"Promising. I think I want to keep staying a few nights with Lily first, get what I can in way of trail rations, learn what I can about this world from her, but I think I'd like to take you up on that. Where should I look to find you in a few days?"

"I'll be sleeping on the north shore, probably, and eating Palla's fish three meals a day. Unless I get up the courage to try talking to Zithra again, but, well. Let's say I won't. So if you come looking for me between here and the north end of the lake, I bet you'll find me."

"I'll do that," she grins. "What was your world like? Any magic there, or strictly mundane?"

"...what do you mean? I can tell you it was less magic than this place, but... I don't know, I feel like I'm missing something."

She tilts her head and hums a bit. "As far as even the slightest shreds of evidence go, the world we came from had no magic, at all. We were moderately confident of that assessment. No data on whether it would have allowed external magic to visit, but it definitely didn't have any of its own, much to our frustration. So now I'm wondering if there's a continuum, or even a whole configuration space, and where your world lies in it if so."

"...I think... I don't know what a lot of those words mean but I have a hard time picturing what 'a world with no magic' would look like. Like, which things are magic and how do you take them out of the world and still have a world left?"

She hums and drums her fingers for a moment. "I think the best way to put it is that if it's a purely mechanistic process that would still function if there were literally no conscious minds involved at any point, it's not magic. This leaves aside a bit of nuance about like... magical plants and animals, but it gets the main idea."

...his face scrunches confusedly. "That... still leaves me with the question of how there's a world left, but you shouldn't talk to me about that, you should talk to Hazel, who knows things. But—wait, wait, if you're from somewhere with nothing that needs minds to work, do you have a soul???" Now he is both confused and also Concerned For Her Safety.

"I don't know! Maybe they always existed and our old world just didn't have any ability to detect them, or maybe we got one when we came here, or maybe we each got one when we showed up, or maybe we just don't have one at all! It's objectively concerning, honestly, and I've tempted Hazel into examining our soul situation sometime in the next day or three."

"—no, I know I had a soul before I got here, everyone has souls where I come from and I'd know if they didn't. Souls are—the main thing I know about souls is that they're what stops people dying by accident. Demons don't have them so you can kill a demon without hardly trying. If you don't have a soul I'm worried because you could get in a fight or hit your head and you'd just die, and that's—I don't like thinking about that."

A brief look of confusion, then comprehension. "Ah, no, the 'our' and 'we' in my last few sentences was about me and my headmates. Not you. Everything you've been saying this whole conversation suggests you've had a soul the entire time from your old world to here."

She hums a bit more. "Souls stop people from dying by accident, in your world? That... I recognize that behavior of souls from fiction in my old world, but not from anything that actually happens where my headmates and I came from. In our old world, falling two floors and landing on your head could kill you. A sufficiently hard punch to the temple could kill you."

"—right, I thought when you said 'we each', but that makes sense. If you fall two floors and land on your head you could break your neck and then give up on life and die afterward, but you won't die right away. If you get in a fight and someone punches you in the head it's their will to kill you against yours to live, stronger wins."

"Nope, our old world doesn't have anything like that. Kinda envy you and your world for that, honestly."

She shakes her head.

"Well. I think you shouldn't go anywhere more dangerous than the lakeshore until Hazel's figured out if you have a soul or not. I only know the one test and I'm not trying it."

"Yeah, I'm not keen to try that test either. Maybe we should find you and bring you with us to Hazel's for their experiments, In case we've got one but it doesn't do the same thing yours does. Maybe we can learn how."

"Sure, I wouldn't mind that." He's been neglecting the fish. He leans over to turn it.

Splash. "Here's your dinner," says Palla to Sable, unslinging a big fish from her shoulders. To Torok she adds, "I see you've been too busy moping to cook. I'm taking the better one."

She grins warmly at Palla. "Thank you! I've got to run this back, so lemme just give you these oranges and I'll be off. I still wanna stay for dinner one of these days, but we'll see when we manage it." She dumps the oranges out, passes them to Palla, and then bags up the fish.

To Torok, she smiles softly. "Don't beat yourself up too hard. I'll come find you soon enough, so you take care until then."

Palla happily devours an orange.

Torok waves agreeably.

And she sets off jogging back to Lily's farm.

Lily's farm hasn't budged an inch. Lily herself isn't obviously in evidence, but her door is right there for knocking on.

Knock knock! "Fish delivery~"

She answers the door in short order. "Ooh, somebody caught Palla in a generous mood," she says, eyeing the bulge in the sack. "Well, let's get that sliced up and cooking, and whatever we don't have for dinner can stew overnight."

"Sounds like a plan!" She brings the fish in, sets it in the kitchen like last time, and quickly washes out and hangs up the bag before returning to help with the prep.

"Hazel might have basic scraps of fabric in our colors in a few days, but recommended the city for cords. Sable right now, by the way."