Sovereigns game

Reset. Where are we even going with this?

0

Instantiate. The wide room. The grand hall. Visitors Center to the right, gift shop attached. Some cafes, probably; this is civilisation, after all. Hallways leading off. Wide doors. Staircases. The entire second floor is a conference venue. This is the base floor of the Atlas Tower of the Magi. There are five towers in total, rising above the great city covering the plains, between the forested mountains. Seres, Gorgon, Torrent, Calcutta, and at their center, Atlas, the main one. The tall one. There are other floors below this, but they are not typically open to the public. The floors above vary. Most of the libraries have hours. The restaurants, the overlooks, the gardens, these are all open when they are open. Anyone could probably walk into one of the meditation chambers at any time, if only they knew where they were going, and as long as they didn't make trouble, nobody would likely mind.

Nissa is in the base now, getting coffee, or whatever their local equivalent is. Whatever her equivalent is. Something sticky and unpronounceable. Boba. She's that kind of student, not that most of the folk around her would take her for a student. She's not really dressed like one, but nor is she dressed like a master. Mostly she's just dressed like a random person, surrounded by random people, and chatter filling the space.

She finds a table, sits down, pulls out a tablet, pulls up some spells. Their forms hover over the table, the accompanying text appearing on air, backed in opaque white. She reads them carefully, mouthing the forms, trying to shape them in her mind. There are rooms set aside for exactly this higher up. Quiet rooms. Fireproof rooms. Rooms with serene views and carefully constructed soundtracks and no distractions, painstakingly designed to facilitate learning and retention.

Nissa doesn't want facilitation. She wants the real world. She wants to learn in the same chaos and cacophony she'll be using it in. She wants her damn boba.

Her fingers spark, and she shakes it off onto the table. That wasn't even remotely related to the spell she was trying to do. She peers at the notes, flicking through the pages - has she stumbled upon something else, perhaps?

The problem is, Nissa is brilliant. Among the Magi, she's considered a prodigy, a sensitivity to the Source unlike anything they've seen before. But it's not true. She might be good, rather better than average, even, but her skill is not talent, and she isn't some sort of magical nexus. It's all skill, trained by an intellect ever seeking answers, with a focus born of practice and discipline. If it were the same discipline employed by the Magi, it would be fine. But it isn't. She made it all up as she went, following the mathematical patterns of the physics of the rest of the universe, assuming there would be parallels with the magic of the Source itself.

And, though she doesn't fully understand it yet, she was right.

Instantiate. Elsewhere. Ciphreya: another city, another world, another galaxy. Civilised, but differently. This is much smaller, and isolate. A sanctuary in crystalline architecture, away from the troubles of the rest of the universe. They consider themselves the apex of development, here, the heart of a monumental organisation. They're right, to a point. Their influence is huge, and spans across the local clusters. Beyond that point, they're not so right. It's too far away. They don't even know what's out there. The void. The abyss. Dark beyond of the known universe. Other civilisations, perhaps, with other apexes. They haven't made contact, and the gods have been vague to a fault.

But their gods back them. Their gods are among them. That makes it all right. Right?

Rahah doesn't think so. She wants everyone to just leave her alone, let her grow up, play, make friends and be ridiculous. She's only six. She's a god, or at least the reincarnation of one, or so everyone keeps insisting. She doesn't want to be a god. She wants to be normal.

She's incarnated as a Deresi, but passes for Nissai: an elf apparently in her adolescence, adult proportions, but lanky, short. Her control over her magic betrays her most of all. A teenager would be able to cast a light without setting it on fire. A teenager would actually know how to cast in the first place. But everything Rahah tries comes out wrong. She can't shape the spells at all. Mostly she can do tricks with force, pushing and pulling at a distance. Sometimes she manages to control the flow of raw energy: not magical, but kinetic, thermal, magnetic, or perhaps simply the very processes behind them. There's no shaping this.

