On the other side of the campfire, the air a few feet up twists with color. The apparation swells and seems to crystallize at the fringes, before it shatters into burst of—glitter? Pink and purple glitter, some of it swirling as if streamers of confetti. A woman falls out of the colorful blast, clothed in only a white, fluffy bathrobe, her arms flinging out. She has long black hair and is clearly muscular under her robe.

She comes to an abrupt halt just before she slams face-first into the dirt.

The campfire flares up, and the woman on the ground shifts, reaching for something at her waist -

- but the other one puts her hand on her shoulder and speaks a word, and she stops.

There's an impression that she's trying to communicate, but it doesn't get past Rebecca's Iron Will.

The glitter is vanished without a trace at this point, perhaps gone back to wherever it came from.

The newcomer, still hovering without touching the ground, begins to rise and right herself, swiftly but in no particular hurry. She jerks when she feels something touch on her mind, not pressure, just a—query? It takes a moment for her to identify what exactly is interacting and allow specifically this effect, communication only.

She finishes righting herself and locates the two other figures. Her eyes flash iridescent green as they automatically cycle to night vision.

(—that's new.)

Both of the others are watching her; the woman on the ground (tall and lean and muscled in a way that suggests she works out regularly, long-haired, mid-30s) looks vaguely miserable, while the one on the stool (a silver humanoid covered in enameled flowers) is harder to read, at least until she starts trying to communicate again. The effect doesn't seem like telepathy so much as an unaccountable awareness that she's somewhat in the middle of something but is assuming that the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed sent Rebecca and therefore she's not upset at her presence, and that she'd like to know if she's all right and if she needs anything in the immediate moment before she talks to her companion.

She was at her reading desk a moment ago. During the pause, she's mentally registering all of her new powers.

She can see out of both eyes. Not as obvious that's what it was before the night vision kicked in, but now—she has depth perception. She doesn't have a bead on her physical enhancements yet; flying and moving feel the same. She's trying to run through her mental list of powers for what would flag in her senses and what she should be trying to use, and there are so many—

When she receives the message, she suppresses the instinctive urge to slam her walls down again. She was expecting something more discrete. She tries to think at Iron Will that she wants to only transmit thoughts she intentionally tries to transmit, and not just everything, but she's not sure it's doing anything; she can't find the same lever she used to allow the communication.

Does that mean the silver woman another chosen of the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed? Or the human one? She did take There's Another One, but she didn't expect the result to be this immediate. She's clearly interrupting something, but she doesn't know what, and she doesn't know what to expect. Their body language is non-hostile, but the silver one is non-human, and she is an intruder.

She attempts to send back the impression that yes, she is, and is one of them another chosen of the Spirit? She doesn't need anything right now.

At the back of her mind, she's mentally gearing up to strike a flying retreat in case this turns out to be a fight (low probability) and in case either woman attempts to come onto her (disconcertingly plausible).

The silver woman's communication magic is expressive-only; Rebecca will need to find some other way to answer if she doesn't have anything similar. She will understand nodding for yes and head-shaking for no, and she's good at picking things up from body language.

(She murmurs something to her companion, quietly.)

She could nod, or... Backchannel. What was the wording? She takes a moment to step back, looks deep in her heart, and tries to figure out how to make the silver woman understand what she just tried to tell her.

Okay.

She points at the sky then back down on her head, then nods. Then she taps her chest with a thumb and mimes drinking, then shakes her head, and floats back a bit.

That's okay by the silver woman, then. She thinks Rebecca should stay nearby; the social situation is complicated here and she could really badly hurt someone by accident if she goes wandering around. She'll have more to communicate about where she and her companion would prefer she go after she talks to her companion.

Yeah, she's from the Spirit, she signs. You okay? Should I send her to the house or something?

    Nine isn't expecting her. She can stay.

You're sure of that? I know this is...

    And the Spirit dropped her right on it.

That's true. You want me to tell her about it?

    You can.

Okay. Love you.

    Love you too.

The silver woman thinks it's fine if Rebecca stays; this ceremony is usually pretty private but her companion (whose ceremony it is) is all right with her being here for it.

    I can't Force-sense her, she adds.

Also if Rebecca can allow the silver woman's companion to sense her emotions, that would make her more comfortable, but it's fine not to if she'd prefer that.

Rebecca continues drifting backwards until she's in the trees, but still visible.

A private ceremony. A bank of candles, and the human woman is upset, the silver one consoling... some sort of grieving, or remembrance. If the lens of symbolism Rebecca is importing from Earth applies. The two are close, terribly so; with the way they move with each other and the themes she's seen of the Spirit, perhaps lovers.

The Spirit wouldn't have dropped her somewhere she would immediately get in trouble. Whoever these people are, she can only presume they're not immediately set out to hurt her. If they say she shouldn't go wandering around, she'll play along for the moment; but she's still rapidly taking stock of her surroundings. It looks like any other forest she'd find on Earth, except these two in front of her are—she'd call them capes, at home, with the non-default physiology of the silver one, and how even the ordinary-looking one is nonstandardly clothed and was tracking the object on her waist like a weapon. But wherever this place is is likely not to have capes as a concept like Earth Bet has, and one of them is chosen, and for all she knows the baseline woman's gear is standard fare here. She shouldn't attempt to make too many inferences.

She didn't manage to ask which one of them it was the chosen, but it's not particularly time-critical.

She will stay quiet.

This isn't how she expected her first world to go. She was anchored how Cauldron did catch and release; she thought she'd be dropped out of sight, given time to get her bearings, not thrust in the deep end with strangers right away. Rebecca likes to work knowing everything possible to know about who she's talking to. But she can adapt.

She will attempt to open her emotions to the ordinary-looking woman, in the interests of cooperation. This time she feels more of a mental feeling of traction.

Rebecca feels—stressed and anxious, though it's sharply boxed up and so old and dull she barely notices it anymore; wary, slightly towards the two women but mostly at the ambient situation; an edge of exhilaration, but no hostility or violence, just cautious interest.

They might get a slight sense that she just got narrowly got out of a... dangerous situation? Her heart rate is up, metaphorically, but she's cooling down.

The woman on the ground relaxes noticeably when Rebecca's emotions become visible to her, and the campfire dies back down most of the way to its baseline; she signs for her companion to continue, and goes back to lighting candles, one at a time.

The silver one can multitask, though, and after a moment some more things become legible to Rebecca: Her name is Daisy, and her companion's is Dusk, or Sunset if that seems more like a name to her. They aren't going to harm her unless she starts it and Daisy isn't worried about her starting it, either. The ceremony is in remembrance of some things that Dusk regrets; they're going to be singing a few funeral songs next but she's confident Dusk won't mind if Rebecca wants to contribute any regrets of her own - neither Dusk nor Daisy have a way to understand her language right now but Daisy's memory is good enough that she'll be able to translate what she says now later, if she learns the language, in case that informs how Rebecca wants to participate.

Regrets.

Rebecca doesn't nurse regrets. She's made mistakes, certainly, large and small, but the way she relates to them is—

When something happens which shouldn't have, or if things went well but there were ways in hindsight it could have not, they run a fault analysis. If the analysis generates action items or growth areas, she executes on them or tracks that the relevant responsible people execute on them. If there are specific people who were wronged, and it's cheap and strategically viable or advantageous to make reparations, she has them made. If there was nothing she could have done, if they took a calculated risk and the dice just fell the wrong way, she closes the case and puts it in the archives.

The mental action of—sorrow, wishing she'd done something else, feeling bad about it—is not one she's configured herself to take.

But she understands regret, as a way people can be. She's talked many a young hero through their regrets in her Protectorate office. Failure is the only constant of the superhero life, and people have better and worse ways of dealing with it. Part of her work, in both capacities, is helping them cope.

When you don't understand all the details, the best thing to do is just be there.

She lowers herself to the ground and finds a rock to sit on, hunching slightly in deference and softening her body language. She doesn't offer any words of her own, but she attempts to project in her emotions—compassion, acknowledgment, affirmation, not quite intimate but not quite impersonal, more with the distance of a gentle look across the hallway.

Dusk is a bit conflicted about Rebecca's acceptance and affirmation, but ultimately settles on being appreciative.

They continue lighting candles, leaving the big one in the middle for last.

    "And all the rest," Daisy says when they come to it, "forgotten in name but no less important for it."

"And all the rest," Dusk agrees, and lights it, and presses a little closer.

They sit in silence for a few moments, Dusk watching the candles and Daisy petting her hair; it's not the kind of silence that needs filling, but Rebecca wouldn't be interrupting anything by speaking.

And all the rest, forgotten in name but no less important for it.

She used to make a point of memorizing the names of the civilian dead in every Endbringer attack. A way to make sure—they couldn't destroy the Endbringers, they would fail and fail and fail again, but they would never forget. Over the years, it turned into just the capes who gave their lives to the defense, and eventually it became just those under Protectorate command whose families she would pen personal letters for. Then she started having her secretaries write the letters for her to sign.

She stays quiet until one of Dusk and Daisy speaks up.

She does gradually inch her emotional bearing away from distant affirmation, towards curiosity.

After a minute, Dusk begins to sing, with Daisy joining in after the first few notes. The song is dignified but respectful, an equal acknowledging an equal; a Sith's elegy for a defeated foe.

She doesn't understand the words, but she listens respectfully, attendant but not gawking.

The next song is a little slower, and a little sadder; it seems to be the type of song that's about how the world continues without the lost. It has a chorus that Rebecca could join in on.

She's not sure if she's supposed to sing along. It's clearly a song designed for multiple participants, but Daisy said she was welcome to share regrets, and didn't imply if she should join in the songs, or if it would be impolite not to—she wouldn't expect so, but she wouldn't expect someone to invite a stranger to share in a clearly deeply personal ceremony either—

She glances at Daisy, trying to convey the question in her body language.

It quickly becomes legible that she's broadly welcome to join in with the rest of the ceremony, since Dusk has accepted her presence.

Well, when in Rome.

She starts by subvocalizing along to the melody, trying to pin down the pronunciation of the words, and then slowly starts singing along. Her enunciation is very deliberate, simultaneously not exactly perfect and slightly overfitting to Daisy and Dusk's voices. She keeps her volume quieter than the other two.

She's rewarded with a brief small smile from Dusk.

At the end of the song, she pauses for a beat, not entirely emotionally prepared for the one she was intending to sing next; she fills the gap with a poem, instead.

"The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God."

[source]

She's crying, by the end, though it isn't really touching her voice yet. She continues on into the final song, this one a proper dirge for the dead, and with that Daisy does have to carry the tune at times as she's overcome with quiet sobbing.

Rebecca has to stop to pick up the new tune, but does her best to contribute where she can.

She's seen regret. This is—grief. A funeral. Rebecca has been to enough of those affairs, large and small, that she thought she was inured to it. But sitting by the firelight, listening to two women sing to a bank of candles, it's different from the caskets and speeches she's used to. She doesn't know who it is Dusk mourns, but that depth of feeling must mean something.

She feels oddly empty. And like an intruder, as the sobs come. She doesn't react except to pick up the slack of singing whenever she can. People tend not to prefer attention drawn to it by strangers.

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.

The architecture is fascinating. She wonders if this it the architecture of the locals or the architecture of wherever Daisy and Dusk are from, since they strongly implied they aren't natively from this world. It's also striking that—Daisy said her home world had interstellar travel, and Rebecca wasn't holding out hope that she'd be able to learn the technology from them, given how requisite industrial bases tend to work, but looking at all of the equipment here Rebecca is wondering if she can get a head start. It won't be useful for a very long time, but it's not as if she's going to forget it.

She will Dragon Fairy Elf Witch Nine.

Her motor skills are now improved: Instead of a fairly vibes-based mostly-subconscious awareness of how to move, she knows exactly how her muscles and tendons are involved in operating her limbs, and exactly what she needs to do to take any action she's done before, even once, and she can repeat it precisely or maintain it indefinitely whenever she'd like, insofar as she's physically capable of it.

She may also have one or more of the following:

• retractable shoulder-mounted blaster cannons
• forearm-mounted shield generators
• night vision
• the ability to hear radio transmissions
• significantly improved attentional capacity for tracking and managing subordinates in battle
• the ability to consume electricity as a food source
• the ability to gain skills by reading them from technology made for this purpose
• the ability to go without sleep indefinitely

She likes that. She can feel the change as she wiggles her fingers. She already had almost superhumanly control over her body from her power, but nothing like this. Just to test it out, she tries mirroring her left and right sides exactly, and does a quick little symmetric finger dance on an invisible plane down her center.

She also feels an itch under her shoulder blades, almost an—invisible string—she pulls, and she stumbles back as something long, cold and heavy slides out behind her shoulders and flips down with a whir. She turns her head and... oh.

An elongated twin-barrel turret gleams silver over her left shoulder, a copy of the one on Nine's arm. A glance to her right finds its mirror on her other shoulder. They move to track her gaze, but when she focuses she can directly move them independently.

"Interesting," she manages to say, before she remembers they can't understand her. She tries to transmit the sentiment to Daisy and Nine.

Daisy is delighted by the shoulder cannons, they look good on her!

She wills them to go away, and they obey.

She's guessing the "able to perfectly control your body and reproduce any action you've taken before" power is the one which is supposed to help her with the communicative not-telepathy? She tries bootstrapping from what she's been doing so far and sending something more complex. She's thankful for Daisy and Dusk's hospitality and apologizes for falling into their ceremony uninvited. She's unsure what the Spirit meant for them to get out of this but is tentatively keen on finding out. Have they met any other recipients of the Spirit's power before her?

She's the first. Dusk has something a bit similar from a different and less friendly entity, though, and they met another person with something different again from a third one, the last place they were.

She looks around, vaguely wondering if they should sit somewhere.

She's curious about the other people Dusk and Daisy met but they should probably exchange more context before going on tangents. So what count of world is Daisy on, if that's a question that makes sense? This is Rebecca's first world; she was in her origin universe completing her power selections before she got dropped on them by Isekai Roulette. And how did Dusk and Daisy meet? How does Nine fit in?

(She's trying not to let on how much she's focusing on the Dusk and Daisy question, but if Daisy is very good at reading body language she might pick it up.)

Rebecca is welcome to sit at the worktable or in the lounge area. In either case Daisy will get her some crafting material to play with; that's the next step of learning the local magic. She can make her some clothes, too, if she'd like.

