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were such her silver will
a may in the moon kingdom
Permalink Mark Unread

May is rolling her way to the library. It's not icy - in point of fact it's summer - but she's got an unhappy ankle from tripping yesterday and it's an accessible library and it's downhill on the way there and Ren will pick her up after. So, rolling.

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The sidewalk in front of her opens up suddenly into a dark whirling void that swallows her whole, wheelchair and all.

She falls for - an amount of time; it's almost impossible to tell how long. The darkness is so complete her eyes don't even try to trick her into seeing nonsense shapes in it. It's chilly and airless but her lungs don't protest the shortage. She can hardly even tell which way is down. Formless limbs tug at her hair and clothes.

 

And then she lands on a soft bed of thick springy moss. It's dark out, but a regular, theoretically-penetrable dark. There's a large half moon in the sky, and a number of stars indicating that light pollution is not a concern in this environment. Her wheelchair crashes to the ground several feet away; it makes a loud noise but not particularly a breaking-important-wheelchair-bits sort of noise.

The moss is very pale, and glitters with tiny silver lights.

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She and her moss - which is actually glowing, as though dusted with tiny pinprick stars - are in a shallow dip in the ground at the base of a round and gently-sloping hill; its silhouette blocks part of the sky in that direction. It's very quiet here. Other details about her environment will have to wait until her eyes adjust.

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She cups her hands over some moss to make sure it's glowing and not just reflecting somehow.

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Yep. Glowing. That sure is some luminous moss. Very pretty, too.

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She pats herself down, hair and outfit, to see if the limbs that grabbed at her did anything.

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Nope, all parts present and accounted for. Apparently the mysterious void was just being creepy.

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She looks at her nonglowing sleeve to speed up eye adjustment.

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A voice from behind her says, "Hey! You look like a southerner! What's your business?"

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"Um - sorry, I'm lost."

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A silent shadow passes overhead, and a one-eyed barn owl perches on one of her wheelchair's handles to peer down at her.

"I'll bet you are!" says the owl, in perfectly comprehensible English. "It's a week's flight to the border! Are you some kind of spy, or - oh!" He flaps his wings excitedly. "Maybe you're an outworlder! There hasn't been one of those in centuries, and they always end up in the blighted south! I'm Starlight, what's your name?"

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"May."

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"Are you an outworlder, though?" he asks. "If you don't know the answer's probably yes - what sort of creature are you, anyway, you look like one of those southern fey but not any southern fey I've ever seen, and I've seen a few - I'm an owl, of course - or aren't there owls where you're from?"

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"I'm a human and given the givens it seems very likely I am an outworlder. We have things that look like you and are called owls but they never talk."

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"Oh, weird," he says. "Owls are all people here. All the bird-folk are either people or they aren't, it's all the same by species, very simple. But girl spiders are people and boy spiders aren't, and there's all sorts of other complicated ones like that. I thought I was safe but I guess not! I'd find it really weird to be from a species only some of which was people, wouldn't you?"

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"Yes, that seems like it would be strange. Poor spiders."

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"They seem to do all right with it. There's a spider in my squad and she's lovely. Anyway if you're an outworlder I guess you should meet the Queen, d'you wanna meet the Queen?"

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"Is that... customary?"

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"Any outworlders in the Kingdom of Night are supposed to meet the Queen at their earliest convenience," he says. "The kind of earliest convenience that means when you're good and ready, mind, not the kind that means get there yesterday or you're in trouble."

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"I'm not sure what the criteria for being good and ready to meet a queen might be."

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"Up to you. But you can go anytime you like, ask anybody who's not busy with something and they'll be your escort, just say 'I'm an outworlder and I'm going to meet the Queen' and you're set," he says. "Probably she wants to do diplomacy or something, I wouldn't know."

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"I'm not actually a diplomacy-designated individual of my world."

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Starlight shrugs. A shrugging owl is a mildly impressive sight. "I'm sure she's thought of that, she's the Queen, she thinks of everything."

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"Everything, really?"

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"More things than I've ever thought of, definitely, but then I guess I shouldn't be surprised, she's been around forever."

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"Metaphorically?"

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"She's probably existed at least as long as the world but I don't know if that's forever or just a really long time," he says. "But I'm not sure there could be a world without the Moon Queen and the Sun King. Maybe a world, I guess, but not this one."

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"My world, to my knowledge, has neither."

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"What's the sky like?"

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"We have a sun and a moon. They rise and set, and the moon has phases. There are stars. The sun is the same kind of thing as the stars, just closer, and the moon is the same kind of thing as the planet, just smaller and less lively."

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"Weird!" he says, impressed. "What's a planet?"

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"A very large ball of rock, with stuff on the surface. My species lives on one; it's called Earth. What are we standing on?"

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"We're standing on the ground! The ground's not ball-shaped, it's just flat. It goes all the way to the edge of the world, only in most places it's under the ocean when it gets there."

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"I see. How does the edge of the world work if you sail that far?"

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"It sort of fades out slowly and if you go out too far you disappear."

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"Oh dear."

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"People go out to the edge sometimes - just sort of to see what it's like, you know - there's places where the land goes that far and somebody's dug a line in the ground where you're safe if you don't step over it. It's weird. Real quiet. Like there just stops being sound."

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"You've gone?"

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"Yeah." He shuffles slightly on his perch. "Once or twice. - Hey, what is this contraption, anyway?"

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"It's a wheelchair. I'm not very good at walking, so on surfaces suitable for rolling I do that instead. This isn't really such a surface."

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"Oh, neat. Kind of like Charm's wings. - Charm's one of my squadmates, she's a fox, and she was tired of not being able to fly, so we made her some wings."

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"Cool! How did you do that?"

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"Oh, you know, when a spider weaves something for you personally it's got some magic in it - I collected up a bunch of shed feathers and Snowfall used her silk to weave them together into wings that Charm can put on and take off whenever she wants, and when she has them on she can fly like a proper owl, it's amazing."

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"I actually don't know, where I'm from humans are the only species of person."

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"Wow! Well, okay, now you know the thing about spidersilk!"

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"Now I do! What other things have magic?"

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"Oh, lots, I wouldn't even know where to start - starmoss glows but you've probably noticed that - owls don't have a thing like spiders do but we get little things of our own sometimes, mine is always knowing exactly where I am, it's real useful. Um. The fey all have stuff, obviously, but I guess that's not obvious to you if you don't have fey, even though you look sort of fey yourself. More fey than anything else, at any rate. Do humans have a thing?"

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"To my knowledge no humans have any magic! In fact, as far as I'm aware, Earth doesn't have any anywhere, not even moss! What do you know about where you are, exactly?"

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"- I'm not sure how to explain it besides 'where'. Like... if your friends put you in a bag and dragged you around for hours, you'd come out lost, right? But I come out just as un-lost as ever. It works even if I'm asleep. I always know which way and how far to anyplace I've ever been."

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"So relative to places where you already have your bearings," she says, "not, some coordinate system, or the name of the location, or something like that."

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"Yeah. I wonder what it'd be like if I went to an entire different world - like, is there even an answer to 'which way and how far to Earth from here'?"

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"There was a... transition. It was more like falling than like taking a bus but not very much like falling either."

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"What's a bus?"

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"A mode of group transportation for people who can't fly or anything cool like that."

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"Oh. Yeah, that kind of thing is useful."

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"Yep. Were you busy? Should I be asking for directions to civilization rather than interrogating you?"

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"No, not really, I was just out for a nice early evening flight. What do you mean by 'civilization'?"

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"A population center? Possibly with buildings."

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"I guess maybe Silver Falls, then? That's the capital city - sort of the only city - they're kind of a Day thing, cities."

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"A day thing?"

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"Oh - like the Kingdom of Day, I mean. This is the Kingdom of Night. The world is a circle and the north half is the Kingdom of Night, ruled by the Moon Queen, and the south half is the Kingdom of Day, ruled by the Sun King. They have a lot of cities and bureaucracy and stuff, it's terrible, Night is way better."

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"Humans find cities pretty useful but maybe they aren't as good for nonhumans."

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"Night folk who like cities live in Silver Falls. I've been there a few times. It's nice to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. It's good that it's there for people who want it, though. Things being there for people who want them, that's - important."

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"I agree. Where do people who don't like cities live?"

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"Oh, everywhere else. Like I have a place with my family in the Moonrise Hills, and I stay with my squad most of the time otherwise - most species have at least one or two places that are just how they like it, and that's where most people of that species grow up, and then when you're old enough to go and see the world you do that if you want to and stay home if you don't, and join the army if you want to and not if you don't, and if you really like the quiet life you move to the mountains where people who really like the quiet life live - the war has never ever ever in the whole history of the world got as far as the mountains, it's safe there. Most other places are mostly safe too, if they're not near the border, but - safe is the point of the mountains, you don't go there if you're the type to scuffle with the neighbours."

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"Is there a lot of call to join the army?"

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"Well, sure, we're - oh." He shuffles awkwardly on his perch. "We're at war with the Kingdom of Day all the time but I guess there's no reason you'd know that."

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"There is not. What for?"

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He blinks at her.

"...well, because we don't like each other, I guess? It's been like that forever. Night gets ahead in winter and Day gets ahead in summer and it all comes back around. Sometimes somebody thinks they'll really break the cycle this time and it never works."

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"It's not that bad - everybody who really doesn't want to be bothered can go live in the mountains -"

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"Are there military objectives associated with this war that aren't 'express dislike for each other'."

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"...I don't know what you mean?"