So mostly she doesn't. She pretends not even to be a caster at all. It's easier than to admit the truth: as Deresi, her connection to the Source is different. She is her own source, her own nexus. And so the general hatred and mistrust of Deresi passes her by, but so, too, do opportunities. Opportunities to learn and grow. Opportunities to understand.

The Source. One of the lingering mysteries of the universe. Every great civilisation has, if they progressed far enough, tried to tap into it at some point on a global scale. It is, after all, a source of power, a connection between worlds, the exception that makes Darstaddian physics work. Like the ambient matter that holds galaxies together, it is the ambient energy that pulls all forces together, and so it is used to power entire civilisations, to reinvent travel, to rebuild the foundation of the very concept of existence. The downfall of many, in time, has been taking this too far. The cenva, the first ones, remade their very selves upon this, and thus unmade themselves. The gods were reborn of these fragments. The Artiil, the humans, launched themselves into the cosmos on the tails of their own destruction, losing their homeworld, but not, at least, their own being.

To engineers and architects, it is but another tool, another constraint, to use and work around.

To casters, those born with an innate sensitivity who choose to pursue its more personal application, or who have it engineered into them later in life, it is a wellspring of power and madness. Most remain at the surface, only pulling small amounts of power, for simple things: to ease the day to day, complement other skills, perform some tricks, but stick to the known, written spells, and never go too far. But some delve deeper. The madmen, the visionaries, the sorcerers. These are inevitably the pioneers, those who discover its applications, who write up the theorems that form the basis for new spells, and for the more global applications of the civilisations themselves. Some of them become gods. Many destroy themselves. Others skirt disaster at every new reach, only to find themselves changed no matter how careful they were, for it always changes its users, the more so the deeper, the darker, they go.

There are speculations as to how deep it goes. There are speculations as to there being another side: a dark side, an existence far stranger, that mirrors our own, perhaps, or something else entirely. But these are only speculations. There are no hypotheses, not that can be tested.

Even the gods don't know, save, perhaps, for one. The biggest one of all. The Spirit of the Universe. She's not even a god anymore, not really, but she was, once. Long ago. Before she changed. Maybe, just maybe, she reached that other, darker, side. Maybe this was what changed her. The Deathgods, after all, call her their Dark Sister. But she doesn't speak with mortals. She doesn't even speak with most gods anymore. The Deathgods act as her liaisons on the rare occasion she deems anything worth communicating, and she doesn't accept questions.

The man sits down across from her, and Nissa looks up in surprise. It's Damorin, one of the Magi masters. "I missed you today," he says. "You need to practise."

"I do practise," Nissa replies. "I'm practising right now."

"What?" Damorin asks. "The lessons give structure. If you don't practise the key foundations..."

"Your key foundations don't work," Nissa says, cutting him off. "There's structure here, but it's all arbitrary anyway. Isn't it more important that I have a structure, rather than conflicting it with contradictory bases?"

"You're a Magus," Damorin says. "You can't just make up your own basis. It doesn't work that way."

Nissa stares at him, dropping a half-shaped spell in a small flash of colour. She doesn't know what to say to this. She's already said too much. Unaffiliated magic is illegal in the Commonwealth, but it's hardly safe in the Union, either, the neighbouring militaristic state with which an uneasy truce is maintained purely out of necessity: an all-out war would devastate both parties, and leave the galaxy in ruins. So, being from the Commonwealth herself, she'd joined the Magi, the Commonwealth mages, and tried to get along with their particular approach. She'd thought it'd be freeing, to openly practice magic. Instead she'd found it utterly stifling.

"What I mean to say is I can do all that already!" Nissa says, feigning incredulity. "Why do I need to go to these lessons? They're pointless."

"Really?" Damorin asks. "Show me a common star."

Nissa holds up her hand and a pinpoint of light appears above it.

Damorin nods. "Make a purification."