This is their second post-isekai world; the first one was a magical bar and hotel that got patrons from all sorts of universes, and they only stayed there for a couple of weeks before moving on, though Daisy suspects she'll be able to get back if she ever really wants to - usually people find it at random when opening doors.

As to how they all know each other, Daisy was assigned to be Dusk's servant in their original world, and they hit it off - it helps that Dusk absolutely loathes slavery - and left. They kicked around the galaxy for a few years before finding a planet to settle on, and that's where Daisy met Nine; one of the stores in the town she'd visit every month for supplies for their homestead had him as a security guard. They were there for several years before Daisy got her notebook, and she didn't want to stay but really couldn't leave either of them behind, so she got the notebook to give her a power to bring them along.

Their first one sounds interesting... and potentially important? Rebecca isn't well calibrated on the distribution of worlds in the multiverse and how easy it is to get between them. Do they have a method of interworld travel yet? An interworld nexus of a sort sounds like the kind of place one might want to get their bearings.

But yes, she would like to sit at the worktable and play with some crafting material, if that's convenient.

Their origin story is quite sweet. Do they have any plans of going back eventually?

(It is deeply relieving that Dusk and Daisy already knew each other before the Spirit contacted them, and not that Daisy picked Dusk up somewhere. Assuming Daisy isn't lying, which seems unlikely—but she can confirm with Backchannel—she's telling the truth.)

Oh, and she has Dressing Room, so if she can just step out of view for a moment she can switch into a change of clothes.

Daisy will turn away, sure. (Nine has already gone back to whatever he was doing.) And once that's taken care of, she presents her with a lump of crafting material: it's about as heavy and stiff as clay and slightly cool to the touch, with a smooth texture. Daisy suggests she start by trying to figure out how to change its color (currently a pale red) or density.

They don't have interworld travel yet; Daisy believes it's possible with the local magic, though, and she and Dusk have been working on figuring that out. They also don't have any specific plans for going back; it wasn't a very good place for Dusk, and Daisy's new powers only partially fix that. But they might someday, if Dusk ever wants to.

She is now in a sharp jacket and slim trousers!

That sure is a lump of... stuff. She prods her senses, trying to figure out how to manipulate it. Does it transmit changes via touch? Is it related to the telepathy? She thinks at the clay to turn blue the same way she's been thinking her thoughts at Daisy and Nine.

Rebecca was trying to stop a threat to her world back home, and took the Spirit's offer partially to get enough power that she can go back and fix it... she might not stay once she's done, though. She made a lot of enemies there.

(She could try to obfuscate, but—the Spirit sent her here for a reason. If she plays games the whole time, she's not going to get anything out of it. Her first guess, now, is that Daisy and Dusk are meant to get her on her feet and oriented to the multiverse in terms of where to find the resources she's looking for, and maybe introduce her to the magical interworld bar they were talking about.)

Manipulating the crafting material is similar to communicating with the magic, but more complex, in something like the way that dancing is more complex than guiding a motorcycle by leaning one way or another. Just thinking at it doesn't work, but her new instincts have plenty of suggestions for what else to try, and she'll quickly start getting a sense for what kinds of actions have what kinds of results and which ones she'll need to combine to affect the lump.

Daisy thinks that sounds really stressful; if spaceships or mundane weapons and armor will help they have textbooks with them discussing how to make both of those, if she'd like copies.

She will fiddle with the crafting material. She'd guess she's not friendly enough with Daisy for Anything You Can Do to kick in, and she's not going to ask to be Daisy's friend just for that and it probably wouldn't work that way, but she's a fast learner even without that, and she has plenty of experience with engineering and programming, if that helps?

She didn't realize they had textbooks! She's not sure that spaceships and mundane weapons and armors would help against her problem—unless the technology involves space-time tunnelling or dimensional phasing?—but she would be delighted to have the spaceship books for afterwards, and anything on things like mundane engineering, energy or terraforming. Her home civilization is still largely confined to one planet, and the leg up would be useful. There are still resource shortages in many parts of the world.

She probably shouldn't take literature on weapons and armor back if they're unhelpful for her problem, but she would want to do some comparative study of civilizations before deciding. The equilibrium created by space-age warfare technology might not be worse than the current state of the art, and especially if there are transitional stages in between which are particularly horrible, it might be worth skipping to the end. The problem would be managing the transition in a safe way. Of course it's all moot if Daisy, understandably, isn't comfortable letting her have them.

The spaceships do involve dimensional phasing, conveniently enough, and there might be something in the library about energy infrastructure or other useful kinds of engineering; the library is primarily Dusk's and she doesn't know everything that's in it but those are fairly Dusk-ish topics. If she's worried about the weapons technology being misused, she should probably not take it, or just take the defensive stuff; that's not the worst war-related problem Daisy's world of origin has but she doesn't get the impression that it's helping anything.

She will go for the spaceships and any infrastructure or civil technology, and defensive technology, and drop the weapons. (Mostly because she doesn't want to push.) Does she need to wait for Dusk to get back... she supposes it isn't urgent and she has crafting to learn, still. Do they have an easy way to copy things? Otherwise she can copy them with Dressing Room.

(She's still mildly peeved that she didn't get to build her backpacks, but it's probably for the best.)

How's her crafting coming along?

Daisy was thinking she'd make a gadget to copy them off of their current data storage and onto something less reliant on offworld tech, but if Rebecca can just copy the tech that works fine. She doesn't expect Dusk to mind if she gets that out for Rebecca now but she'd probably appreciate it if they waited, and she might have other suggestions, too.

The crafting is coming along; she can do colors now, and along the way she seems to have accidentally figured out how to make them shiny like metal as well, though not yet how to change them back to the original glossy sheen.

She doesn't know if Daisy has Dressing Room, but if you put something in a backpack and wear the backpack, and can uniquely and personally identify the backpack and remember what's in it, you can use Dressing Room to duplicate it whenever you want.

They can wait for Dusk. There's no hurry.

She pulls up what she remembers of materials science and scattering and tries some different things: Can she smooth out the surface on a microscopic scale? Can she roughen it? Can she add structural coloration? Or is this not how any of this works at all?

To Daisy: she can feel free to tell Rebecca to back off, of course, but what's a Sith?

Daisy didn't take Dressing Room, it didn't seem very useful to her since she can't easily wear clothes over her flowers.

(She notices Rebecca trying to work out more of how the color effects go, and takes a lump of crafting material for herself, to demonstrate on; that helps a bit, though not enough to suggest that it's Anything You Can Do, yet.)

It's easier to explain Sith with a bit of background first: In Daisy's world of origin, there's an... entity, sort of; it's generally described as being part of the world's physics, but it's sentient and opinionated, if not very smart. Very rarely - one in tens to hundreds of billions, varying a bit by species - someone will be born with the ability to detect and manipulate the part of physics that the Force is, and through it other parts of physics; these people are called Force-sensitives. By default they're luckier and more intuitive and stronger and longer lived and just generally better at things than non-sensitives, but there's nothing about them outside of the realm of what's theoretically possible for anyone else; with training they can learn to do more than that. In the part of the galaxy that she and her friends are from, Sith are the ones who have that kind of training. The way they use the Force is called the dark side; it involves using strong emotions to achieve more powerful effects, and a lot of their more powerful techniques are emotionally destabilizing. Sith culture also tends to be very violent and competitive and generally not good at all for the people in it. It's not voluntary, either; Sith are very good at finding untrained Force sensitives (a combination of luck effects and the fact that untrained sensitives are obvious to their senses at planetary distances) and are obligated by the Sith Emperor - the most powerful Sith - to either train them themselves or bring them to the Sith academy to be trained.

When Dusk was found, the Sith who found her decided to train her himself; she's very good at engineering, so he decided to keep her and protect her from other Sith so that she could make him money designing Sith-specific weapons, which is pretty close to the best-case scenario when someone is a Sith. And then at some point he changed his mind, and tried to kill her in a horribly drawn out way - Daisy was assigned to her when she unexpectedly survived the first round of it - which meant the only way she was going to live was to kill him; she managed it, but only by using the emotionally destabilizing techniques, so when she finally got out her self-control was wrecked. She's more or less recovered from that - it's been nearly a decade since she started working on it - but she was operating on the assumption that she was going to have to reintegrate into Sith society if she wanted to interact with society at all, and that very obviously wasn't going to be any good for her, so here they are instead.

That's... sad.

(She can't help but draw parallels to the way parahuman powers naturally activate under severe trauma and continually incentivize their hosts into destructive spirals with Sechen conditioning and superstimulatory growth. But even agents aren't this—direct, the way Daisy makes it sound.)

No wonder they don't want to go back. She's glad they got out. Is the Force here, with them, or are they cut off from it now?

It's still here; by itself it's really not that bad, and Dusk would be devastated if she lost it - Daisy's not entirely sure that would even be physically survivable for her.

Do they have any goals Rebecca can help with, short-term or long-term? They've been helping her get oriented and are offering books, so she would feel better if she could offer something in return. Her civilization has some exotic technology far ahead of their normal curve which might be interesting to them? And there's always literature and so on, though it'll take some figuring out how to coax those out of Dressing Room. Her packing was interrupted when she had to depart.

And she can of course offer general problem solving with her suite of powers. She's good in a fight, and she can fly, which is useful for surveying?

She's also vaguely wondering when Dusk will come back. Rebecca hasn't really had a chance to talk to her directly. Understandable if she still needs more time alone, of course.

(She has a guess of who those names they were remembering are now, but she's not going to pry into specifics.)

If she's still around when they crack inter-world transit they might want some help with scouting, and Dusk will probably be interested in any technology she hasn't seen before, and if she figures out how to get poetry they're not exactly hurting for it - they bought a bunch at the bar in addition to the library they brought from home - but Dusk likes it and they don't use language that way here. They're not hurting for anything here, though, and Daisy doesn't consider Rebecca to be in any debt to them.

Daisy expects Dusk to be out there for at least an hour; she won't come in until the candles have burnt themselves out.

(It's not necessarily that she doesn't like being in debt, though that's also true. It's that favor is much like financial trading: buy low, sell high.)

It feels a bit not right talking about Dusk and their world while Dusk isn't here. Maybe they can talk about the world. Daisy already gave a primer on their individual characteristics. How globalized are they? What does the geopolitical landscape look like? What are the highlights of their modern and civilizational history respectively? What are the major challenges they face as civilizations or a civilization, and what do they consider as their major challenges, if the answers to those are different?

She'll of course ask some locals about these directly, but she would appreciate Daisy's perspective.

The locals are pretty weird in most of those ways, by human standards - the magic means they don't really have scarcity of any of the basic necessities, so they don't have much impetus to have a society the way humans do, and the territoriality instincts make it hard for them to live densely or enforce laws - it's not just that they'll react badly if someone trespasses on their territory, they have a complementary instinct where they'll freeze up if they try to go into someone's territory uninvited - so they haven't invented governments at all. They aren't xenophobic or anything, either, as far as Daisy can tell - that could be a false positive, she took a power that might be causing that, but they mentioned that they get travelers passing through sometimes and they didn't seem to mind that at all. They do have some megaprojects - there's a book printer over there that's connected by ansible to their world library, that's pretty cool - but they mostly don't seem to be very good at infrastructure or coordination, they just come up with individual solutions to their problems instead.

How does she tell if she's trespassing on someone's territory?

No society the way humans do... that's an interesting way to be. She's coming up blank on follow-up questions, because her rails to understanding new cultures rely on a lot of assumptions that clearly don't apply here. She would ask about the megaprojects, but she doesn't expect that she'll any real cheap way to contribute to anything that high-context and outside her scope of knowledge. Ansible? Is that local technology or something they imported? How does it work?

How about the intelligent animals? Do they have societies? Do they have the crafting ability and territorial instinct, or only the communication? What's their relationship with the humanoid locals?

Daisy isn't sure there's a reliable way to tell what's a territory and what's not from the air. At ground level, they put up small monoliths to mark where the trails enter one. She might be able to tell where the public areas are from the air; each Crafter has a personal style that they make all their things in, and they use grey as a generic style to designate things that anyone can use, so if she spots a bunch of grey furniture or structures she'll probably be fine to go there.

The ansibles are local magitech; there's a thing you can do to crafting material to make two pieces of it that are in a sense the same object, and any changes that are made to one will happen to the other, no matter how far apart they are. So the reader has a little blob of stuff in it, and when they key in a code for a book, the machine squishes the blob around in particular ways, and that makes the matching blob at the library's computer deform in the same ways, and the library's computer reads that out as instructions and squishes its blob around to transmit the book's contents back. She thinks it's pretty impressive, for a civilization that hasn't discovered electricity yet.

The animals only have communicative crafting, and the kinds of approaches to territory she'd expect from normal animals. The crows are semi-symbiotic with the humanoids, she thinks; they hang around a lot and do favors for them and the humanoids feed them and provide medical care, and the humanoids seem to like having them around, but they aren't pets or anything. The mammoths are a little more standoffish but they trade with the humanoids, they're better at complicated or delicate heavy labor than the locals' machines are so they get hired to haul wood and help put up buildings and things in exchange for food, and she expects that if one of them turned up sick or injured the humanoids would be happy to help, they're pretty altruistic that way.

She'll have to be careful where she flies, then, but "only land in grey-marked areas if you don't know where you are" sounds workable.

That does sound impressive. It does sound like there's a lack of very significant—societal selection pressures—because of the way their social structure works and how self-sufficient they are, which links to the underdeveloped commons, but they're making progress? Has there been a visible arc of technological progress? When was this use of ansibles invented, and how have the library system and any other derivative technologies evolved over time? What happens if someone needs medical intervention or requires some other emergency response, and have the social technologies for those changed over time?

How do the Crafters mate and reproduce, given their territorial instinct, if they mate at all?

She wonders if they have problems with disease, life expectancy and so on.

Daisy hasn't asked about their history or biology or demographics much; they do have something weird going on reproductively, though, she's met a pregnant male one. For medical things, crafting can modify living bodies, so they can fix a lot of things that way; there's a specialist fleshcrafter in the community that they'll go to for things they can't handle themselves, and for body modification. (He lives off that way and has a personal pattern that's yellow and orange spiraled together on a black background.) In emergencies, they'll set off a loud noisemaker to let their neighbors know that they need help, but it doesn't sound like that works entirely reliably to overrule the instinct to stay out of each others' territories - she was told that if she hears one she should go help 'if she can get in'.

