When we next recombined on ʔetekeyerrinwuf, we unlocked the gifts of Phage in our selves that were there, too.

I was able to see the process of traveling the Tunnel more clearly, and it didn’t bother me.

I suspected I could see a way to actually move from one side to the other without making a copy, but I also saw that that was just a matter of semantics. The same kind of thing happened from moment to moment, just by the process of thinking.

I could see that I was truly me, truly present in both places simultaneously, the same person on either side of the Tunnel, and would continue to be until I was ready to be more.

And when I talked to Sarah, she said she saw and understood the same thing.

It was also easier to visualize, comprehend, and remember certain details, such as the difference in time between our two homes.

The Tunnel was basically a wormhole. Each end of it experienced the warping of space/time appropriate for its velocity. But it was also a whole, and kept in sync with itself. Which meant that, so long as you were traveling back and forth via the Tunnel, a second spent on one side was also a second spent on the other. But not so for someone trying to travel the long way.

It was a literal time machine. Protected from paradox by the fact that its two ends were traveling at relativistic speeds away from each other.

So, I could say, for all practical purposes, ‘etekeyerrinwuf days are divided up into sixteen units that we could call Sunspot hours, though their word for it translates into ‘digit’, like a finger or toe. And that those Sunspot hours were 7,002 Earth seconds long, or 116.7 Earth minutes.

I could point out that their years were longer, too. Both by number of days and by number of seconds. I don’t want to put a full translation of calendars here, though.

The important detail was that we started keeping track of that difference without assistance fairly quickly. Without really thinking about it.

Phage’s gifts did help significantly.

We could more easily manage our own processing of any given energy, including sensory and emotional impacts. Though, going beyond a certain amount of pushing that threatened to fundamentally change who and what we were. But, it also meant that managing and completing our projects was easier. And that Sarah and I were less in the way of Ashwin doing the same.

Ashwin finished the first round of editing nems book only a few days after we’d accepted Phage’s gift.

Karen was ecstatic.

We reminded her that we wanted to keep to the mid-line schedule for all future projects, and stages of this one, to give ourselves the room to flounder and for life to interrupt us, if we ever needed it. If we happened to get it done faster, so much the better.

She happily accepted that and went right back to work.

Us being so surprisingly easy to work with may have made her more receptive to some of Ashwin’s objections to her red edits.

She asked if she could meet any of the characters from the book, not understanding that Phage was the only one that had been named that was actually part of our Earthly system. She specifically wanted to talk to Metabang, or Mutabenga.

She must have got it into her mind that the Sunspot was part of our inworld, despite how we’d told her otherwise. Or, if she accepted that it was an actual, real physical place, that we hadn’t clearly expressed to her the cost of traveling through the Tunnel.

And we didn’t feel comfortable lying, and saying that they were purely fictional, when clearly Phage was not.

So we asked Mutabenga if it wanted to join us. And then, to be fair to the other authors of the Sunspot Chronicles, we extended our invitation to them as well. And our system grew.

Aunti Zero’s pulled through in less than a week, and was open again in time for our next meeting with the Collective of Pluralities, or the Terran Collective. Still, it had been a real scare, and the lost days of business impacted both the owners and the employees.

They’d lost two of their baristas to the shuffle, and had to hire replacements, and we argued about whether or not we were physically and emotionally up for trying to take one of the slots.

Peter was adamant that we should not, and with a glance at the potentials we could all see he was right. Though Abacus, author of the second book of the Chronicles, quipped that Peter couldn’t see that he was right, he was just creating his own principle to stick to based on ideals and his pride in supporting our writing and artwork.

Which was OK.

And Erik and Beau started making plans with Rräoha to take the Murmuration on a sailing trip around the Earth over the next year. And we had to come to terms with that.

If we went with them, which I know I wanted to do, we would be failing our own projects in a worse way than if we took the barista job.

But then, if we didn’t, the Collective would be stretched across the planet by however much further they’d sailed each day, and we didn’t have the Sunspot’s Network to meet over, or the Tunnel to travel between systems.

Erik did claim to have a gateway in his system, as he’d called our Tunnel. It’s not a completely unusual thing for someone to perceive within themselves, plural or not. The Troops for Trudy Chase had written about theirs in When Rabbit Howls, and you can read that. There are Internet groups consisting of gateway systems sharing their experiences. 