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"Like, humans sometimes have wars, which are usually about making sure some humans don't have access to scary weapons, or that they stop doing horrible things to their own citizens or their neighbors, or that they secure economic control of some resource, or that they follow through on their promises to protect other groups of humans that they are allied with, or something like that. Countries that merely don't like each other might find an excuse to have a war but they would need an excuse."

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He tilts his head at her. It goes quite a ways over, being an owl's head.

"There's something - not matching up - and I can't quite figure out what it is," he says. "You have wars, we have a war - your wars stop, I think? They start and then they stop? Ours just goes on."

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"Our wars do stop. Somebody wins or somebody surrenders or they get distracted by something and decide to quit and do the other thing."

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"The war between Night and Day isn't like that. I mean, you could sort of say that each side wants to win, the Sun King wants to defeat the Moon Queen and vice versa, but it's been forever - I don't know how old the world is but I'm pretty sure the war's the same age - and it hasn't happened yet, so it's obviously not going to, so it's just - if we stopped trying, we'd get wiped out next spring..."

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"Is that what you'd do if they surrendered?"

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"I'm not in charge. And anyway I wouldn't surrender to Day. If the Sun King wants to rule me he'll have a fight on his hands."

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"Often surrenders are conditional, at least with humans. I don't know the details but they go like, 'you win and can have most of whatever your objective was but we get to keep our pre-war borders and head of state, otherwise we keep fighting'. And humans mostly don't like fighting so that often works."

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"Maybe you should talk to the Queen about this stuff," he suggests. "I'm just a scout."

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"That seems possible. In this country what happens if the Queen doesn't like somebody?"

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"...they don't get to be her secretary or anything, I guess?"

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"That makes sense. Most human countries today have temporary, elected rulers, and while we have had monarchs historically they are known for abusing their power to do things, especially by being awful to people they don't like."

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"Oh. No, the Queen isn't like that at all. She's really fair and stuff."

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"Cool."

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"D'you think you'll want to meet her soon, then? I could take you to Silver Falls! I'm the best at going places!"

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"It does seem like the obvious next thing to do, but you're probably so much better at going places than me that I might have a hard time following you."

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"Oh, don't worry, I'm used to guiding groundfolk. I could bring my squad, too, Button's plenty big enough to carry you if you'd rather that than hike for days."

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"I did mention I'm not very good at walking."

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"How are you at riding bears? I guess if you don't have any bear-folk you probably haven't done much of that."

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"I have not. I'm probably not awful at it though."

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"Okay! Should I go get everybody and bring them here?"

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"Sure why not. About how long will this take?"

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"I should be back in a few minutes. Might take longer than that for everybody to straggle in."

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"Okay, thank you."

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He takes off, and soon he's over the hill and out of sight.

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May inspects her chair.

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It is a bit rattled but not actually damaged in any substantial way. It is also defnitely completely unsuited to this terrain.

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She folds it up.

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Starlight is back in a few minutes, as promised, with friends. One, a white fox with sparsely-feathered wings that seem half made of light, is almost certainly Charm. There's also an unsettling silhouette that resolves on approach into a long winged snake, and a blur in the air that trails indistinctly behind them.

The winged snake lands a conversational-but-not-crowding distance away and coils herself up. She has dark glossy scales and dark leathery wings, and looks to be about twenty feet long. Charm settles in next to her, with an affable nod of greeting. The blur lands beside Charm, and when not in motion turns out to be a dark-skinned pale-haired humanoid maybe two and a half feet tall, with wings like delicate sprays of long silver leaves, wearing grey leather and a watchful expression.

"Hi!" says Starlight, circling above her since her wheelchair is looking less perchable this time. "These are my squadmates, Charm and - uh, Ebb," he dips his wings at the snake, "and Reflect," the humanoid. "Button and Snowfall are on their way."

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"It's nice to meet you all."

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"Likewise," says Ebb. "I never expected to see an outworlder in my lifetime. And it'll be nice for those of us who have friends or family in Silver Falls to have the excuse to visit."

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"So I'm not accidentally insensitive could you identify your species for me, and Reflect too?"

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"I'm an amphiptere, and Reflect is a fey," says Ebb, perfectly casually. "It's all right to ask."

"Reflect's a bit shy," Charm puts in, "but then Starlight talks enough for the rest of the squad put together -"

"What, how could you say such a thing," says Starlight, dramatically hiding his face behind a wing. Charm giggles. Even Reflect cracks a smile.

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"Is it also all right to ask if I am allowed to pet people," she wonders.

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"Well, the answer might be 'definitely not', but if you're on reasonably friendly terms I don't think most people would mind being asked," says Charm.

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"Good to know."

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There is a rustle from the top of the hill, and then there is a large fluffy polar bear ambling down it with a large spider perched on her head, dark slender legs visible in silhouette against the bear's white face.

"Button, Snowfall, this is May, the outworlder," says Starlight.

"Pleased to make your acquaintance," says Button.

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"Pleased to meet you too," says May.

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"I'm told I might be carrying you to Silver Falls?" says Button.

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"I'm not very good at walking and the contraption I usually use," point, "isn't meant for irregular terrain, so yeah, that would be very nice of you."

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"Oh, that's an interesting contraption," she says, examining it. "Will you want it brought with you? Could be a bit of trouble, but I'm sure the Queen will appreciate that we were nice to her guest."

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"I'm a little reluctant to abandon it but if it's very inconvenient I can do without it. I do definitely want the bag on it," she takes her backpack off it, "but I can just wear that," she does.

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"Well, how heavy is it - Reflect?"

Reflect flits into the air and grabs the wheelchair and lifts it easily, despite the fact that it is nearly bigger than she is. The blur effect is less pronounced this time, but seems to just be a characteristic of her flight regardless of how fast she's going. It extends slightly to the wheelchair but mostly covers the fey herself.

"Not bad," she reports. "I could carry this. Might want somebody else to roll it when the ground's flat enough."

"There's at least one reasonably long stretch of road between here and Silver Falls," says Starlight, "I bet it would go all right on that."

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"Should do unless it's a gravel road or something."

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"Is dirt an 'or something'?"

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"Depends how smooth it is."

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"Smooth-ish," he says. "I'm not super qualified to evaluate road quality."

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"I can probably at least push the chair myself then."

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"Okay," says Starlight. "So we can get going whenever - or I guess it wasn't necessarily the same time in your world when you left as it was here when you landed - are you even nightfolk, when do humans like to sleep?"

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"Humans are usually diurnal but can with some accommodations stay up at night. I would've been up for another ten or twelve hours after I fell."

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"Want to get going now, then?"

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"Sure."

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Button crouches down near May, and Snowfall hops off the bear's head and climbs onto Ebb.

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"How careful do I need to be about grabbing your fur?"

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"Not terribly. Try not to yank on it, but I won't begrudge accidents while you're learning."

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She nods and attempts to climb the bear.

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The bear turns out to be easily climbable! And, when climbed, pretty easily sittable too.

"You can hang onto the fur over my shoulders if you feel in danger of slipping off," she says. "All set?"

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Grab. "Yes, thank you."

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"Off we go, then."

The flyers take off, Starlight in the lead, Snowfall clinging to Ebb, Charm following, Reflect bringing up the rear with wheelchair in hand. Button lopes after them. Her gait is very comfortable and does not present any imminent danger of ejecting her passenger.

There's - something about this place, an impression more easily clarified now that she's seen a little more of it. It seems... sharp, vivid, clear, unnaturally beautiful and at the same time utterly natural, like if 'reality' is a characteristic that comes in amounts, this place has more of it than Earth by a generous margin. Hard to see it when everything's dark like this, but the more her eyes adjust and the more of the landscape passes by, the more obvious it becomes.

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Weird. It's like everything is a really sharp well-composed photograph or she's looking at it through a lens or something.

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Yes, exactly like that.

It does bring a nice extra aesthetic touch to this trip over moonlit hills on the back of a polar bear.

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"It's really pretty here."

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"Isn't it?" agrees Charm, dropping down into chatting range. "Wait'll you see Silver Falls. Most beautiful thing I've ever seen, the waterfall and the Queen's palace - I've only been once but it was a very memorable once."

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"I bet it's great. Did it take a long time to learn to fly on - made wings?"

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"It wasn't so bad! Spider-gifts are nice like that. Maybe a week from the first time I put them on until I could keep up with the squad on 'em? A little longer before I was maneuvering like a real flyer."

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"That is awesome. There are ways at home for humans to fly but they're all really cumbersome and most of them are either dangerous or not properly fun at all."

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"Well, flying with these is no picnic if you get it wrong, but if you're sensible about it you can learn without getting in much trouble. I could, anyway. Flying's easier for smaller creatures, we don't fall so hard."

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"That makes sense."

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"Why, d'you want a set yourself?"

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"Maybe!"

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"Snowfall liked making mine, if she gets to know you maybe she'll offer." Flap flap. There does not really seem to be enough solid substance in those wings for them to work - strands of barely-visible spiderweb bind together a skeletal array of feathers haloed by a soft silver glow - but nevertheless they are demonstrably functional. "Hungry yet? What do your folk eat?"

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"Humans eat lots of things. So far none of the same species that are people here are things I eat, fortunately, I feel like that would be awkward. Bread and broccoli and cheese and rice and chocolate and potatoes and cabbage and apples and strawberries and certain species of mushrooms I could not confidently identify in the wild and eggs and a whole bunch of stuff."

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"Sounds about like the commonest sorts of fey, then, that's good. If you'd said you subsist exclusively on figs or something we'd have been in trouble."

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"I'm not sure I have ever eaten a fig, although they are edible to humans!"

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Charm giggles. "I had one once. You can get them down by the borderlands. It'd be a real trick to find one this far north."