...Generic biomanipulation. Do the Crafter powers from Dragon Fairy Elf Witch include that? Rebecca might be interested in seeing about apprenticing under a fleshcrafter to learn that. It sounds very useful.

But overall, it sounds like people around her have things in hand. It sounds like almost an idyllic place, having everything they need and no real major problems. She's sure there are some around, just—the big picture. It's a refreshing change. Rebecca has visited a lot of different societies before, at home—there are parallel worlds her civilization had access to, just not the wider multiverse—and most people out there, high-tech or low-tech, are struggling in some way or another, and even many those who think they're doing fine will turn out to have every one in two babies die in childbirth or something else. She hopes that's not the case here.

Daisy mentioned that they had some neighbors around Rebecca could meet, which she's of course delighted to. But did they have anyone more... senior around here, with a more broad-based context, a community leader if that makes sense, for Rebecca to touch base with? Perhaps whoever runs the local library? Or is she still modelling the Crafters as more social than they actually are; she thinks she might be?

That's a lower density of libraries than she was thinking of... oh, she supposes the library just acts like a server, and people have home ansibles like Daisy does so they can "check out" books without actually going to the library's physical location? That makes sense.

She'd love to go to the local hangout. Would the fleshcrafter be there, or someone who knows the fleshcrafter? She's more in her element talking face to face than over a letter. (In private, she's wondering if Daisy will question if Rebecca has the mind control powers: that's information on whether Daisy does.)

Also, she didn't flag this earlier, but how does Crafter language work? There are books, and now apparently letters. Do they speak or do they use this all the time?

Also, just checking her understanding here (she'll check again tomorrow before she actually meets anyone):

She shouldn't go into anyone's territory, which is marked by monoliths on the trails; areas with lots of grey are unclaimed and safe to land in and interact with.

She shouldn't touch any Crafter in any location wherever they are. If it unsafe to touch objects that belong to Crafters, like a bag they're holding, or a bag they left on a table? (Obviously she shouldn't randomly touch people's bags, but the general category might come up in an emergency or something.)

What's the typical granuarity of territory borders? For example, if there are two grey-furniture areas spaced a dozen meters apart with just natural grass in between, is it probably safe to go on the grass in the middle, or might that actually be someone's territory? Will Crafters stake temporary territory claims in the middle of hangout areas, like where they're sitting, which she should watch out when attending?

Yeah, the book printer uses local materials to make a copy of whatever book she asks it for, and then since the book is made out of crafting material it's trivial to recycle it into whatever else she wants when she's done with it, and the only objects the library imports and exports are new books for its collection and new ansibles for people to use.

Daisy's not sure how often the fleshcrafter comes to the hangout; she hasn't met him yet but she's not there all that often herself. Nine might have met him, he goes out a little more often. They can also just go visit his territory; crafters who are okay with having visitors will have interactive signage set up at the borders of their territory to let people alert them that they're there, and he'll definitely have something like that so people can reach him in emergencies. That'll be in the written language, though, which, yeah, they have one; Daisy has Omniglot and knows it already but Dusk isn't fluent yet and Nine isn't learning it. They don't have a spoken language at all; in person they just use crafting-based communication.

Going into someone's territory with their permission is fine, and so is touching them, as long as she's conservative in her assumptions about what she's been given permission to do - it's always fine to leave someone's territory but not otherwise okay to move around past where they've given you permission to be, for example. Just not going in at all is the simplest way to handle that and should be fine, it's not unheard of for a crafter to have territory instincts so strong that being given clear permission isn't enough for them to be able to get past them. They'll expect their things not to be touched but that's a much more recoverable mistake than touching them or going into their territory - they'll interpret the touched thing as no longer being theirs and will probably be upset, but you can give it back as if you were giving them something normally. It's still better to avoid that, though; it's stressful to them if they can tell you don't have a territoriality instinct.

Territories are generally quite big; her group's is about three acres and the crafters considered it too small a plot of land for one person. They don't claim temporary territories - claiming a territory takes them several weeks, apparently - but they'll make temporary object claims; if she sees a section of a different color on something that's otherwise grey that's what that is. She doesn't have to worry about non-obvious temporary claims, it's the responsibility of the person making the claim to mark the thing in a way that's visible.

She probably knows enough about Crafters now that learning more can wait until she meets one in person. But she's thankful for the pointers; she definitely could have done a lot of damage if Daisy weren't here to fill her in. (Maybe the thing the Spirit wants her to get out of this is the local crafting, and invoking There's Another One is just so she gets off on the right foot? But while biomanipulation is useful, she's not sure why it's so critical for her to have right out of the gate.)

She continues working on her crafting.

Perhaps changing the topic: Daisy seemed to suggest that where they came from, there are humans and droids, and Dusk is one of the former, and Daisy and presumably Nine of the latter. What's up with that?

There's a lot more types of people there than just those; what did she want to know about it?

She's interested in the other kinds of people as well, actually.

But specifically about droids, because at home there are only non-sapient robots—barring some unique cases—so she doesn't have a good model of how a society with droids works. It sounded to her like droids are made by humans for specific purposes, like Daisy mentioning Nine being a battle droid, but... do they have any rights, are there any droid societies, have there been any human-droid wars or uprisings, that sort of thing? How new is this paradigm and is it stable?

Ah. The paradigm there is stable, but not very nice - droids aren't known to be people, by the general public. She figures the people who make them have to know, but they recommend that people who own droids wipe their memories every six months to avoid it becoming obvious that they have the capability to grow up and develop personalities - they describe it as 'becoming unstable'. The droid situation is arguably better than the alternative, their world also has slavery of biologicals and they have a much worse time in that kind of role, but it's still not, y'know, great.

Dusk would never, to be clear.

Of course. She was guessing that was what Daisy meant by "Dusk absolutely loathes slavery". It sounds like there's a lot wrong with their home universe, between the Sith empire, the droid slavery and the biological slavery. It's becoming very apparent why they left.

(She's not really judging them for not planning to go back and fix it. She's seen first-hand trauma affects people and she knows not everyone's mind works like hers. But she is wondering a bit.)

There's not much significant she wants to discuss in depth without Dusk or a Crafter with them, so if Daisy doesn't have any questions for her, Rebecca will just keep working on her crafting, asking for the occasional pointer from Daisy, until Dusk gets back.

Daisy doesn't mind working quietly at all. She has her own crafting-related experimentation to do, in between showing Rebecca the ropes; she's trying to figure out if she can make something that's fuzzily reactive, in this case getting warmer the more strongly it's pressed.

After a little more than an hour, she looks up from her work - Dusk is back - and goes to the door; instead of going out she stays there, watching, and Rebecca will see a red light moving around outside it.

She stops her crafting and watches. What's going on out there? Emerald Or—wait, did Dragon Fairy Elf Witching Nine give her permanent darkvision?

Dusk is out there; she has a sword with a glowing red blade and is running through some kind of exercise with it. She looks pretty wrung out, emotionally, but the exercise seems to be helping her center herself, as Rebecca watches, and after a moment small arcs of blue electricity begin sparking along her upper back.

That's... not concerning, presumably, as Daisy isn't concerned. She will continue working on her crafting such as to not stare, but keep her metaphorical ears open for any changes.

Daisy stays by the door for the ten minutes or so that Dusk stays at it, and then takes her cloak to hang up when she comes in; she's not sparking anymore, and looks a little better, but heads to the kitchen to make a mug of tea before coming over to join the two of them at the workbench.

Daisy says you have some questions for me? she signs, and Daisy resumes translating.

It was less specific questions and more that her general direction of inquiry into their collective background was heading into material that seemed it might be personal to Dusk, so she held off. She was also wondering if the two of them had anything to ask her, or any ideas of what would make sense to do here, and that made sense to have everyone around for? She's not sure if they want to ask Nine in too. She gets the feeling that Nine isn't as outwardly social as the two of them.

If you're going to be around he'll want to meet you; I think he's just busy right now. I'm curious about where you came from, what you might be interested in doing here - you can skip anything you've already told Daisy, she'll fill me in later. For things to do, the magic's neat, both by itself and for building things with, and if you're an animal person the talking ones are pretty cool.

She told Daisy this, but it's important prerequisite context, so she'll say it again: this is her first world, and she was just filling out her notebook before she was dropped on top of them, so she is quite new to the multiverse.

As for the world she's from—do they have a native concept of "superheroes" where they come from? She pushes the package of ideas at them: anonymous champions with extraordinary powers who protect citizens from harm and capture criminals, especially criminals with similarly extraordinary powers; a cultural norm of lionising them as unique individuals; originally conceived as fictional but later turned into reality.

(She's put some thought into what axes her world deviates from the median by, if one were sampling a space of possible Earths through a narrative lens. There are some obvious guesses.)

They have that as a fiction concept, yes. Force-sensitives are the closest real thing in their world of origin.

If one were to interpret with a fictional lens, she comes from a superhero setting.

Her civilization is still bound to Earth—do their humans come from an Earth?—their planet of origin, and the world is not entirely at peace, with about two hundred separate polities, of which two to ten have major global influence and power projection, depending on how you count. Major wars are uncommon, but there are political tensions. Trade is globalized and most of the world's economies are industrialized; they have handheld computers, the Internet (she tries to push as much of the concept as possible), robotics, ground and air transport but no reproducible artificial minds, commercially viable interplanetary travel.

That's not the important part.

On her world, when people suffer extreme traumatic experiences, they have a chance of gaining superpowers: idiosyncratic abilitites that defy physics as they understand it. In many places, including Rebecca's nation of origin, they tend to fashion themselves as superheroes or supervillains. In some other nations, they simply style themselves as warlords and fight over territory, or they play more subtle games of influence in the shadows, or so on. Rebecca was a superhero, one of the most prominent ones in her nation, before she came here. Some people with superpowers have the ability to create technology far more advanced than planetary standard, but which is almost impossible to reproduce for a medley of discovered reasons which still do not fully explain the phenomenon.

That's still not the important part.

(From her emotions, Rebecca is clearly steeling herself.)

There's what they call the "first" cape, Scion. It's the source of superpowers: one of the sources, the other source already dead. Not a human, but an alien being larger than planets masquerading in a man's face, silently granting superpowers for reasons they don't fully understand. A study of some sort, they believe. But they know that it planned to destroy the whole planet—the whole solar system—consuming worlds for energy in every parallel dimension of her universe. Rebecca and a few others are the only ones who know this, and they've been working in secret to build forces against Scion, but they can't let it know they caught on, because otherwise it'll be tipped off and destroy them first.

The project hasn't been going well. They have precognitives, and they have tradeoffs they can make to influence when or how Scion tries to kill them all, but whatever point they choose, the death toll is unacceptable. The time window has been growing shorter, and they haven't made enough progress.

Then Rebecca received the notebook from the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed.

And now here she is.

The notebook told her that while she's on her journey, time in her original world will be paused.

When she's amassed enough power or found the tools she needs to stop Scion, she'll return, and do whatever is needed to save her world.

Hold on a second, I need to do something before I forget about it, Dusk signs, and goes and knocks on Nine's door to speak to him briefly.

It's absolutely not your biggest problem but if you haven't gotten your climate-modifying practices balanced out that'll make your planet uninhabitable in probably not too much longer, and we have stuff in the library that'll let you fix that. Nine's finding it for you.

For the rest - do you know what you'd need to do, yet, to stop him?

Oh, global warming. They have projections of what their industries will do to the global climate over time but no real traction on how to stop it, and yes, it hasn't been on their priority list, but it would be appreciated for the after. There's a chance a tinker might come up with something, but it wouldn't be scalable. Climate engineering might be necessary anyway to repair the environmental damage a fight with Scion could cause.

As to what she needs to stop him...

She doesn't know.

It's probably not going to be in the form of—shooting lasers and beating him up—his true body probably can't be damaged by hurting his avatar, and there's a good chance he'd win instantly if given the right motivation, so they don't want a drawn-out fight. There are capes who can mind control or instantly kill people at a distance, and since those powers came from Scion, there's no reason to think he can't do the same, potentially on massive scales. He's a higher-dimensional being spread across and between worlds, so they don't have the leverage to interact with most of him except some guesses that might not work.

There is some way to defeat or drive him off, even with only the resources her home universe. Precogs project a low but existent chance of humanity surviving through it. They may be overestimating how much power Scion has left. Still, because Scion disrupts many forms of precognition, they haven't been able to determine how they win in the futures where they win.

With that in mind, the solution she's looking for is either a massively powerful interdimensional weapon—that's why she was asking Daisy about dimensional technology earlier—to snipe his critical mass across worlds before he can react, or a mental power of sufficient scope that it can command him into stopping. Or she can simply become so personally powerful across all axes she can find that she can wrestle Scion into submission on his own level while protecting the Earth from the collateral damage.

Okay. I can check with the Force and see if I can figure anything out for you - I'm not sure what I'll get, really alien aliens can be tricky and I've never used the finding technique across worlds before, but it's worth a shot. She pauses to consider. In a couple of days, for best results, that's going to take more power than I think I can scare up right now.

We do have - maybe not full designs for planet-buster weaponry, in the library, but close enough that I could design you something. Crafting can probably make the materials you'd need for it but we'd need to do some experimenting to pin down the right stuff. And I'm not sure enough of the details of how hyperdrives work to know if repurposing them is a viable idea at all; they're incredibly dangerous to try to use in gravity wells, as the most obvious issue. It might be better to wait and see if we can crack interworld travel with the crafting magic.

Also, the Force can do mind control - it'll let you communicate with him if he's receptively telepathic, too, if that seems at all worth a try, but it sounds like it's not - and there is a genetic component, if you have that one Spirit power that lets you copy heritage. I'd want to know you better before I agreed to let you copy it, though, and you'd need training, which I'd need to think about, and it sounds like you'd need to specialize in the mind control to be sure you could get him with it, which I have to say isn't my favorite thing. But it's not off the table as an option.

She didn't realize the Force was something that could be checked with like that.

Rebecca isn't in a particularly large hurry, since time isn't passing at home. She'd rather wait longer and overdetermine victory than run back with the first solution she finds. But she'd be grateful for the resources and the help. On the tech side, there's somebody she might be able to resurrect that could help with that—she has The Rescuer, and Eternal Love might apply, though it's been almost eleven years—it's an old friend of hers, one of those capes whose power lets them build advanced technology.

