"Well, the very first crazy idea I brought into reality was the one that led to me being a darkstrider. My understanding is that most stars stay on all the time but for some reason the star my people's planet orbits turns off for a couple centuries at a time before turning back on. It used to cycle on and off more frequently but for reasons we don't understand it's slowed down.

"Anyway, my species hibernates during the time we call the dark. It gets so cold during that time that the air itself freezes and becomes snow until there's no air at all. I theorized that there would be certain kinds of very small microbes that could eat that frozen air and generate enough heat to make it into air again and let us wake up during the deepest dark. And after a number of experiments I found them. With a lot more work and a lot of refinement that let me and three others wake up in the middle of the long dark and win the war that was on at the time without anyone else needing to die."

Emily knows that stars can twinkle in the sky, of course, but she had never thought before about what it would be like to live with a twinkling star as her sun!* This is a terrifying prospect, that the sun could just turn off one day and the air could freeze! Emily shivers.

"So... your side woke up, while the other side was still sleeping, and you... disabled their weapons, or something? So that when they woke up, they couldn't fight anymore?" Emily does know something about war. The Ferngill Republic has always been at war with the Gotoro Empire.

* Emily, unlike Maru, has never studied astronomy, and considerations of white dwarfs or pulsars are not occurring to her.

"We sabotaged a critical logistics depot using black paint and explosives. The black paint worked because the sun is much much brighter than usual during first light. That meant that they didn't have the strategic depth to sustain operations after the relight and they knew it and knew that we knew it."