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"I know nothing about the Earthly growing climates of figs but that seems reasonable enough. About how much area is this world?"

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"Good question. You could ask our geography expert, next break."

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"How long a trip are we looking at?"

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"At this pace, we'll sleep one day in the wilds along the way and get there by midnight tomorrow."

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"Okay. I hope it doesn't rain."

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"Probably won't."

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"What do you do when it does?"

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"I huddle up under Ebb's wing - there'd be room for you too, I bet - if it's a short downpour. Longer than that and we'd find or build a shelter. If we were out on something serious we'd have brought a tent, but it's hard to carry one that'll fit us all, and these hills are nice for packing light in. Good forage, not much rain."

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"I don't know how to forage, what do you find?"

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"This time of year, plenty of nuts and berries for you plant-munching folk, a reasonable supply of moths and crickets for me and Snowfall - Ebb ate last week, she's fine - if Starlight's lucky we'll catch a rabbit, otherwise it's crickets for him too - if we're feeling leisurely we roast the crickets. I don't mind rabbit myself if it's going spare, but wild-caught roast cricket, that's my favourite."

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"Some humans eat crickets but not me."

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"More for me then," Charm says cheerfully. "Do you go in for rabbit, if we find some?"

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"I haven't tried it but if it's cooked I would."

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"I'm sure Starlight'll save you some, in case you're not impressed with the fruit-and-nut selection and turn out to agree with him about rabbit being a superior sort of food."

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"I think I would have expected an owl to mostly eat rodents, not rabbits."

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"He's a picky sort. And rodents are a tricky subject - most of them aren't people, but there's exceptions, and it wouldn't do to make a mistake."

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"Individuals sometimes are, or some hard to distinguish species are?"

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"Mostly the latter. It's easy enough to tell rat-folk from plain rats if you get a good look, but out hunting, peckish and in a hurry... I have a cousin who got in a fight that way once. Bit the wrong frog and 'watch where you're going, mister!' He hasn't touched an amphibian since, even though they're not normally ambiguous, you could go a whole lifetime without running into a surprise like that and most people do."

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"Most humans don't hunt our own meat. It's farmed, by and large."

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"Farmed? Sounds southern."

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"It does sound like humans as a group have some southern tendencies."

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"Oh? What else?" she asks curiously.

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"Being diurnal, living in buildings, Starlight thought I looked southern when he first saw me..."

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"Yeah, you do sort of have that southern-fey look, I'd've said the same if I hadn't known, but once you know 'outworlder' it's obvious, you're sort of - I don't know - off in the details? Not that I know which details, I've barely seen any southern fey, but there's definitely something."

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"Humans have a lot more than two ethnic groups. Mine's a minority in my country."

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"Oh, there's lots of different kinds of fey on each side, you certainly don't look anything like a dryad or a sunsprite or a riverwalker."

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"What kind is Reflect?"

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"Shadowsprite. It's fine to just know 'fey', though, there's hundreds of kinds and most people can only name a few dozen of 'em."

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"Okay, that's good to know. It's a little too dark to write even now my eyes are adjusted or I'd be trying to take notes."

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"—oh, right, dayfolk vision. Not sure how to help with that, sorry. I bet you can get more light in Silver Falls, there's some folk who like it brighter."

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"Oh good, I like to write."

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"This far north you won't see much sun even when it's up, but I'm sure there's some way to put together enough lamps to suit you."

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"Lamps are fine. You're being very accommodating."

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"Well, you're an outworlder," she says reasonably.

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"Still, I appreciate it."

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"I'm glad!"

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"What do you all do when you aren't taking outworlders to see the Queen?"

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"We're scouts! We scout. Farther south than here, usually. Updating maps of the borderlands, making sure there isn't anyone sneaking up here to do mischief."

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"What are you doing this northerly, then?"

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"Taking a little holiday. With permission, I should clarify."

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"You go on vacation with your squad?"

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"Why not? We're all good friends."

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"I suppose that makes sense."

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"I certainly like to think so!" giggles Charm.

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"How did you all get squadded together?"

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"Oh, I'm the newest - I was really happy to get put in Starlight's squad, he never gets lost, you know, it's great - I'm a real good tracker, Reflect and Ebb and Snowfall are good at sneaking for when we need that, Button's here to look intimidating and carry the slowpokes -"

Button rumbles a laugh.

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"So it's assigned. Do you have to report to somebody?"

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"I suppose so, yes."

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"You suppose."

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Charm laughs. "I don't know, 'report to somebody' just sounds - so official."

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"Are you an unofficial squad?"

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"Maybe it's another one of those things where humans are a bit southern? We know where to hand in our reports and how often we're supposed to take holidays and when we're supposed to check in about this or that, but there's nobody whose - job it is to pay attention to us?"

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"I suppose if you didn't want to report and take only certain numbers of vacations and so on you wouldn't have joined up in the first place?"

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"Yeah. And they'd notice eventually, and then we'd get kicked out and everybody'd know we were kicked out of the army for not doing our jobs, it'd be a thing."

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"Gotcha."

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"But I like my job, anyway, it's a nice job."

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"I'm glad. Do you get paid?"

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"Yeah, but I don't pick mine up very often. Not a lot of call for it out here."

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"What's the local currency?"

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"Stars. They look like - well, you'll probably see some in the capital, little sparkly silver things."

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"Does the other kingdom use those too?"

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"No, they use discs. And in the borderlands they'll take either."

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"The borderlands must be interesting."

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"They are that, though I don't know what you're imagining."

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"I'm only vaguely imagining it, really."

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"Lots of interesting folk there. Some of 'em are friendly, some very not."

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Nod.

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"Met a dryad there once. They're so tall! Taller'n you, even! Not as tall as Button when she stands up, but still!"

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"How much taller than me?"

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"Oh, like you with another quarter-you on top, maybe."

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"Humans get that tall but not often."

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"Huh. I think most fey kinds don't vary that much."

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"There's a lot of humans, so lots of room to be different."

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"Really? How many's a lot?"

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"More than six billion."

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"...that's more people than there are in the world. By a lot."

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"I was getting that impression."

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"Yeah. I wouldn't even hardly - how do you all fit? Your world must be so big!"

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"It's pretty big, yeah. We also have more cities so people live more densely."

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"Southern of you, but it makes sense, with so many people..."

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"Are there also more people in the south?" she wonders.

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"Not sure. We don't exactly get to read their census."

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"I suppose not. Do they speak the same language?"

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"Yeah. That much I know 'cause of the borderlands."

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"It's very strange that we're all speaking the same language. Or are we?"

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"I think so!"

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"Parlez-vous Français?"

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"No, I can't say I do - um," she says, almost losing a wingbeat. "That was weird."

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"Weird how?"

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"Well - I understood you even though you were speaking a language I've never heard before! It's weird."

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"But the language I speak normally is the language you speak most of the time even when I am not around?"

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"I'm pretty sure it is now that I've seen the difference!"

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"Hajimemashite, watashi wa Mariko desu."

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"You know a lot of languages! I don't think I've even heard of more than just the one until now!"

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"I'm not good at either of those two but I know enough to check. Languages are one of the things humans have a lot of because there are so many of us."

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"That makes sense. - Wasn't your name May?"

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"My full name is Mabel Mariko Swan. May is short for Mabel and Mariko is a name in Japanese. Mei is too, but I'd sooner go by Mariko if I were speaking Japanese."

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"Oh, I guess that makes sense. How many languages are there in your world?"

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"I don't know exactly, hundreds maybe thousands."

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"Wooooow."

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Giggle.

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Giggle. "I'm gonna go see if I can catch some moths on the wing," she says, "see you later!"

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"Enjoy your moths!"

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"Will do!"

Charm swoops off. It is now somewhat quieter around here. Button is still a very comfy bear.

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"I don't urgently need to eat but if there's a good way to get drinkable water that would be good."

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"We can pause at the next stream we cross," says Button.

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"Cool, thanks."

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"You're welcome!"

They come to a stream a few minutes later. Button stops in front of it. The water sparkles prettily in the moonlight.

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May slides off the bear and scoops up water in her hands and drinks it until she is done.

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And the rest of them either drink some water themselves or do a little foraging while she's doing that. Reflect puts down the wheelchair, finds blackberries, and picks enough to share with May and Button.

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"Ooh, blackberries." Nom nom nom.

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Nom nom nom!

"What does everybody think," says Starlight, "should we stop for a proper forage or keep going?"

"I wouldn't mind a bite, but I'm fine to continue," says Button.

"Don't look at me," says Ebb.

"I'm a little nibblesome," says Charm.

Reflect shrugs. Snowfall, perched on Ebb's back, doesn't contribute an opinion.

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"How long would we keep going till a proper forage if we did that?"

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"Probably about an hour, if Charm's nibblesome and Button's thinking about it," says Starlight.

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"I'm good for an hour."

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"All right," says Starlight. "Let's keep going then."

"Sure," says Charm.

The fliers get back in the air, and May can get back on the bear.

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May does that.

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And they're off!

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"I do apologize for interrupting your vacation."

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"Taking an outworlder to Silver Falls is just as much of a holiday as roaming around the hills, if differently," says Button.

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"All right. We're not common but you knew we were a thing?"

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"Yes, it happens every so often. A few centuries perhaps, I think sometimes longer. Nearly always in Day, for some reason, so they might get more we're not hearing about."

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"I wonder why in Day."

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"Maybe they're all as southernish as you and whatever brings them here wants them to feel at home," Button suggests. "I couldn't say."

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"The thing that brought me here was a weird falling magic thing, it was not very homey."

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"'Weird falling magic thing'? I'm not sure what I should be picturing."