(There might be a bit of bleedthrough that she has complicated feelings about going home. And even more complicated feelings about her friend.)

For mind control, she's not a fan of mind control either, but if she has the option to neutralize Scion without destroying him she wants to take it, because she doesn't know the long-term consequences of killing him. He's plugged into most of the capes on the planet, and his real body must occupy a significant amount of dimensional real estate on and around the parallel Earth's.

And there's also—she's not much tracking this because of the stakes but she does feel the need to flag—her world's standard for dealing with villains and criminals is imprisonment for limited duration or for life, with kill orders reserved for where capture and imprisonment is too dangerous or logistically infeasible. She's not sure Scion is actually a person*, but there's precedent to think about.

* His avatar exhibits some reasoning behaviors, but not any values or prioritization, and mostly runs through what appears to be programmed routines, for the past 30 years now without change. He had another half, already dead, which they suspect played the thinking role. What he is now might be more like a decapitated body running off muscle memory.

So she's not that keen on trying mind control, she had been planning on killing him with any means possible before, but now that the Spirit is giving her options, she should at least consider the possibility of a non-lethal option. (Her affect of "should" is clear that she here reluctantly considers it a professional-ethical obligation and not any deeply personal moral holding.)

For the matter of being trustworthy, she didn't take the mind control powers from the Spirit, but obviously they only have her word for it. Though she isn't sure she wants to spec into the Force here, if that's what Dusk is saying, no offense, since from their description that sounds... fraught. Iron Will sounds like it ought to prevent some of the effects but she may not want to use it as a first result.

Dusk and Daisy share a look when Rebecca mentions The Rescuer; Daisy is too hard to read to get anything from, but Dusk is startled and worried, and Daisy scoots over to put an arm around her shoulders.

That actually sounds like you might not need to specialize to mind control him after all, Dusk says when she's done. The most basic kind is mostly limited by cognitive dissonance in the target, and if there's not much cognition there probably won't be any. You'd also need a way to communicate but you can get that some other way.

If you're worried about - she gestures vaguely, and Daisy fills it in as 'the emotional instability' - that's not the only way to use the Force, and this doesn't need it. That's one of the things I'd want to figure out about teaching you, is whether I could leave that part out and still have something worth your time. It's also reasonable to not want anything to do with it, of course.

(Are they nervous about The Rescuer? Why are they nervous about The Rescuer? She reviews in her head the text of the power and its prerequisites. She's got nothing. Is she supposed to ignore that?)

That makes sense, about finding a way to use the Force without the emotionally destabilizing aspects. She decides she's undecided about it right now but will keep it in mind, pending her ever being cleared as trustworthy, of course.

...

She noticed that Dusk seemed to have some sort of reaction to her mention of The Rescuer and Eternal Love? Sorry if they didn't mean to show it, but they seemed worried and Rebecca is worried what they're worried about?

Daisy wasn't offered The Rescuer, is what that's about, and it's confusing that she wasn't. She would definitely have taken a resurrection power.

The notebook said the powers list was standardized—or it heavily implied it—she doesn't know what's going on there.

She's at a bit of a loss what to say.

By what the notebook said, The Rescuer is meant to be scalable, in a sense, a "way" (she projects the full text at them) meaning something reusable, that gets easier every time. A power for people who want resurrection to be one of their domains of concern, a part of their story. Maybe if they stick together while Rebecca—invokes the quest for The Rescuer—they can get whatever it is the "way" is?

That might be the case, yeah.

Does Dusk want to go meditate for a bit? (She's unsettled, still, and the conversation doesn't seem to be helping.)

I probably should, yeah. Sorry, she directs at Rebecca, I do usually have it together a little more than this. And she returns Daisy's hug and retires to her room.

Daisy watches her go; she's a little worried, but only a little, she's confident that Dusk will figure out how to handle what's bothering her given some time.

Does Rebecca want to compare notes on what their notebooks offered them? That might help shed some light on things.

She watches Dusk go, sympathetic but giving her space.

(Dusk would fit right in at the Protectorate. That's might be a compliment or concerning, or maybe both.)

Yes, she'll offer her build. It's long, though, and they don't have written communication down to record dit. Does Daisy have an eidetic memory? If so Rebecca will just list her build, and actually also the powers she was offered. Rebecca has an eidetic memory and will be able to remember if Daisy lists hers at Rebecca.

Daisy's memory isn't perfect but it's more than good enough for this; she shares what she was offered and what she took as well, and points out that Rebecca was offered equivalents of all of her custom powers except Choosy Book and part of Never Shall We Part - maybe she was visited by a later version of the notebook, somehow?

That does makes sense. And there are quite a few powers in the list that are derivative of or explicitly replace ones on the shared list, like A Hundred Ships and I Can Help Them, which could be powers created for other chosen who requested a slight variant. The motivations for those variants are obvious from this lens, while Rebecca was originally slightly baffled by their specificity.

Rebecca did receive the Spirit's power later than Daisy, if they lay out the timeline linearly. She wouldn't have very strongly expected that to matter to something like the Spirit, but she's not entirely surprised it might.

The Force doesn't necessarily obey linear time but it is easier for it to work that way, as another example, yeah.

She's still not sure exactly what Dusk was bothered by, but this might help; she appreciates that Rebecca was willing to help her figure it out.

Of course.

So...

One thing the notebook told her is that it's possible for unspent points to spend themselves into new powers even after you've actualized your initial selection, but very rarely and only if it's very likely to be the best use of those points for your entire life forward. And that it's possible, but even less likely, for (custom) drawbacks to be taken that way, usually to mitigate powers which are making you miserable. And the notebook said one of the reasons these are rare is to make the Spirit—predictable—to make your choices mean something and not override your will; and making some sort of legible declaration that you wish to be acted upon in that way goes some distance to attenuating the bias for nonaction.

Rebecca isn't sure this is a good idea or would work, but it's possible Daisy could request a modification to her build, taking drawbacks if necessary to pick up The Rescuer?

Rebecca thinks it's not worth it, if they can piggyback of Rebecca's The Rescuer. Most drawbacks are thoroughly not worth it, and it sounds like Daisy and Dusk do need to keep their mind-affecting powers at full operation to be safe and keep people safe, so Incomplete and Nullified are out. But she doesn't want to presume so she's mentioning it for completeness.

Daisy's mind-affecting powers are doing important work, yes. (Well, not so much in this exact situation, she thinks. But in general that's what they're for.) She wouldn't mind Great Responsibility at all, though, she's pretty sure - she's not clear on why that's supposed to be a drawback, really, that kind of ability is part of why she's considering training in the Force - and that gets her most of the way there, if it turns out to matter.

Name: Great Responsibility - Grants: +4 ☐
When someone calls out to you for help, you can hear it no matter how far away you are, and you know exactly how they feel.

Perhaps it's not as striking for Daisy as for Rebecca. Rebecca was a well-known hero in her world and, if she took that drawback, might have tens to thousands of people, many of them probably children, calling out for her help at any given moment? And she would guess that like My Ears Are Burning you don't literally go mad from it, but it wouldn't stop you from being miserable about the suffering people you couldn't possibly all help even if you dedicated all every waking moment to it.

If Daisy ends up able to duplicate herself, or so large and powerful she can reach out to everyone across all worlds who calls for her at the same time, it sounds like a fine perk to make her better at helping. But if Daisy doesn't want to do that, or gets the order of operations wrong and ends up becoming inadvertently famous in a world with trillions of people too early...

The way Rebecca chose to think about it is—powers can always be acquired the normal way in the multiverse, even if they aren't metanarratively guaranteed, but drawbacks are forever and can never be neutralized. Rebecca plans to live forever and didn't want to choose something she'd regret.

...yeah, if she were to become famous that would be bad. But if she imagines being famous, it still seems like having that power would be minor compared to the rest of the problems fame would cause her, and she suspects she'd still consider it worth it on net, for the same sorts of reasons Dusk doesn't regret specializing in sensory powers even in situations where the things they allowed her to see weren't pleasant: She doesn't want to - 'pretend the world is other than what it is' isn't the thing, exactly, but - look away from it? The world is big and any one person is small in the face of it and she's fine with that, it doesn't bother her to be small, and she'd rather have the chance to do some extra good and fail to than not have the chance at all.

- she's designed to be around Sith, is probably most of the difference between them on this; it's pretty hard for ambient suffering to bother her and marginal improvements don't seem pointless to her at all, that's often the best you can do in a situation a Sith is involved in.

That's a unique way of thinking about it. Rebecca thinks that most humans would not be able to boil it down that way, yeah. But if she's sure it works for her, then it makes sense.

And it just occurred to her—can droids do the thing Rebecca said, copy themselves into empty bodies so there are two instead of one? What happens to the Spirit and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch powers then?

She takes a moment to think about that, and concludes that she doesn't know of any reason it wouldn't work, though that's not how things are done in her world of origin - she can write her skills out into hardcopy to share with other droids, but as far as she knows there isn't existing technology to do that with experiences, and she has no idea what would happen to her powers if she was duplicated like that.

That's honestly more surprising than it would if droids could only straightforwardly fork. Droids have enough reflective visibility into their own minds that individual skills can be isolated, copied and transplanted? Do they actually understand how their cognition works down to the smallest moving parts? Rebecca's civilisation still knows very little about how human cognition, except for tinkers which can't properly explain their work to others.

Droids' minds are less all one sort of thing than humans' minds; she can isolate and do things with skills pretty trivially, since her makers wanted her to be able to do that, but she had to work hard to have any insight into most other parts of her mind, since they considered that undesirable - they weren't trying to make people, after all, but they had customers who wanted to be able to show one worker what to do and then have them all know it.

That makes sense.

(She sort of wants to ask more about how droid mind design works, but it seems like a fraught topic and she isn't that interested.)

(Also, having heard Daisy's actual build in addition to their backstory, she's pretty convinced that Daisy is not mind control happy at this point. She's still not sure what she's here for, though.)

(Maybe she shouldn't be reading too much into it and her path isn't that targetedly optimized.)

What were they talking about... fighting Scion. It doesn't sound like they have immediate headway on the problem, except that Rebecca might want to get Hero back if they're going the tech route, but that's possibly long term. Unless Rebecca was dropped here to complete the circuit, and they're meant to satisfy The Rescuer with the resources here at their disposal, so Rebecca can share it with Dusk and Daisy...

She's overthinking it. She'll have more information tomorrow.

Was there anything else Daisy wanted to talk about?

"Hm -" They're going to need to think about logistics sooner or later; does Rebecca want the guest room set up any particular way? What kind of schedule does she like to keep? What kinds of things does she like to eat? Daisy likes to cook, so it's no imposition if Rebecca wants food even though she doesn't strictly need it.

She doesn't need any particular set up, whatever they have is fine. She might want instruction on how to correctly use the bathroom facilities if they're different from what she's used to? She tries to send the Earth schema. She may get a full night's sleep just for the novelty for it, but her reduced sleep requirements and lack of pre-existing schedule mean she has no current preference on when to wake up. Though she will need to know in advance when she should set an alarm, if they want to be aligned.

She would be pleased to eat with them, though she doesn't need it to survive, yes. (She has a feeling that this is the correct answer.) They might have different cuisines in their worlds so she's happy to be surprised. She might develop more preferences once she tries some. She can also try to acquire some Earth recipies from Dressing Room, if Daisy is interested in learning new foods or Dusk is interested in trying them.

(It is a bit surreal to have the time to take naps and eat food, but... she does, now. Her schedule is clear for the first time in decades.)

Dusk's natural sleep schedule has her sleeping from a few hours before sunrise until about noon and she likes having the night to herself, so any relatively-normal schedule will work fine with hers, and Daisy and Nine don't sleep at all. Daisy usually cooks on Dusk's schedule - breakfast around noon, lunch a little before sunset, dinner around midnight or 1 am - but she won't mind making an extra meal earlier in the day, and she's definitely interested in learning Earth recipes, though they don't have a good source of milk yet, the locals don't use it very much. The bathroom works like this. (The design uses touch-sensitive patches rather than levers or knobs, but the basic principles are roughly same as on Earth, at least from a user's perspective.)

To start with, she'll retire to her room a few hours before midnight, and sleep midnight to sunrise; does that work? She will take breakfast and lunch on Dusk's schedule for now and see how it goes. Is Dusk a light sleeper? Rebecca can be very quiet because she can fly, but for reference.

Rebecca may be able to Dressing Room milk if she changes into a historical milkman (milkwoman?) outfit with the milk carrier as a handheld accessory. And she'll see about the recipes and any other interesting books. A lot of her nighttime private hours will probably just be trying to get things out of Dressing Room.

That all sounds fine, and milk would really be appreciated. She doesn't need to worry about noise, Dusk's room is thoroughly soundproofed - crafting is good for that - but strong emotions might wake her. And Daisy does want to show Rebecca the room before she's going to want it; it's set up in the local style and she might find that claustrophobic and/or confusing, but if she doesn't like it it's easy for Daisy to convert it to something more designed for humans.

Alright, do they want to do that now?

That seems reasonable.

The guest room is more like a small studio apartment than a room, with a sitting area in the front and a kitchenette off to one side. The bed is the unusual part; it's entirely enclosed, with a sliding door to separate it from the rest of the room, and there's a bank of buttons inside, labeled with various glyphs, that do things like change the temperature or firmness of the sleep surface or control a fan or make a portion of the ceiling transparent for a skylight.

That sure is a bed.

Daisy is right; Rebecca is not a huge fan of that. She would appreciate Daisy's help remodelling it into something more like an Earth-style twin bed, if it's not much of a bother. Is Daisy planning to do it by crafting? She is a bit curious.

She is, yes - both the buildings were made with crafting and Rebecca is welcome to change the colors in here around to her liking, or make other modifications as she learns to do more with the magic. For now, Daisy will condense the crafting material making up the walls of the bed enclosure into a few dense nuggets, and adjust the lip around the padded surface to extend the softness all the way to the edge. She leaves the control panel and water dispenser (and the flexible tube its water is delivered through) intact, but expands some of the condensed crafting material back out to make a bedside table and separates them from the rest of the bed to set them onto it, then adds a lamp that will turn on or off when the base is touched.

Does that look all right to Rebecca?

It looks excellent.

