A deserted place, a single bunny in gloomy light against an all gray background and its face downcast.

I receive the theatrical image from Aster while sitting at the back of the flying craft with all the empty seats in front of me.

“So you are depressed?” I send back through our link or the closest I can approximate with the telepathic bond trying to clarify because it doesn’t make sense. After a moment she shakes her head indicating that I didn’t understand what she meant and the single picture morphs slowly into a movie.

The bunny turns happier and the grey gives way to pastel tones as others start joining until there are around a thousand of them. Just about the amount in my inner world, a standard sized colony.

As I’m about to speak, the view switches to other places and I can see now not only one colony, but another a ways off. As a few bunnies move between colonies the more diverse pastel colors, still heavily dark gray start to lighten up and turn brighter and brighter as the view moves higher in the sky to show not only the two colonies but dozens, hundreds, all interlinking with each other. The euphoria transmitted makes clear that this was the state they were meant to be.

I look at her in confusion and question:

“You can still go to other places and bring more of them into the inner world. This ‘trade’ doesn’t need to stop.”

Again she shakes her head and zooms in on one of the colonies, before a human vaguely resemblant of me kneels, opens a backpack and the entire colony enters it. Inside the bag, much smaller on the outside than on the inside, I can see the colors, still as vibrant and beautiful as before with them jumping and moving around just as enthusiastically as always.

The man puts the bag on his back and starts walking as the view slips into two. The second view focuses on the interior of the backpack.

I wonder just how much of this she actually understands about the images she is using, and how much is just copying what I send her when talking about Earth. Shaking my head, I go back to paying attention to our bond closely as the man walks and the color for a good while doesn’t change. But after passing near other colonies, and a few bunnies leave, the interaction is always brief, and the same few bunnies from the bag, now marked with orange stripes on their backs, go back and the is intermingling is only temporary.

After a good while the inside becomes gloomy, not quite full gray, but back to pastel tones and I start to understand what she is getting at. I just can’t for the life of me figure out why they don’t just switch colonies as the others do.

“The solution seems simple, just go back to trading your population with the others.”

A little frustration from the oldest rabbit in the colony comes at me, but it’s brief and not something she intended to communicate, so I just wait until and something ominous shows up in the sky. An all-seeing eye fading in and out and dread hits me for a brief instant.

This is how they see the system, as a few bunnies trade places, the eye sends out a strange pulse and the bunnies from both colonies start trembling. Through our bond, I know that although it’s uncomfortable, the fear the system induces is not what the bunnies are trying to avoid. Hastily they all move back to their own places and I kick myself for being so obtuse.

I remember that couple of times when Aster asked me to stop so a few of the inhabitants of my inner world could leave and others could enter.

Besides the normal schedule, it only happened once or twice when I stopped by near another colony, but after her explanation, it seems so obvious.

Looking for something I could do to help solve this problem I send a few possible solutions, but the frustration through our bond is unmistakable and I stop.

“What is the solution?” I ask realizing that trying to come up with something I barely understood is bound to cause more problems than to solve. The mountain I could fill with what I didn’t know about the inner workings of rabbit culture is half the reason we were in this predicament in the first place. If I had noticed things before I could have helped them.

I wait patiently, sending a mental picture of me sitting and waiting like an obedient little bunny.

The tiny furry head looks at me from my lap breaking the mental link but I don’t need to rely on the telepathic bond to translate her thoughts and body position to me. I instantly know she is considering me and after a moment, she settles again on my lap with her head on top of her paws in the same position as before and I re-establish the link at full strength.

This time the inside of the backpack is all I see, except it is different. It’s a near copy of the inner world and the colony begins to shift. Before it was spread out and very similar to what I see in the instance, but now it shrinks the area while growing deeper. The large area it covered before becomes less than a dozen paces as another several colonies are set up and portals open letting hundreds, thousands of bunnies stream in. They continue until the entire place was packed.

“Are you sure? Won’t the inner world be too small for a dozen colonies?”

A clear image of a cartoonish rabbit closing her fist and huffing is sent my way, before an image with a tower with a dozen shoe boxes stacked on top of each other, is filled with over a hundred rabbits, and the meaning is clear. If they have to, they can fit in anywhere and the size of the inner world is plenty for them.

I finally nod with me reattracting the bond so I can rest and allow both of us to ruminate on how to go about bringing more of them into the fold to inhabit the inner world.

Not that there was much to figure out, but it is best to get everything line up before I started showing up, getting whole colonies and dropping them into the inner world. Aster would probably want to have the time to talk with the other colonies before they agreed to join us.

