ꙮ Very early morning of the day after you arrove at the Travelers’ Valley. Luĉja is, of course, awake and about; it remains to be seen who, if any, of the three are as much of an early bird as they are.
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has a small array of ingredients laid out in front of them atop the satchel they were stored in, wondering how best to combine them for breakfast, and how long before the cooking should begin. Smells rouse the sleepers from time to time.
clears her throat, from a respectful but still surprisingly close distance. She wasn’t TRYING to sneak up on him - but she treads very very softly. “Want help? Barring that, mind company?”
: “Good morning, V. I am always happy for the company. If you would enjoy it, the help would also be fine. Please feel no need to exert yourself so early though.”
makes a tiny little waving-off gesture with her hand that you immediately recognise as having seen Solei do, once or twice. “I’m a light sleeper, I’d rather keep my hands busy.” And she’ll start… chopping something and being useful in some capacity, and– subtly pointing out ingredients the Valley provides, things Xilai and Duškomira particularly like.
is thankful for the intel, as it were, and begins to prep alongside them. “May I pry, while we have some time? I have a great many questions for all of you. I would be happy to return any answers I can as well, should you have them.”
smiles like she’s trying to keep it hidden, and in this regard, at least, stealth is not her strong suit. But there’s still something surreptitious about it. “You certainly may. What else is the early morning for?”
: “I find the early mornings are best spent not waking my companions before they wake themselves. Which mostly means keeping the little coeurl occupied.” They laugh, a little. “I suppose the first question is, why V? Do you feel Tasna no longer suits you?”
: “A bit of a private joke, honestly? ‘Voss’ is the name of the… in this plane’s trashy murder mysteries, an unidentified person’s name is ‘Voss’, by convention. As for why go by a pseudonym at all?” She frowns. “Well. You all were- attacked, by something, or someone, more or less. Kidnapped. Yes? When I came here, I feared much the same. Didn’t know the shape of things, of course. I think I expected… some sort of interplanar society for the prevention of nosy Academics ending up somewhere they didn’t belong that’d come pulling my tent down around my ears any morning now. And then by the time I actually felt safe here, I’d already left Tasna behind, I suppose.”
can’t help but chuckle. “Voss! Amazing. Yes, we were brought to a different place. It interfered with our memories. I spent what was only just shy of a month, but felt like at least four unable to recall my name, and the knowledge that my placeholder was not my name…grated upon the corners of my mind. I almost miss it though, which is strange, for it not being mine.” A moment, punctuated by the slicing of vegetables. “So when you traveled here…was there no intervening area? Right from Samudra to the Beast? Or did you also see the Void?”
shakes her head. “Thence why I peppered you all with obnoxious questions when you described what the process had been like for you. I, ah…” She looks quizzically at a root vegetable. “So, you’ve probably figured out that Xilai and Duškomira had about as rough a time of it as you all did, memory-wise, when they came here, and they’ve… rebuilt, much more than regained? I think Xilai was a little jealous of those of you who were able to recover their memories.” She looks wry. “I cheated, though. So it was easier for me. But yes, that was a direct transfer.”
: “Some of us have been luckier than others in that regard. I have complicated feelings about regaining all of my memories, as opposed to the gradual trickle some of my companions have had. Or having to build completely new ones. They are strong to be able to do so.”
: “Did you also arrive in the canyons, when you traveled?”
: “I imagine it felt much different to regain them all at once. Or, well, in truth, I can’t imagine what that must have been like, I can only guess.” She goes back to chopping vegetables for a moment. “Canyon, no. When I got here… First Principles, it was practically the middle of a battlefield. I suspect Khejvard thought I was a weird new kind of very pretty blue fiend, at first.”
: “Quite jarring. I too, was thought a fiend when I first surfaced. The speaking bit was a big help. So was the shield.”
: “Wait. You. Have a body here.”
laughs, softly. “Not that it was too difficult to situate myself on the correct side of the Rite, but.” She waits, as instructed, nods. “I do, yes. Would you like me to explain how that works? It’s quite clever of me.”
: “Very much so. I saw your statue on Samudra. Caion showed me. The implications of the statue and the body being more separate than imagined are…interesting.”
: “Unfortunately, I suspect it’s a trick that’d only work for Naiads. If you’re… not in possession of a tremendous instinct for self-preservation, you can throw your… self? The part of you that thinks and feels and is you, into… oh, any sufficiently-large body of water, really. Which admittedly was a challenge, here. I was a profoundly-attenuated fogbank for a terrifying several minutes of my life, I don’t particularly recommend that.”
: “But if you do that, you escape the deleterious effects of the transfer on your continuity of self and memory? Or, I did. Only having one data point makes me far less confident in the claims I’m willing to make in a broad sense.”