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"I was rolling along and then ahead of me was a - vortexy - dark - thing - in the ground, and I fell into it, and then for something that may or may not have been a period of time I did something not entirely unlike falling in truly excessive darkness and mysteriously harmless cold and vacuum, while poked and prodded by something, and then me and chair landed on some moss."

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"...goodness," says Button.

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"Yeah."

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"That sounds very uncomfortable, I'm sorry."

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"It didn't hurt but it was certainly startling and bewildering."

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"Yes, I imagine so."

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"I'm hoping that since outworlders are a known phenomenon there may be some known phenomenon causing us to arrive that I can learn about."

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"Maybe the Queen will know. She would've seen all the ones who've come here before."

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"That seems the best bet."

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"Good luck."

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"Thanks."

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They proceed. Eventually it comes time to stop for a proper forage. Numerous nuts and berries are located, and two rabbits; Starlight is very pleased with himself.

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Do they have a way to cook rabbits?

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They do! Starlight doesn't mind either way but if May prefers roast rabbit, roast rabbit it is.

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Roast rabbit: pretty tasty. Nuts and berries: likewise.

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Excellent. Once everyone has had a chance to eat and a short rest, they continue onward. The landscape continues to be surpassingly beautiful.

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"I don't think many places on Earth are this pretty! Is it an established scenic route or just some wilderness?"

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"It's just some wilderness," says Button. "Much like any other. But it is lovely, that's true. Is Earth not like this?"

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"Earth has nice places but they're - messier?"

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"Hmm, what do you mean?"

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"Like - flowers have petals missing and not everything is looking its nicest during the same times of year and there is more dirt on things and the grass doesn't look like it has been to a hairstylist and - it's a little hard to describe really."

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"I've seen flowers missing petals but I think I might see what you mean," Button says thoughtfully. "I wonder why that is."

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"I'm inclined to think it is a thing about here, and not a thing about Earth," says May, "because it seems more likely that Earth is what you get when you have an unattended system. But it's possible that both places just have different underlying rules that get different results. I also feel here almost like I can see better? Everything is - higher contrast without being garish, sharper somehow -"

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"Oh, that's interesting. I can't imagine what could be causing these things."

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"Maybe magic! Earth doesn't have it. I don't yet know much about how to expect magic to affect things but it is definitely a good candidate."

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"What, no magic at all? That does sound like it would tend to lead to things being very different."

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"Not a speck, except apparently for person-devouring vortexes."

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"Person-devouring vortexes are not at all the sort of magic I'd want in my world if I could choose."

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"Well, this has been interesting so far, but I'd like a nice gate with a sign."

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"What - instead of the person-devouring vortex? 'Kingdom of Night this way, come see the unnaturally petal-retaining flowers'? Wouldn't that be something."

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"The flowers are probably not the first thing I'd advertise. The talking owls, maybe."

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"Do you not have owls - or are they not people, where you're from—?"

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"Not people. Only humans are, but we have nonperson owls and foxes and I wouldn't have particularly expected to find a place where those were people any more than I would have expected to find a place where rabbits or moths were."

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"How odd that must be, to have only one kind of people."

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"We're used to it. It makes things easier to standardize."

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"I suppose it would, at that."

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"I'm having a hard time how you arrange for a spider to be able to read books or an owl to be able to open doors, which maybe explains why you prefer to live out in the open."

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"Oh, Snowfall doesn't have any trouble turning pages - less than I do, certainly, I have to worry about damaging them," says Button. "But yes, some days when I think about all the work that goes into a place like Silver Falls I can't imagine why anyone ever bothers to put up a building. Except then I remember what Silver Falls looks like and it seems much more understandable."

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"So it's set up to work for everyone? That must have been a staggering hassle but I'm really curious."

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"As nearly as possible! I can hardly think of what to mention - I suppose you'll see when we get there."

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"I suppose I will."

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"And I'm sure the people who put all that work into Silver Falls will be terribly embarrassed if it turns out they didn't think about what would happen if someone had to roll around the city in a wheeled contraption," she says with a laugh that rumbles up through her fur.

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"I don't have to, unless it's icy."

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"Then I don't think you'll need to worry."

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"Good."

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Onward.

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May asks smalltalky questions about their families and what other species there are and if they have a ballpark idea of how big the world is and how the kingdoms were founded and such.

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Button's family lives in the mountains and was mildly surprised when she went off to join the army. Charm's family lives by a river and fishes a lot, and she can describe an amazing variety of delicious-sounding fish, although she maintains that her heart belongs to wild-caught roast crickets fresh from the fire. There are rats and stoats and beehives and, as mentioned, the occasional frog, and lots and lots and lots of kinds of fey. At their next forage break Starlight is happy to perch near her and put a serious effort into translating units of distance, whereupon it transpires that the world is approximately the size of Australia plus several miles of ocean. Nobody has any idea how the kingdoms were founded.

"I'm not sure the Kingdoms are the sort of thing that has a beginning," says Starlight.

"What would they have instead?" murmurs Reflect.

"Wouldn't have been much of a world without a Sun or a Moon," says Ebb. "Maybe it all happened at once, the King and the Queen and the Kingdoms and the people and the war."

"I think a world is too complicated a thing to happen all at once," says Snowfall. "Something must have started it. But I can't imagine a world without the Queen..."

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Beehives are people one per hive?

"My world doesn't have the Queen," she reminds them.

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One per hive, yes. They're one of the few sorts of people who live on both sides of the border in substantial numbers, although Charm happens to know that there are different species in each Kingdom. Southern bees are fuzzier.

"Can't imagine this world without her," Snowfall corrects herself. "I suppose I have trouble imagining your world too but it's a different sort of trouble."

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"Is 'Queen' a species or are she and the King the same thing or what?"

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"I'm not sure if it's a species when there's just one of it," muses Snowfall.

"They have some things in common but I wouldn't call them the same," says Charm. "They both sleep as statues, her in the day and him at night. They're both very tall. I suppose they're sort of fey-ish, more fey-ish than anything-else-ish anyway."

"How would you know the King's very tall, I hardly think you've met him," says Ebb.

"I talk to folk in the borderlands!" says Charm. "Sometimes I learn things! It sounded like he was just about the same height as the Queen."

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"What do the borderlands types make of the war?"

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"Mostly they wish we'd have it somewhere else," says Charm.

"Seems difficult, that," says Ebb.

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"Do you have any kind of diplomatic channel with the south? Ceasefires and stuff?"

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"Mostly not," says Button.

"The borderfolk pass things along sometimes," says Charm. "And - the way it shifts with the seasons - when everyone knows Day's going to keep the upper hand all summer, you don't try as hard, and neither do they, so we just sort of scuffle all season until autumn when Night makes a push, and then in winter it's the same thing backwards."

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"Maybe this makes more sense to people who are from here."

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"Could be," says Charm. "Does it not make sense to you?"

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"It really doesn't."

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"Well, what about it?"

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"Maybe you're calling a 'war' what I'd call something else, but I think wars are very bad and you need an extraordinary reason to have one - even the ones that are had over economic stuff on Earth are at least about economic stuff that affects a ton of people - it sounds to me like everyone would be best served if the Queen issued a conditional surrender at the end of fall and everyone just stopped doing the thing."

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"...but you couldn't just - then we'd be surrendered to Day and they'd probably want us all to, to, live in buildings and fill out forms," says Charm.

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"I said a conditional surrender, you could insist that the Queen get to keep ruling you and not demand forms or at least not very many of them. The timing would be so if it didn't go over well you wouldn't be in much trouble if you they made a fuss about the conditions and you preferred to keep fighting."

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"Well that wouldn't really be a surrender, then, would it? It'd just be a - a 'go away and stop bothering us'," says Charm.

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"Exactly. But they'd probably be more likely to go away and stop bothering you if they got to say they won, right? And all the important things like not having to fill out forms would still be here for you and you would have fooled them."

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"...well, maybe," Charm says dubiously.

"And what's to stop them from nodding along and then coming back next spring?" wonders Ebb.

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"Oh, you'd probably want to guard the border for the next year or so to make sure. If you wanted to be really sure, you could propose that there could be immigration between the countries and then you could have spies there and hostages here if they violated the terms."

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"We'll see what the Queen thinks, I suppose," says Ebb.

"I don't wanna surrender to Day," says Charm.

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"Maybe the war is much less bad than I am imagining and is not at all what happened to Starlight's eye and nobody ever dies in it."

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Starlight shuffles.

"Oh, people do die in it," says Ebb.

"I don't wanna surrender to Day either," says Starlight.

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Sigh.

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The rest of the forage break is somewhat quieter. They press on.

When the sun begins to peek over the horizon in the southeast, Button locates a cozy cave in which to sleep through the day. Scouts pile in.

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May finds a shady place where she will be able to sleep in spite of daylight.

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And the sun rises and the sun sets and everyone wakes up and goes for an early evening forage. Nuts! Berries! Rabbits! And, much to Charm's enthusiastic delight, wild-caught roast cricket!

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May doesn't sleep all day long; she tiptoes out to do some writing before the forage. But then yes! Nuts! Berries! Rabbit!

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And after an hour or so of further travel, they find the road to Silver Falls. It's a dirt road, but a pretty smooth one, in reasonably good repair. Reflect puts down the wheelchair.

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And May rolls along. "If it gets even smoother than this later I can walk and lean on the chair, that's faster. Meanwhile if anybody wants to push me go for it."

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"I'm not sure we're built for it," says Button. "But I do expect the road to get better as we near the city."

Onward they go. After their first forage stop of the night, Button turns out to have been right about the road.

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May walks.