Nissa gives him a slightly surprised look, and then pulls up the spell on her tablet, before shaping it out, mostly according to the instructions, adapting it slightly to her own manner of casting. She drops it over the table, and it immediately sparkles, clean.

"You need to know the spells," Damorin says, frowning. "That won't work in the field."

Nissa tries to hide her own surprise, and apparently pulls it off. He hadn't noticed the difference. Had he? "Why would I need to clean something on the spot without time to look it up?" she asks. "What possible situation could mandate that?" What she also doesn't mention is that she already has another cleaning spell that she knows well - a much less pristine version with a more variable scope. Hers looks natural, unlike this. Like cleaning by hand, it takes multiple passes, multiple castings, to make anything sparkle. She uses it daily when no one's looking, to avoid having to clean things up by hand.

"I can think of a few," Damorin says.

"Okay, fine," Nissa says. "What do you want from me?"

"Come to the lessons," Damorin says. "Practice with us, and complete your basic training. You're young yet, but with patience you'll get the independence you crave."

"Okay," Nissa says. She's not as young as they think, but what they'll forgive of a twelve-year-old is far more than they might of seventeen. And she doesn't look her age. She'd always resented this, when she lived on her own. Now, though, here, it's her armour, her saving grace whenever she goes too far, says the wrong thing. She's just twelve. Doesn't know what she's talking about. That's all there is to it.

Damorin smiles.

Twenty yaks. Twenty yaks had stampeded the corridor when they opened the portal. Rahah stares at the mess below, dumbfounded. She's perched atop a doorframe, clinging to a bit of wall trim. This wasn't what she'd expected. Jerindal, hanging from a light fixture further down, also stares. This wasn't what he'd expected, either.

Two yaks, all that's left, stand around amidst the mess. They forage a bit at it. They chew on the potted plants.

Two yaks is enough for the two young elves to remain clinging to their perches above them, afraid to make a sound.

The much older elven man who marches in a moment after, however, is not afraid to speak at all. "What, in all the worlds, happened here?" he demands loudly.

The two yaks stop munching to watch him yakily.

"Don't!" Jerindal squeaks. "You'll spook them again!"

"Really? That's all you have to say for yourself?" the man says. "And you, Sovereign," he goes on, turning on Rahah. "I would have expected better of you."

"Er, better than what, exactly?" she asks. "This was all an accident."

"Yeah, dad, this really wasn't what we were trying to do." Jerindal says.

"So what exactly were you trying to do?" Jerindal's dad asks.

"Er," Jerindal says, starting to panic. "You know. About that? Yes."

"Leave," Rahah says.

"Leave?" Jerindal's dad asks.

"Leave Ciphreya," Rahah says. "We were trying to get away. I mean, I was. Trying to get out of here. Anywhere but here. So we opened a portal. Jerindal was helping me because he's really good with magic, but it's not his fault. I talked him into it. It just... it worked, sort of, but then a herd of yaks came out and... um..." she shrugs blankly, looking sheepish, trying to cover the lie. Jerindal is basically the only friend she has. He'd insisted on going with her, just so she wouldn't be entirely alone, even though he was actually fairly happy here. And she'd needed it enough to not say no. "It didn't really... work?" she finishes, lamely.

Jerindal's dad stares at her. "Jerindal," he says, still looking at Rahah. "Room. Now."

Jerindal drops off the light fixture and runs away, giving the yaks a wide berth.

Rahah drops down as well. She stares up at Jerindal's dad defiantly, mostly just because she is so short, and that's the easiest way to look when looking up without looking totally pathetic.

His name is Jerdalim. He's a member of the Hadris Citheldryn Arbitration Committee, the closest thing they have to a ruling body here. Or the closest thing in lieu of her, the supposed Sovereign. Not that they'd listen to a child. Maybe when she grows up they will, but somehow, naggingly, she suspects they'll to find a way around it then, too. It's been a very long time since the god has ruled here, and it's a far different organisation now.

"Why?" he asks.