Opening a small portal where she and the other two came after she enters the inner world, I go back to the book. I would not spend the whole trip working on it, but I wanted to see a little more improvement before I started working on other things.

I cycle Aether around me in the ever-strengthening natural cycle. Usually, it felt like I would need to spend forever to achieve anything with it, but looking at it now it seemed like something was hiding just behind the corner.

More than a day pass with everyone but the scout taking at least a short nap as we are approaching the spot on the extreme south where he and the other scouts started leaving the last time around.

Each of the Earthmovers leaves in a row, responsible for a 5-kilometer stretch which they rush through and then try to catch up with the main craft that I periodically stop to provide them with more detectors given their slower speed and pauses.

Each time the cycle completes, we are another 50 kilometers ahead and though there were more delays than I had hoped for, I never have to wait for too long as we all move on at a decent clip ahead.

About two days later as the sun starts to lose its heat, about three in the afternoon, I stop for a little rest and the scout, after an entire day with little contact with anyone else. He is looking for someone to talk to, especially given he would need to stay awake for the entire trip if he wanted to repeat my feat.

“So tell me more about the data cells.” He says.

“Well, I’m thinking about how to engrave something more quickly. Not the type of engraving where the total power is stronger like making larger batteries or more powerful turrets to shoot fireballs from, but something relatively simple if very repetitive where we need millions of repetitions to get to the scale I want.”

“Uhmm, what have you tried?”

“Simplifying the design, but currently it still takes about thirty seconds even for the simple symbols to be engraved with the current tools. Even that pace requires a lot of skill. I can make them much faster, but I’m only a single person. So we either need some decent method to allow people engraving faster or to find a way to completely automate the process.”

“Why exactly do you want it? I mean bigger libraries would be nice and all, but it doesn’t make sense to pour so much of our efforts on this.”

I look at him and say seriously. “Not a word about this.” He nods changing his easy demeanor to something more somber. Looking at him in the eyes I continue to speak: “Do you know how my book provided a little information on the first days, and even to this day it continues to provide with a nearly constant stream of knowledge?”

He nods and waits for me to continue and I do so:

“Well, the bigger the library it has access to the more knowledge it will spit out. I mean we are in the dark ages information-wise, and along with the development expected from the libraries with the book, access to something akin to a computer alone will do wonders, but accelerating the progression past anything that my book could ever achieve if I rely on only myself sounds like the only real choice.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I read a few notes that came from your book, and you aren’t even a scout. I can only imagine what you are helping the mages to accomplish.”

“A lot more than if we had to rely only on the books that we buy from the bookstore.”

“Does the type of knowledge you input in the book or whatever influence the output?”

“Uhmm, maybe, hell probably. I haven't noticed anything so far, but I should test that.”

“If you find out that it does, we could start to log more stuff about scouting on notes for your book, it’s bound to increase how we can train to improve our craft, development paths, and all kinds of good stuff.”

“I will, I definitely will. I need a while to separate the knowledge on the network, I will get someone on that. When I’m back it will provide an interesting experiment.”

He shakes his head.

“You mages and your experiments, the only people that beat you are a couple of alchemists we discover 9 villages South. By the way, what is the current system? Are handwritten notes ok?”

“Yes, and I actually made a system to store what other people type as notes printed on paper but even if we figure out how to transfer all of it to my book there are too many limitations. We need something like the runes which will store information like an sd card that can be accessed anywhere from the network.”

“If that is the case, why don’t the others just pitch in?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, plenty of the most accomplished of the engravers from most of the villages around just ‘donated’ their time and efforts to help protect everyone. With the proper incentive, I’m certain the simple runes that their junior engravers can produce might be helpful.”

“Oh, you are a genius.”

“No, I’m just bringing a fresh perspective to it. And I even have another Idea.”

“Come on. Tell me already.” I say leaning

“You know how you said that you wanted something akin to computer memory? I have one idea about how to do that. Do you remember how the first computers inventory stored their programs or whatever?”

“Magnetic memory? Nahh, I don’t think that will work.”

“No even, earlier.”

I widen my eyes as I look at him.

“Punch cards. Bloody paper punch cards. How could no one have thought about it earlier?”

“I’m pretty sure someone did, but they didn’t have someone like you to their side to think about how to make it work and from the look on your eyes you already have a design or two in mind.”

“It’s not just that, mechanical storage is perfect in so many ways. It will be permanent storage, but I think I can come up with something that will serve our needs.”

With the biggest grin I can muster on my face I sit down and pull a few pages from my inventory to jot down ideas, I couldn’t let this moment of inspiration go to waste. Where before my mind was desolate, now ideas are sprouting faster than ever.