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The road goes on, winding between increasingly dense hills, until they finally round a corner and see Silver Falls for the first time.

The city is built into the side of a cliff, a tall intricate winding thing with a broad waterfall pouring right through the middle and down into the lake below. To say that it sparkles would be doing it a grave injustice. The spray catches the moonlight and shatters it into a thousand glittering pieces. It's breathtaking.

"You see what I mean about it being worth the effort," says Button.

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"Hoooooly shit."

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This gets a few shocked giggles out of her escort.

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"Is it not customary to swear here."

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"If there's a time when it's appropriate, 'first sight of Silver Falls' has got to be it," says Charm.

"You have a point there," says Ebb.

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"It's gorgeous!"

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"It iiiiis," Charm agrees.

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"I am not sure Earth has any places this pretty at all."

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"Silver Falls is the prettiest place," says Starlight. "I've been lots of places, I'd know."

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"Where does the Queen live?"

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"Most of the palace is behind the waterfall," Reflect says quietly, coming a little closer so May can hear her clearly, "but do you see those towers at the very top...?"

She points. There are three slender white towers, one on either side of the top of the falls and one right in the middle of them. The tower on the left has an empty silver circle at the top; the one in the middle has its circle half-filled; and the one on the right is completely silver.

"Those are the visible part."

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"Nice."

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"Yes," Reflect agrees.

"Okay, let's go to the palace and introduce you to the Queen," says Starlight. As they proceed into the city, he drops back and Reflect takes the lead; she seems to know the place better than the rest of them.

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"Have you all met her?"

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"I haven't," says Ebb.

"I grew up in Silver Falls. I used to see her a lot, when she made appearances. But I haven't spoken to her," says Reflect.

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"When she makes appearances what does she usually do?"

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"Announce the change of the seasons, say a little about what's been going on in the kingdom."

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"Is announcing the seasons necessary or just ceremonial?"

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"Ceremonial, I assume," says Ebb. "We'd notice it just fine by ourselves."

"It was nice to be reminded, though," says Reflect. "And I used to love the celebrations on the first day of autumn."

"The fey near my folks' place used to bake cakes and give everyone some," Charm reminisces. "It's no roast cricket, but it was good."

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"Mmm, cake."

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"Cake is good," Reflect agrees.

The streets are a little busy this time of night, once they've rounded the curve of the lake and entered the city proper. They pass all sorts of folk on their way toward the cliff. Mostly humanoids of varying shape, size, and colour, but also a few foxes and rats and small wiggly mammals who go by too fast to be easily labeled as ferret or weasel or stoat. Local custom seems to be a bit like a busy city on Earth, although this place isn't nearly as dense: where possible, strangers try to go past without acknowledging one another.

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So May doesn't try to say hi, but she does gawk discreetly at everything.

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It's pretty gawkable. The buildings are indeed clearly built with accessibility in mind: doors tend to be saloon-style, there are upper-floor entrances for winged folk... No one thought about wheeled contraptions, but she's mostly covered just by the sheer range of existing needs: a bear and a weasel can't really use the same set of stairs, so when they start to go up the cliffside it's all gradual inclines.

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How convenient.

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Indeed!

And then, halfway up the cliff, they come to a huge silver set of double doors, a new moon engraved in the left and a full moon embossed on the right. They're open; if they weren't, it's not clear how they'd get that way.

The gate guard is a fey of ambiguous gender who looks about nine feet tall, thin and angular, and also seems to be made entirely of ice. "What's your business in the palace?" they ask. Tiny flecks of frost form in the air when they breathe.

"Bringing an outworlder to meet the Queen," says Starlight.

"You may pass," says the guard, nodding.

"Ah—none of us knows the palace very well, as such—" says Charm.

The guard kneels down and touches the ground in front of the open doors. A line of sparkling frost forms, maybe two inches wide, leading into the dimly lit interior of the palace. "Follow that."

"Yessir," says Charm.

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Oooh. May rolls along the line of frost. "Thank you."

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The ice-fey nods graciously.

"I think I'll wait out here," says Button. "I forgot how much I don't like enclosed spaces where I can't see the exit."

Ebb and Reflect also hang back, but Charm and Starlight and Snowfall accompany May into the palace.

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It's a little scary but on she rolls.

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The light in here is dimmer than outside, but the frost-line catches it very clearly, and the floor is smooth stone tile, neatly joined and devoid of obstacles.

"Spooky in here," Charm comments.

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"Yes."

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They proceed. The line of frost leads them through a maze of barely-visible corridors, until finally it runs under a set of closed double doors similar to the ones at the front entrance.

Charm scampers up and taps the bottom of one nervously with a paw.

They swing silently inward.

The room on the other side is a vast empty hall, with one side made almost entirely of a window looking out through the falls at the lake and the kingdom beyond. The view is stunning. The moonlight pouring in reveals that there is absolutely nothing here except for the polished grey marble floor, the polished grey marble walls and ceiling, the three creatures, and a raised platform with a silver throne, on which there sits a beautiful woman in a long black dress who looks almost entirely human except for the telltale details of being twenty feet tall and having luminous white hair and bright silver skin.

"Welcome," she says. Her voice is lovely, and carries all the way to their end of the hall despite its low conversational volume.

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"Thank you, your majesty."

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"It is rare to see an outworlder in the Kingdom of Night. I was glad to hear of your presence, and I hope you will enjoy your stay," she says.

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"Your kingdom is very beautiful," says May, "and the creatures I have met have been very hospitable."

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"I am glad to hear that as well. I would like to speak with you privately, if you don't mind."

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"...all right."

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"You may wait outside," she says to the other creatures. They retreat, with varying reluctance. The door closes behind them.

It's very quiet in here.

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"What do you want to talk about, your majesty?"

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Her posture shifts to something less majestic and more... conversational, attentive. Perhaps also tired.

"What have you heard about the war?"

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"It's... close enough to eternal as to make no subjective difference to the participants..." She pulls out a notebook. "...predictably seasonal, avoidable at least on this side by moving to the mountains, seems to use an all-volunteer army, not harmless but my vague impression is that it is still more harmless than the average war from my world, not over any apparent strategic objectives or economic motives or anything more concrete than ingrained cultural opposition to one another, partisan by species, and, uh, mysteriously beloved of its participants."

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"You're very thorough," the Queen remarks.

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"It seemed worth knowing about."

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"Yes," she agrees. "And what are your thoughts on the matter?"

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"Nobody liked my idea, I don't have a backup idea yet."

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"What was the idea?"

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"I thought you should issue a conditional surrender around the end of fall, optionally with subsequent immigration afterwards, but it doesn't work very well if your army is going to hate it and break ceasefire."

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The Queen nods thoughtfully.

"I can see why that would have seemed like a good idea, but yes, it does have the problems you describe."

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Sigh.

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"Problems that seem simple at first glance often turn out to be trickier at second or third."

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"Yep."

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"The war of Night and Day has been going on since this world was made, and I am very, very tired of it. But ending it will not be a simple task."

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"Is it just a matter of the army not being likely to cooperate? You don't seem to have standard chains of command, admittedly, but they're your army, you could probably shuffle them around some."

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She tilts her head thoughtfully and regards May from across the very long room.

"No," she says, after a pause. "It is not just that."

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"What else?"

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Another considering pause.

"What theories does the evidence suggest?"

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"I'm not really sure how best to extrapolate from the characteristics of a magical dualist Canadian-kidnapping flatland and I'm also not sure why you're asking me."

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"I'm interested in your perspective," she says. "New perspectives are often very valuable."

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"Is that why even though outworlders show up every few centuries or so everyone still knows to bring them to you earliest convenience?"

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"It's among the reasons, yes. I also find that sometimes they have trouble adjusting. Everyone else in my Kingdom is as well provided for as I can manage; I would like to be able to offer guests as much, and I can't do that if I don't know they're here."

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"You keep implying I'm here temporarily; is that so?"

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"It's sometimes possible for outworlders to return to Earth."

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"Sometimes?"

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"I would not be confident in saying it's always possible. More outworlders land in the Kingdom of Day than here, and the news of those that reaches north is often scant. And some of my own visitors chose to stay."

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Nod. "- why do you want to have this conversation privately?"

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"Because it's possible I might discuss matters with you that my subjects should not hear."

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"Why?"

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"Outworlders have a capacity to affect this world beyond any person from within it," she says. "If you tried, you could win this war for whichever side you chose. It would not be easy, but it would be possible in a way that it ordinarily is not. But it seems that instead you would prefer a ceasefire. As it happens, so would I."

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"...oh good. Uh, how do I have that capacity, what-all can I do?"

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"It's not easy to explain," she says. "And in some ways it can be harder to use once you know how it works, unless you happen to be very good at directing your own mind."

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"How does the kidnapping vortex pick people."

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"If there are worlds other than Earth, it doesn't seem to draw from them; it never chooses anyone less than eight years old or more than sixteen; and it has a moderately strong preference for the northern hemisphere. Besides that, I haven't detected any firm patterns. Why do you ask?"

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"'Cause I'm really good at that."

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"As far as I know, that is probably a coincidence. But it is promising to hear," she says. "The clearest example I have is how visitors can use their power to leave, because I've helped them do it many times. Do you want the explanation, even though if you are wrong about how easily you can adjust, you might find it much more difficult to go home once you've heard it?"

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"Yes."

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The Queen nods.

