"—I haven't met you, right?" says Torok, tracking the switch. "I think I've heard your name and I can tell you're not anyone else but I forgot what it was so I can't look clever by guessing."

"I will need to prepare some things," says Hazel, slightly distracted. "I look forward to seeing you again whenever you have the time. In an ideal world I would like to collect vital samples from each of your personas to begin my investigation, but I am aware that most people's patience for bleeding into cups is quite short."

"Maya," she says to Torok. To Hazel, she notes, "Ours is somewhat higher than the average, I suspect, especially if it gets us answers. How does injury, damage, and healing normally work in this world? Also, is the fact that Torok can track our switches better than anyone we've met before coming to Mareth useful evidence?"

"I'm not entirely sure how to answer your question because I'm not sure what framework you're used to understanding these things with. I suppose I could always start from the beginning. As for Torok, I've been assuming that it's unremarkable that he's more socially perceptive than me, as most people are. Are you suggesting that he might be perceiving your identity directly as mediated by your soul or souls?"

"I don't think I'm doing that but I guess maybe I wouldn't know. It just feels really obvious from... how you... are?"

"It's a consideration that he might be, yes. As for the injury question, what we are used to is a purely physical and mechanistic process. If the arm experiences an impact force greater than the impact resistance of its bones, it breaks. Healing that takes several weeks with the bones held in proper alignment using an immobilizing device. If one is careless while picking up broken glass off the ground, one could cut the skin of one's hand by mistake, and the resulting laceration could take days or even a week or three to heal. There are no potions, no alchemical preparations, and no involvement of the will or soul. Does that differ here?"

She checks the food again.

"Resistance to unwanted transformation and injury are both functions of the will, yes. But resistance to injury is also a function of the lifeforce, which doesn't interact with the mind or will at all. Do you mean to say—I suppose you have no way of knowing what I mean—hmm."

Hazel picks up a pebble off the ground.

"This rock is inanimate. It has a material essence, which mediates its base physical properties: it is hard, brittle, grey, heavy, has a certain shape, and so on. If I—or perhaps Torok, who I'm sure is stronger than I am—were to set it on a hard surface and hit it very hard with another object, the interaction of their material essences would likely produce the result that the pebble would crack. If I were to leave it on a riverbed for a hundred years, the interaction of the material essences of rock and flowing water would slowly erode the surface of the rock, smoothing it out over time."

They point to the skewered fish. "Dead fish are also inanimate, but when they were alive they had lifeforce, which mediates the properties of life. It is the lifeforce that provides both initial resistance to injury—it is harder to injure a live fish than a dead one—and eventual healing. Without lifeforce, with only the material essence of a dead body, a cut or a broken bone will simply never heal. The times you suggest sound reasonable for someone with a relatively weak lifeforce who is not strongly invested in their recovery; a person, unlike an animal, can will their body to heal faster, because the soul governs the lifeforce which governs the body's material essence. And a stronger lifeforce, achieved with good food, consistent appropriate rest, and sometimes meditation or physical training, strengthens both initial resistance to injury and the speed and completeness of healing."

They shake their head and drop the pebble. "This is all to say that... the world you seem to be describing is one in which minds can exist and maintain consistency without souls, and living bodies can exist and maintain function without lifeforce, a world where objects interact only through their material essences but life and thought are still possible. Is that what you mean to say?"

"Correct. A world that runs entirely on material essence alone, without any mediating factor of lifeforce, will, or soul."

"...man, I would've thought I lived in a world like that, before I met you and learned there's a world where souls don't even exist. Like—there's way less alchemy and magic and all that, in my world—I caught Hazel saying demons probably can't navigate and I bet I know why, and in my world that's not how navigating works, you don't use your will to decide where you're going, you use your memory to remember how to get there. But souls not even existing is just a whole different level of things not being magic."

"Aha. We noticed their saying that as well. We'd started to notice the will-based navigation here and found it quite bizarre. Glad to have that confirmed. And yes, it's quite the difference, coming from a world where only material properties exist."

She shakes her head and notes that the fish is almost done.

"Oh, I've theorized that there could be a world where navigation operates based purely on physical direction and distance!" says Hazel, lighting up. "Like an enormous hedge maze! Isn't it terribly inconvenient, though?"

"It is at least entirely consistent and unchanging, allowing things like going to the store and noticing on the way the existence of a shop you might enjoy visiting on the way back. We have yet to see what makes Mareth's way more convenient."

She nudges Torok to check the vegetables while she takes the fish off the fire.

"You can explore with an open mind, of course. But if the world were an enormous hedge maze it would be so difficult to reach distant places! Of course this world is not infinitely flexible; you can't reach the swamp by heading east from the lake. But you can walk nearly anywhere in the world within one or at most two days, and as a child when I tried to draw a maze-map of Mareth I calculated that if every part of the world were as stable as the inside of my house, a healthy and unburdened traveler would take several weeks to cross it." They reflect on this conclusion for a moment. "My childhood calculations may not be fully accurate, granted. I would have to make a project of revising my estimates if I wanted to be sure of my conclusions."

"I guess it'd be pretty rough if getting to the city from here took a week instead of a day," Torok acknowledges, peering into the pot. The vegetables aren't quite done but they're getting there.

"It compresses distance? Well now, that is convenient."

"Yes. If you focus your will tightly enough to skip past intermediate landmarks, you can reach a distant destination much faster than if you walked through every known location on the way. The only waypoints that can't be skipped are transitions between regions, such as from the wasteland to the lake, or the desert to the plains."

"Almost like a Babylon candle," she murmurs.

"Hmm?"

"There is a children's rhyme on our old world:

"How many miles to Babylon?
"Three-score miles and ten.
"Can I get there by candle-light?
"Yes, and back again...
"If your feet are nimble and your toes are light,
"You may get there by candle-light."

She pauses for a moment, the recitation complete, then continues. "An author in the modern day incorporated the rhyme into a work of fiction, through an artifact in the story: a Babylon candle. Light one, hold it in your hand, and you can cross miles in a single step. Step, and you find yourself in the woods. Step again, and you're entering the plains. Again, and you're atop a hill in the meadow, and the forest recedes far into the distance."

"I see! I wonder if such a spell could be constructed," Hazel muses. "Spellcasting is not my area of expertise but I do appreciate the theory. I think it would have to be a spell, I can't imagine how you might do such a thing alchemically—alchemical essences can only embody properties that things have, and I don't know of anything that has the property of crossing vast distances in a single step already."

"Your world's navigation already does it to a limited extent, compared to what we're used to. It's fascinating. And no, from what you've said I doubt alchemy would work unless a Babylon candle somehow fell into this world. Then you might be able to study and reproduce the effect alchemically.

"But what cups ought we bleed into, to allow you to best conduct your tests?"

"Ah, right! One moment." They get up and trot back into the house to clank through some drawers.

"Do you want to—eat... lunch..." says Torok, trailing off as Hazel disappears from view. "Well, I'm hungry." The vegetables are still cooking but he can grab a skewer of fish.

She'll start eating a skewered fish as well with a faint smile. "Thank you for the reminder, Torok."

"Food is important!"