The first circle of folks sort of falls over themselves in astonishment that I’m there, and they do it in a way that makes it more than a little awkward. I stand on a larger platform in the center of a ring of seven smaller platforms, mine and one other person’s empty; she introduces herself, but I immediately forget her name.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t even try to solve the riddle I pose her. I know they have eggs here, and the whole A box without key or lid thing is older than the Fleet and something you expect children to figure out with no prior knowledge, so when she knocks her fists together and giggles simperingly at me, leaning forwards, I get the point. It’s uncomfortably familiar, and it’s not what I’m looking for, so I pretend not to notice and move on.

My platform takes me a bit further up and a bit further in, maybe a meter higher. There’s a whole bunch of platforms at this height, each of them with at least one platform lower down; it’s like a fractal of spirals, often with more than one lower area feeding into a higher one. It can’t possibly be the full expression, not with a couple of dozen sets of platforms, not when even ten platforms with just four people is on the far side of a million people, but there’s enough to give sort of the suggestion of what that vast array of people would look like. There were eight people in the previous platform and only six here, and it’s being fed by three of the lower ones, the one I came from and two more.

There’s a couple of people in the center when I come up, and one of the people on the rim catches my eye and taps their lip twice in an unmistakable sign for silence. That’s fine with me; it gives me time to look around and take in the sights of the battle and the audience.

Two of the people on this set of platforms with me are other humans, one man and one woman, both in a sort of vague early-middle-aged look. The others are a gamahad and two very different sed; one with a thick coat of short, coarse black hairs and grey, pointed ears with a bunch of structure, and one with a more dark reddish-orange coat made of long, oily fur. The second one looks maybe, vaguely fox-like, and they’re in the center, facing up against the woman.

There’s a set of stones laid out in front of them. They’re a selection of sizes of various shapes; an array of cones, cubes, and cylinders sits in the center, and off to the sides, haphazardly, there’s more of those plus some other shapes, stars and cups and pylons and more. There’s one cone, two cylinders, and twelve cubes, with the cubes split into a grouping of five and a grouping of seven, and eventually the sed gives a little nod.

“There is a rule of selection by edges, and there is a rule of grouping by primes.”

“Correct.” The woman sounds like she’s beaming happily, but I can’t see anything other than her back, so I can’t tell. The foxlike sed loses their composure, grinning widely and pumping their hands into the air, and the woman breaks into laughter. “See? You do belong in the second ring.” She leans forward and ruffles the sed’s hair, and murmurs something I don’t pick up, but which makes the sed squirm out from under her hands.

“Auntie!” The last syllable is drawn out in a whine. “You’re making me look like a kid in front of the Magelord!”

“You are a kid, kiddo.” She turns around to smile at me, waving. “Magelord, thank you for your patience. Yelda here takes the round, and if you’re rising, my place is yours, to challenge her.”

“If I’m rising?”

She stops mid-withdrawal to her own little platform, and smiles at me again. It’s a striking smile; not because she’s particularly beautiful, but because there’s a simplicity and sweetness to it, lacking the pressure of expectations most people I’d been interacting with have had. “We most of us find our level and stay; unless there are eight on a platform, there is no pressure to move.”

“If there were,” I say, smiling back at her, “what would your level be?”

“I met our delight’s parents on the eighth, Magelord, where I was minded to be flirtatious rather than serious.”

“I’ll bet,” I murmur, stepping forward to the center. My eyes come back to Yelda, who’s in a sort of exaggerated pose of readiness and patient waiting, tail in her lap with her as she sits with her knees drawn up to her chest. Her ears flick and wave in a way that belies her seeming calm, but I have no idea what the actual meaning of the gestures might be. “Hi Yelda. I’m Adam, and it’s very nice to meet you.”

“Auntie says that I should call you Magelord.” Her voice is bright and curious, and I immediately fall into old habits, mirroring her body language and how she’s sitting, which seems to make her more at ease.

“Well, if you’re going to call me Magelord, I have to call you something formal, and I don’t want to. So can you call me Adam, and I’ll call you Yelda?”

She considers this with immense seriousness, and comes, thankfully, to the conclusion I hoped for. “Okay!” Yelda pauses for a moment, then leans forwards, voice quiet. “Do you know how to play Hagah?”

“No.” I match her, in tone and body language. “Can you teach me?”

“Yeah.”

We are, instantly, fast friends. She’s a perfectly capable teacher, too, for such a simple game; it’s a pattern-trick game, similar in some regards to ones I’ve played before. In the version she plays, there are two rules, and they are parallel; in more involved versions, they can modify each other, and there are potentially up to seven of them, along with shapes of different colors and textures.

“They’re the same. Bumpy for red, smooth for brown, waves for blue, pointy for green, and a few others. It’s ‘cause some folks…” Yelda pauses for a moment, consideringly. “You should guess! Poppas and Auntie always make me guess.”

“Hmmmm.” I don’t make too much of a show about it, only a brief pause. Kids can be incredibly good at telling when adults are condescending to them. “Is it because some people can’t tell all of the colors, and some other people can’t tell the textures apart very well, but everyone can do at least one of them?”

“You’re smart, mister.” Yelda leans forwards, grinning. “I’m not gonna go easy on you, okay? Here. It’s a two-rule.”

“If you were going to go easy on me,” I murmur, looking at the shapes, “it would have had to be before you picked the pattern, you stinker.” I don’t get a response from that, which is fair, and I grin down at the shapes.

Eight of the flat six-pointed stars, like two triangles superimposed on each other. One of the flat circles, one of the cylinders, and two of the triangular pyramids. They’re in three groups; first the stars, then the pyramids, and then the circles and cylinders.

I grab some flat squares, three of them, and put them in a grouping in front of me. I see Yelda’s shoulders slump and hear her groan, and I grin at her. “I claim,” I say firmly, “that the first rule is a rule of counting: the Pingala sequence, where each subsequent element is the result of adding the previous two elements, and the index is the… I don’t know the word for it. It’s the number of nodes that the base has; a circle has one node and it’s wherever you start.”

“Gnnnnnrgh.” Yelda makes a show of groaning, but grabs the three squares. She puts them with the circles and cylinders, then looks at me with a hint of impatience. “Well?”

“The second rule is a rule of ordering. The rule is… space filling, I guess? Squares and circles are perfectly space-filling. A triangular prism would be perfectly space-filling, but a pyramid isn’t; and the stars are even less so.”

“How high are you gonna go, mister Adam?” Yelda’s eyes are a little narrowed, which I think means that I solved that a lot faster than I could have gotten away with. I regret that, a little bit; she’s adorable, and I could see myself enjoying dawdling a little bit here.

“To the top,” I say softly.

Yelda nods at that, like it’s the least surprising thing in the world. “I like it here. People in the first ring act like I can’t think, just cause I’m a kid, and they talk like I can’t hear them, but if I do that they say I’m rude. When I go up more, I hope people keep just getting nicer.”

“Your Auntie seems pretty nice, and I bet your Poppas are too. And they met pretty high up, didn’t they?” That gets me a smile, a hopeful one with her eyes lighting up. “Honestly…” I scratch my chin. “I think when people become experts, real experts, they tend to really like sharing the joy of it, and they like learning. If you keep learning, and you keep trying to be the best you can be, I think you’ll find a whole lot of nice people.”

She studies me with the seriousness that so many small children have, and then shrugs. “So, mister Adam, I think it’s your turn.”

“So it is,” I say with a smirk, rubbing my hands. “So it is.”