"Because it's absolutely stifling here!" she says. "I can't do anything, I can't have friends, whenever anything goes wrong it's always their fault and they take the fall, even when it's not! I'm the sovereign, the god, so I have to be perfect, and yet I'm a child and you won't even listen to me or let me do anything or anything! You can't even make up your stupid minds!"

"That's not how it is at all," Jerdalim says. "You just need to grow up, that's all."

"You won't let me grow up!" she yells.

Jerdalim gives her a somewhat confused look, and starts to say something.

Rahah turns and runs away.

It's the wrong way. The way the rest of the yaks went, full of damage... and yaks. But she keeps going anyway, stubborn anger and fear and confusion driving her on as they hop away in surprise at the tiny ball of bushy hair and tears rushing past them. Why did she actually say all that? She doesn't know. She does want to get away, of course, but it's not that important, is it? They respect her so little already, and she knows this won't help, but... but she doesn't even know. It's all a mess, her whole life, and she doesn't know how to deal with any of it. She doesn't even have a dad, like Jerindal does. He lost his mother when he was very small, but she'd never had any parents at all. Been born from a seed of her own creation, she was told. Something she'd set up in a previous life.

She doesn't remember any of it. Previous lives, being a god, any of it. And yet that is the entire cause of everything wrong now - her past selves setting it all up for this - and so she resents them terribly. That they were all her only makes it that much worse, somehow.

She curls up in a dark corner, past the destruction and yaks, past the people going on about their lives as they pass from place to place, and winds up amidst the dust of the empty rooms beyond. She cries into her knees, not knowing what else to do.

The Arbitration Committee of the Hadris Citheldryn does more than arbitrate. They also review proposals, among other, even more boring, tasks. Most of the proposals up for consideration now are fairly standard, and this one, submitted by a member they don't know, probably some recruit from the galaxy of Edo itself, fits right in with the rest.

The proposal is essentially thus: establish formal diplomatic relations with the Magi of the Edo Commonwealth. It makes some solid points. The Magi are organised, and generally peaceful, unlike their Union counterparts, a loose consortium of warring warlocks who basically run the Union. The Magi safeguard various powerful artefacts, and it would be valuable to ensure these artefacts remain in good hands. The Magi are relatively enlightened, unlike most of the very competitive factions even in the Commonwealth itself. It would be worthwhile to share knowledge and practices, and learn from each other. There's little to lose from a diplomatic mission as a cover for a more thorough evaluation.

The committee deliberates. They don't bother to meet up, just read through it as they get to it and submit their comments online, replying to each other as need be. Standard practice. Consensus is established tricklingly, until nobody has anything more to add, and the proposal is put in the approved queue.

Rahah gets a notification, and pulls it up warily on her handheld. Strangely, it's nothing bad. A proposal she submitted almost a year ago under another name, almost as a joke, just to see what would happen, has been approved.

She stares at it blankly and wipes her eyes, the glow of her handheld illuminating her face, and the dust, and the empty room around her. She hadn't expected this. And yet she'd had a plan with it, sort of. She'd chosen Edo specifically: it was a big galaxy, heavily populated, not of the elven worlds, and not Artiilie, and yet full of magic. Somewhere, perhaps, that she could disappear. Or be someone else. Or... what? She doesn't remember. It was a half-baked plan from the start, and now it's almost entirely gone.

She marks the proposal for further notifications. Now that the committee has apparently finally looked at it, something should happen fairly soon.

1

Nissa attends the lessons, even the ones conducted by the masters she really doesn't like, and goes through the motions, casting the spells. She doesn't even try to do as the masters instruct anymore, simply casting them all her own way, translating them to her own understanding of magic, but even still, none of the Magi seem to notice the difference. She's not sure why: she can see it plain as day. But they simply applaud her apparent talent and tell the others to look at how she's doing it, follow her lead.