But, none of us, not even Phage, could perceive his gateway or discern how it might work.

If it was there, it was incompatible with us.

We decided to assume it was there. Let the Eriks and their Collective of the cuttlecrabs be the scientists of their own system. If he or they figured anything out about it, we’d learn of it. But it wouldn’t be a way of communicating any better than an internet connection or a cellphone, once they were all underway.

Sarah asked Phage if it could somehow split or copy our end of the Tunnel, and place Tunnels in the psyches of Erik and the Murmuration.

The answer, for one reason or another, was no. Like as happened with Phage on occasion, there was no explanation.

And, consigning ourselves to losing regular contact with our closest friends starting sometime in the Spring, we started getting used to spending more time with Peter and Abigail as a household.

We started going out to dinner every time Peter got a paycheck. He’d save money for it over the course of the two weeks, and celebrate being able to do so by taking us out. We paid for our share whenever we could, when we did something that brought in a boost of money from our Patreon.

We let the dead laptop rot, and started using the computers at the library for our word processing, when we didn’t want to rely on the chintzy phone we had. And that worked well enough.

If we ever got a large enough check from our publisher, then we’d buy a new computer.

That was the plan.

Abigail started to want to cuddle when we were watching cartoons, and Sarah was amenable to that for simply having more physical human contact. But we didn’t know what to do about the offensiveness of her hair gel.

Finally, Niʔa mentioned it, saying, “Our body is not compatible with your hair, Abigail. We are having a reaction to the fragrance that we cannot quell. Can we find you an alternative treatment for it?”

Abigail looked flummoxed, but then started looking for something else she liked just as much that maybe wouldn’t bother us. And that was informative to both me and Sarah.

Meanwhile, on ʔetekeyerrinwuf, we started making more friends.

We had energy there, and no bodily pain what-so-ever, and time, and no obligations.

It was bewildering, shocking after every re-merging, and exhilarating.

We decided to explore as much as the ship as we possibly could.

Some days, we went everywhere together. And some, we went as far apart as we could and maintained our mental link, just as if we were in our system together back home, reporting back to each other on what we saw.

And that was just the physical parts of the ship. We’d decided not to explore the more diverse corners of the Network until we’d become familiar with the corporeal halls, trees, rocks, and waters of ʔetekeyerrinwuf.

And we wanted to meet people who were at least somewhat closer to our age, and we figured we could only find them in the cities of the Garden.

Sarah did end up accelerating her growth there, but not by taking any memories “artificially” as she put it. 

Without using any Network tricks, she used her gift from Phage to push her neural processing to be more amenable to learning languages, to make it easier for her to choose for it to be her new special interest. And then she had Mutabenga coach and lead her in learning Inmararräo as she boldly tried to engage with any stranger she encountered who wanted to talk to her.

She learned the language so fast, she did end up triggering migraines back on Earth in the process, but they were minor and more easily treatable now that our whole system was gifted.

Interestingly, on ʔetekeyerrinwuf there was less call to use Phage’s gifts than on Earth, even though we had more freedom to use them.

Aside from the language gap, and just playing around to see what we could do, there just weren’t the same degree of stressors and frustrations that usually prompted us to daydream about having magical powers of destruction and mayhem, or the ability to fly away from all our troubles.

And almost everyone else there was simply using their gifts to prolong their lives and shape their bodies to be closer to what they wanted them to be. Or to assist them to make things, craft things, examine things, and explore the world.

Really, after a short while, we realized it was just the same as using our eyes, ears, nose, and other senses. And sometimes, occasionally, like using our muscles.

But no. We were not gods amongst gods. We were surrounded by people.

I make this seem idyllic.

And for us it was.

But we were children to them, and kept that way until we declared we were ready for more. We had full rights as citizens of ʔetekeyerrinwuf, but we were living in the peaceful part of the world, and we were not engaging with the greater politics of the place. And we didn’t have to.

Like on Earth, we had the habit of keeping our heads down and just living our lives. And like many people in many countries on Earth, we never really saw the worst of any of the strife there. Relatively speaking.

Not during that time, at least.

Overall, they were experiencing a time of peace, though. We were told that much by anybody. It had not always been like this.

There’d be time for a deeper participation later. Maybe centuries later.

So, we explored.

And we met people.

And we started to get used to the culture.

And there was a particular person I met.

