"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!"

She laughs and nods. "Good point. Have a good day, Beenu."

He nods and smiles and walks past her to a trio who were waiting and watching the conversation.

Staaaaaaaare.

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?"

"Uh... Sure. Yes. I apologize. I'm - not fully recovered."

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.

She investigates the things carefully and - does a magic thing to the wallet, which Sable can feel through the core.

"This is organic but... Weird. Huh. I could reshape it, but I won't. I honestly have no idea how to process this? Except that maybe you don't know more magic than I do?"

The magic thing ends.

"I don't know if anything was weirdly done with the core. I don't know why we have two binders when that's unheard of. I don't know why I mysteriously have both deadspeaking and mentalism. I don't know why I ended up in this world. I just don't know enough. Maybe you don't believe me. Maybe I botched this explanation in my stress about being in an entirely new world for less than a day, and suddenly becoming one of two people ultimately responsible for three hundred people. Maybe I got my hopes up too high about getting to be friends with the other deadspeaker. I don't fucking know."

She leans against the wall, sighing hard. "What I do know is that there are a bunch of 'it should be fucking obvious' things about magic, this world, and deadspeaking that you know and I don't, and I would like to know those things."

"I will... Answer questions? It's easier than, like, trying to do magic right now."

"Top questions: how does crop growth work, what are the stupidly obvious things everyone should know about magic and deadspeaking that an inexplicable outworlder would not know, how does melding wood work, what can you share about how tweaking plants works, and do you have an anatomy textbook or anything like it?"

She huffs a bit, clearly frustrated (though not really with Hessia, more at the overall situation), and colors a shock-white streak into her bangs over her left eye, just to mess around and vent her frustration.

"...'Kay."

She sits too, leaning against a stalactite.

"Uh... One at a time I guess? There's a very particular meaning that makes crops grow at hyper-speed without actually requiring nearly as much water or fertilizer as they'd need growing naturally, and also without killing themselves through overheat. It's actually subtly different depending on the crop. Cereals, bushes, whatever. Meanings have- There are flowcharts. It's hard to put into words, but you set mental conditions on what the different aspects of a meaning do and when they'll activate, there's a notation for it. What you do is you have copper wires buried under the dirt, contacting each and every plant in a whole huge tray, and then deadspeakers walk along, claiming through the wire and imbuing the meanings, then activating them. Sometimes they have a massive bound tool for it instead. It consumes a lot of imbuement... Dungeon cores give you infinite imbuement to spend, most deadspeakers have to breathe and focus to claim life energy. Or suck on a bead in their mouth, or use beads to power a bound tool."

"Huh, interesting. Do you have copies of the flowcharts? Or could you write them down from memory? One thing I've noticed is that everything in the demesne counts as touch-range."