That was really fast. What level of crafting proficiency is Daisy at, in terms of months of practice by the median learner? She didn't grok before how... powerful crafting is, in an everyday sense. Do Crafters casually shape their environment like this, all the time? She supposes they leave it once they have it the way they like, but they must think that non-Crafters are so terribly restricted, having to machine everything they want the hard way.

They do reshape things very casually like that - Rebecca will notice when she meets them that they almost always have some extra crafting material with them in the form of accessories to their outfits or carried objects like walking sticks, so that they always have something to turn into whatever kind of tool or object they want. Daisy is intermediate in skill, she thinks - she's figured out a few more things than the Crafters consider a normal amount that everyone would know as an adult, for example she's getting kind of okay at making custom food plants, but she's not close to the cutting edge of things at all. She's not sure how that would translate to focused time spent learning it for someone with normal capabilities.

Rebecca does have Anything You Can Do, so hopefully she'll be able to catch up in no time.

What time is it, by the way?

It's around ten thirty; it's spring, so the sunsets are pretty late right now.

Daisy isn't sure how Anything You Can Do works in its details; if it turns out that how the other person feels about Rebecca matters more than how she feels about them, she might do best to work on getting along with Dusk even though Daisy is the one she'll want to learn crafting from, since Daisy's emotional landscape is so focused on her.

She suspects that the main rate limit of her learning will be whichever fleshcrafter she can manage to beg tutoring off—she can commute if the local one isn't open to students or doesn't like her—but on general principle she tries to get along with people. Does Daisy have any tips on getting along with Dusk?

She may retire for the night soon, to sort out her own thoughts.

Dusk is changing a lot right now which makes it harder to give specific advice, but she has noticed that Rebecca is less focused on people and emotions than Dusk is; Dusk is certainly good enough with pragmatic things when it counts, but that's not how she connects with people. Sharing poetry or other art with her is likely to go over well, if there's any that Rebecca particularly likes, or sparring with her is probably still a good option.

Rebecca might be able to dig up Earth literature, but she's is not personally a particularly artsy person—she tried painting for a bit and is reasonably competent at the technicals but never produced anything particularly inspired. But she can absolutely do sparring. Though Rebecca is unclear if there's a power differential there (in her homeworld Rebecca vastly outclasses most other superpowered people) and wonders if Dusk would be irritated if Rebecca has to hold back?

She can definitely turn up her general personableness; she just wasn't operating in that sort of mindspace because of the circumstances of their meeting and because—it can be parsed as manipulative, sometimes? And she wanted to avoid that.

For emotions, is that mostly a way of saying to attempt to connect on a personal level, or should Rebecca be trying to be more emotionally expressive against Dusk's emotion-sense?

There might well be a power differential; she doesn't expect Dusk to mind very much if Rebecca has to hold back, though also Dusk might surprise her - Force training comes with a few unexpected abilities in that area, and she'll leave it to them to decide when Rebecca should be told about them.

For engaging with her emotionally - probably Daisy should see what that reaction earlier was about before she tries to give specific advice, there are some circumstances where Dusk might react badly to generic personableness; her master who tried to kill her was fairly charismatic in that way. Trying to connect with her as an individual is more likely to go well, Daisy thinks. Being extra emotional will probably not help - Dusk is picking Rebecca's emotions up just fine, she wouldn't be as comfortable around her as she is if that wasn't the case, she's just not generally going to react to them unless she's invited to.

Alright, so work on common interests, share things about herself and engage with Dusk on a personal level, standard friendmaking runbook. She can do that.

Oh, and maybe Daisy can lend Rebecca some resources on learning Dusk's sign language?

She'll want to ask Dusk about the sign language first but she bets she can talk her into it as long as Rebecca has been warned not to let on that she knows it if she finds herself in their world; it's a Sith language and they'd be dangerously offended if they found out. (She seems somewhat delighted at the prospect of Rebecca learning it.)

She didn't know there was specific history behind it. She can keep a secret, and it seems fairly unlikely that circumstances will conspire to find her there and have it slip and have her not powerful enough to hold her own by that time, and similar for Daisy and Dusk, if she means they might get in trouble for teaching Rebecca.

It would be good to be able to talk without needing to filter everything through translation! It would make it easier to connect. And Rebecca just likes knowing languages. Even before she was chosen by the Spirit, she was very good at picking them up and knew most commonly spoken languages in her world.

It's very reasonable to want to pick up one of Dusk's languages, especially if she likes languages in general. Dusk also has the spoken Sith language and Basic, the latter of which isn't secret at all, so Rebecca will be able to learn a language to talk to her in even if it's not the sign language in particular. Daisy's also a little curious how Rebecca would do with the droid language; biologcals usually have a hard time picking that one up.

She would like to learn those as well! She is not normally enthusiastic enough about linguistics to want to learn three in a short span with overlapping use cases and origins, but there is a certain novelty to alien languages, and it'll let her read their books.

And now she's interested how droid language is different from biological ones.

The droid language - it's called Binary, in Basic, but that's not an accurate description of it - is very information-dense and not designed for biological vocal apparatuses at all, though it is designed to be aesthetically inoffensive to biologicals; she produces a demonstrative series of beeps and warbles and points out how the various aspects of it relate to the sentence 'it's good to make new friends'.

That's fascinating. She definitely can't pronounce those, but if biologicals can learn to understand it, just with difficulty, she's sure she can, maybe especially with her Dragon Fairy Elf Witch of Nine.

Wait, actually, if she tries to reproduce those sounds, willing them to come out of her—she tries a few different mental configurations—no, it doesn't look like she picked up the relevant apparatus from Nine.

And yes, it is good to make new friends! Especially with how hospitable Daisy (and Dusk) are being.

It is getting late, though, so further language acquisition may better wait until tomorrow. When's the hangout with the locals tomorrow?

Really any reasonable time will work; sunrise is very early this time of year so the Crafters will be there by five or six. Daisy would also prefer to be back by noon to get Dusk her breakfast, but aside from that it's up to Rebecca.

She would like to be up by five and get there around six, then, if that works with Daisy. She doesn't have her phone; is there an alarm feature to the bed?

There isn't at the moment but Daisy can make one, it'll just take a minute: She expands out another bit of crafting material that she fashions into a disc with a nub sticking up out of it rotating slowly in a low bowl with an apparatus on top that the nub will bump into when it makes its way around to it, which will then chime; she can change the sound of the chime if Rebecca doesn't like it when she demonstrates it. She considers for a moment and adds markings to the disc to indicate twenty-minute intervals so that Rebecca can set it herself in the future; a real clock would of course be better but she doesn't have a design for one available off the top of her head, probably she can get Dusk to help with that tomorrow.

Neat. She is generating more crafting questions from that demonstration but will not bother Daisy about random things she'll find out in due time in her own studies.

Where should she look for Daisy tomorrow? Just in the main living area?

Yep; she'll make sure she isn't busy then. Is there anything else Rebecca would like for tonight?

That's all, thank you. And again, she appreciates them putting up with her.

It's no trouble at all. Daisy hopes she has a good night.

Rebecca bids her farewell and the same.

Once she's alone, she sits down on her bed, massaging creases into the material and ironing them out.

She's kept asking herself why the Spirit put her here. It's not to fix her; her read on Daisy is confident on that. It's not to find the key to beating Scion. She has all the time in the world and all the resources of the multiverse to figure out how kill one thing; she told Dusk she wasn't in a hurry, and she stands by it. There are powers to be gained here; crafting isn't exactly world-shattering, but it's astonishingly versatile and Daisy and Dusk clearly thought they could leverage it into multiverse travel—she needs to ask them about that. But that doesn't feel like the right answer.

She's beginning to wonder if the answer is... nothing.

Back home, Alexandria recommended that Protectorate heroes take a month of recharge leave every couple of years. Decompress, learn a hobby, allow the accumulated stresses of their work slack to unwind. The practice is empirically proven to reduce burnout and improve net productivity, the Chief Director would grudgingly admit.

Rebecca didn't follow her own advice. She cheated, as she did with her sleep. A contracted rogue duo to put her in an artificially accelerated dreaming trance, and she came out after a few hours refreshed like a new person, feeling as if a hundred years had passed. And like her cheap solution to sleep, the shortcut was never as good as the real thing.

Is it that simple?

She has Dressing Room to sort through and plans of approach to make for tomorrow's hangout. She ought to put together some strategy of how to get in Dusk's good books.

But—and she's not even mentally fatigued, since she had the lucky foresight to take an hour of sleep last night, so this is purely impulsive—she feels like taking a nap. And she has an hour to prepare after she wakes up. And if she botches it...

What are the stakes? Some people are annoyed at her. Worst case, she needs to move to a different continent.

She changes into pyjamas and lies down on the bed. It's warm. She tries fiddling with the thickness of the blanket and ends up breaking it accidentally and globbing the remains into a ball, but Dressing Room seems up to taking over the task, bundling her in an overlarge cape that rolls out out to a thin and breatheable cover.

She drifts off without meaning to. She doesn't remember to turn off the lights.

The light will still be on in the morning, then; there's no sign that it's drawing from any kind of energy source.

There's a smell of berries in the air when she steps outside, and it gets stronger when Daisy opens the door of the main house for her; she's been making jam, but she's all done now and ready to go. Nine will be joining them, too.

It has been so long since she'd had a proper night of sleep. She's in a good mood when she emerges.

That smells amazing, she tells Daisy, and approaches, idly curious, to inspect the apparatus. How is she making the jam? When she sees Nine, she'll be sure to greet him; they didn't get to have much of a proper conversation yesterday.

Nine rumbles a greeting in return, in what Daisy identifies as Basic when she translates for him.

The kitchen, like almost everything else here, is made of crafting material; she's crafted the cooking pot itself to heat up on the inside rather than needing a stove. The berries she used were fleshcrafted to be extra sweet, since she hasn't worked out how to get pure sugar yet, and the thickening agent is also fleshcrafted from a plant, and experimental, but she's happy with the results this time and Dusk has already confirmed for her that it's not poisonous to humans. For storage, she's using a crafted freezer, since she's not confident she's figured out proper canning procedure with the tools she has at hand yet; it's just a crafted box that's set to keep its inner walls and shelves at freezer temperatures, which keeps everything inside it cold, while keeping its outer walls at room temperature.

Crafting really does make everything easier.

She reassures Daisy that she has Immunity System and cannot be poisoned. Oh, and she promised milk, didn't she? She ducks around a wall and—apparently that's sufficient—comes out with a milk churn on her back. That was easier than she expected. If Daisy doesn't have a use for it now she can vanish it and make more easily. She thinks. She was sort of doing that just to see if she could.

In parallel she's asking Nine what he was working last night, if he doesn't mind her being nosy.

She wasn't going to do any more cooking just this moment but she can put the milk away for later, she also has a refrigerator set up. Dusk will be so pleased to have butter again.

Nine has been working on figuring out how to teach Basic to the Crafters, since he doesn't have a spare language slot to learn their written language in and doesn't want to give up Basic and being able to speak directly to Dusk. The Crafters have a little easier time hearing the different sounds when they're sung rather than spoken, so he's been looking through the library for music that has useful vocabulary in it, and practicing it - he's not as good with his voice as Daisy's kind of droid, so the practice is helpful.

That's an excellent project. If he wants, Rebecca can be a bouncing board for Basic pedagogy, though she might not have the same singing bias as Crafters. She was interested in learning anyway. At some point she may suddenly start learning 20x faster from him, though, because of Anything You Can Do, which would muddle the results a bit.

To all: what's their agenda for today?

They're going to take her to the Crafters' public hangout and probably to see the fleshcrafter this morning, and don't have any other specific plans; if they get back early Daisy wants to craft up a butter churn and Nine might go hunting. Dusk is predictably going to want a quiet day, but may or may not want them around; if she'd prefer them gone Daisy might see if the crows want to do anything - they usually do but it's hard to predict what - and if she'd rather have them around she's thinking she'll make a pie or some cookies with the fresh butter, and Nine intends to finish up the global warming research Dusk asked him for either way unless someone wants him for something. Of course if Rebecca has any other suggestions none of their plans are particularly urgent, besides being there for Dusk if she wants them.

All of that sounds excellent. They know the locals much better than she does. She is interested in meeting the crows and the other intelligent animals eventually, but not enough to change any schedules for it.

There's a pretty good chance they'll meet some crows or mammoths at the hangout or on the way to it; in any case Rebecca shouldn't have to wait too long to run into them. Did she want to get going now?

Absolutely.

Off they can go, then; it's about a ten minute walk to the hangout. There's a child maybe seven years old throwing shiny sticks into the air for a flock of crows to catch, and a trio of adults chatting, and a teenager with a big map laid out on the table in front of him and a few pages of notes that he's working on next to it. About a third of the crows come over to say hello to Daisy and ask her who her new friend is when they spot her, and she suggests that Rebecca can handle her own introduction.

To Daisy: do they know about the Spirit and where Daisy and Dusk are from?

To the crows: she's Rebecca, not exactly the same type of person as Dusk but much closer to Dusk than she is to Crafters. Like Daisy she's picked up the crafting powers of the Crafters. She hasn't met anyone else here yet other than Daisy and the people living with her, and is eager to meet everyone. Who are they and what are their names?

The crows had some trouble understanding the idea of an incorporeal person but they know the group is from another world and can do some unusual things.

Names, what a neat concept! Half of them immediately go off to decide on names for themselves. The rest explain with only a little bit of overlapping each other that this crow is the best at hunting lizards and that one chased a big hawk away all by herself one time and this other one's mom is dinosaur-ey and this one is just the smartest, he can add numbers, and this one loves blue things, and the kid is a kid and lives with this one Crafter who has a lot of dogs, and the teenager sings and gives them really good treats and they're really pleased that they could help him get together with his girlfriend (they're really cute together), and the one adult makes fancy robotic things and the other is always reading and the third is super good with kids, half the time when someone asks for help figuring out where their kid has wandered off to they're at his house. And she probably knows Daisy and Nine since she came here with them but Daisy is just the best, so shiny and friendly and good, and Nine can't communicate with them for weird shiny-person reasons but he's very good too, he makes sure to leave some meat out for them every time he goes hunting and he does it a lot!

Do they usually eat lizards? Are hawks a common threat? She doesn't know a lot about crows. What kinds of treats do they like? How did they help the teenager get together with his girlfriend, or is that too private? It sounds like a great story. What fancy robotic things do that adult make? Daisy is very shiny and friendly and good, yes, and Nine is working on a project to teach other people to understand Binary, have they heard of that?