—

“Goresh! Come! If you will, I have something to show you!” gems voice rang out from across Fra’s central Septagon of Food. I will let gem call me ‘Goresh’ in my book.

The place was a regular septagon, with equal sides, an open floor at the intersection of several walkways, where booths, benches, and tables were arrayed and where artisans and amateurs and anyone else could gather and partake in food however they wanted to.

It was a gigantic kitchen. An eatery. A convention. A park. And it was big enough to be dotted with smaller trees. And the roofing that sheltered parts of it were also planters, covered in things I could only call mosses and ferns and bushes, some of them flowering.

I could give you exact measurements and numbers of people, easily, but that’s not the way we do things here. And I don’t want to anymore.

Nifirri was not so far across the Septagon that we couldn’t see each other. It was the sight of me emerging from the crowd as Sarah and I stepped into the place that had prompted the call. And there was, for the moment, a clear line of sight between the two of us.

“Go,” Sarah said. “I want to go that way.” She pointed Spinward, to one of the nearer sides of the Septagon, where somebody was making a spectacle of frying things in a gigantic pan.

The Septagon was a real challenge for both of us, for engagement, because neither of us had yet gotten over our autistic fears of food. But, really, we were only challenging ourselves. Nobody would push anything on us, and we’d never really had any trouble with the smells.

The agony was in trying to decide to risk putting something in our mouths, on our own. Even with our nanite exobodies being impervious to poison and able to cease sensation on a command, the memory of an overwhelming food, along with a lifetime of being traumatized by food on Earth, made it hard.

But we were there to push ourselves on purpose. Because it was safe.

And that celebration of frying things over there certainly looked fun.

I nodded, and we parted ways. We could always feed each other memories, emotions, or sensory experiences as we went, no matter how far apart we were.

And I started walking across the Septagon, toward my new friend, Nifirri.

Nifirri beamed at my approach, hefting a paper bowl.

Nifirri was twenty-six Earth years old, and, like the Pembers were, covered in something we might as well call feathers.

Unlike the authors of the Sunspot Chronicles, I get to describe people in terms of the Earth animals they resembled. Though there often weren’t many parallels.

Nifirri had six limbs, like an insect, but not. Like me, with my legs and wings, but not. And gem had a tail. And the lower half of them had a stature similar to that of a giant ground sloth. Gem walked around on two legs, using their tail as the final support of a tripod. And gem was generally slow about it, but not too slow.

Gems larger arms were the next set of limbs up, and they were long enough to reach gems mouth. Gem didn’t have to bend over to pick anything up, and it was with gems left such hand that gem held the bowl of food.

Gems smaller arms were folded across gems chest, just below gems equivalent to a collar bone. If gem were a fauna, we’d probably call them feeding arms, but that’s kind of rude to do for a person. Gem used them for all sorts of fiddly work, and gems eyes and mouth were both situated on gems head to easily access anything gem was doing with those arms. Which currently was nothing more than hold gems poncho-like garment close to gems body.

Gems larger hands had three digits each, with hefty claws. And gems smaller ones had four fine, highly articulate digits that gem usually kept curled up and tucked away.

And then there was gems bizarre, beautiful face! Mouth slightly open, tongue visible behind mostly flat teeth, or what might as well have been teeth, literally stretching nearly from ear to ear like a grin at all times. Though gems ears were hidden entirely by gems plumage, and I had yet to learn what they might look like. Short, fine hair-like feathers flowed away from gems mouth and covered gems whole head and the rest of gems body seamlessly, a dark, silvery gray, but punctuated around gems scalp and back of neck by longer, thicker black feathers with bulbous ends, almost like tiny peacock feathers, or the brilliant vermillion plumage of the Pembers. 

Nostrils, like ears, were hidden. There may have been four or more of them, for all I knew. But I had a sense of where they were as a patch of plumage on the front of gems face billowed as gem breathed.

And Nifirri’s eyes were set wide and large, big black orbs more to the side of their head than the front, with contours of gems skull sloping away from them to give the widest field of vision possible. And, like many Earth creatures, they could blink, but not quite in the way I ever expected. Nifirri blinked from back to front, and it looked adorable.

I’ve spent some time trying to find a Terran animal that has a head closest in shape to Nifirri’s, so you can visualize gem. And, so far, I’m saying that it is the Palmato gecko, but it really isn’t quite right. Nifirri’s head had more room for gems central nervous system than that, for one. And the feathers are another difference, of course.

