All told, we spent three days just hanging out in the Necropolis. Connie was trying to get permission for us to be lowered down the central shaft of the pit, something that apparently wasn't going well. Our little band of mercenaries headed out into the city and only checked in twice a day at lunch and dinner, as confident as everyone else that no harm could possibly befall us while we were here. I still hadn't gotten a very clear explanation why.

"Nobody would ever kill anyone here."

"Right. Sure. But if they did..."

"They wouldn't."

"So you say. But... look, Telen is evil. He threatened a toddler. I don't think he gives a shit."

Katrin looked frustrated. "If you... hypothetically, if..." she sighed, and ran one hand through her hair. "If someone did try to kill you here, they'd... well, they would... you can't feel it? You can't feel the... wrong-ness about even thinking that?"

"No. Maybe because I'm from another world?"

She shook her head, looking very uncomfortable. "I guess. Maybe."

"Wait, but doesn't this just make Cyne's thing about killing undead extra stupid? Because if it's this instinctive thing where you can't try to kill people here and nobody can articulate why, but we know for a fact you can kill zombies and shit with no problems... then I mean, whatever big spooky force is making the rules is saying he's wrong and it's okay. Right?"

"I don't know. I never thought it made sense. I've met one other person with the same beliefs, but we didn't talk about it much - he ran a stall where I bought vegetables, so we just made the normal small talk. They think... okay, so do you know what life mana is? As opposed to just... normal, generic mana?"

I'd talked to Connie about it some, both when she originally told me about the different types of things I could learn with a Dumine and later when we were chatting about what I might pick. "Yeah, but I'm not clear on why it being its own type changes anything. Like, Connie has that big canister of crystalized time mana, but the way she tried to explain it life mana is different somehow?"

"Right. Same idea but there are some important differences. Making... I don't know the technical term for it. Flavored mana, let's call it. Making flavored mana is hard, and doesn't accomplish much in most cases. That time mana Connie has? Ridiculously hard to make, and while it's able to do time-based magic easier it's worse at everything else and if it were released it would cause all sorts of havoc. Plus, since there's so much of it it would interfere with anyone trying to do non-time magic in the area."

"Yeah, she said when she messed up the lab she stole it from a bunch of canisters like it failed and turned the whole place into a radioactive crater. Shit, that didn't translate well. Radiation is like... a frequency of light that you can't see but fucks up your body and... man, I don't know how to explain it. It doesn't matter, it wasn't literally radioactive I don't think. It was just... too much time mana I guess, and she said a bird flew in and just turned to dust."

Katrin shook her head, eyes wide. "That's... terrifying. But that's a really extreme case, and it's rare for people to have that much crystalized mana because it's a pain to make. Back to life mana though... that stuff is everywhere. All living things have a little in them, but it's hard to use unless you're using it specifically for life magic and even then it's dangerous; use it all up and you just drop dead. More importantly, if you shove life mana into something it comes to life. It's easiest with organic material, which is why zombies and stuff are the most common example, but you can do it with anything. It typically gains a little bit of... flexibility? Like you would think that would need a different type of magic entirely, but if you shove enough life mana into a steel rod it might start wiggling around like a snake. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and I think some of it depends on how you've developed your Dumine.

"But that animating force, that's where Cyne's thing comes in. There's something, an intelligence of some kind, that animates objects once they have enough life mana. And then if you disrupt that energy, it goes away. So he would say - this is based off of a conversation with the greengrocer rather than Cyne but pretty sure it's the same - that there's a chance you're harming that force, in a way that's the same as harming a person. And so, you know, you shouldn't do it. Just in case."

"I mean... I guess I was dismissing the idea that zombies could have feelings mostly based off of stories from my world, which probably have nothing in common with how anything actually works. But even so, they're... I mean they aren't smart, right? They're like rabid animals."

Katrin got that look on her face that said "I want to lecture you on this but I'm worried I'm wrong about it". She had that look a lot when we talked about this sort of thing.

"There are ways to make them intelligent, but that doesn't have anything to do with life mana - or not by itself. Normally they're just sort of... following a set of rules. They can seem intelligent but they don't actually understand what they're doing. I think."

"Okay, so they're like NPCs in a video game. Which of course means nothing to you. Man, I wish my phone worked. I have Chrono Trigger on there, and a Tetris knock-off, and a bunch of pictures. I want you to see where I'm from. Oh! Shit!"

Katrin jumped up and spun around, looking everywhere. "Is there a bug? Or?"

"No, shit, sorry. I just got excited. Okay so once you're all... recovered, or whatever, and you can practice spells again -"

"I'm fine now, it wasn't that bad."

"In a week, when you're all recovered and can practice spells again..."

"Yes mom..."

"Then you should look for some mind reading shit in there. Something that uh... like, hopefully, it would let me be in charge of what I show you."

Katrin opened the spell book and began to flip through. "Maybe. There are a lot of spells in here, but I don't think I've seen any for memories. There are some I can't even begin to read yet, maybe memory magic is trickier. This is mostly light, and heat, and force. Some other stuff in here, but it's got a pretty heavy focus on combat. I'll keep an eye out. You might also want to think about getting memory magic yourself, especially since you think there's something wrong with yours."