: “Fascinating. That does seem rather impossible to test rigorously.”
: “Frustratingly and unfortunately, yes. I was trying to figure out ways to make the transit easier for Ciet, but…” She frowns, softly. “I am as confident as I can be that that had nothing to do with their failure to make the transit. That is not as confident as I would like to be. You know? And my appetite for experimentation’s diminished, since.”
: “I do understand. Based on my, admittedly, rather limited knowledge of the situation and mechanics, I agree that you are not responsible. You learned of them on the far-caster, yes?”
nods. “Yeah. I… mmm. I knew of them, even before that. Was trying, actively, to get their attention. I’d…” She frowns. “Been communicated with, in unorthodox ways. It’s why I went looking for the Door, it’s why I actively reached out towards Ciet and Duškomira. Some…one? Something? Gave me the information that– gave me information which I interpreted as that they existed, that if we all worked together we could… I don’t know. I don’t know. I felt so certain, once.”
: “Feel free to pivot the conversation if you do not wish to continue it. I am very intrigued. Could you explain…how you had been communicated with?” They look up (“Don’t suppose it was you, was it?”)
does the little hand-wavey thing again. “I can certainly try. Are you familiar with the laws governing random chance, and noise, and chaos in a formal sense? Or, I suppose– have you played at games of knucklebones with your Hunt companions around a fire?”
: “I have played many a game of knucklebones. Sadly, I think you will find me less formally educated.” They take out a small bag, and spill some knucklebones out onto the ground.
picks one up, and starts playing with it, idly - rolling it, picking it up, rolling it again. “I loved them. I always loved them. Loved studying them, loved… understanding the logic behind the predictions you could make. I was an entire depths-terror at playing tavli in my days as a student.” She smiles. “And so there are… rules, remarkably consistent rules, about the behaviour of what we consider randomness.”
: “And in the course of studying that behaviour, I identified… faults. Patterns that should not have been, that I could force to the forefront.”
: “Patterns in which were coded, with devastating elegance, information which increasingly became… addressed to me.” She smiles brightly. “Of course, I assumed I was simply mad.”
: “Unfortunately for my model of reality, I was able to test that hypothesis, and found it wanting, which left more terrifying conclusions to be drawn.” She finishes up the chopping she was working on, leans against the counter, glances at Luĉja.
: “I think I understand the concept. I haven’t the first idea about how I would even attempt to devise any such anything related to it. And these messages…told you that there were other people and worlds to find?” Luĉja’s gears have been turning faster, and faster, and faster, until they stop, and they vent a large plume of steam, shaking their head.
nods. “And that… well. Without expressly saying so, but obviously once I understood the method of transmission, that there existed something, somewhere, capable of using the laws of physics to say hello-and-good-fishing, which… I’m still mulling that one over.”
nods like she’s agreeing with the steam-vent.
: “Did they expressly tell you anything? Other than, hello and good fishing?” Luĉja sounds like they’re fishing a little. Their gears are turning again, normal speed.
shakes her head. “Whatever it was was… remarkably abstract, cagey. I’d…” She laughs. “For… what must have been years I’d walk around trying to find more-elaborate ways of… asking the World questions, hoping against hope to get a clear answer filtered through the… conditional probability of aggregate events firing in specific ways, I– I had a very very strange decade or so, along the way. But eventually, I– well, first I ended up being the Primus, which surprised even me. And then I… kept, over and over again, all of my calculations kept spitting out coördinates, instructions, a rolled-out red carpet leading me to the Septentrione.”
: “Interesting. If I was to do something that would yield…perhaps a random result, perhaps just an unpredictable one, would you be able to point me at how to interpret it?”
: “Unfortunately, most of the kinds of things I found were… things that only made themselves apparent in the extreme aggregate. Hundreds of thousands of trials– somewhere in the Academy I bet there’s still an elaborate gnosis-fired mechanism for rolling a roomful of dice, I hope someone’s having fun with or is extremely confused by that.”
: “Understood. I will not begin crushing hundreds of rocks, then.”
: “That said, I’ve… heh. At some point I became a person who puts a great deal of stock in the outcome of random processes when I’m not sure what to do.”
: “Though, I am now struck by the temptation to somehow provide you with a mountain’s worth of knucklebones.”
laughs! “Oh, Xilai would never stop glowering.”
“Does Xilai not like games? Or not like divination?”
Luĉja cannot comprehend that someone would dislike a prank on such a massive scale
: “Xilai mostly doesn’t like -clutter-. Or. Principles, I just thought of the idea of a door and you open the door and just, a flood of dice come out when you open the door, and I think that might kill the poor man.” She laughs. “He barely tolerates the abstract concept of caves, and that’s for mine and Duškomira’s sake, I shan’t be burying him under a mountain of knucklebones tucked away in a cavern any day soon.”