"When a visitor tells me they want to leave, I suggest that they travel to the edge of the world," she says. "I tell them that if they reach the right spot at the right time, they will see a doorway there, and the door will lead them home. And then I give them an escort and send them on their way, and I arrange for daunting but surmountable obstacles between them and their goal. It has worked every time but twice. The doorway does not otherwise exist. What creates it is their sustained, focused, directed effort to reach it, and their expectation that it will be there if they succeed. Once, I failed to stop a storm in time and it sank their boat. The other failure was when someone dawdled on the way and arrived a day late. He knew he was too late to find the door, so it wasn't there; and he was so upset that he impulsively ran out past the edge of the world."

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"...that doesn't even sound like a difficult self-editing project."

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She smiles a small silver smile. "Good. That simplifies things."

The smile fades.

"I think you might be able to help me end the war the right way," she says. "But it is going to be complicated and difficult and involve trusting you with some very weighty secrets. I think I can trust you with those secrets; do you agree?"

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"I mean, that depends on what you mean by that, presumably."

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"I think if I tell you that acting rashly in this matter might destroy this world, you will take that warning seriously and listen to the full explanation and not take any sudden drastic actions even if some of the things you hear are upsetting and sound like they might urgently require drastic intervention," she says.

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"Yes."

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The Queen nods again. She spends a moment regarding May thoughtfully.

"Perhaps... the best place to start would be the diary," she says. "A moment."

And she gets up out of her throne and goes around behind it, and there is a very secret-compartmental-sounding click, and she comes back around holding a notebook with a black-and-white patterned cover that will look familiar to anyone who has seen a certain film, although this one does not have anything written on the front. It looks very small in her hand. She crosses the room in long strides and bends down to offer it to May.

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May is a spiral notebook person, herself, but composition books are okay too. She takes it. She opens it.

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The Queen returns to her throne.

The book starts like this:

I should write this down before I forget any more details.

My name is Elizabeth Ann Kirsch. I was born on October 13, 1983.

In December 1996, when I was thirteen, I was on my way to a friend's house after school and I fell through the world.

I landed in a green field at dawn. It was beautiful in a way I don't think I can describe. It was like photographs of Ireland. I could see a town nearby, so I went there. I met a lion named Dancer (I have bitten back so many reindeer jokes, you don't even know) and a dryad named Morning, and they told me I was in the Kingdom of Day, and that I should travel to Bright River right away to meet with the Sun King.

Having provisionally accepted that I was in a children's fantasy adventure novel now and should probably roll with it, I agreed. Dancer and Morning and I set off for the capital immediately.

It was early spring and everything was indescribably picturesque. The only notable obstacle we encountered along the way was an ominous-looking opening in the ground that Dancer and Morning wouldn't let me get near. At the distance I saw it, it just looked like a long dark gouge in the middle of a field, like somebody had crashed a small alien spaceship or taken a really big knife to the place or something. There was a hasty-looking fence around it and a sign I wasn't close enough to read.

They tried, badly, to convince me that everything was fine and it was just a big ugly hole in the ground that we were in too much of a hurry to stop and gawk at. I didn't try very hard to go get a closer look, but I did keep asking questions (as innocently as possible) until they admitted that the hole had appeared last week and people who went near it tended to be sucked in and disappear with a horrible scream.

This was obviously fairly concerning.
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"Are there still those holes."

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"There are not," says the Queen.

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"Did you found this kingdom or usurp it or other."

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She smiles slightly, tilting her head to one side. "I am the Moon Queen, whose hands shaped the world. But yes, I am also Elizabeth Kirsch. It's complicated."

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"I'll just read it shall I." Page turn. "It's summer 2004 now."

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"Yes, that sounds about right," nods the Queen.

The diary continues:

Dancer and Morning rushed to get me tucked away in the palace before sundown. We got there with maybe an hour to spare. And before I could extract a coherent explanation of the rush, they introduced me to the King.

He was about twenty feet tall, wearing white, and made entirely of gold. Apart from that he looked fairly normal. In structure if not material, I wouldn't have been surprised to see his face on a movie screen.

He explained to me that he had been at war with the Moon Queen since the beginning of time, and neither of them could ever defeat the other, but that as an outworlder I had the power to tip the balance. I asked him about the hole in the ground, and he said that it was the Moon Queen's fault, that she was attacking him with everything she had and killing his people in the process. He asked me to help him defeat her.

I had a strong intuition that something was up. It seemed wildly implausible that I had actually just landed by accident on the Good side of a perfectly straightforward Good vs Evil conflict, and I kept having the feeling that there was something sketchy about the Sun King. But it also seemed like it would be a bad idea to try to call him out on it when I still mostly had no idea what was going on, so I agreed. He set me up with a room in the palace and warned me never to pass within sight of the sky at night, because the Moon Queen sees what the Moon sees, just as the Sun King sees what the Sun sees. Then, half an hour after sunset, he sat on his throne and turned into a statue. That's apparently how he sleeps.

I went to my windowless room and tried to sleep and ended up reading my algebra textbook all night because I have an odd notion of comfort. In the morning the King wanted to see me again. I kept getting the impression from him that he was dancing around some horrible secret, but while I'm pretty good at reading people I wasn't confident about how well that skill would transfer to giant golden fairy-tale kings, so I kept my observations to myself and acted like I was fully on board with the 'defeat the Moon Queen' plan, because for all I knew maybe it really was the right thing to do.

The next few weeks are a little muddled because I was sleeping badly and having trouble figuring out what to keep track of. I have quick personality profiles of everyone I met, and memories of the first time I tried this or that local food (toasted nuts with dandelion jelly: yes, dandelion salad: no), and notes about the way the translation effect works that I'm going to write up separately, but I don't have a clear sequence of events.

I spent a lot of time with the King, discussing the war. He was a surprisingly bad tactician for someone who claimed to have been at war for millennia. I entertained the hypothesis that maybe the power of outworlders was just a dash of cynicism with a garnish of common sense. It would've seemed funny, except that people kept dying.

When I'd been there for about three weeks, helping the King overhaul his approach to the war and trying to figure out how best to deploy me as a secret weapon while also privately trying to figure out whether I really wanted to be his secret weapon after all, another hole opened up just outside the city. I was up early and out for a walk, because the never going outside at night was starting to wear on me. I saw the ground open up, and I saw a tiger cub playing nearby, and she scampered over to see what all the fuss was about, and I yelled and bolted for her but I didn't quite make it in time.

Dancer and Morning had not been kidding about the horrible screams. They hadn't mentioned the part where it looks like the person is dissolving and unraveling and turning inside-out all at the same time, like they're moving toward a place where concepts like 'place' and 'moving' and 'being a particular shape' no longer apply. I still remember the image, rather more vividly than I would strictly prefer, but I have no words adequate to describe it.

Logically speaking it shouldn't have mattered more than the casualty lists, but it got to me a lot harder. I was tempted to start feeling very personal about this conflict. Except that one of the big questions I still had was whether the ominous holes were actually the Moon Queen's fault. The Sun King kept saying so, but then he also said she had no capacity to act during the day, and I'd seen that hole appear in broad daylight.

I asked the Sun King more about the holes. He let me spend a day in his library looking up historical accounts, and I did some amateur statistics. Something definitely didn't add up. Fighting between the Kingdoms was always heaviest in spring and autumn, and when the holes appeared, it was usually in spring or autumn, but sometimes there would be a few in summer or winter if the war got unusually intense. And there were plenty of times when things got really nasty and no holes appeared at all. They tended to come in waves, and go away on their own after a few months but then return unpredictably.

If they were a weapon of the Moon Queen, I could not for the life of me figure out how she was doing it or what she hoped to achieve. If they were a tool the Sun King used to manipulate the mood of his populace, he was using it really clumsily and, again, to no useful end I could see. If they were just a natural phenomenon, I couldn't explain their obvious connection to the war. And when the King talked about them, I got the definite impression that he knew more than he was telling.

Eventually he decided to take me on campaign. I'd been advising him for some time, but having me in the field seemed to make everything easier. It's hard to notice a pattern you're in the middle of; I didn't think there was anything odd about things going more smoothly when I put more personal attention into them, especially since it was obvious that I had a much better head for strategy than the King and a significant edge over his top generals.

As soon as our army crossed the borderlands and held a piece of land in the north for one night, reports started coming in from all over the Kingdom of Day that the holes were closing. The Sun King told me I was doing well, that I'd saved the kingdom. We threw a little party. I still had no idea what the holes were, but at that point I was very confident that he knew the truth and wasn't telling me.

We pressed on.

When we came within sight of Silver Falls, a hole opened up right in front of us, the first we'd seen since we crossed the border. I could see it pulling at the Sun King before he stepped away. He held together much better than that tiger cub; he looked a little shaken but still in one piece. He invented some transparent excuse about how the Queen must have laid one final trap for us.

That night, I woke up an hour after sunset, told the camp guards that I was on a secret mission from the King, and walked into the Moon Queen's palace.

In retrospect it was a little stupid, but it seemed like the only place left I could go for answers, and I was right about that much. When I told her I thought the Sun King had been lying to me, she laughed and said she was sure he had, and when I explained about the holes in the ground, she told me what they were.

The story goes like this: Before the world, there was the void. By itself it was nothing, but it could be shaped by minds. The minds that eventually became the Sun King and the Moon Queen agreed that they wanted a world, but disagreed on everything else. They created themselves and their world, inspired by scattered glimpses of a world they could sometimes see next to the void, fighting each other every step of the way. He wanted things warm and bright and peaceful and stable. She wanted things cold and dark and violent and chaotic. Their war became entangled with the cycle of the seasons.

And because they had been fighting since the very beginning, that cyclic conflict became part of the structure of reality itself.

