The song goes on for a while. Dusk doesn't seem bothered by Rebecca's presence; it mostly doesn't seem like she's particularly paying attention to her surroundings at all, until it begins to wind down.

She sits, for another moment, when the song ends, and then signs translate, and Daisy does, just a beat behind her.

Peace is a lie. There is life, and there is death.
And life brings us sorrow
But sorrow brings wisdom
And wisdom brings mastery.
Through mastery, may my chains be broken,
May we all be free in the Force.

Daisy fills in some context, too, while she's relaying: This poem makes heavy reference to the Sith Code, a central philosophical writing for the type of person Dusk is, and it's very heretical; the Code is concerned pretty much entirely with individual victory.

Dusk takes another moment to collect her thoughts, and then continues, with Daisy still translating.

I think I've done well this year. I haven't - slipped. We tried that new approach to intruders at the homestead, and it worked. I didn't kill Nine's owner, even though that was tempting.

Having the Spirit on board is new, and I'm not sure what to make of that yet. It doesn't seem bad but it's only been a few months. I'll have more to say about her next year, I guess. I'm glad she picked you. And I'm sorry I didn't realize earlier what you wanted from me.

Being - out in the world - is a little nerve-wracking, but so far it's been fine. Milliways was... a lot... but I liked it, once I got used to it. I've missed having people around like that. It's good to be able to do it again.

Of course none of this makes up for the past. And there's still a ways to go; farther than I'd realized. But I'm - comfortable, I suppose, with my progress, and I will continue on.

Oh.

She expected some of the chosen would be in it for the power, like her, to solve the problems of their own home. Others might be there for the joy of living out a life of romance and adventure, or the perverse delight of a world bent to their every whim. Heroes and rogues and villains, to use the cliché framing.

It never really occurred to her that people would take the Spirit's power just to—get away. To heal.

And Dusk said, I haven't slipped. I didn't kill Nine's owner, even though that was tempting. She said, Of course none of this makes up for the past.

The names, the grief—those weren't for people Dusk and Daisy failed.

They must have been people they killed.

The surprise doesn't make it to her face. Though there might be a flicker in her emotions when she realizes. When it resolves, it's back to the calm acceptance of before. Rebecca has killed her share of people, though she suspects her reasons are better. But people change, and the least productive thing to do is kick them down when they're trying. Rebecca knows excellent men and women who started their careers killing and murdering because that was all they knew or because their powers warped their minds.

Why is the Spirit showing her this?

...The closeness of the two. Daisy being the chosen, Dusk attached to her, trying to make up for her mistakes. Dusk's... personal creed, or something like it, a rejection of the Code of whatever the Sith are. Her "progress".

I Can Fix Them.

The Spirit wouldn't—

It wouldn't have put her here just to make her the next member of Daisy's harem of reformed pets. The silver woman doesn't read to her as the kind of person to collect people, but if she thinks it's good, just a righting of the way of those who've gone astray—

The Spirit wouldn't do that. If the Spirit were hostile in that way, it wouldn't have gone to all of that rigamole about choice and preferences, it wouldn't have allowed her to not choose There's Another One in the first place. She's overthinking this. There's a sensible explanation for it all. If she chooses not to trust the Spirit, there's nothing she can do to stop it, so trust is the only actionable path.

And she doesn't need magic reforming. She can get her own goddamn head on straight if she needs to.

Her emotions may reveal that she's a bit antsy about the interaction and relationship between Dusk and Daisy, if Dusk can tell with that kind of granularity. Otherwise it'll just show that she's a bit antsy.

We're making her nervous, Dusk signs up to Daisy. And the timing is wrong for it to be about me. Maybe see if she wants to go to the house? I'll be okay here.

    All right. And Daisy gives her a little squeeze around the shoulders.

Daisy can tell, legibly, that Rebecca is uncomfortable; she's not sure why, though. She can show her to their guest room if that will help, but she doesn't know if she should expect it to.

...

She has two options here. One is to immediately fly off and not look back. The other is to trust that Daisy isn't going to try to Fix her aginst her will. There's not really a useful intermediate option where she's weird about being shown to a guest room and vaguely lingers in their vicinity, pointlessly alienating the two while not actually protecting her from anything.

The Spirit has her interests in mind.

She will nod and give an appreciative smile, with an apologetic lilt, trying to express that her antsiness is instinctual and not consciously endorsed.

Daisy will say her goodbyes, then, and extract herself carefully from behind Dusk; she has a flashlight with her to light the way to the house, which is only a little way off through the woods.

On the way, she explains some things about the area by way of small talk: There are humanoids here, most of them visually human, but they're psychologically quite different, and most importantly they have a strong territoriality instinct such that going into their territories uninvited will render them homeless and touching them uninvited is even worse. The tech level is quite low relative to where Daisy originates (which has relatively easy space travel within the galaxy and multiple interstellar societies) and all of their technology runs on the local magic, which they call crafting; it lets them give arbitrary material properties to matter, including simple stimulus-response reactions and a few things that Daisy doesn't consider normal parts of physics, like producing infinite heat or heat dampening, or straightforward faster-than-light communication. There's also a lesser version of the crafting magic that she's using to communicate; particularly clever animals also have access to that one, so Rebecca shouldn't be surprised if the crows come to talk to her when they notice her in the morning. The magic isn't purely genetic, but if Rebecca has Dragon Fairy Elf Witch and wants to use it on one of the locals, that will give her a noticeable boost in working with it; Daisy didn't find it very hard to pick up from there but she suspects it's the sort of thing that droids are a bit better at than humans, so she's not sure what exactly to expect for Rebecca. She or one of her friends can bring Rebecca to meet one of the neighbors in the morning, if she wants to, and she expects her friends to be fine with her staying for at least a few days to a week, long enough for her to figure out how things work here and what she wants to do.

