. "Actually, it looks almost like one of the early fields before we figured out stable crystal structures -- look at the gravitational spindling."

Yew has their forb grab onto a few of the water molecules that the other fixity field is holding in place and gently vibrate them to see where the field is being projected from.

"I believe you, but this is really big for a non-fold-crystal field. The projector is about 40 meters away. I think ..."

Unexpected mental changes detected, the forb informs them. Rolled back 0.5 seconds.

"Aaah! What the hell!"

She looks at the diagnostics window.

"There was a big burst of particles, and then it tried to re-write our brains."

"The changes are centered in the language processing center," she points out. "Do you think it's communicative?"

"I have no idea. Can you ... prune it to only the secondary effects in our audio processing loops?" she asks.

Meanwhile, she's getting her own better look at the anchor of the fixity field, releasing a burst of radiation and neutrinos to see better. She also starts flashing Morse code and vibrating some of the water molecules in their overlapping areas of control, in case it is able to talk that way.

She does so, and re-applies the diff to her audio cortex.

"Curious," the mysterious being says.

"The induced sound is 'curious'" she reports. "I'm going to set it up so that if it happens again you keep getting rolled back but I get the pruned version."

She acknowledges Xanthoceras's plan, most of her attention still on trying to figure out what this thing is.

... what a completely unhelpful thing to say. She has the feeling that she's getting maybe 1-2% of the information content of these bursts.

She looks at the most recent burst, tries factoring it out into pieces.

"Schedule/damaged/expected/clean," the mysterious being says.

She doesn't know how to reply, but one part of that seems most like something she'd want to say. She crosses her fingers and transmits the corresponding portion of the burst.

She pulls the burst apart into principle components again.

"Consequence/common/transaction/healing," the being says.

She interrupts Yew to catch her up on the conversation.

"I think we should respond with transaction/healing -- does that sound okay?" she asks.

"I don't really like the idea of engaging in a transaction without knowing the cost. But its fixity field is really messed up -- how about common/healing? And then an explanation of how to feed power into our field as a wide burst across the other media I've been using?"