: “I wonder if Aurelius might teach him their favorite trick for supplies management.”
: “You have communicated with Tsem intermittently. How does your far-caster not have interference? Aurelius and I attempted to create one upon our arrival, and got…Deepforge interference, I believe.”
At this point, everything has been long past prepped, and Luĉja begins slowly adding ingredients into the pot above a small fire.
: “Well, a number of answers to that. One being that it does, and that’s why the farcaster can only manage timing gaps, and anything that you can encode into timing gaps. The other is that what I built was always ever only designed to talk to people on different planes entirely. If you tried to use my farcaster from one place to another here you just get a garbled mess, we tried it once.”
: “Fascinating. So, not useful as a communications device on the same plane. But possible to still send messages elsewhere. Probably won’t need to keep working on that one then. Tomestones work a bit faster.”
: “Absolutely brilliant, by the way.” And she takes hers out, and– you can tell that she spends a lot of time with one finger kind of looped around the linkpearl embedded in its back.
if Luĉja were capable of forming tears, they’d probably have one welling up right now.
A puff of steam. The closest they can manage. “So you traveled here, because the universe told you how to find the door. Did you…have a plan? Grand designs? Or just the…need to discover what lies past the horizon?”
: “Mmmm. Needed… to know. What was so important that it was tucked away carefully into the experimental error-bars. What was so secret that it was– put there for me to find. And then it felt– When I got here, and Khejvard and I used our gnosis together, it felt like something was happening that I’d never felt before. There was– somebody had a plan. I’m sure of it. I’m still not sure what the plan was; privately, now, I suspect it was always doomed to failure in a grander sense. But… as for me? I got to see a whole different world. My only regret is that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get information back to Samudra, to tell them what happened, where I’d gone. And I know– I knew even at the time that it’d hit them hard. But. Mmm.”
: “So you found no doors here. And without your rooms full of knucklebones, no good way to find one. I am sorry. A difficult shadow, past the horizon. I would not say that your plans ended in failure, though. Perhaps just not just the successes you envisioned for yourselves.”
: “Whatever we were supposed to have done, I’m reasonably confident we were supposed to do it here. I don’t… know what it was we were supposed to have done. It needed Ciet. I know it needed Ciet. And– yesterday I wondered, what if all I was supposed to have done was just… be here when you got here?” She shrugs, lightly. “What if I was wrong, about everything, and I was just here to tell you what I know? I think I’d be fine with that, if that were the case. But it’s all… strange, and bigger than I can wrap my head around.” Pause. “Not an admission I make often.”
: “I am glad I am not the only one staggered by the incomprehensibility of the universe. It is always better to have company.”
laughs! “Indeed, indeed it is. There’s bafflement, and then there’s bafflement with the Virtue of Counsel. And a good laugh.”
: “And I am grateful for the help you have been to us, no matter if it was your purpose or just an additional benefit. I think one thing that still confuses me greatly is the Rite texts. I know Salme’s been cataloguing them. But…I cannot for the life of me remember what they were, or when they were elsehow. I have participated in Rites for well over 100 years…and I know on some level, they must have been different, for you did not come here more than 100 years ago. It makes sense for it to be the only Rites the others know. And if I have recovered all of my memories, in my ordeal with the Dream-Whale and the Crystal, how do I still not remember?”
: “If it’s any consolation, they’re strange to us as well? Despite knowing full well that some of what I feel when I invoke the tone is my own words, they -feel- to me like they were always thus. It’s– it’s so easy to forget. I’ve invoked a rite-tone and then looked up at Xilai like a surprised quokka because it mentions me by name enough times that it’s one of his absolute favourite things to laugh at me for, out of a category which by no means is limited in cardinality.” She grins.
: “Perhaps, once-changed, they propagated backwards, so that we would remember them always as thus.”
gives them a pained look. “Now you’re sounding like Xilai.”
: “But, I mean. That might even be -right-, it just… I mean, it comports with theories some people held in the Academy, I suppose.”
: “Nonsense. I welcome the thought of hiding a room of knucklebones in here.” They chuckle at their own joke. “I would speak with them, as well sometime, given the chance. He also prefers the Scale in the Rite.”
laughs, again, and leans back against the stone that’s been carefully and painstakingly carved into a countertop. “I suspect the two of you would get along, yes. He made… almost all of those. The path up from the valley, almost all the stonework. He’s brilliant, don’t ever let him tell you he’s not.”