And as I made my way to my friend, I passed by people I could badly describe as a polar bear crossed with a crocodile, an emu with monkey arms, a hippopillar, a velociraptor-maybe-not, a skinkweasel, and about six leafy-sea-dragon-axolotls with antlers of various neon colors who were obviously Crew or Tutors in their favorite nanite exobodies. Only they really weren’t like axolotls or leafy sea dragons at all, just like someone’s cute, cartoony, totally inaccurate dragon inspired by some of their traits. Like Eh.

And none of this phased me anymore. These were my people, now, but not my person.

The wilder fashions of the Crew, who were technically no longer called Crew or recognized as having any more rights than others, had inspired me to take liberties with my own exobody. I only call them Crew here because we do so for so many of the books of the Sunspot Chronicles. They’re really now only referred to as Elders or Ancestors, and even their age is not all that exceptional as there are more of them than any of the rest of us. But that age brings about boredom, which brings about wilder and wilder and more elaborate experimentation. They’d found ways to coax the nanites of their exobodies to do so many different things.

I’d always kind of wanted tattoos, and now I could have tattoos that glowed. Or, markings, really. Big, curving and zagging stripes that I could turn up in brilliance to match a desk lamp in power if I wanted to. Against my greens and coppers, I had these glowing scales set to pulse with golden to violet gradients of light.

This was an elementary modification, really, but I liked it a lot.

My wings were dark, because I hadn’t yet figured out how I wanted to decorate them.

Nifirri hadn’t yet seen my latest alterations, and as I got close enough, gem craned gems lengthy neck back and forth to get a look with each eye.

“Hailing Scales, Goresh,” gem said in conversational tones as I stepped up to gem, smelling the spicy nuttiness of gems dish of food. “You are really figuring those stripes out!” Then, as my nose neared gems bowl, gem pulled it gently away, and said, “No, this is not what I was talking about.”

“I know that dish anyway,” I said.

“I know.”

“And thanks for the compliment.”

“Ah, do not thank me for something I have foisted on you!”

“Sorry, it’s what I do.”

“Yes it is. Come!”

I tried to think of what gem could have for me this time. Maybe a new game to play. Or yet another book. Gem knew I liked games and books, and that Sarah and I hoarded Fluffy Fauna. So those were usually the things gem had found to show to me, in case I wanted to live with them for a while. But also, just simply so I could appreciate someone else’s elaborate Art with gem.

We walked around a couple of tables full of people and a cooking booth full of steam, and came to a circle of people watching an Elder and a Child playing a game of Sentences. Which I’d seen before.

Sentences is a tile game, a little like Scrabble, but worse. Each tile had a Fenekere character on it. And no two tiles had the same character. And you had to keep a hand of five tiles, and alternate with the other player according to a sparse set of rules, to use your tiles to create four character Fenekere words. And then, with those words, create a poem in a single block.

Which meant, thanks to the way Fenekere worked, you could read four completely different sentences from that one block of words.

And then you would keep making these blocks of four sentences each until you ran out of interest in the game or ran out of sufficient tiles.

And you’d talk with everyone around you about what the sentences meant and how to interpret them.

There were 155 tiles, one for each character.

And, with them, you could spell most derivatives of the 923,521 Fenekere root words.

And that’s the part I’m referring to when I say “worse”. 

There’s no misspelled word. There’s no nonsense word. Only really obscure words you’ve never seen before, no matter how old you are. And all sentences can make sense, they just might not fit a given context or whatever it is you’re trying to say.

It’s not really a competitive game. It’s more of a cooperative exploration of this ridiculous language that’s used to command ʔetekeyerrinwuf’s Network and systems, and in which the oldest surviving myths are written. Through a certain amount of chance.

I’m not going to get any further into Fenekere here. We’re doing that on our website, and hopefully in the back of our published books. Sparingly.

But I was now vaguely confused and worried that Nifirri had forgotten I’d attempted to play this impossible game once.

No, it wasn’t that.

“I thought you were going to bring me food,” someone in the crowd said to Nifirri, when they saw gem eating from the bowl.

“I did bring you food,” Nifirri told them. “I brought enough for both of us. But I brought you something else.”

Uh, oh.