And it seems to work. Somehow some of the other students are learning by watching her. Or do they only think they are, and this is still enough to inspire them to succeed regardless? A sort of magical placebo effect? Nissa isn't really sure, but the Magi approach does seem very much based in feeling, so it would make sense. Hers is more about mapping the perceptions to predictable patterns, like the mathematics of music, playing out in impeccable beauty.

It's in her physics classes that they show surprise. She's very good, a very quick study. She's doing her best to not betray the fact that she knows it all already, of course, but this is very basic stuff. Mechanics. Simple energy. Introductory fields. She wiles away her time mapping more complex concepts back to the Source, and the Source to the very same mathematics as the rest, and sometimes they glance over her shoulder before she realises, and see the equations on her screen. Usually she's just staring blankly, thinking, and so they take the blank stare to mean she doesn't actually know what she's looking at and ignore it. But then someone catches her making some connection, writing down a counterpoint or progression, finishing a proof.

Nissa isn't even sure what it's for. She just followed the maths to the logical conclusion, intending to test it out later. She's just about to go back to staring blankly at it when she realises she is being watched, someone is standing over her, and she looks back suddenly, up.

Master Callas is staring down at her screen in wonderment. "I don't believe it," he whispers. "You've solved Alacro's Theorem."

"Huh?" Nissa says blankly. She has, genuinely, no idea what he's talking about, but then she runs a search and pulls up the theorem itself. It's familiar, all right. Not exactly what she was working on, but very close. This isn't something she'd counted on at all, someone recognising what she was doing.

"Do you mean to say," Callas says slowly, "that you came up with all of that, start to end, on your own?"

"Uh," Nissa says, pulling up her version again. "I just found this on an image board. It's not even the same..." She starts to point to one of the differing bits and then stops, realising her mistake, as usual, all too late. "Oh."

He's not even looking at her tablet anymore, just her. "Come with me," Callas says.

The rest of the class is staring, watching, trying to figure out what's going on. They're oddly quiet.

Nissa gets up, follows him. The class watches in utter bemusement as they leave, tense with anticipation.

He takes her to his office. "All right," he says. "Let's put it up on the board."

Nissa glances between the board and her tablet, considering how best to connect them, and then doesn't. There's something amiss with this, something niggling that she can't quite place. She grabs a stylus instead, and starts rewriting it out, referencing the tablet, trying to figure it out as she goes.

It's fairly normal, as far as she can tell. Straight maths, mapping into the Source.

And then it occurs to her, all at once, why all their science is stuck. Why the stagnation, why none of the maths have moved on past a point, for so long: that's where the theorem stopped. It's leaving out the Source. They are leaving it out of all of it. Magic is as much a part of mathematics as force or energy, and yet nobody is using it.

She's quick enough to not say anything, maintaining her blank expression, just pausing as she goes, glancing back up at what she's already written. There's no way she could be the first person in a thousand years to realise this. Not in a galaxy this big. Not on both sides of the divide. What happened to all the others?!

She writes out the next line, changing one key thing from the proof in her notes.

She changes the following line to be a progression from that, and continues on, propagating the change through the rest of it, until she gets to the end, and closes the proof. She steps back, pressing her tablet to her chest, screen inward.

This doesn't make any sense. It's utterly insane. And yet that feeling in her gut, that great seeping dread, it tells her that she's right, against all logic.

Callas nods, reading through it, and then just stops. "Wait," he says. "How'd you get this? From Sade's induction to..." he points between the previous line and the one Nissa had changed. "That's not right."

"Er," Nissa says, trying to sound as clueless as possible, "you can't do that?"

"No," Callas sighs, but he chuckles regardless. "Still, this is very good, especially at your age."

"So what... can you do there?" Nissa asks.

Callas write out another line, slightly different from the changed line, and then just stops. "That's it. That's all you can do. That's the problem," he says. His replacement matches her original. Except unlike his, hers had continued right on from there.