: “I do enjoy stonework, as well. Perhaps we shall find a moment to converse. Outside, since he cares not for caves.”
chuckles to herself. “Hopefully you will. You’re welcome to stay as long as you wish, I don’t… have a good handle on when the Queenstown festivals are happening, though, so I certainly won’t demand that you stay longer than is reasonable, I know you’ve got the Grand Soups to make it back for.”
: “Indeed. The Scorpion Queen’s humor truly knows no bounds. Did you avail yourself of the dumpling experiments from last night?”
: “Though at this point, I think the Soups are more for Archie’s ego than the boon from the Queen. She was going to tell us where to find you.”
: “Oh, First Principles, yes, I did. You’re going to win and it’s going to blow everyone’s minds. Also, it was… I wasn’t expecting it to be -that- markedly nice getting a little taste of home.” She smiles. “But it was.”
blinks. Laughs. “Wait, the–“
laughs so hard she has to steady herself against the counter. “Well, now you HAVE to win.”
: “I do not understand the humour. Why must we win now? Simply to prove the point?”
: “Well, you’ve already found us, and you were winning in order to find us, so–“ –she gets control of her breath. “I really have spent a long time around Xilai, haven’t I–“
: “I would assume the answer to that is ‘Yes.’”
: “Would you be so kind as to watch the pot for me for a moment? I…left something elsewhere.”
is not a very good liar
tilts her head to the side very slightly, but the actual words that she says are “Of course?”, because she’s definitely curious, but also she’s here to be Helpful and so she’s going to be Helpful if Luĉja needs her to be.
walks into one of the other rooms of the cave, and just so happens to have the tablet right where they need it. They take a quick jaunt into the Library, feed Jory a secret (it’s important to keep friends well-fed), and open up the passageway to the Kitchen.
ꙮ Luckily, nobody left the sun on ‘angry’.
Hoping that it won’t be too much of a problem, Luĉja raids a couple cabinets and the FU for some Samudran ingredients that weren’t part of the soup and dumplings plan. They don’t run the kitchen out of anything in particular, but they’ll likely need a hand from their local cheese thief / liminal entrepreneur much sooner than otherwise anticipated.
Stepping back into the Library, they stare at the stars for just a moment, before walking back into the caves.
ꙮ You’ll have to find some kind of truly appalling Beast-made beverage to introduce Samudra to– or, well. Best not, it might cause a thoughtstorm.
: “We had brought a pretty good stock of things with us when we traveled. Obviously, some of this we’ll have to use today, but I grabbed a good portion of anything that didn’t require being cold to stay edible. This way you can have a few more tastes of home when you need them.”
They place down a bag of rice, some dried seaweeds, and a few bottles of sauces onto the countertop.
blinks at the bounty, and– blinks, again, repeatedly, and– “–can I hug you, are you a hugs person? I– I didn’t used to be, but then I met the others and–“
: “Hugs are always welcome. I will make sure I do not return the hug too strongly.”
knows to be very careful. Only Endjinn, Spoken-Wood, and Izaak get the full force hugs.
hugs Luĉja with surprising vigour, then, and beams. “Oh, there’s something here I’ve been wanting to be able to share with Xi and Duša for -ages-, this is brilliant, thank you.”
: “You are most welcome. It is only a little, but I can think of no better use for it.”
: “Only a little goes a long way.” Pause. Glance. “Does the Academy still have the sauce lab? That’s probably a tomestone question, honestly.”
: “I believe it does, yes. I think several of our compatriots had a small adventure there.”
giggles. Oh, there’ll be a story there later, and she’ll get it out of someone, and she’s looking forward to every moment of it.
: “Salme and Awoken spent a lot of time procuring burger ingredients while we were on Samudra. I am unaware of all of the details, other than I was asked for a recipe, and that the burgers were delicious.”
: “One last question before breakfast, if you don’t mind.”
: “I think I’ve either read or heard a bit about that process, it sounded brilliant– yes?” She does lean over to take a deep breath of whatever’s almost done in the pot she’s been minding, though. It’s nice.
: “I guess it’s a bit of a two parter. Did you know the worlds were ending before we showed up? And any idea where all the moons are going? It seems like those things are probably related, unless the Scorpion Queen has decided to start hoarding giant rocks in the sky.”
: “I had a suspicion that something was wrong. I don’t… have a handle on what the moons are -doing-, yet, it’s so difficult to be sure of the properties of a work that big from all the way down here. But I am -certain- they’re sustaining some kind of complex gnosis-working. I’m just not sure what it’s for or…” She shakes her head. “Let alone where they’re going, or why.”
: “Then perhaps we must win the Three Grand Soups after all. Many thanks, V. There is more than enough to go around - please help yourself - I’m sure the others will wake soon.” The pot is full of a medley of softened, slightly charred vegetables, diced roots, and some eggs and cheese to bind it all together.