If I hadn’t made it clear, I had sort of a crush growing on Nifirri. And I didn’t know what to do about it. It seemed like Nifirri was excited about knowing me, too. And here we were adding someone else in the mix, and I couldn’t tell what the implications were.

Was I just about to meet a new friend, and life would be better, with no extra complications?

Or, what was Nifirri telling this person about me? What was gem going to say just now?

Was gem going to confirm or dash my hopes?

Just as I was thinking about that, I got a flash of vision from Sarah, from across the Septagon, of me standing amongst the Ktletaccete with Nifirri talking to gems friend. Everyone around me was wearing at least something. Usually just a head dress, a sash, a poncho, maybe sandals, straps, a harness for carrying their favorite things or artwork they’d created. Something.

You’re naked, the thought accompanied the image.

I also got a good whiff and taste of what she was eating, and my simulated stomach decided to growl in response to it.

I have my glowy tattoos, I responded. Besides, I’m a dragon. I’ve been naked in our head since we were born.

It’s still funny.

The new person, who looked a lot like a fox crossed with a monkey covered in orange scales, and who came up to my elbows, looked up at me and perked up their ears, pupils dilating, and opened their mouth in a panting grin, “Hello! My name is Geri. My pronoun is rrem.” And then rrem waited for my greeting.

Ktletaccete do not introduce each other. That’s considered rude. You introduce yourself.

Geri is pronounced very much like Gary, but with the second syllable stressed. Sort of the stereotype of a French accent. Geh-RI. My borrowed knowledge of the language also told me immediately that Geri means ‘light of the people with naked tails’ in ancient Inmararräo.

Now, I had a choice. I could introduce myself by pronouncing my name and pronouns perfectly, as I do in English, because I can. Or I could dictate how this new person should mispronounce them in Inmararräo. I couldn’t bring myself to lie.

“Hello. My name is Goreth, and my pronoun is they,” I said, matching their smile. Smiling on command, or without something to make me naturally delighted, is still hard for me. But I was beginning to find delight in meeting people, so I managed it.

“Goresh?”

I looked at Nifirri, who had not stopped beaming, and said, “Sure.”

Nifirri turned to me and asked, “May I tell Geri all about you? Because I have been wanting to for some time now.”

Oh, OK, I thought. “What are you going to say?” I asked aloud, not via any private channels, by way of also indicating that I wasn’t too concerned about what Geri might hear.

I glanced at Geri again. Rrem was the one wearing a knick-knack harness. And rrem also had a set of four nubbins of horns on rrems head, between rrems very expressive big ears. The front pair were twice as long as the back pair. 

Also, rrems ears were interesting. They were set maybe a bit further back on rrems head than you might expect for any Terran animal. And while they were parabolic, making them look, as a basis, very similar to fox ears, they had sort of an elongated S-curve to the lower edge of them that gave them flared tips. The outside, or back, of rrems ears were covered in tiny scales, but the skin on the inside was bare and a velvety violet color, similar to the inside of rrems mouth and nostrils.

Normally, orange and violet would be a jarring color combination, but these hues were not clashing. A dusty orange and a deep violet with subtones of indigo.

I realized I was paying so much attention to Geri’s ears that I missed most of what Nifirri was saying, and caught, “… and I thought that you two might have a lot in common.”

There’s a trick where you can ask your nanite neural terminal, or your equivalent Network management protocols, to replay words that you missed for you. It’s really handy when you have auditory processing impairments. As someone who’d already been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of accommodations open to me, I completely forgot to use it.

I did remember to tilt my head up instead of just nod. A definitive ‘yes’. I’d been living on ʔetekeyerrinwuf long enough that at least that was second nature. I’d never intended to say ‘no’.

But now I definitely had the impression that Nifirri was playing matchmaker between me and Geri.

Nifirri gleefully turned to Geri and started babbling about how we met and what we liked doing together, which was mostly talk. We could talk for days and days.

Was Geri even my type? 

If rrem liked to talk like Nifirri, rrem probably was, actually.

But, if Nifirri was actually trying to match me with Geri, why? Just because gem thought we were compatible? Or had gem picked up on my interest in gem and was trying to give me what gem thought was a viable alternative.

And if the two of us were being matched, was I actually ready to have another person in my life? 

Despite how cuddly Abigail had become, I could certainly use more physical contact and affection. Especially now that I was living two lifetimes at the same time. Double the bodies and consciousnesses and you do actually double the touch starvation.