"Oh," Nissa says. Apparently she'd only barely caught it in time. Or something. In time for what, though, really? What is the deal with that feeling, that terrible dread about all of this?

The Magi talk about following their feelings often, speaking of the Source guiding them, and up until now Nissa has always just sort of nodded along, not really understanding, figuring it went hand-in-hand with their weird casting in general. But is this what they meant? Is the Source guiding her now, keeping her away from something terrible?

She gives Callas an uncertain look, masking her fear in confusion.

He shrugs. "We should get you some proper maths classes," he says.

They get back, only to find the rest of the class gone.

"I suppose this is why you don't leave a pack of twelve-year-olds unattended," Callas says.

"Well, not without an explanation," Nissa says.

"Relax, child," he tells her. "I got overly excited, that's all. You didn't do anything wrong."

Nissa isn't so sure about that. She isn't so sure at all.

A call for participation is announced, like any other. Diplomatic mission to the Magi of Edo. Primary roles: two ambassadors, three assistants, five guards. Secondary role for all: investigation. Rahah signs up as a guard, under yet another name, this one with agent clearance. She has a knack for names, and the access required to add them. She covers it up by adding a bunch of others, too, going through the request queues and performing evaluations like it's all totally normal. The guidelines are straight-forward enough. She's pretty sure she's doing the real ones right. Nobody has sent her anything complaining, or done any mass reverts.

She changes her form for the occasion, pushing herself to the limits of her shapeshifting abilities, which are, admittedly, pretty limited. She changes her facial structure as much as she can, which turns out to be slightly, makes her skin paler, her hair sleek and black and long, no longer the bushy brown mess that had stood out so much. The addition of horns and a tail mark her as Unezca now, a demonic elf, and the deep blue scales pointing her arms and legs and framing her face only solidify the look. She's still short, a patent midget, but a pair of hoverskate boots adds a few inches, even when they're turned off. On, levitating her rather off the ground, they add well over a foot.

She won't be able to change her form again for a few weeks, at best. But it should be enough. Now, with her boots and black Ciphreyan guard uniform, weapons on her thighs, hair pulled back in a tight knot and swinging braid, she doesn't even recognise her own reflection. The girl in the mirror, she looks too adept, too organised. Too old.

"Oh, I am surely mad," she tells herself, plonking her mask on top of her head. Her voice is different, too, deeper, raspier, changed with the rest. It's all little things, really. Easy things, adding up.

She puts on a shield, affixing the small blue gem to her forehead, right above her brows, like a piece of jewellery, and a faint glow spreads over her form before disappearing. It doesn't look utilitarian, but it is. That the colour of the gem perfectly matches her scales is entirely by design.

She goes to the hangar, meets the rest of the party at the ship, kind of hanging behind the bulk of the group, not trying to draw attention. Not show her guilt. She's real. Of course she is.

Stuff is coordinated. The woman in charge gets progressively more tired-sounding as she directs folks about, and Rahah realises it's Tersulles, a member of the Arbitration Committee.

"Okay, okay, fine," Tersulles says loudly, "everyone just stop."

Everyone just sort of stops, waiting for Tersulles to do something else. She takes the opportunity to count heads, winds up short, looks a bit concerned, and then comes around and spots Rahah.

"Oh, stars, would you not stand in back?" she says exasperatedly.

"Sorry!" Rahah says.

"Is this your first mission?" Tersulles asks, marginally more kindly.

"Er, yeah," Rahah says.

Tersulles turns back to the rest of the group. "Anyone else new too?"

"Is that a problem?" a guy says.

"No, just... who are you?" Tersulles asks, shooing people out of the way.

The guy, now visible, waves.

"Right," she says. "You two, make a note. If we ever pair off, don't pair with each other. Make sure you wind up with someone more experienced."

"But she's so cute and tiny! Why can't I?" the new guy asks.

Rahah glares at him.

"And how would you like to be called 'cute and tiny'?" Tersulles demands.