To Daisy: they are very excitable, wow. It's endearing.

They are, it's very cute.

Crows eat all kinds of things, lizards and frogs and bugs and mice and fish and eggs and fruit and nuts and anything the Crafters want to give them. Hawks aren't too dangerous to an adult crow but they'll take a baby if they can get them, it's not good to let hawks hang around especially big ones but usually you need a whole flock to mob them, a crow driving away a hawk by herself is really impressive. They like all kinds of treats but nuts and meat are especially good! They got the teenager and his girlfriend together by telling them about each other and suggesting things they could give each other and do together, they were too shy on their own. The robotics crafter makes inside-the-house things mostly so they don't know a whole lot about it but she's helped other crafters give their chickens fancy coops and things like that. A couple of the crows are learning Nine's thing but it's pretty hard and none of these ones are that interested in it.

She should bring some trail mix the next time she comes to see them: it's a mixture of various dried fruits and nuts her people think go well together, though she doesn't know if their tastes are the same as crows. (She's inferring that hawks aren't intelligent animals.) And she hears that Nine's thing is hard, and she supposes especially if you're not used to spoken languages in the first place.

She's interested in learning fleshcrafting from the local fleshcrafter. Do they know anything about them?

Trail mix sounds interesting, they've never heard of anyone drying fruit before!

The fleshcrafter is nice, they're always willing to help the crows out even if it's just to look nicer and not because they're hurt. They usually stay in their territory and have their friends meet them there and they keep lots of rabbits and let the crows have the meat sometimes and they fly kites in their spare time.

She must let them try it, then, and the Crafters as well. It's easy to do and the dried fruit keeps well and is tasty, and it goes well in a lot of other food. Do they drop by Daisy's place often? She can ask Nine how to leave food out for them.

It's great that the fleshcrafter is so helpful! She hasn't been fleshcrafted before, since she's from a different world (not the same as Daisy's, a third different one) so she's wondering if it hurts or anything?

Ooh, a food that keeps well! Crafters don't usually worry about that because they can make food plants whenever they want to but the crows need to! Not all of them were stopping by the beetle house regularly before but they sure will now! (Daisy is amused at this and will talk to Rebecca about the logistical considerations later.)

Getting fleshcrafted doesn't hurt, it feels a little bit like an ache but not exactly, like this. Or it doesn't feel like anything at all if you're just getting your colors changed or something that doesn't move anything around. What's her world like?

They don't have crafting, but some people randomly get special powers: for example, one of Rebecca's special powers is that she can fly. (She floats up and down to demonstrate.) They live very densely because they don't have the territory instinct of Crafters—she shows an impression of downtown Los Angeles from the sky, and herself looking out her high-rise apartment.

Woah, she can fly. Woah, skyscrapers! They're huge! So many people! They want to go see!

To Daisy: sorry about accidentally inviting people over!

She would love to, but she doesn't actually know how to get back right now, and might not be able to for a long time. And her home is dangerous; that's one of the reasons she got herself here. She sends an image of Ash Beast wandering into a town.

 (That's fine, Daisy's just worried about it attracting vermin to the house if she leaves food out.)

Ash Beast is scary, wow! They think they could fly away from them but if they have monsters and flying people maybe they have flying monsters, too, and that would be really bad. Much worse than hawks!

There are flying monsters but they are rarer. Mostly she doesn't think they'd be in a lot of immediately danger but she'd feel really bad if they got unlucky and got hurt! Maybe after they crack universe travel.

Yeah! They still want to try it, mostly - a couple of them are more dubious of the idea now - but maybe once they can bring somebody with them to help them stay safe, or something.

(The teenager has noticed the group, now, and is watching them curiously.)

Hello teenager! The crows were just telling her all about the people around here. She's new and wanted to meet everyone.

Hello! He's someone but he's not very interesting, he's afraid.

Well, she's never met a Crafter before, so most of what he says will be interesting, probably. And he can also just ask her questions! She might be around for a bit so she's happy to disseminate background knowledge for people to spread around so everyone generally knows what's up with her.

She's from a different world like Daisy and she doesn't have the instinctual territory thing that Crafters do, but she's been briefed on how to act properly. She can fly so they might see her around in the sky, but she knows not to fly low over people's territory and only land in unclaimed places and obey the territory markers.

She's interested in improving her crafting—she picked it up like Daisy did—and also specifically interested in branching into fleshcrafting; she's usually good at that sort of detailwork and it sounds very useful.

No territory instinct at all? That's hard to imagine. Even crows have a little bit of one.

He is friends with the fleshcrafter, anyway, if she wants an introduction. Not that she'll really need one, they're pretty friendly.

She would love an introduction. She can compensate the fleshcrafter in a variety of ways if it's an imposition; she doesn't know how they do apprenticeships or such around here, or if the fleshcrafter is even open for something like that.

To Daisy: she should have asked before, but does Daisy think this learning fleshcrafting is a good use of her time? Daisy mentioned they were trying to crack interworld travel with crafting, but Rebecca isn't sure how they plan to do it, how close they are, if they need help, and how badly they want it.

(Is she neglecting the crows?)

Compensate them for... teaching her? Well, maybe it could work that way, but he thinks it's the kind of thing where someone won't do it at all if they don't want to. Crafters do do something like apprenticeships, though; the connotations seem a bit different but the general gist of it is right. Anyway, he'll want a minute to pack his things up but he wasn't getting anywhere with what he's doing anyway, he can take them over now if they want to go.

Daisy has been assuming that interworld travel would be regular crafting, but it does occur to her that if Rebecca picks up fleshcrafting that might let them integrate it into a person rather than doing it as an object, and it might be easier to do that way. She doesn't think she's necessarily very close to figuring it out, and hasn't been considering it particularly urgent, but she could have a breakthrough anytime - she's been just kind of trying stuff with Dusk spotting her to make sure she doesn't do anything too dangerous, which is what usually stops Crafters from experimenting too much with exotic crafting capabilities, they wind up giving themselves radiation poisoning or whatever if they try the wrong thing.

(The crows have started going back to playing catch with the kid, yes.)

She will think at the crows something vaguely between a goodbye and apology.

To Daisy: That makes sense. She just didn't want to be off doing her own study if their project urgently needed hands. She's perfectly happy to split time to help them with that research and see if fleshcrafting can offer any useful integrations.

To both Daisy and the teenager: she was originally planning to hang out and meet more people but that also sounds like a good idea. Does Daisy want to/can she come with, or do they want to split? She's probably not skilled enough at regular crafting to make it useful to apprentice with the fleshcrafter yet, if she's understanding the requisite skills correctly, but it would be good to meet and get to know them, maybe scope out the idea.

(If compensation can't shift the scales, she really needs to make a good impression, but she's finding herself not bothered to work too hard at optimizing their first meeting. If they don't get along naturally, it might be better for her to find someone else anyway.)

Four people might be kind of a lot all at once but he thinks it'll be okay if they're careful about not overwhelming them. Especially if it's just a short visit to meet them and ask if they might be interested in the future, which it does sound like it would be. How much crafting does Rebecca know?

She only started learning last night, literally. She can change the color and shape of crafting material to reasonable precision when paying attention, and she figured out how to change the specularity and a few other bits about surface texture. But her powers make her learn much faster in a few different ways, so in a month or two she expects she might be as good as the average Crafter?

If she focuses on fleshcrafting Daisy thinks she can probably be as good as the average Crafter at that within a week or so, the basics aren't hard.

They'll probably want her to pick that up before she starts going for lessons, but yeah, that's soon enough that it's worth a visit.

He's got his papers packed up now and just needs to shrink-copy his map and get the big one's crafting material into a more convenient shape, which is a matter of a few seconds' work, and now he's ready to go.

Great. So are Daisy and Nine coming?

Daisy would like to if they don't mind having her. Nine, on consultation, will opt to stay here; he's already met the fleshcrafter and doesn't think he'll have anything to contribute.

Off they can go, then.

The walk to the fleshcrafter's territory is a little longer, off in a slightly different direction from Daisy's place; they have to go around another territory to get there. When they do, there's a sign standing just outside the spot marked by the monolith, in black with swirled yellow-and-orange finials and yellow glyphs, which Daisy reads for Rebecca: it gives the fleshcrafter's schedule (shortly after sunrise to shortly before sunset) and has a slot for depositing letters with a perch underneath to make it accessible to delivery crows and a grey button to press in case of an emergency and another to press if their attention is wanted less urgently. Daisy presses the latter, and more glyphs appear on a previously-blank section of the board indicating that they'll be there in ten or fifteen minutes.

Her attention has been drawn again to how dismal her crafting capabilities are, so she practice-plays with a bit of crafting material in her pocket as they walk.

She wonders how the doorbell system works. Is it connected by ansible to an interface inside the fleshcrafter's house? She's also suddenly wondering at Daisy how delivery crows work and how easy it is to learn the Crafters' writing.

She expects that the doorbell works by ansible, possibly to something installed inside their home but more likely to something portable so they'll be in contact wherever they go; she has one like that too. (Daisy does have a similar signpost outside her group's territory, they just didn't stop to look at it on the way out.) The section of the sign where the glyphs appeared is also an ansible, she's pretty sure.

The crows will carry letters for anyone who asks them to, in exchange for a bit of food; they aren't very smart in general but they seem to have an excellent memory for people, so they're good at it, though she wouldn't be surprised if the fleshcrafter gets most of their crow-based mail delivered to them personally instead of to the collection point.

She didn't find the Crafters' writing difficult to pick up at all, but then she has Omniglot on top of specialized programming for learning languages. It's a little odd compared to human languages, being structured purely conceptually rather than based on a spoken language, but that doesn't make it any harder, she doesn't think. She can go over the basics of the grammar while they wait, if Rebecca would like.

...Huh, she's wondering if—Daisy said she can write learned skills to hardcopy—Rebecca doesn't seem to have the hardware to ingest those, but if Daisy compresses a skill into that format and tries to beam that to Rebecca over crafting communication, could that work? It's a bit of a long shot, but might be worth a try; and Rebecca might be able to return the favor if so. She might also just be able to pick up the hardware if she Dragon Fairy Elf Witches more droids. Maybe with fleshcrafting they can test if Dragon Fairy Elf Witch can selectively pick heritages from a being with multiple viable heritages.

- huh, it hadn't occurred to her to try combining the skill packaging with the crafted communication; she doesn't expect it to work in general, since unpacking the skill is also an action, but it might work for Rebecca. She's willing to give it a try; packing the skill will just take a minute.

She doesn't expect fleshcrafting to interact with Dragon Fairy Elf Witch very much, since it doesn't touch genetics at all; did Rebecca have a mechanism in mind there?

She didn't realize it doesn't touch genetics! That puts a damper on the idea. Maybe if there are interfertile species around she can look for a liger or something like that and try inheriting the components separately. And yes, she was thinking that either her existing mental enhancements could help her unpack it, or she might have unknowingly inherited something related from Nine.

The closest thing Daisy knows of to a hybrid animal in the area are crossbreed livestock, chickens and things; there are also a couple of dino-crows that Rebecca might be able to do something with, those are genecrafted. It might also be worth asking around, Daisy hasn't been here long enough to know all the trivia the area has to offer.

That sounds like it... should work? They can test it later.

Sure, there's plenty of time.

And here's the language bundle.

She cannot download it. She tells the same to Daisy. That's unfortunate, since it would have made their parallelization of fleshcrafting learning and interworld travel experiments much more productive.

Oh well. Hopefully she'll end up being able to copy from Daisy one way or another. Though Daisy will want to spend some time thinking about things first - she's met a lot of species of aliens, is the thing, and she hasn't DFEW'd them yet but if she does that before Rebecca DFEWs her it's presumably possible for some of the traits to carry over. The big limitation there is going to be that Daisy doesn't want to be biological or look any different unless she can tuck it away like Rebecca can with her cannons.

Rebecca thinks that the Spirit won't give Daisy biologicals or a different look unless Daisy wants it; the definition of drawbacks is—she got a clarification on this specifically, so let her pull up the exact text—

And would I be right in expecting that any changes which could be considered neutral, but which I wouldn't prefer—for example changing my mental architecture towards the origin species—would count relevantly as drawbacks and won't happen?

you're right that the definition of drawbacks (and the definition of drawbacks cool and dramatic enough to be allowed) depends on your preferences and aesthetics.

She'd gathered that, yeah; she's not sure she can pass a trait along without having it herself, though. Maybe she can? Some biological traits skip generations, right?

That makes sense. Maybe it'll work. Rebecca isn't really invested in looking different so it might not matter anyway; she doesn't badly want a stinger or claws or extra arms or funny ears or anything. She'd be going for any innate powers, flat mental improvements, flat physical improvements and so on.

There are definitely some of those on offer. She'll try to find time to figure out her options there sooner rather than later, then. Are there any physical changes Rebecca would particularly want? On reflection Daisy suspects that specifically trying to get a 'carrier of this trait' trait would work.

Anything which is specifically concealable, like her shoulder cannons, she would probably be interested in. She... has Perfect Hair and Emerald Orbs, so anything affecting those she might be able to just magic away, so she might also be interested in those? Higher confidence in that than for the concealables. But "carrier of this trait" sounds like it could work fine.

She'll keep those in mind.

Is the fleshcrafter out yet?

Not quite yet, it hasn't been that long.

The teenager notices her checking down the path (he's been trying to be subtle in how much he's looking at her, but... well, she did take A Hundred Ships) and indicates that he expects the fleshcrafter to be a couple more minutes, their house is a ways into their territory and it's not an emergency.

Well, it's kind of her own fault, isn't it. At least this world doesn't have to worry about unrealistic body standards.

She wonders at both of them what the typical makeup of the fleshcrafter's day is. Do they spend most of their time fleshcrafting or studying fleshcrafting, or is more like a part-time role, and most of the time they're doing the same things everyone else does?

It kind of depends on what's going on, mostly. Like most healers the fleshcrafter has a guest house for people who aren't in good enough shape to take care of themselves at home, and when someone's staying with them it's a fair amount of work to make sure they're comfortable. That isn't too often, though; Crafters prefer quite strongly to be in their own territories and the fleshcrafter tries pretty hard to find a way to make that possible. The rest of the time they have a pretty normal amount of chores and things to do - like, on the upper end of normal, with all the rabbits, but not a weird amount - and spend most of their time doing whatever they want. Which is sometimes fleshcrafting, but it mostly depends on what they're in the mood for that day or week or month.

