"Those seem like pretty solvable problems! People would have to be careful with the glass, yeah, but the rest of the room and hull can be designed to make navigation extra easy around it. And trees are probably a bad idea, yeah, but... roots and vegetables, where the majority of the plant gets eaten, would probably work pretty well?"

"I wouldn't want to have to be careful with glass while I'm scrambling around to tack our way out of a storm!"

This still seems like an engineering problem. Maybe just on the level of having glass that's thick and strong enough, but...

"I guess the sailors could put it on a smaller ship that's towed along behind, so there's less need to climb all over it?"

"Huh..."

"That's an interesting idea but the bridge between the ship would have to be - I don't even know -"

"I'm not a shipwright, I'm sure there's stuff I'm not considering, but I was just imagining a bunch of strong ropes people can climb back and forth. I guess someone would have heard if that was tried somewhere, huh? Might take a few designs to get it right, but don't see why it wouldn't work."

"No, you couldn't do just ropes, because then the little glass ship could crash into the main sail."

"Oh there's loads of solutions for that! The ropes can be tied in a way that makes even sharp turns keep the glass ship trailing behind, and you could add something halfway between the vessels like a big sack full of straw to cushion impacts! Okay that probably doesn't sound reassuring, but I think you can also make... uh, I don't know the word for them, but imagine a sail that's attached to the back of the glass ship, right? That adds extra drag on it, so it's always moving slower than the main vessel? I think that would work, but like I said I've never made a sail before..."

"I think I'd want to try it with a model first."

"I'd want to run it by the newest engineer available. Six of them."

"Yeah."

(Below his curiosity and excitement, below even the ambient enjoyment of the conversation, the patient, pragmatic eyes peer out at what he's doing, and know that if this world has embedded means of maintaining stasis, he is dropping a stone whose ripples may be large enough to get noticed. He may have painted the first real target on his back, not to mention those of everyone else in this room... but he has to test certain hypotheses sooner or later, and in this context the risk is lower than it would be in most, and the splash damage is minimal.)

"You'd need such a lot of glass, too."

"Eh, you can grow some plants in houses, near windows."

"Would you even really need glass? Maybe you could do it with open windows to let in rain and light both."

"Maybe wooden panels on hinges that can be opened or closed, if there are things you'd want to keep out? Do ships ever have problems with bugs or birds between rounds?"

"They're much more common right near a round, where there's things for them to eat, but sometimes a ship'll have pests that notice we've got food - not something you can solve by closing the windows during a trip, though, that's just to manage the weather situation."

"Are storms the most dangerous thing for sails?"

"Yeah."

"Well, pirates."

"There aren't pirates around here, but I guess that can always change..."

"Pirates would be worse but storms are worse, here, for us."

"Makes sense. Have you heard any good stories of other dangers, even if you don't believe them? Where I come from, there were old tales of monsters that would make entire ships disappear, or mysterious disappearances of crew while on voyage."

"Whoa, spooky."

"Crashing on a cannibal round would be bad."

"Cannibal rounds are real."

"He said even if, not only if."

"Do ships crash into rounds often?" It would make sense to misjudge where the gravity suddenly kicks in, especially if there was a storm at the time. "And can someone explain the cannibal thing to me? How do some rounds become cannibal rounds in the first place?"

"No, not at all."

"A really bad storm can do it, or if the crew are all sick and can't steer, but it's not remotely common."

"I don't know how rounds start being cannibal rounds to begin with, but they're rounds where there's not much to eat, so the people on them make people to eat, and everybody alive there is a cannibal."

Huh, that makes sense...

...except, wait, didn't Chesabit say she was younger than usual because she was made earlier than expected...?

Are the cannibal rounds full of specifically baby-eating cannibals?

Ok, think it through.

A full 20 oz steak is about the size of an adolescent's limbs, right?

An adult could probably get... a few days' worth of meals out of a 5 year old, counting the liver and heart and so on...

So each cannibal would need to be able to make a new child once every few days. Probably they have some forage or crops to get wider nutrition, so say... one per week?

Or maybe if the "growth rate" is different than he's expecting, they just eat a baby a day and supplement with some nuts and fruit.

But either way, they're certainly not creating people at whatever age they want no-cost, and they're definitely not creating people at a rate of 1 second per second of pre-made "growth."

"Do people ever escape from them?" he asks, voice quiet. "Is anything being done to take over their rounds?"

"Sometimes somebody will say they're from a cannibal round and got up a tree with a fan and sailed away, but I think they're mostly making it up."

"If we found a cannibal round we'd civilize it, for sure."

He wants to ask why someone would do that (he doubts they'd be getting fame or money out of it) but more importantly... "Has that happened before? Are there any ex-cannibal rounds?"

"Not nearby."

"My penpal on the Littlest Sun's been to Reclamation and it used to be a cannibal round."