But I also felt socially and emotionally full.

Sarah and I had more than tripled the size of our tiny system in just one year, and now we also had two cities to navigate, and a whole culture to integrate into. And we were still working on artwork and writing and getting some books published.

I had a long, long way to go to match the number of people I knew on the Sunspot with the number of people I knew on Earth, and I was eager to do so. But, something in my being was telling me to slow down, too.

How did dating and courting work on ʔetekeyerrinwuf, anyway? Since I didn’t know, I thought I probably shouldn’t participate. At least not until I grilled Mutabenga about it.

“May I ask you a question, Goresh?” Geri asked.

“Please do,” I said, again having missed a chunk of discussion.

“What are your favorite Earth games and what are they like?” rrem asked.

Well.

I felt myself become more present as a subject I was very familiar with was presented to my mind.

“Well,” I said. “I’m going to sit down for this, because it could be a long one.” And then I just plopped my butt on the ground, hardly changing my posture otherwise, and sent Sarah an update on what I was doing, asking if she wanted to join us. “Most popular Earth games, where I come from, are built around competition, which I do enjoy. But, in my lifetime, in my culture there, there has been a big increase in solitaire and cooperative games, where you play against the algorithm of the game itself. But, conceptually, those still involve a kind of competition. And there’s this one game that doesn’t do even that…”

Don’t tell them about that, Sarah thought at me. Most of their games are like that one.

Right at the same time, Geri said, “I’m sorry to interrupt. I’ll prompt you back on topic. But, is that your favorite game, the one you like to play the most?”

I tilted my head, “Not truly? It is the one I’m currently most enamored with as a concept because there aren’t many games like it where I come from. And I have a lot of fun playing it. But it’s not an old favorite. Not the one that gives me the most sense of satisfaction and enjoyment. But I’m a, uh, fibrillator and it takes a while for new things to really grow on me and I like my familiar things.”

Geri tilted rrems head back, which wasn’t as much of a feat as one might expect because rrem hadn’t really been looking up at my face while we spoke, “I know that feeling. Go on, if you like. You were saying ‘And there’s this one game that doesn’t do even that…’”

“It’s a game called Wanderhome, by Possum Creek Games” I said. “It’s what we call a table top role playing game. A game of make-believe.” I used words that didn’t translate specifically to ‘table top role playing game’ or ‘make-believe’ but that were their cultural equivalents. I pronounced the game company’s name as if in English. “Really, the quickest way to describe it is that it is like one of your games. It’s like this game here,” I gestured at the game of Sentences going on in front of us. “In which the simplest set of rules possible are provided, with prompts and language to work with, but instead of tiles you use each other’s imaginations as playing pieces. If that makes sense. It is basically cooperative storytelling. And we have a lot of games like that, but in this one, the rules explicitly state that the game isn’t about conflict, it’s about discovery, and very little is given to the players with which to construct conflict. And that is the unusual part that reminds me so much of this place. Which intrigues me, because it wasn’t made by any of us, anyone in my system. There are groups of groups of people’s work that went into it, too.”

“Interesting!”

“But, admittedly, my truly favorite game is a board game called, simply, Go,” I said. “It is nothing but conflict, distilled down to its most abstract form. But the reason I like it is because it’s so mathematically complex that degrees of mastery are extremely diverse, and often one player will be so good at it that their opponent will have no chance of beating them. And then it becomes an exercise in learning, the master teaching the student, and the both of them exploring the patterns of the game together. At least if the better player is at all graceful about it.” I tilted my head the other way as I watched Geri to see if rrem understood what I was saying. 

Not that rrem wasn’t smart enough, but that I didn’t really trust my command of the language to get it across well. 

When rrem jerked rrem’s chin up, I added, “It is important to note this game isn’t from my culture, either. It’s ancient, by Earth standards, and comes from a completely different group of people than from whom I’m descended. So, this is my interpretation and impression of the game, not theirs. But also, I do really like it because it involves bags or pots full of little stones, and it’s basically an instant hoard if you get a set.”

“What do you mean?”

Ooh. How to explain dragons to the Ktletaccete. I’d had some practice in the past few days, meeting new people like this. But I liked to revise my explanation each time.

I settled my front end down on top of my foreclaws, like a cat loafing, and wrapped my tail around myself, and lowered my head in thought. I’m not sure how this body language read to everyone around me, but it was comforting to me. Then I looked up again to talk.