It finally made sense of the data I'd seen in the Sun King's library: the holes in the ground appeared exactly when the war got out of step with the cycle of the seasons. It was especially bad when I showed up because the Queen was making a solid push in early spring, when the cycle expected the King to be reclaiming the upper hand as winter ended. And once we started winning again, the problems stopped, until we got as far as the Queen's palace and threw the balance too far the other way. The holes were a symptom of a much deeper problem; reality was tearing itself apart, and they were its surface wounds.

It didn't escape me that it was awfully convenient for the Queen if killing her would literally destroy the world, but the theory fit the evidence.

I asked her what I should do.

She said that I could kill the King and take his power and maintain the balance with her, have a scripted war that flowed with the seasons and never got out of step, and rule an entire half of the world, which she didn't want anyway because it was much too bright and peaceful there. He wanted to destroy her and everything she stood for, but all she wanted was to be left alone.

In much the same way that I'd known the King was lying about the void holes, I knew the Queen was planning to betray me. But she did sound like she meant it about killing the King and stealing his power, and somebody clearly had to do something about this nonsense.

She gave me something which she said was a magic knife made of moonlight, and told me to go back to the King's camp, and that she would challenge him to single combat at dawn during the hour when they were both awake, and I was supposed to sneak up behind him and stab him in the back during the fight.

I went back to the camp and read my algebra textbook for the rest of the night, because I had no idea how I was going to get out of this alive and with the world intact, except maybe by stabbing both of them, which seemed chancy if the Queen was misrepresenting what would happen when I stabbed the king or if she had very sensibly given me a knife that didn't work on her, and also kind of evil if I'd misjudged her somehow and she wasn't planning to betray me after all.

She so obviously was, though. She talked about the Kingdom of Day with such contempt, and when she'd said all that about not wanting to destroy the Sun King the way he wanted to destroy her, she sounded... maybe the best way to put it is, she sounded like she lacked a basic understanding of what not wanting to destroy the Sun King would be like.

Dawn came, and with it the Queen. She was very impressively theatrical about it. I had a hard time appreciating the grandeur of the moment, because I had slept for about one of the preceding twenty-four hours and was under a lot of stress and mostly just focused on figuring out how to make sure both I and the world survived the fight. Although if it came down to it, the world was the higher priority.

They fought. He had a huge golden sword and she had a much thinner silver one. It was terrifying to watch. I had no idea how I was going to get close enough to stab either of them without being crushed. I was just starting to think about maybe climbing a tree when the Queen knocked the King to the ground and stunned him for a second. I ran up and stabbed him in the neck.

Stealing his power worked. It also gave me an understanding of why it had worked. All those times during the war when I put a lot of effort into something and it turned out miraculously well, the reason why the Sun King wanted me on his side, it was all because I was an outworlder. The world is... malleable to us.

And in taking the Sun King's power, I was trading in mine. The King and Queen made the world; they have an instinctive understanding of how it works, and they can reshape its surface details, but they can't push it around on a fundamental level the way an outworlder can, because they are ultimately still a part of the system.

It was all very disorienting. One second I was a thirteen-year-old girl with no discernible magic powers, the next I was that plus a twenty-foot-tall golden god who could definitely discern her/my magic powers with his/my magic connection to the underlying structure of the world. One of those things was on the way out, the other was on the way in.

The Queen tried to cut the King's head off while I/he was distracted, and I/Elizabeth jumped up and stabbed her with the moon knife. I could tell very directly that the knife had never been the important part; it was my mind, my outworlder's power, that let me do what I did to the King. But the knife made for a convenient mental shorthand, and I was in a hurry.

It worked. And it was the last action I took as an outworlder. I watched that power fade while the Queen's came in. It was like the whole world had been sort of subtly leaning in toward me, and now it was relaxing and losing interest, and at the same time my awareness of it was being intensely expanded.

Running three bodies at once was... an experience. Having to pretend to be both of the people I had just murdered did not make it any easier. I made a lot of mistakes over the next few days, of which the biggest was trying to explain the truth to too many people. I'm still dealing with the repercussions of that now, a year and a half later. Orchestrating this war from both ends is hard, and I'm getting the sinking feeling that I'm not going to be able to deescalate it nearly as much as I'd like. But if I'm going to be in crisis mode for the next decade, then I need to take the time to write this out now.

This might be one of the last things I do with this body. It's coming time for Elizabeth Kirsch to 'go home'. It's just too exhausting to be two people at once most of the time. And of the three people I am, Elizabeth is the only one who's expendable.

If I had more time, I'd rewrite this from the beginning, make it more polished, organize the hazy parts, try to find other sources and make the details more accurate. But I don't. The few hours of distraction that went into this have already cost me, and those are just the slipups I noticed. I am not letting the void take any more of my people if I can help it.
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The Queen waits for May to collect her thoughts.

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"Wow," is May's thoughts.

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"Time runs approximately one thousand times faster here than on Earth," she says. "That's one of the two major omissions from that account; I didn't find it out until later. The other, I was still verifying. There is... a sense in which people who die in the Kingdoms are not entirely gone. It's subtle and hard to track, but I'm very confident in my conclusions at this point. Sometimes they reincarnate without memory of their previous life, sometimes they just linger as faint impressions with no continued awareness, but anyone who has ever died in this world is still here... unless they went to the void, either through one of those holes or past the edge of the world. It's the same result either way: it destroys them completely. Once I was sure of that I became much more conservative in my experiments with deescalation."

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"I'm not sure reincarnating without memory - counts?"

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"It is not impossible that one day those memories could be restored somehow. I am much less optimistic about getting anyone back from the void."

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"Okay."

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"I want to find a way to use your outworlder's power to end the world's dependence on the war, so that I can deescalate the rest of the way without the world tearing itself apart and throwing all its inhabitants into the void. I have some thoughts for what to do after that, but the crucial thing is not having to be at carefully managed war with myself any longer."

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"Mm-hm. Uh, if I have to work in the standard fairytale framework options include 'third party enemy' or 'Romeo and Juliet plot'... respectively costly and awkward to implement..."

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—that startles a laugh out of her.

"Yes, rather. I don't think we'll have to go that far. I expect you'll need a lot of sustained effort and a high expectation of success, but the exact framework depends on what works best for you. If I were in your position, the approach that would come most naturally to me would be going out into the world and convincing as many people as I could that the war was pointless and should stop, with the implicit assumption that reality itself was listening. Some people might have an easier time of it if I built a physical representation of the structure and they worked on altering it until reality shifted to match. As long as it's something that can sustain a significant time investment, that you can commit to doing for a while, and that feels like it should work..."

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"I mean, mostly what this feels like is that it should not have been like this in the first place, which is different."

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"True enough. But I don't see an immediately obvious way to turn that into a means of changing things. Unless, I suppose, you want to go the very direct route and spend a lot of time talking or thinking about your dissatisfaction with the way the King and Queen made the world."

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"I could do that. Is talking to creatures an important ingredient or could I just write a design document and gesture at it emphatically."

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"If design documents are what feels effective to you, then design documents will work best. And I'll be able to tell how effective your approach is; I've had a very long time to study my sense of reality and I'm very familiar with it by now. How easily are you adapting to the nocturnal schedule? Would it be easier to work in the Kingdom of Day? It wouldn't be very difficult to send you across the border."

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"It's not terrible, I'm not sure it's worth the travel even though the place is very picturesque. I think the phrase I used was 'the grass has been to a hairstylist'."

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...she laughs again. "What an evocative description."

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"You're not personally combing all the grass, right?"

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"No. To some extent, the place does that by itself; I influence it but more in the way of an art director than a hairdresser."

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"Is it like that in Day too?"

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"Yes, but with a different underlying aesthetic."

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"I'm sort of curious to see it but that's probably not enough to justify a trip either."

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"I'm sure you'll have the time afterward."

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Nod.

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"The design document idea raises some interesting possibilities," she adds, thoughtfully. "For example, if I were designing a world under these circumstances, I would give it expanding borders, although then we would need to figure out a patch for the lighting, since the current scheme doesn't scale indefinitely. I think it should be possible to add in a few tweaks along those lines without a significant extra cost in your time and attention. It might even make the original task easier, by giving you more to focus on. How thorough an explanation of the cosmology have you heard; should I fill in the details you're missing?"

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"Not thorough at all, I knew it would have to be screwy if the creatures were right about the planet being flat but I don't know that much astronomy from Earth to compare."

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"The world is a flat circle of land and ocean under a hemisphere of air, surrounded on all sides by void. The moon rises in the northwest and sets in the northeast, travelling eastward over the Kingdom of Night; the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest, travelling westward over the Kingdom of Day. A naive rescaling of that would eventually lead to too much air between the lights in the sky and the middle of the circle, making everything uncomfortably dim."

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"The moon gives off its own light? And do the sun and moon just go around and travel through void? The void is voidier than vacuum, right?"

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"The void is very much voidier than vacuum. I have reason to believe that it's what people travel through to get between here and Earth, except that transit between here and Earth is safe in a way that contact with the void normally isn't. The sun and moon don't travel through it; they're... more like a projection on the outer edge of the sky than like objects moving through it. And yes, the moon gives off its own light, although it still has phases."

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"I felt like things were grabbing me. Are there grabby thing in the void."

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"I'm not sure there are things in the void. When I fell through, I felt... like I was in a current, but not a current of anything. But based on the stories I've collected from other visitors, I think the experience is different for different people, or different instances of travel. No one has ever come and gone and come back again, so I have no data on repeated travel by the same person. I do know that the people who leave get home safely, though."

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"How do you know?"

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"I can - catch glimpses - of Earth. It would not be a very effective spying tool if I wanted to use it for that, but it suffices to verify that someone is alive and healthy."

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Nod.