That's a lot of information. Matter programming magic, interstellar travel, telepathy... She has a lot of questions and no real way to ask them quickly. But Daisy said that her communication magic is composed from innate traits, not something else, so—

Backchannel.

Rebecca tries to mime wings, pointy ears, and a pointed hat with her hands, then points at Daisy, and gives her a questioning look. Can I Dragon Fairy Elf Witch you? Hopefully she can get both the local humanoid heritage and... "droid" heritage. She got the vague idea of "robots", but... not? Loaded with more and different connotations than Earth Bet's equivalent term?

She's not entirely comfortable with that; she has Dusk's heritage and she expects her to want it held a bit more closely than that. If Rebecca thinks she can do it selectively to avoid that, it should be fine, though.

She shrugs and shakes her head: she doesn't know if she can do that, so she won't try. After a moment of thought, she tries pointing at herself, then up into the air, and puts her fingers in front of her eyes to mime "looking" while pans her head around. Then she makes the Dragon Fairy Elf Witch mime.

Should she try Dragon Fairy Elf Witching some of the local wildlife from a bird's-eye view to get the communication magic from something?

That has a pretty good chance of working, sure - if she doesn't spot any of the local humanoids, the crows and mammoths are the next best options, and she's not sure where the crows are roosting tonight but there's a mammoth herd down by the river, over that way. She just needs to be careful not to fly too low over the humanoids; if she's clearly out of shouting range of the ground that's a safe height.

She nods. She was planning to just go straight up and not move horizontally at all, but "out of shouting range" being enough means she has more to work with if that fails.

She lifts off the ground, clears the treetops, and then in a blink and with a light breeze in her wake, she's vanished.

...She thinks she's faster than she was before.

She scans around for crows, mammoths or the local humanoids. She also keeps an eye out for if there's anything that's not forest around. What does the general landscape look like? What does the sky look like?

There's a big flock of crows roosting at the top of a group of trees, quite nearby to her starting point, and one of the locals - an example of the 'mostly' in 'mostly visually human', he's covered head to toe in deep blue fur and has long whiskers and a tail - a little farther off, sitting in a clearing doing some unclear thing to a pile of wood, and the promised herd of mammoths hunkered up together down by the river.

The landscape is hilly, eventually trailing off into plains to the east and turning more mountainous to the west. The night sky is weird, above and beyond the difference the lack of light pollution makes: most of the stars look familiar, but some are missing or out of place, and there are a few unfamiliar ones up there too.

No city in sight. The stars are... interesting. She's not sure what that means. She'd expect the stars to be the same or completely different, depending on whether this is an Earth or not, but she can recognize some constellations and not others. Perhaps she shouldn't read much into it.

She will Dragon Fairy Elf Witch the local only, and think about the crow later. What does that do?

She now has a new set of instincts, somewhat like motor skills but not for moving any part of her body; they aren't very strong, and it's clear that she'll need to put some time into learning how to do the thing they're related to, but she has some idea of where to start, at least. She may also have a tail, if she's been wanting one.

No tail, please.

Does it seem like she has whatever Daisy was using for communication?

It's hard to tell what the actions the instincts are for will do without doing them, and there don't seem to be any valid targets around; her mental motion slips unpleasantly through the air if she tries.

She'll go back down and look for Daisy again.

Daisy is right where she left her; she turns the flashlight off when she sees Rebecca coming. (She's realized now that Rebecca must have night vision, Rebecca will see.)

They can go meet Nine now if she wants; Daisy doesn't expect him to mind her copying his droid-ness, and that should help with the crafting nearly as much as Daisy's - he's a battle droid, so he's a little bit differently specialized including in terms of learning skills, but the approach to motor skills and the memory are the most important part and he does have those.

She nods and follows, though she tries using the communication thing on Daisy to express to her the question if Daisy can hear her. She already has an eidetic memory and enhanced processing, if that helps.

It takes a few tries to figure out the correct sort of action to take to target Daisy, and then holding the target takes a fair portion of her attention - it's clearly the sort of thing that will get easier with time, but it's only another minute's walk to the house, and she can't manage it that quickly, though she's definitely making progress.

The house itself is a sprawling single-story structure; its most prominent trait is its deep green iridescent walls, as if a beetle's elytron was enlarged to gigantic size and wrapped seamlessly around the building. The roof is flat, and black where it overhangs the walls, with a silver gazebo on top, off to one side. There's a smaller building off to the side, decorated similarly, that Daisy points out as the guest room, but Nine will be in the main building, and so that's where she leads her.

Inside, the bulk of the house is open-plan; half of the main room is devoted to a workspace full of tools and disassembled machinery, while the center has a couch and a few comfortable-looking chairs and the other end of the room holds a large kitchen. There are three doors in the back, done up in sunset tones, enameled flowers, and a rainbow pattern similar to anodized tungsten; Daisy knocks on the third.

It doesn't take long for Nine to appear; he's tall, nearly seven feet, with thick plating of a duller silver than Daisy's and less in the way of body language. Daisy speaks to him for a moment, and he pauses thoughtfully before answering; she relays that he's fine with being copied from.