“I’m a dragon,” I said, using their word ‘gerbesh’ for it, which basically just describes a creature, a fauna, not a person, that is very generally shaped like me. It’s really used to describe story monsters that are each very unique and tailored for their settings. 

But look at me. 

I’m saying that this is one of those really spooky coincidences that Ashwin had talked about. 

Ktletaccete basically have dragons, just like we do. Why and how, I don’t know. But there are some key differences, because Ktletaccete also seem to be dragons from my perspective. 

“I am an Earth dragon, specifically,” I said. “Except for a few very simple fauna and flora, and people like myself, Earth dragons really only exist in story books, and the Internet now. Dragons that look like I do now. On Earth, I looked like almost any other human.”

I now had a growing audience of more than just Nifirri and Geri. The two players had even stopped their game to listen in. This was unusual for Ktletaccete culture, as people usually asked before they joined in on listening to what people were saying publicly. What they were doing was bordering on rude. But, I was speaking out loud, too, and not using private Network channels. And that was also bordering on rude as well, forcing everyone to hear my story.

I was realizing, as I spoke, that Nifirri and Geri had started this by speaking out loud first.

I was realizing that everyone tended to do that around me.

I have been given some more observations about these nuances of culture, and what Nifirri and Geri had done, but first, more about Earth dragons.

I continued, “Earth dragons are a lot like your dragons in many ways. The story book versions, I mean. But, one of the things that Earth dragons do that your dragons do not, commonly, is hoard things. A dragon’s hoard is featured in many stories as a kind of treasure that the hero sets out to seek, or gains as a reward for killing the dragon. And I feel better if I have a manageable hoard. A hoard of anything. Currently I have a hoard of Fluffy Fauna, but I found that when I got my first Go set, I wanted to hug it.” I let that feeling of remembering that day inform my smile.

People around me smiled, all like the Ktletaccete they were.

“More recently, or maybe always, the dragon’s hoard has been used as a metaphor to represent the wealth of tyrants and billionaires,” I explained. “On Earth, there are a handful of people who exploit everyone else and collect something called money that represents power gained from their labor. And these people are called billionaires because they have billions of units of this money, while people like me have it in the tens or hundreds digits at most, at any given time.” Some of my listeners comprehended that, and I saw horrified looks on their faces. Or what I assumed were such. “As a dragon I do not aspire to be a billionaire. I find that offensive.”

More nods and smiles.

“But, I seem, for some reason, to have an instinct,” I said. “Maybe it’s a human instinct. Maybe it’s a trauma response, a habit for comfort that I formed from experiencing many traumatic things in my childhood. But I feel the need to have a hoard. And preferably an interesting but worthless hoard. One that I can share with my friends and talk about, but that I can’t sell for anything. Um, ‘to sell’ means to trade something for that money I was telling you about. And that’s ‘sell’, not ‘shell’, which is a very different thing and kind of beautiful.”

Someone in the back, on the far side of the game players, tilted their head to the right and upward, and speared me with their eyes.

I guessed that this meant they were asking me if they could talk to me, so I tilted my chin up while looking at them.

They were one of the Elders with the popular draconic bodies.

“Some of us remember what your money is,” they said, without introducing themself. “And since Eh has written their book,” ‘their’ was pronounced ‘shey’, unconjugated, an English import as Eh used, as I used, “many others have learned about it, too. It has been so long, though, thankfully, everyone finds it confusing. We call it ‘kyä’. It is such an old and previously forgotten word that it has not changed in pronunciation or meaning in over a hundred millennia.” The way that the Elder spoke ‘kyä’, it had sounded like a vicious curse word.

“I like that,” I said. “I wish that kyä did not ever exist.”

There were thoughtful Ktletaccete nods all around.

“My name is Goreth, and my pronoun is they,” I told the crowd. And then in the custom of being most grateful, “Your Art of listening teaches me.”

Pronouns in Inmararräo are not conjugated, so it’s best to pick your favorite form of your pronoun and just give people that. And an interesting thing about choosing to use ‘they’ instead of ‘them’ as the primary form of my pronoun is that in Inmararräo, ‘they’ sounds plural and ‘them’ sounds singular.

Anyway, that started a round of introductions, starting with the Elder that had spoken to me.