"Well, uh," he says, "It's okay? I mean, people do it all the time."

"And you're just straight up admitting this?" someone else asks.

"Okay, I did not need to know that," another person entirely says.

"Er, why do you assume we know what we're doing even if we have done this before?" another woman asks in the middle of all of this.

"Everyone, please!" Tersulles shouts, putting up her hands. "Stop. You're like cats!"

"Cute and fluffy?" someone suggests, and receives a withering glare for his comment.

Finally everyone stops, and Tersulles conjures up a console and activates overlays on everyone. Suddenly all their names are hovering above their heads for everyone to see, colour-coded in blue, purple, and red, with a small amount of status data as well.

Rahah looks up worriedly, but hers just says 'Sjerdami' like it's supposed to.

"Now we know who everyone is," Tersulles says. "So if you want to continue making annoying comments, I will know who you are." She goes on, losing the threatening tone, "Colours mark your roles: red's guards, blue's aids, and I and Keke Ama are apparently purple."

"So what's purple?" a guy named Varras asks.

"We're the ambassadors," Tersulles says. "Which you should know if you've read the brief." She pauses. "How many of you have read the brief?"

Three agents raise their hands, including Rahah and the other newbie, whose name is apparently Lhorys. Then, very hesitantly, another hand goes up as well. This hand belongs to Keke Ama.

Tersulles stares at the other ambassador worriedly.

"Wait, so there was a brief?" Varras says.

"Usually is," an elderly Nisai woman, Tull, says.

"But you didn't read it either?" Varras asks her, looking a bit relieved.

Tersulles sighs. "I must honestly wonder," she says, "What those who hold our organisation in high regard would think if they saw this."

"Oh, we're totally professional," Tull says. "We just need to put on our professional faces first. Isn't that right?"

"Unequivocally," Amanstani says. "Arbitrator, come on. Tell us what we need to know to pretend to be professionals."

Tersulles gives everyone a moment just to see if they care to continue to irritate her before going on. "As you all would know if you had actually read the brief," she says irately, "this is a diplomatic mission to the Magi of the galaxy of Edo. I will be acting as primary ambassador, with Keke Ama as secondary. You all will be acting as assistants and guards, and generally pretending to be real professionals." She glares around at the group. "You all remember which you signed up to be, right?"

The agents nod.

"Sure," Amanstani says. "I'm a guard, right?" Her name is in blue, though, clearly marking her as an aid.

Tersulles ignores this. "Because if not, again, you're coloured accordingly," she says. "I also want you to observe the Edo while we do this. See what stands out. See what feels off. There may be undercurrents in their worlds that we do not yet know, and it is your job to follow up on them." She pauses. "That being said, this is a low-priority mission. Should things go... awry, simply get out. Retreat to a safehouse. Don't everyone get killed or come pester me about it, or pester me about getting killed. Any questions?"

An apparent Tenenbaume raises a hand slightly.

"Yes?" Tersulles asks.

"Awry how?" Tenenbaume asks.

"Awry," Tersulles responds. "Wrong. Problems. Catastrophic failure. Anything from and up to rabid squirrels to imploding planets. Completely overreacting regardless of the situation is fine, as long as you remember your fellow agents and don't get them killed. Please, do not get them killed. Or me. I will be very upset if you get me killed on what is supposed to be a low-priority, low-risk mission to peaceful words."

Tenenbaume raises his hand again. "How completely is 'completely overreacting'?" he asks.

"Like if we implode the planet in reaction to rabid squirrels," Tull suggests.

"That seems excessive," Aa says.

"Exactly!" Tull tells him.

"We do want to avoid excessive loss of life, damages, or anything up to or including starting a war," Tersulles replies.

Tenenbaume raises his hand again. Tersulles just stares at him flatly.

"Define 'excessive'."

"Gods take me now," Tersulles mutters. "You're not cats. You're... somehow worse. I'm herding something worse than cats."