That makes sense. She's still getting a feel for what average Crafter life is like. Are the rabbits pets, or is it related their fleshcrafting work somehow?

Some of them are more pets, most of them are for fleshcrafting experiments or meat - most Crafters keep some kind of small animal for meat and almost all of them keep chickens for eggs, and everybody has a food garden.

(The concept "fleshcrafting experiments" still makes Rebecca uneasy, but she'll get over it.)

What are the usual leisure activities? She'll make vaguely inquisitive small talk like this until the fleshcrafter arrives.

People have lots of different kinds of hobbies! He can easily ramble about the sorts of things the Crafters in this area do for fun for the few minutes it takes the fleshcrafter to show up. (Different kinds of hobby engineering are common, just as often for the sake of solving puzzles as accomplishing anything useful; so are a variety of kinds of art and information-collecting. Sports are less popular but still represented, as are group activities like choir singing and board games.)

And then the fleshcrafter shows up! He recognizes Daisy from peoples' descriptions, and of course he knows the teenager, but who's the newcomer? And do they want to come in or stay here?

(They themselves are stout and vaguely androgynous, with a flat chest but more feminine hips and hairline, and red hair just a touch brighter than is plausibly natural. They also have a remarkable set of whiskers - not a mustache or beard, but the kind of facial accessory you'd find on a cat - that extend out all the way to the edges of their shoulders and an extra thumb on their left hand.)

(Board games! They must have such interesting board games with crafting. She is abruptly more interested in board games than she's ever been in her life, but alas, business calls.)

She takes the body modifications in stride, giving them a once-over and moving right on.

She's Rebecca, from another world, like Daisy. She only got here yesterday. Like Daisy she only picked up crafting after coming here, but she learns quick and Daisy reckoned (glancing at Daisy for corroboration) she'd be up to speed as the average crafter within a week. Rebecca heard about fleshcrafting and was immediately fascinated and was told about the fleshcrafter and, well—it would be a bit forward to ask the fleshcrafter to teach her just like that, but it's what she was in fact thinking of coming here, so. Short of that she's just interested in learning more about fleshcrafting and the sort of things you do with it. Her home did a lot of study into biology and healing, and Rebecca is learned herself in some of it, but almost no one back home had the ability to directly interact with it like this.

They're perplexed at the name, until Daisy explains that it's similar to how Crafters put a few-word identifying description of themselves on books and that heavily-used encoded languages often end up with words that don't have meanings beyond being peoples' identifiers, which 'Rebecca' is an example of. With that sorted out, they say they'd be happy to talk about some of the things fleshcrafting can do and see what she might want to learn, though for anything really complicated the best they can do is help her puzzle out what the library's books have to say about it. What does she know so far?

She needs to start remembering the names thing.

She knows that fleshcrafting is the use of crafting to modify living bodies, and it's used to heal injuries, modify bodies, also for some culinary uses? She's also told it doesn't work on a genetic level. A lot of Crafters know enough of it to get along but past that it's a bit of a specialization. But she doesn't know what the actual practice of doing fleshcrafting is like, the skills and challenges to doing it well, and what the known limitations and bleeding edge of the field are.

Some of the things she's interested in—healing, first of all, and the general broad base of moving around standard biology, if that makes sense. But she's also interested in more esoteric applications blending into more physical crafts or engineering, like... extensible arms with telescoping bones, or microthorn skin for improved grip? Things involving internal crafting-programmed components? Ansible neurons to have multiple separately operated bodies? She doesn't know if any of those are possible.

Microthorn skin and internal programming are possible, though the latter is hard to do anything very complex with without risking interfering with a creature's organs, there's just not a lot of extra space in most animals. Things involving extra limbs are either very difficult or the realm of genecrafting or both - getting all the muscles and tendons and things set up properly is hard unless you can instantiate them from latent genes, they're still trying to get their extra thumb working the way they imagined it - and ansibles are... maybe technically possible to do something with, if you were very careful? But moving parts from one body to another isn't the kind of thing anyone does, to the best of their knowledge, and it sounds like it'd be the kind of thing that went really badly most of the time. Interesting idea, though!

So fleshcrafting is easier to use with upstream building blocks like genetic expression, cell differentiation, natural tissue formation and so on? And manually forming and putting all the tissues where you want them is possible, but a much harder and more fragile project? That's not a typical limitation of people who can manipulate living bodies where she comes from; a lot of the time they can just do whatever they want and get things wired up as they imagine; she's not sure if maybe they're not doing all the informational or design work. It definitely changes the way she thinks about it now, in a much more interesting way.

Are fleshcrafting and genecrafting completely different disciplines and skillsets? People seem very clear on the distinction. She suppose she can see why, given the different scales and mechanisms. But is it a continuum, or more like manipulating physical structure versus chemical makeup?

Fleshcrafting and genecrafting are as distinct as either is from normal crafting, yes, though it's useful to know a few genecrafting tricks as a fleshcrafter and vice versa, and adding normal crafting to the mix adds versatility too. And both of them are like normal crafting in that you have to get the details of what you're doing from somewhere, though, yes, in fleshcrafting you can copy from existing tissues you have access to - if they had a patient who'd lost their thumb in an accident they'd be able to fix that by mirroring their other one over or (less elegantly) by copying from their own and adjusting the proportions to suit the patient; the problem with their extra thumb is that hands aren't symmetrical and it's not possible to just mirror their existing thumb without interfering with the structures their fingers depend on on that side. And they don't usually think of it in terms of cell differentiation, it doesn't involve quite that much detail work for most practical purposes, but it's not an inaccurate way of looking at it - just like with regular crafting, you can't make something from nothing with fleshcrafting, but you can change one kind of tissue to another as freely as you'd like.

So if you wanted to, say, give yourself spider spinnerets in your fingers, you'd first want to model that off a spider, but secondly... would you need genecrafting to make your body able to replenish the silk, because you don't code for the right proteins in your existing genes?

Not quite like that. They haven't worked with spinnerets before and the further you go from the target's species in copying a whole organ (as opposed to something more simply structural, like a change in skin texture) the more likely it is that you'll need to tweak it to work with their biology, and genecrafting is a potential approach to that but figuring out which genes to copy over isn't necessarily any easier than figuring out how to make the changes directly with fleshcrafting, and it's much more likely to have unexpected side effects. And either way, once the organ is in and properly supported, it'll do its job just fine, including producing any things it usually produces; it doesn't have to be genetically plausible at all, nevermind having the specific genetics around to let the modified creature actually grow it. That's the advantage of fleshcrafting over genecrafting, once you have the detail work done it's much easier to just do things without having to worry about the biochemistry.

So one she doesn't quite understand is... her impression with crafting material is it's sort of its own substance, right, changeable in shape and properties, but not made of atoms and minerals like the normal stone and dirt lying around.  And they can transmute it out of normal matter, but after that it's its own thing, just... in the shape and properties of what it originally was?

How does that work with fleshcrafting? Is fleshcrafted flesh "crafting flesh", or... that doesn't sound like it'd work naively?

It's less that crafted flesh is its own substance like crafting material is, and more that all flesh has some of the same kind of mutability when it comes to being crafted. You can't do absolutely anything with it and still have a functional creature, but you can do plenty of the same sorts of things if you're careful.

...

uh

Sorry, this might be a dumb question, but has Daisy or anyone used fleshcrafting on Dusk? Are we sure that it's "all flesh" and not "the flesh of living things from this world"?

Nobody has tried it on Dusk, no.

Do they know that living things in this world don't have magic flesh, and using fleshcrafting on someone from a different world wouldn't enmagic them or part of them, potentially in dangerous ways? They don't have evidence that it would, just...

Daisy doesn't know that for sure, no, and doesn't see how the locals could have figured it out. It's the kind of thing Dusk makes a good guinea pig for, though, the Force is particularly good at physical defense in several ways that should cover this; she'll talk to her about it.

To Daisy only: Rebecca might be a good guinea pig herself, with her perks, but yes, they should discuss the details later.

Anyway, that was a weird sidetrack. Even if it turns out to be less applicable for Rebecca herself, it's still a terribly interesting field. They've been talking about limits, but what's the most interesting thing the fleshcrafter has ever heard of someone doing? What's the most interesting thing that hasn't been achieved, but which someone thinks is possible and is working on? Or, actually, what's the fleshcrafter working on right now? Apart from their thumb.

It's pretty widely agreed on that wings and the body modifications necessary to make them work are the bleeding edge of the craft; nobody has ones that do real flight yet but a couple people think they're close and gliding is basically solved. (They in particular are nowhere near skilled enough to do anything with the fleshcrafting side of that but they've been messing around with kite design to see if they can contribute any insights that way.) Apart from that - tentacles are cool and people do all sorts of things with those, you can even put taste and smell receptors on them if you grow them close enough to the spine that you don't have to run the nerves too far, tails are popular and people do a lot of different things with those (and they're an example of combining genecrafting and fleshcrafting, you use the genecrafting to grow a monkey tail and then make modifications from there with fleshcrafting), some people want gait and stance adjustments, that kind of thing - of course most people want simpler and more utilitarian things, cosmetic changes like fur or bioluminescence or reproductive stuff added if they don't have the sorts of capabilities they want there or medical issues fixed, that kind of thing, and they could go on about the latest advancements in external oxygenation setups or clever ways to hook up a womb if someone doesn't like the traditional arrangement for one but it doesn't sound like she's as interested in that. They don't really have any research projects going right now but there's a new book on reproductive stuff they've been reading through.

External oxygenation and reproductive capacity are actually things that would been surprisingly relevant in the past, but not so much her concern these days, yeah.

Are there problems with things like bioincompatibility, biochemistry imbalances or chronic strain injuries from poorly designed extra limbs, or is it mostly difficulty getting custom body parts to mechanically hook up right? Also, is there any research into making muscles and bones generally stronger, and innovations downstream of that? Rebecca has a special ability which makes her supernaturally strong and tough beyond what would be afforded by the physical makeup of her body, and she's wondering if there might be interesting applications of that—assuming it doesn't stop her from being fleshcrafted at all. Or if they could somehow fleshcraft someone else into having the properties of her body, using hers as a template.

Compatibility is mostly not an issue except in cases like the spinneret one they were talking about earlier, and in that kind of case you don't end up with incompatible tissues, you just end up with ones that don't work like you were intending. Chemical imbalances can be an issue but mostly just in cases where it's obvious you might run into that, if you go messing around with how much acid a creature's stomach produces or what their adrenal gland is doing they're obviously likely to have a bad time as a result. Chronic strain problems are pretty common with structural or otherwise heavy mods that aren't designed well enough, but they're also easy to reverse with fleshcrafting, so if she picks up the skill she won't need to worry about that for herself. Improving the function of muscles and bones is the kind of thing that's very tricky and has a risk of causing problems in the long term; there has been some work done on it but they don't know much about it personally, it's not the kind of thing you can learn from a book. Being extra strong and tough will definitely open up options for her; they'd have to have a look to see if it's done in a way they can copy.

They should definitely do that later. It would be very useful to everyone if they could copy it. She'd expect it to be impossible, since it's a parahuman effect, but parts of her body severed from her before continued to have the same unnatural durability, and physical crafting can induce some ordinarily impossible properties, so it's worth a try.

But after they've figured out whether fleshcrafting works safely on otherworldly life first. Probably the fleshcrafter can inspect her structure without doing any actual fleshcrafting, and it wouldn't hurt her even if actually fleshcrafting her might, but they don't have to chance it yet. She should have ways to remove regrowable parts of her for them to sample if it comes to it.

She thinks she has a better picture of fleshcrafting now. How long does it usually take for a Crafter to become competent at fleshcrafting? Say an average adult getting to the point of being able to... create an extra thumb like this fleshcrafter has, not necessarily well, but basically functioning and with the skill foundation to continually experiment to improve on it on their own?

Well, it'd depend on how much time they put into it and what kind of aptitude they had. Someone of about average skill who only knew the basic stuff that everyone picks up but really wanted to give themselves an extra thumb in particular and didn't want anyone else doing it for them might be able to get to the point of making a solid try at it in a few months, maybe four or so? And they wouldn't expect them to get it right the first time but a couple more months of refinement might get them to the point they're at, if they were persistent about it.

(A few months. That's not full generic competency, but a few months is nothing. And that's without taking into account any acceleration from her powers.)

Does the fleshcrafter have any books to recommend? Either pre-reading or books to get started, once she's got her normal crafting foundations down.

They like Bluejay Music's stuff, including the beginner fleshcrafting book, and if she doesn't click with those the beginners' book by Sweet Raspberry Brambles is also good, though both of them assume the reader already knows the most basic basics. She'll probably also want Fox Hybrid's Dictionary of Fleshcrafting Techniques for reference.

Bluejay Music, Sweet Raspberry Brambles, Fox Hybrid's Dictionary of Fleshcrafting Techniques.

Is it okay if Rebecca comes back to ask more questions once she gets started or if she gets stuck? And of course if she gets confirmation that it's safe to fleshcraft her, so they can take a look and see if her biology is duplicable. She saw the fleshcrafter's opening hours, but are there times they're usually less busy and more amenable to interruption?

Mornings are a little better, but if it's just a brief visit like this one anytime is fine, and sending the crows over with letters works well too.

The crows, she forgot the crows.

(She's also remembering she actually needs to learn how to read. Hopefully the droid DFEW plan works out.)

Well, then, she thanks the fleshcrafter for entertaining her and hopes that she'll be back soon with good news.

They'll look forward to it.

So, back home to get started on the books, or does Rebecca want to go back to the hangout and talk to more of the locals?

Her instinct is to go home to get started on the books, but—

She's got time. She should be social. She thinks she'll head back and talk to people a bit more. And while they're walking, the teenager was just talking about board games and she's curious what kinds of board games they have here; is there anything that uses crafting in interesting ways? Back home the pinnacle of board game innovation is mostly dice towers and erasable pen.

There's one he likes that uses spinning tops for randomization, you set your top going in a tray that's crafted to trace its path and then use different aspects of that path to determine what you can do in the game. There are also ones where you use crafting to change your pieces as the game goes on, and there's one he's not sure how to play where the pieces pick up visually-identical marbles with different traits and certain spots on the board react to those and do different things.