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"In order to make the current lighting scheme scalable to arbitrary world sizes, I think the sun and moon would have to be... less like light sources and more like optical illusions, looking a certain way depending on how far north or south the viewer is. "

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May writes that down. "Is the sun responsible for temperature or is that handled separately? Tides?"

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"The sun affects temperature somewhat, but a lot of the details of climate variation are handled by the, ah, grass hairstylist phenomenon. Tides are not directly affected by the moon but are on a related schedule."

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Nod. Notetaking. "Is there any time stuff apart from the weirdness relative to Earth?"

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She shakes her head. "No. All the parts of the world have the same flow of time relative to one another. A day is twenty-four hours and there are three hundred and sixty of them in a year."

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"Is that a fundamental law or a convenient convention."

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"The lengths of the day cycle and seasonal cycle are both fundamental law. I do like having seasons. In some respects it would be convenient for timekeeping if every day had twelve hours of sun and twelve hours of night, instead of the proportions varying with the season, but the variance is useful for climate purposes."

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"No, I just mean that if you wanted to get back the void-eaten people and they are in fact thoroughly eaten the easiest way conceptually would be something in the neighborhood of informational time travel."

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"...ah. Yes, I see what you mean. No, I don't know of any way to accomplish that."

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"Damn."

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"Yes."

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"You could maybe do something with backwards extrapolation if the place is deterministic enough and computational load isn't a factor."

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She shakes her head. "I don't think it's deterministic enough."

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"Hrm."

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The Queen nods. "It's a hard problem."

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"I will probably also want to design in more stringent editorial constraints because, however convenient is for me, what the heck kinda world kidnaps rando teenagers and gives them root access. - Was English already vernacular when you appeared? Were you the first kid to show up?"

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"I wasn't the first. They spoke a different language before I showed up, but the way the translation works turns out to mean that the language spoken in the Kingdoms will tend over time to shift to match their respective monarchs. It took two centuries and was fascinating to watch. I'm not sure it's possible to entirely get rid of the effect outworlders have on the world, but I do think you might be able to - shore some things up, make them more resistant to change."

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Nod. Notes notes.

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"If I'd had the option at the time I would've changed the translation effect to something with less accidental cultural imperialism, but now that English is the common language of the Kingdoms I don't see that much would be gained by going back."

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"Do you know much about what the kids before you did?"

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She shakes her head. "I only know I wasn't the first because both the King and Queen obviously already had an idea of what an outworlder was going to be like and how they could use one before I showed up."

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"Apparently none of them were effective assassins."

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"I'm not surprised; most teenagers aren't."

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"So... congratulations."

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She smiles wryly. "Thank you."

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"You're welcome. - Did you lose anything other than the body when it, uh, went home? Did it go home or did you just sorta stage it -"

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"Staged it. I knew in theory how I would have sent someone home who still had an outworlder's power, but I didn't have the power anymore and couldn't do it myself. When I lost that body I lost a little clarity on my memories from when it was my only one, but they've stayed stable since. The - mental architecture, I suppose - of the King and Queen has very long-term-stable memory storage, although it takes some effort to reach things from more than five centuries ago."

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"It's really weird that you were able to assume both their - positions."

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"How so?"

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"It seems like it has to be a meta-fact about how outworlder influence works that it lasted long enough for you to get the Queen as well as the king but not indefinitely and it's kind of an arbitrary meta-fact. Whence the meta-facts?"

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"'Not indefinitely' is because I was becoming something with a different relationship to reality; the fact that the transfer wasn't instantaneous is a common thread among acts of outworlder influence, they tend to be slow and subtle and gradual rather than taking effect all at once; I don't know why this one was so comparatively fast but my hypothesis is that the juxtaposition of my two natures was - an uncomfortable state for the world, like holding two magnets together when they want to jump apart."

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"That's potentially useful as a model but not exactly an answer about whence meta-facts."

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"I'm not sure I understand the question, then."

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"It is a fact that outworlders affect this world in a way. Why?"

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She frowns thoughtfully.

"I know the answer, more or less, but it's difficult to describe the answer. It's... hmm. To some extent, all minds have an effect on this reality. It's just that with most people, the effect is so small that they barely notice it, especially living in a society made up entirely of other people with exactly the same ability. People here are, on average, just a little bit luckier than people who live in a physics-based universe. Then there are the King and Queen, who made the world in the first place. Their connection to it is direct and personal, but limited: if I wanted to use that power to change the fundamental structure of the world, I would have to tear it down and start from scratch, which the King and Queen each preferred over continuing to coexist with each other, but which I obviously find an unsatisfying solution. And then outsiders... because they don't come from within the system, either by having originated there or by having built it and in a sense built themselves within it, their influence on it is stronger, with a wider scope."

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"I'm not following that last inference."

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"It's difficult to explain. I'm trying to think of an analogy and none of them are coming out quite right. Saying that you have diplomatic immunity from the laws of physics, while snappy, doesn't have a lot of explanatory power."

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"Not really. I guess if we table that part my next question is why the Sun King and Moon Queen were the entities who existed in the world in this way instead of only one of those or zero or more or different ones."

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"By 'existed in the world in this way' you mean...?"

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"Why is there something instead of nothing? The king and queen made it. Why were there those in the first place though?"

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"My information on this is not very direct, but the impression I have is that the void had... minds coming to exist in it and then being swept away again... and the King and Queen happened to hang on unusually long and interact with one another and observe that they both preferred to continue existing, and they ended up being the first ones to create a world. It could also be that they were genuinely the first minds the void produced, but I find the other explanation more intuitively satisfying."

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"Huh. Are any new ones happening? Do you think it kidnapped people before there was a world to land them in?"

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"I think, but can't confirm directly, that I would notice if another world existed or came to exist in the void, and I have noticed no such thing; I haven't noticed new minds coming to exist there and I'm not sure whether I would. I also think, but again can't confirm directly, that anyone could go out into the void and try to create a world there, and they might succeed but would be far more likely to be irrevocably destroyed. I know for a fact that the mechanism for pulling people here from Earth is entangled with the world in a way that means it couldn't have existed in that form before the world did; the void could have had a separate mechanism for doing the same thing without a destination world, but I don't have any information suggesting that it did. The King and Queen were definitely not of human origin."

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"Did they set up the kidnapping thing?"

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"No; it seems to have arisen on its own."

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"Do you think all worlds made from void would share fundamental properties dissimilar from Earth?"

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"Yes. I'm very confident that one of the common threads would be the respective degree and kind of influence that creators, outsiders, and locals would have on such a world. I'm not sure how the residents of one void-world would interact with a different one, but my best guess is that they would have less influence on it than someone from outside the void entirely but more than someone from within the world itself. And I think, a little less confidently, that world-creators going visiting would not find themselves much different from their residents in that regard."

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"I think I should add a section in the specs about interactions between worlds. Seems like part of growing, you mentioned growing."

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She nods. "That sounds like a good idea. Do you have any preliminary thoughts on what such a section would look like?"

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"- I have wide error bars about what other voidworlds would be like. Like, I kinda wanna go make one once I am done speccing things, but other people who had very different opinions might have done so."

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"I'm not sure I follow; what do you mean?"

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"Like, the King and Queen made a world that, while objectionable in many ways, still has - owls and waterfalls and stuff - but I don't know if that's typical - and they also made a world that, while lovely in many ways, still has eternal warfare, and I don't know if that's typical - and if I thought all worlds would be sorta like this one I'd want to handle contact differently than if some of them were six-dimensional and populated by gelid horrors, or if some of them were dystopias of endless strife, or if some of them were easily damaged candylands?"

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"Since the King and Queen were able to catch glimpses of Earth and model their world on it, I must conclude that it's a natural property of the void that minds within it can do that, and it follows logically that worlds created in the void are probably to some extent modeled on Earth - but I don't know if there are other worlds besides Earth, and if there are any I don't know what they are like or whether minds in the void might glimpse them instead. I've been deliberately avoiding giving my subjects the impression that all visitors from other worlds are human because it doesn't cost me very much and if I ever get a nonhuman outworlder I will be very curious to meet them and don't want them to - have to deal with an unnecessary set of wrong expectations."

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"Yeah, and the same applies if they're prepping to bump into other worlds which might have gelid horrors."

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She smiles at this second instance of 'gelid horrors'. "You do have a way with words. Yes."

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"Thank you. I mean no offense to the gelid horrors I'm sure they have many fine qualities."

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"If I ever meet any gelid horrors I will do my best to get along with them," she agrees.

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Giggle. "Uh, is reality listening only to outwardly discernible actions I take or does it have - do-what-I-mean?"

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"There is definitely a strong do-what-I-mean component."

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"Cool, that's easier."

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The Queen nods.

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"So loosely - end to eternal warfare and dependence thereupon. Protocol for interaction with other worlds. Protocol for growth. General tidying up and improved - legibility?"

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Thoughtful nod.

"What do you mean by legibility?"

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"I don't have a lot of complimentary things to say about the uncaring laws of physics and their unceasing regularity but I do like that it's easy to learn more about them and then exploit that."

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"I see what you mean. On the other hand, there's a sense in which a world like this is overly vulnerable to exploitation - if it were perfectly clear exactly how everything worked, and an outworlder showed up who happened to prefer eternal warfare, I'd have some trouble dealing with them..."

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"I was more thinking about the use case of the locals. It might be easier to hedge out outworlder influence if there was a solid set of known rules that they could learn about."

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"Hmm. That could work."

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"Reservations?"

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"I could see a more legible world being an advantage or a vulnerability or both, and I think the difference is likely to turn on fine details but I'm not sure which ones or whether we will have knowledge or control of them. So I have reservations but I want to explore the possibility in case it can be done well."

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Nod.