"Yeah. Maybe. Man, now I'm thinking about Earth and I really want a chocolate milkshake. I can't even imagine what to compare one to, I guess I need to learn more about the food here. Here, what's this?" I held up one of the little leaves from the salad I'd been half-heartedly munching on.

"You've had that before. That's kinat, it's in everything. We had it last night, too, but a different kind. The little ball things?"

It didn't look anything like what I'd eaten the night before. "Seriously? That's the same plant?"

"Oh sure, it just depends on how you grow it I think, or... like, different breeds. Any time you eat a vegetable, it's probably kinat. Do they not have something like that where you're from?"

I thought about it, but I'd never really paid any attention to farming. "I don't think so. We don't just do variations on the same thing, we have tons of different plants. Like, broccoli, or kale, or cabbage, or brussels sprouts, or cauliflower, or... I don't know. Some of the plants here are pretty similar. The animals, too - I saw a cat the other day, it looked exactly like the cats on Earth. There must have been some point where things just freely crossed over, I think."

Katrin reached down and ran a finger along the seam of my jeans, which I had decided to wear - with so many different cultures mingling in the Necropolis, some odd clothes didn't seem likely to stand out. "Would you ever want to go back?"

"If I could be sure I would be able to end up back here, I think I'd go back to go shopping. Maybe see some people, though... yeah, not really anyone I need to say goodbye to. But I'd snag a solar charger for my phone, and some other stuff you can't get here." I'd actually made a whole shopping list in my head, especially when we were camped out somewhere uncomfortable. Jeans, underwear, and socks. A laptop, and some solar panels. A bunch of camping gear, if I was going to be traveling in the wilderness. Maybe a gun - couldn't hurt, right? "But yeah, I'd come back. This world is fucked up and there's monsters and shit, but on Earth it's... well there's no magic, and without the chance of learning magic it feels like the people in charge just make it harder and harder for everyone else to catch up to them, you know? Like if poor people could spontaneously learn to control the flow of time I think it would really mix things up. Not that it matters to me right now, since I cannot read this fucking book. I wish my bracelet worked for it."

Katrin looked thoughtful as she reached over and snagged a few more leaves out of my salad bowl and popped them in her mouth. "Well," she said around the half-chewed food, "could be it's making it harder. Trying to translate it and failing. It might actually be easier with the bracelet off."

It seemed worth a try, so I fiddled with the nearly invisible latch until the bracelet came free and set it aside. I flipped to the page Katrin had marked as being one of the simplest spells - basically the arcane equivalent of a match - and stared until I went cross-eyed.

"Anything?" Katrin asked.

"No, this is useless."

Katrin punched me. I turned to look at her and she was staring at me, eyes wide. "Ouch! What was that for?"

"I asked if you saw anything and you said no, this is useless."

"Right, it..."

Wait. I looked down at the bracelet. Then back up to Katrin. She had said 'aduzar ikosi' and I had replied 'az, hunak az do azartereku beliu'. How was the bracelet still working when I wasn't wearing it? Had it just seeped in over time? I'd only been in this world for a month, but the bracelet did leave me sort of aware of how the words were coming out and so it made sense that I would learn some as I went. "Holy shit," I said in English, and then "Uh... gurutz sentoe." yeah, that was right. Katrin giggled, and then launched into a whole excited rant that I was catching about every third word of. I waved at her to stop. "Wait. Too much. Too fast. I'm still... shit. I'm still... bad."

That just made her laugh harder.

Soon it was time for me to swap out siblings and hang with Errod - I'd promised him that I wouldn't leave him alone with our refugees, but I had to admit I'd been avoiding them as much as possible. They kept treating me like some sort of savior, but all I could see was a bunch of homeless kids and it was dredging up some memories that I really preferred to keep down.

"I had nightmares about them last night. They were all kids I knew from the group homes, and I had somehow adopted them but then fucked up and they got taken away. Put back into foster care, just dragging trash bags of clothes behind them. Fuck. I don't want to be responsible for a bunch of kids, I can barely take care of myself. I'm not even nineteen."

Errod smirked. "You're not anywhere near nineteen. You need to remember to convert your years over."

"Ugh. Fuck these strange long months and long years and base six counting and... I don't know, I think your inches are shorter than mine but I can't really tell because I was never good at eyeballing that anyway. Fine. Sure. I'm not even sixteen years old. Better?"

"Yes. Look, I'm not trying to be a jerk. You don't want to raise any suspicion by getting your own age wrong."

"But being a jerk is part of it, right?"

"It's a perk, yes."

"Okay but it turns out I'm not done complaining. Because not only am I almost sixteen rather than almost nineteen, in base six that's almost thirty-one which is even stranger. I'm either a few years younger than I should be or way older. I hate it. Base ten is better, you guys are hitting triple digits by the time you reach thirty-six."

"But that makes sense. Thirty-six is a very important number. It's the number of planes, the number of days in a month, the number of different types of gifts you can get in the Duminere. Well, if you count the ones you can't actually select."

