Travel memoirs (and memoirs in general) are a popular genre here, does she want to specify further or have Daisy read off a list of subtopics?

Oh, bring on the subtopics; she's interested what a sample looks like.

The main subgenres are scientific observation (the author writes about a particular real-world topic like a family of plants or an aspect of Crafter culture that they've seen in different places), personal journey (the author tells a story about their or their traveling group's journey), poetic description (the author describes their travels and observations in a less plot-based way), themed story compilation (generally somewhat similar to the scientific observation subgenre, but more engaging and less rigorous and intended for recreational reading), and 'other' (mostly unedited personal journals). She can also specifically look for things about a particular continent or type of travel experience - traveling by airship vs. ground vehicle vs. boat, traveling alone (generally with crows and livestock) or with other Crafters or with elephantiforms, traveling through particularly cold or dry or mountainous regions, things like that.

Themed story compilation, with airship travel if that makes sense as a combination? The former might provide the most useful vocabulary and the latter would be relevant to navigating by air. Does Daisy have any particular favorites, out of interest?

She likes the poetic description subgenre best but she's not sure she has a favorite within it, yet. For themed story compilations with airships she might want something by Traveler: he mostly goes places by ground vehicle but he likes to go up in an airship to take a look around anytime he's in someplace new, and he gives really detailed descriptions of that, and his books are a little less themed than most in the subgenre; he's more enthusiastic about getting to see new things in general than about any particular type of thing.

That sounds like a good start. Maybe Rebecca can take a look at some of the poetic description works once she has a better grasp of the language.

She'd like that.

Traveler has written a lot of stuff; obvious places to start would be his first book (a trip around one of the biggest lakes in the world), his first book that's broadly considered good (a comparison of different places where Crafters live in more dense conditions than normal), the one that's considered his best (a trip to the world's tallest mountain range, focused on the animals there and comparing them to other mountain animals with a few chapters on particularly interesting plants as well), or his most recent (an examination of Crafter relations with talking animals in different parts of the world) but there's thirty-something of them if she doesn't like the sound of any of those.

The relations with talking animals sounds very interesting, and the dense living one as well, maybe in that order? Also, wow, thirty-something books? How long has he been doing this?

A long time! Daisy's only read a few of the actual books but there was an article on him in a magazine; he's in his early sixties and has put out a book almost every year since his twenties, except when his kids were tiny.

That's some dedication.

He really seems to enjoy what he does, yeah. She's half-expecting him to show up here someday, new things are his favorite and she and her friends sure are that.

(They get to the edge of the territory; the monoliths here match the doorways to their rooms, and the sign across the path from them is in Daisy's silver with wielded-on enameled flowers. She continues toward the house.)

Rebecca wouldn't mind that herself; it would be a bit of a shame if this world got interworld visitors and most people didn't know about it. But it seems like Daisy and Dusk are keeping a lower profile, which is entirely understandable.

Yeah. They might seek him out eventually - she thinks Nine in particular might like that, actually, and it'd do him some good to get out and see the world - but it's not what they're here for.

If they'll pardon her rudeness, what are the goals they do have, or is was it mostly just trying to get away from where they were before, and now trying to... rebuild?

Mostly that, yeah; they're focused on getting their territory set up to be nice to live in right now, and getting the skills they need to live comfortably here or to leave. And Dusk's finding her feet again, of course, and Nine's never had this much freedom before either.

What did Nine do before this? She knows he's a battle droid.

He was a security guard for a pawn shop before this, and they don't know much about where he was before that. He's an older model, though, he's definitely been around a bit.

She nods.

Dusk could maybe check his history with the Force if she's curious, Daisy relays for him. He doesn't really care, though, he doesn't think that was meaningfully him.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Back at the house, Daisy starts the book printer going, keying a number in and letting it print out pages on sheets of paper cut from a roll that feeds into the back of it.

Nine, meanwhile, sits at the workbench, and when Daisy is available again he has her relay for him: What about Rebecca, what was she doing before this?

She was a superhero—Daisy said they have the concept?—in a civilization limited to only their home planet, industrialized and with computing and Internet, but no (reproducible) artificial intelligence or cost-effective space travel. So her day to day was a lot of fighting bad guys. She had a secret identity, and as her civilian self she's one of the Directors of the PRT, the major non-parahuman government agency which helps with parahuman law enforcement. She's not supposed to do that, be playing both sides at once, but, well. She doesn't trust other people to do the job right.

She and some other heroes were secretly trying to gather resources to fight a hidden Big Bad—though even separately from that the world was going downhill for various reasons mostly related to parahumans and adjacent phenomena—but it was looking pretty hopeless. And then the Spirit landed on her, so now she's trying to gather resources across the multiverse to be able to actually win.

That's a long-term project, though. The notebook said her world would be paused while she's away.

Huh. What kind of bad guys? What kind of Big Bad?

In theory superheroes deal with all sorts of crime, but in practice they mostly specialize for dealing with supervillains. The most harmless ones are just people who try to rob places or steal things with their powers, but the worst—there's this person called Nilbog, who can use biological material to create creatures he designs, sort of like fleshcrafting, which is why he came to mind. He took over a whole town, Ellisburg, killed everyone and turned their bodies into his minions. He has dead man's switches: plagues and other things they never figured out. Precogs say if they get triggered, it's a disaster. So they can't kill him, so they just walled up the whole town and posed a perimeter guard. He just lives there now.

But apart from the humans, there are also the Endbringers, these monsters that came out of nowhere as far as they know. Unkillable, and they've tried very hard. They destroy whole cities whenever they decide to attack. One of them sunk an entire island under the sea.

That's not the Big Bad.