A grumpy, tired trans girl is walking across the street in North Louisiana. She's boymoding, because North Louisiana. Gotta buy some groceries, so she can keep eating, so she can keep working her terrible internal-customer-service job, so she can eventually save enough money to leave this shitty place and move somewhere safe to transition.
"Name's Beenu and I'm a vigas farmer, ma'am. I want to know where's we're allowed to get planting. It'll be a be a few weeks before you'n the fox girl can speed 'em all up, so I want to get to plowing today."
The "ma'am"-ing and "Lady Binder"-ing continues. And these are both important conversations.
"Ms. Winters, I'm going to very much enjoy talking to you, I expect, and it will probably be a long conversation and not quite as urgent, so I'm going to talk with Beenu here first, if you don't mind. Best get the farming started quickly, y'know. Thank you for your patience."
Then she turns to Beenu. "Mr. Beenu, what are the ideal conditions for farming vigas?"
"Silty soil's best. Got to be pretty dry to start with, good drainage, we'll need watering but it gets too wet real easily, Vigas. Gentle slope is fine, but too steep's not. Needs all the sun it can get. Most importantly we'll need some kind of low fence or wall to keep chokers out. Either that or constant guard day and night plus lots of traps for the little pests. So a big block of field we can all farm together would be nice..."
He glances doubtfully over to a different part of the cave.
"You seem sensible, so let's just say lots of folk have got it in their heads that they're gonna own land and get rich off farming or renting it. Self-sustaining like. That is a hazy dream that will vanish under noonday sun. A lot of these people, all they'll get is fat chokers and badly built huts. Then they'll come beggin' for help when winter comes, having cost valuable seed crop to boot. It would be bad on multiple levels."
"Those people sound like morons who want to take advantage of others. Ugh. Being in this business isn't for getting rich, it's for creating safety, community, and contentment. You take a group of people, find decent land, and try to make everyone involved moderately better-off than they started."
She sighs and shakes her head. "Growth cycle? Yields? About how much land does it take to make how many people's worth of meals? Going to try to budget enough land for farming to feed the whole village with a little bit spare to lay in for hard years, and then do more than enough of everything else that we can keep a lot set aside."
"That depends on a lot of factors. Under ideal conditions in a dungeon farm with a lot of setup and magic labor, a few hundred square yards* can grow half a raten's** worth of vigas flour per year. Rolling harvest every two weeks. For three hundred people, with no certainty for how much forage, meat, or other food we can get... I'm gonna guess only modest deadspeakin' assistance so we manage two, maybe three harvests before winter, and then double that guess to be safe... Maybe two and a half demiholds***? That's for the three hundred we have now with some comfort."
*'yustri', but it seems to be pretty close?
**This is at least several tons
***This translates to about 0.3 square miles
She nods thoughtfully, then gestures at the area south of the core, roughly where the ridge starts to curve away from the river. "What's the best spot for growing vigas in that general area? And how many people do you need assisting you to work two and a half demiholds? I'm thinking closer to the ridge than the river if possible, so you can use the ridge as a bit of a natural wall for one of your four sides, limit the fencing I need to grow you."
"I'd have to walk it more to say. Probably not so close to the river. As for how many people, I can't say much but 'as many as possible'. Breaking new ground and harvest are the two most labor intensive parts of farming. Oh, and before you try it- You can't whisper soil, it ruins the ground for planting."
"Good to know. Well, something has to be the first thing other than the core cave to get a firm location, so you find me the best two and a half demiholds for growing vigas within a taum of the core, preferring closer over farther, and preferring near the ridge. I'll double-check that it's in range of the core, and then we'll get to fencing it and getting people assigned to help you. Probably I'm giving you everyone who isn't otherwise spoken for, but don't quote me on that until I have a better handle on where we need to put people. Come find me when you've got a better idea of where you want to be."
"I think I can tell where the colors start ma'am- Though I suppose closer is better even if it's all within the demesne. I'll get right on that. I'll be having a couple of friends help me pace it out and mark the corners and everything. Good day, then!"
And then she turns to Hessia. "It is an absolute delight to meet you, Ms. Winters. Mind going for a walk with me, leave Mr. Cooper to his organizing for the moment?"
She leads the way into the cave, to the core room, where there will be no eavesdroppers.
"I have many more-important things to do than stand on ceremony. You owe me no apologies. I'm just glad I could get you healed up last night."
"That's the core. That-" She glares, but in a reflexive and puzzled way instead of a genuinely angry one. "I'm not- What?"
She rubs her hands over her face. "Okay, I'm trying to wake up more for this. Morning. 'Good' would be a stretch. So. Mysterious new deadspeaker, yes hi. Yes, I'm very young. No, I don't have family who came with because dad's not worth a rainbow's ass and mom has no more ambition than being a laundry woman. I went to public magic school in a small hold called Mayyom. It barely taught me any magic worth knowing. I can do the standard healing meaning, and the standard crop growth meaning, and meld wood, and that is it. Oh, and how to make a core, obviously."
"Mysterious is right. My name is Sable Weller, and I am going to have to learn a lot from you. I brought you to the core room because this is something I do not want to tell anyone I don't have to, but you will inevitably figure out if we work together long enough.
"I am not from this world. I know none of what I'm supposed to, and lots of things I'm not. I happened to appear in this room at crucial moment during core-creation when things were threatening to go badly wrong through no fault of Nico's, and managed to somehow dual-bind the core and stabilize the mentalism and deadspeaking facets of the core by virtue of having inexplicable skill with both jammed into my brain as part of my arrival. And I'm telling you all this because I want to have more than just Nico that I can let my guard down around, and you're going to figure it out anyway unless I'm a truly masterful liar."
She facepalms and sighs.
"That sounds completely fake? Making a core is supposed to be so easy you can do it by accident. They tell you it's high treason and then teach you how in school. So you know what not to do. And it is easy."
"Then explain the fact that there are two binders, and the fact that I'm simultaneously the deadspeaker that healed you last night and the mentalist in the room with you right now."
She levitates a nearby pebble off the ground and into her now-outstretched hand without breaking eye contact with Hessia.
"Maybe you did it wrong." She is looking at the core with some amount of fear now. "You- Fundamentally, you just take some iridescence and a lot of imbuement of the type you can control and- Let the iridescence eat it, then claim and bind the resulting amalgam to stop. At least, That's what I was taught."
She huffs, reaches into her jeans pocket, pulls out her wallet, and tosses it to Hessia. It contains several pieces of currency, credit/debit cards, and ID covered in a language completely unrelated to any language spoken by anyone on this world. The wallet itself is a synthetic material printed with an elaborate floral design, completely smooth to the touch, and more precisely printed than could be possible without modern technology or magic that Sable doesn't know about.