“I am Ngemereme, and my pronoun is ke,” ke said.

Ke is an exception. Ke is not plural. It is a Fenekere pronoun imported as is from that language. And, originally, the only people who had it for the longest time were Founding Crew members. But, I didn’t need that pronoun to indicate to me that this person was Founding Crew, because kes name did that work.

I took a moment to search my memory to see if I could spark a recollection of that artificial knowledge of what that name meant. And when it came to me, I suddenly felt as if I was in the presence of a deity observing kes mortal followers. My installed memories told me that kes name was like a title.

The Artist of Making Games.

When facing an ancient head of state who was instrumental in creating the world that I was now living in, I found that the name ‘the Artist of Making Games’ took on a very sinister cast to it.

The chances of just running into a Founding Crew member is very, very low. Considering the entire population of the Network, it’s maybe fifty-seven thousand to one at best, depending on what you consider to be the population of the Network. But, thanks to the efforts of Yarrayoaʔuf, a number of Elders who had been Founding Crew were spending more and more time amongst the Children and Monsters, the population that inhabited the Garden in organic bodies. They’re still seriously outnumbered there, but eventually you will meet one if you wander long enough, I supposed.

I’d met Eh upon arriving on ʔetekeyerrinwuf, of course. Eh makes it a habit to greet all newcomers, and to visit the most forgotten and marginalized people as well. Possibly an attempt at reconciliation for having been Senior Captain of their technocratic regime for so long.

Because of that, and because of what Eh had casually told me about their own past, I always had to reconcile in my mind these conflicting visions of the Founding Crew: mythical iconic revolutionary visionaries who had escaped fascism to try to create something better; retired defacto technocratic dictators; literal gods; and great, great, great, great etc. grandparents.

I tried to tell myself that these people were aliens. Their history was not the same as Earth’s. Their psychology wasn’t the same as humanity’s. Their sociology wasn’t the same. And on this ship, their circumstances really definitely weren’t the same.

According to them, no one on ʔetekeyerrinwuf could die without their express consent and intent, or without the nanites themselves being destroyed, such as in a nuclear blast, and killing everyone. And if that was indeed the case, if you were an iconoclastic cadre of transgender revolutionaries who’d created this new world for generations to come to benefit from your lessons, but then discovered that you’d made mistakes and set yourselves up as technocratic dictators for eternity, would you cling to that power? Would you graciously step aside? And if you stepped aside, would you all commit suicide and otherwise not face the consequences of your crimes? Or attempt to atone and hope to see the benefits of letting your children have their freedom? Would you, as an individual, choose to stick around just to make sure your peers weren’t going back on their commitment to let things be? Or what?

And if you decided to stick around, what would everyone else be able to do about it?

That’s a dilemma that Earth has not seen, and hopefully never will.

There was one concrete parallel I could compare all of this to, though. 

A system. 

There’s a theory that some people accept that system members never really die, and can’t be killed. Not while the body is living. They just go dormant for a long time, maybe the rest of the vessel’s life. But also maybe not. 

And what had happened on ʔetekeyerrinwuf was very, very similar to a lot of stories I’d read from other systems over the internet.

However, this was in the outworld. This was the history of a living people. People made of atoms. Atoms made of gluons, and muons, and quarks, and electrons. Or, at least, some of them were.

And here I was, trying to make the best of having permanently moved to this world. Much like how I’d had to make the best of being born on Earth, which also sucked. A lot.

But, then, like, there was this god talking to me like I was a tourist, and ke was just someone’s wise grandparent.

You’d think that after Ngemereme making kes presence known, all conversation would have stopped and no one would feel able to introduce themselves following ke.

That was not the case.

It was as if ke was just another person, and while I wheeled from the realization of who I had just met, everyone else introduced themselves. Including other people who were walking by and joining in.

It seemed like this group introduction session was drawing in even more of a crowd, becoming a spectacle itself.

I have a record of all the names and pronouns I was given, but it would be prohibitive to list them all here. I would need to get consent from everyone, which I could probably get, but it would also be a very long list.

This new phenomenon almost overshadowed my meeting Geri, in importance to my life. It did utterly distract me from my new friends for a moment, both of whom were thoroughly enjoying themselves, watching this happen.

I was gawking at Ngemereme, who was returning my look, when during a lull in introductions Geri turned to me and said, “You should meet the other Outsiders, if they consent.”