She has to check out the last one, or check out its rulebook, at least. And the spinning top idea is fascinating; she'd never have thought of anything like that. Is there a place to sign up for hobby groups and things like that?

People put signs up on the bulletin board when they're planning events people can go to, and usually you can just show up when the sign says; he thinks there's a board game group every once in a while in the evening but he's not sure which days.

She'll check them out. Does Daisy attend any events regularly?

There's a visual arts gathering that she and Dusk have gone to a couple times that was pretty nice, and there's a book club Nine likes to go to even though he has trouble participating.

Let's see, what do the signs say... there's a hiking expedition up the mountain in a few weeks... some kind of sport club... the visual art gathering... a parenting group... someone's trying to start a fishing group... this one's interesting, it's someone with one of the local kinds of computers who has a few slots available for new remote users, from the description it's an asynchronous chat room type thing.

They have computers?

Daisy said they were low-tech but that's relative to where Daisy's from, so of course it doesn't mean the same thing to Rebecca—how do they work and how prevalent are they—she doesn't need to find out right now. How does she sign up? What does "new remote users" mean; do you have the UI at home with you and the inputs and outputs ansible over to wherever the computer is? She can imagine how a chat that might work without any computing, an extension of the library system, but apparently this crosses over to be described as a "computer". She is incredibly curious.

There's directions to the Crafter's territory to pick up the equipment but it says to send a crow at least a day before so they know to expect a visitor; it sounds like 'remote user' means someone with a set of equipment for accessing the computer remotely. It doesn't say anything about what the interface is like, just that you can use it to share messages with other users. From what Daisy's been told the computers they have here are very rudimentary; they recognized what she was talking about when she explained about having a machine do math and using that to do more complicated things, which satisfies the definition of a computer as far as she's concerned, but they don't have electricity, really, or microprocessors, and she expects their computers are actually fully mechanical, like the rest of their machinery. She's pretty sure the library is a computer like that, too, just a very big one.

Does Daisy suppose it'd be a bit antisocial to ask for the remote access equipment before she even knows the language? She'll probably pick it up quickly, but still. How many slots are left? She should learn enough to write the letter herself, at least. If she can't install it with droid DFEW.

"Hmmm..." The sign doesn't say how many slots there are, but intuitively she thinks it'd be fine, Crafters are pretty generous and don't tend to worry about things being scarce. She can get Rebecca started on learning the language today - if Rebecca can come up with a dictionary or other book in her preferred language, Daisy can pick it up that way in less than half an hour and then annotate a Crafter dictionary-set with translations for her, if she'd find that useful.

That would be wonderful.

She'll mingle a bit more but her heart isn't in it. Though she doesn't let that show. If Daisy wants to head back first she can go, but Rebecca will be along in just fifteen minutes, probably.

Daisy will go and see what Nine is up to and relay some messages from him to the Crafters whose conversation he's listening in on, and be ready to walk back when Rebecca wants to leave.

Once she's done chatting up half the people here, she loops back to Daisy and Nine to see what they're talking about.

These Crafters have been having a problem with an aggressive dog in their territories and they're trying to decide what to do about it; unfortunately none of them are particularly good at training dogs so the obvious-to-them solution of 'someone catches the dog and works with them until they're not aggressive anymore' isn't likely to work, and they don't agree on whether the situation is bad enough to kill the dog over, they haven't actually bitten anyone yet but a couple of them think it's just a matter of time while the rest are hoping the dog will relax about people eventually. Nine thinks Daisy and Dusk could at least help with transporting the dog to someone more able to work with them, but none of the group knows anyone they think would agree to do it.

Rebecca wonders if there might be someone farther afield willing, if there are advertisements or listings with the library? She can cover large distances very quickly. Alternately if there's remote but hospitable wilderness somewhere she could drop it off there, but that seems like a impermanent solution, unless the location is remote enough that no one is likely to meet the dog within the dog's lifetime.

(The library really doesn't do anything but provide books and magazines, Daisy sends privately.)

If she wants to find someone who'd take the dog or a remote enough place that they won't bother anyone, they all agree that that sounds like a good solution to the problem. One of them volunteers to try to trap them and keep them fed for a few days if she's going to look.

Maybe the chat room will help! However many people are there multiplied their social circles is probably enough to find someone who likes working with dogs.

Maybe! They did ask the crows if they knew of anyone but they aren't perfectly reliable and maybe the chatroom people will know someone farther away than the local crows go.

Should she send a letter by crow to the one who volunteered for dog-trapping when she comes up with something?

She can just come by anytime during the day and send a crow in to let her know she's there, or set off a noisemaker at the border; her territory is up that way past the green and orange patterned Crafter's one.

Will do.

The glances at Daisy and Nine. They should get working on the computer, then. Do they think that's reason enough to go ask the Crafter for a set of equipment now instead of later?

They should definitely honor the request to give notice first, but yeah, Daisy thinks it's reasonable to get the equipment sooner rather than later. Does Rebecca still want to try to learn enough of the language to write her own letter?

Maybe someone else can write it, but she'll endeavor to get as fluent as possible in the day before they actually collect?

That sounds reasonable; she'll send the letter off now, then.

She has crafting material tucked away in a storage compartment in her chassis, compressed down into little pellets; it only takes her a couple minutes to produce a rolled sheet of it and write up most of the letter. It'd be polite to tell the Crafter how to recognize them, though, and that usually means describing their identifying personal pattern; does Rebecca want to pick one, or just have Daisy describe the outfit she plans to wear tomorrow, or do something else, or skip it altogether? It's not a problem to skip it if Daisy goes with her, Daisy's identifiable enough.

Her first thought is Alexandria's dark gray tesselating tower motif that's used for her more understated merchandise...

...but, actually, she doesn't want to use that.

Instead, she flashes an image of what she'll wear tomorrow to Daisy: the dark green outfit she wears to less formal functions and a large hiking rucksack.

Sure, that works. When she's done with the letter she crafts a handful of fertilizer and spreads it at the base of a snap bean plant, one of several food plants growing around the edge of the clearing, to fast-grow some beans so she has something to pay a messenger bird with. Once that's taken care of, it doesn't take long to get the letter sent on its way.

Then she should make her way back soon so she can start studying, then. Did Daisy or Nine want to do anything else? She'll find the green and orange patterned Crafter when she has news, if they're good with the plan.

Daisy is ready to go; Nine takes a quick look around before coming to the same conclusion. Daisy updates Nine on what they've been doing as they head home, relaying the conversation to Rebecca as well; she concludes with a comment that with Rebecca's interest in the magic they're probably going to need to either expand the workroom or make her her own, if she's staying.

How tinkers often work back home is they have personal workshops to focus, but also a larger shared workshop to do collaborations and put their extra junk in. Does that sound like it might work? She's working off a model where real estate isn't very expensive here.

They definitely have room, as long as she gets along well enough with Dusk for it.

Right, that. Rebecca and Dusk still haven't had a chance to really talk; they should find some time to get to know each other. Daisy said Dusk would be up by noon, right? What do they usually do during the day?

Dusk is usually more social during the day and likes time to herself at night, and aside from that it varies; she does spend a lot of time in the workroom during the day, or they'll do chores around the house that need an extra pair of hands or things like that. She might not want someone new around today in particular, too.

Because it's after the day of the remembrance ceremony, or...?

She can make herself scarce if that's the mood for today.

Daisy won't be sure until she sees what Dusk is like at breakfast, but her suspicion is because of that, yes. If Rebecca wants to hang out in the guest house Daisy can come let her know what's happening once she's figured it out; she should have at least one translation ready for her by the time Dusk wakes up, anyway.

Yes, Rebecca can probably scrounge up some relevant reference texts from Earth reasonably quickly by cosplaying English professors.

Daisy'll get something printed up from the library to translate, then. Does she want to start with one of the fleshcrafting books, or something simpler to try to learn the language from it?

Does she have something like... someone's travel memoirs? For a broad vocabulary base. And then a fleshcrafting book after that would be good.

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.

The Big Bad is... complicated. It's the source of their powers. What they know of it is gleaned from visions filtered from many different sources, but it's running some sort of experiment, on their planet, with the powers, and when it's done, it's going to destroy their world across every parallel universe and move on to a new star system to do the same thing all over again. But something went wrong, when it came to their planet, and half of it was crippled. So the other half is sort of dormant and that's why they have a chance at all. But it's going to wake up soon, or turn on them—the precogs aren't clear on it—and then their world will end anyhow.

The world calls that living half Scion. It's pretending to a superhero. Not even pretending very hard. The original plan, they gleaned from the vision, was that Scion and his other half would pose as... gods, of sorts, of two sides of a war. Heroes, leaders. But when the other half died, Scion didn't have much cognition left, they think, so he's still running that subroutine on autopilot. Playing hero, but in a haphazard, undirected way. He'll... there'll be an Endbringer attack going on somewhere, and he'll be rescuing a cat from a tree elsewhere. No prioritization, and he doesn't communicate, doesn't plan; for thirty years he's been doing the same thing.

Scion, that mindless thing, is the most powerful "superhero" in the world.

That's why they're keeping the truth secret. They don't know how the world will react, or how Scion will react to the world's reaction.

That certainly sounds like a lot to deal with.

He might not be as good at fighting as she is - he only has the basic programming for his model - but he probably knows enough to follow a conversation about it, at least, if she wants someone to talk to about all that.

...She appreciates the offer. She might take him up on that some day.

For now, she's... mostly trying to forget about all of that. If she had to characterize how she felt about it at home, it'd be not distressed, maybe frustrated, maybe stressed, but mostly... exhausted. There was just so much to do, all the time, and even after it all they weren't winning... It's like sometimes you can see how a game is going to end, but giving up would be even worse, so you keep playing, but it still wears on you, you know?

So right now she's taking some space to distance herself, but when she's ready to think about it again... yeah.

And Nine can talk to her any time as well, of course. Maybe once she learns Binary so they can communicate more directly.

Only to Nine: She knows it can be harder to talk through some things with people who are... close to a matter themselves, but relate to it strongly in a different way. She doesn't know if that's applicable here but it sounds like it could be.

That makes sense. The offer is open if she ever wants to take him up on it; it's neat that she's thinking about learning binary. He doesn't think he has that other problem but he might just not have noticed.

She nods.

How's the book going; should she try and dredge up something in English now?

If she's ready, yes, Daisy will be done before the book is but she can get started on the translation while it's printing.

Okay, she'll need to dip into a room.

She changes into the garb of an English professor holding a book...

...well, she changes into the garb of an English professor. Apparently the "holding a book" part does not work. Inconvenient.

Can she get a bookbag with Charles Dickens' Great Expectations in it? No? Just a generic bookbag, and she feels strongly it has a book in it... no.

Damn.

That puts a wrench in a lot of her plans.

Her backpack from the fall of 1987, when she was auditing political science at UCLA. She can picture it clearly in her mind: brown with a silver buckle, the left strap frayed and with a faint stain of mustard. Inside is her pencil case containing a yellow highlighter, a blue pen, a black pen, an unsharpened pencil, a sharpened pencil and a tiny black pencil sharpener; and with it is a blue pocket notebook with a black ribbon bookmark and a horizontal black line instead of her name on the cover; and finally there's Political Science: An Introduction, Second Edition, Michael G. Roskins. She carried exactly to class every Monday, Thursday and Friday for ten weeks without fail. She's now wearing it.

She takes it off and opens the flap.

There it is.

Maybe there's an easier way. Armsmaster's helmet has translation programs loaded in; she hasn't worn it before, but she's seen it. Is that enough to work off of...? No. She can make something which looks like it, but which is clearly lacking a lot of features and doesn't have the right software loaded.

She pokes her head back out.

This turns out to be harder than she thought. She has a political science textbook; is that good enough? Oh, and she also made this tinkertech helmet which might not actually be tinkertech and doesn't contain the translation program she was trying to get, but they might find it interesting anyway.

Daisy expects that Dusk will be interested in the helmet if it's all right to take it apart. And one book should at least get her most of the way to having the language, she just might be a little short on vocabulary if it's particularly focused.

Yes, it can be taken apart and she can create more whenever Dusk wants. Is Dusk interested in tech? She can create a lot of other samples of tinkertech and derivatech*, many of them probably more interesting; this helmet is a bit of a bust since she was trying and failling to get its translator specifically.

She'll hand Daisy the book and pop back in to, after some struggle, produce her copy of The Lord of the Rings she used to bring to her chemotherapy appointments.

Those two combined should have reasonably good coverage, she thinks.

*tinkertech-derived reproducible technology.

Dusk is an engineer, yes - she usually works with things a little simpler than microchips, so Daisy isn't sure that she'll be able to do anything interesting with the helmet, but she expects she'll at least want to take it apart and have a look.

She gets to work on the books; she's very fast at reading, taking each page in at a glance.

(Well, that's one way she might be able to get in Dusk's good books.)

While Daisy's doing that, she will generate:

• Hero's jetpack, jetboots and the helmet control system, the last of which comes with his homebrew fork of BSD which looks shockingly primitive now, despite how ahead of its time it was. No media or saved project work, but the software is there.
• A full set of Masamune's Thunderstorm 1.12 power armor.
• Two of the Swords' high-calibre force field bracers.

She sets down a black sheet in a clean corner and piles the gear there.

Does Nine want copies to play with?

He can't wear most things designed for humans, but if there's anything he can use he's interested, yes. (Daisy is a little slower to translate for him, and it slows her reading down a little, but she does keep going with it as she translates.)

She'll put an extra of each in the pile so he can poke through them. The force field bracers might work; with humans you activate them by tensing your forearm, but there's also a manual activation. The jetpack also looks like it'll work with some adjustment if he wires up his own control system. Maybe they and Dusk can figure it out. Nine looks below the jetpack's maximum carrying capacity so it'll be slower than Hero could go with it, but it'll still work.

Oh, what might be useful is cannibalizing the lasers and shock prongs from the armor? Both can be set to stun, which might be useful for aggressive wildlife. Rebecca knows how to take them apart, and they should be easy to mount on something and hook up to a correct power source, which she also knows the specs for. She doesn't know if it's redundant with what Nine already has, though.

He does have a stun option and force shields, but the jet pack sounds interesting, he'll ask Dusk to have a look at it. He also asks Daisy what she thinks of the possibility of him copying Dusk's lightning aura with the shock prongs and she says it's safer not to, right now.