"Fine. Whatever. It's still stupid." I think we both knew that I was just being cranky because I had started talking about foster care. Things got uncomfortably quiet, and I was just staring at the kids across the room. There were five of them - three girls and two boys. They were uncertain of their ages, and when I had asked their names two of them just burst into tears because they couldn't remember.

"My daddy is a blacksmith," one had volunteered, "I see him sometimes when I'm sleeping. Hammering, and there's sparks. And I see my mommy sometimes too. In my dreams she braids my hair, and... and sometimes I do bad things. Very bad things. But she still braids my hair, every night."

They all had similar stories. It was impossible to say if the dreams were actual memories or just escapist fantasies, and only one remembered the name of a town. Errod had looked it up at a sort of cartographer's guild, and it was nowhere near us. Still, it was on the list for as soon as we were done finding the lost Duminere. Connie said she had enough money to keep them in our current place until we got back up out of the pit, and then we figured they would just come with us through Nusos which was supposedly not too dangerous as long as everyone stayed together. At that point they could even get a chance to go into the Duminere potentially, which meant that even if we had to just turn them over to some kind of orphanage any who hadn't gotten a dud would be able to find apprentice work somewhere their skills would be useful.

"How long do you think they were there? With the Sargher?"

Errod watched them, huddled together across the room playing some sort of game with little sticks in a pile. "I think a long time. I've heard that they stole children, but I was never sure it was true. To have five of them in that one spot, though - it must be fairly common. It makes me want to go back and... well."

"Maybe some day. I don't think we're in any position to take on all of fairyland right now."

"Elba over there, she seems pretty sure she was just four years old. She's the most certain of them, and I'd say she's probably eight and a half now."

"And that's your stupid long years."

"It's... yes, it's normal years that everyone in this whole world and the planes beyond use like normal people."

"Like stupid people that can't just have a normal year."

"And how long are your years?"

I hesitated. I already knew this wouldn't go well. "Okay so... it's about three hundred and sixty-five days, but really it's three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days which means every four years we need to tack an extra day on."

"So your months are... what, thirty and... thirty and a half days? A little less? That doesn't work."

"Some months are thirty days, some are thirty-one, and one of them is twenty-eight. That's the one we tack the extra day onto every fourth year."

"That's ridiculous."

"It's... okay yes, it's a little ridiculous, but that's what makes it normal! It's not normal for everything to fit so neatly into multiples of six. That's strange."

"Why?"

"The universe is random and meaningless and... I don't know, it just isn't that tidy."

"Sounds like your world is the stupid one."

I didn't really have a rebuttal to that. It was, in fact, the stupid one. Of course everything fit into multiples of six, because magic was real and the gods were real - apparently - and the whole crazy system had been actually really designed rather than being random. I'd been a pretty staunch atheist on Earth and as eager as I was to accept magic and fairies and whatever else it still felt strange and wrong to acknowledge what that meant on a more cosmic scale.

"Do you... are you religious, Errod? I haven't seen you go to church or anything."

He looked uncomfortable, and I was about to apologize for asking when he spoke up. "I was. I am. I just haven't gone since my father was taken away. You've made enough comments about religion that I know none of it is the same for you. Here, we... we know the gods are real and you can even feel their presence when the planes are aligned right. But for the most part you don't actually want them to notice you. Most of the gods are... well, they're not evil. They aren't. But... it would be like a mouse trying to get the attention of a herogant." The word mouse had translated fine, but I wasn't sure what the fuck a herogant was. From context it had to be something big and probably dangerous, and I didn't want to interrupt him so I just settled for picturing a hippopotamus. "It wouldn't understand the mouse, and might step on it without even noticing. People have communicated with the gods before, and they almost always end up dead or insane."

So the gods were eldritch horrors. Great. "Doesn't seem like there's any point in worshipping them then, right? Or does that... does that keep them from stepping on you?"

"It's not like that. The main one we worship, the one that my family used to attend church for, is Yesirn. It's the only god that took human form and walked among us, to better understand the world."

"We've got one kinda like that on Earth. Became human, taught some people, got killed."

"Yesirn didn't come to teach, but to learn. It... it hated it. It said that existence as a human was horrible agony and a confusing nightmare of emotions. It shed its body after only six days."

"Big mood."

"What?"

"Nothing. Continue."

"Um. Well, Yesirn felt bad for us, and promised to listen and try to care for us. And... I mean, people disagree on what is and isn't a legitimate miracle but sometimes things do happen. And if nothing else, you know that Yesirn gets how hard life can be when it's bad."

I had to admit, that did make some sense. A god that for sure exists and will listen and say "yeah, that's rough buddy" sounded like it could be comforting even if no miracles were forthcoming.

"Okay, but I know there are tons of churches and some of them worship other gods. If Yesirn is the only one to actually make an appearance, what's the point of the others?"

"You'd have to ask them. I... never really tried to learn about other religions honestly. You go to church with your parents, and just sort of believe what they believe and don't think about it much."

"Well at least that's the same on both of our worlds."