"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?"

"Sounds good. Let's see..."

And Yew dumps the code that forbs use to control energy transfer, as neutrinos, light, and sound. Followed by a tiny demonstration, bleeding a little bit of their power into its field.

"Kitten/lifetime/destruction/embrace," the being says.

And then their forb is dumping power from storage into the repair routines as fast as it can, the crystal itself starting to fluoresce from the excess power.

The being pulls them towards it with terrifying speed, guiding their crystal between slabs of dense flesh to nestle softly against an orb very like their own.

She runs their newly repaired fixity field over the being's core, seeing how it is formed.

It's getting a lot of power through a pinhole wormhole. Enough to sustain a large fixity field despite completely inadequate hardware.

She twists, folds, balances, and smooths the fixity field projector into a more efficient configuration. It's not proper fold crystal (that, she's not willing to give away), but it should have about 90% of the range for about 1% of the energy cost and higher peak force output.

When she's done, she gently pushes the being away. It lets her go, vanishing into the ocean almost instantly.

"Well. That was. A thing," she states, leaning back on her cushions. She pulls up the forb's power readings. "It looks like we've got almost enough to make another forb. You reckon it's time to divide and conquer?"