~~~ Day 139

  I had done my research.

  Not the way Mo did research, which involved a minimum of seventeen notebooks and an organizational system that had its own documentation and a subsystem for indexing the documentation. It was like staring into a mirror facing another mirror, endless, and made my brain hurt. My research had been a conversation with myself at three in the morning while the settlement breathed quietly around me and a small grey-pink shape slept in a loose blob on my chest, rising and falling with my breathing with the complete trust of something that had decided I was safe and hadn't reconsidered.

  Mimics, in every game I'd ever played, had a type.

  They liked treasure chests. They liked doors. They liked barrels in the corner of rooms that nobody checked. They liked the things people reached for without thinking, the things that looked safe because they always had been. The disguise worked because people trusted the shape of the familiar. You'd reached for a thousand door handles in your life and none of them had tried to eat you and so the thousand-and-first had the full benefit of that history.

  The question I'd been turning over was this: Nibbles had been wood and ceramic and metal and a hundred shapes of a hundred things. It had tried to replicate most of them with the earnest effort of a student who was very motivated but unfortunately working from incomplete notes. It had gotten some right. It had gotten more approximately right. It had gotten a few memorably wrong.

  But it had never been taught. I imagined in the wild a parent mimic would have demonstrated the classic forms, the natural camouflage of the species. It hadn't had that.

  I was going to fix it.

  I assembled the items before Nibbles woke up, which was easier than expected. I just scooped it onto my shoulder and it latched on with those stubby sometimes-clawed appendages without so much as stirring, just relocated in its sleep with the complete confidence. It had been a little alarming the first few times. Now I just found it endearing.

  The settlement was just waking up around me. The kitchen fires. The first voices in the east barracks. The particular music of a place coming to life, people free of tyranny and oppression beginning to find the shape of a new day. The Shadowfen was doing its thing at the perimeter, which was existing with an air of vague menace that I'd mostly stopped registering, and the arachnae tower had a few windows lit already because some of the new arrivals apparently kept early hours.

  I sat down on the garden bench.

  Nibbles, who had woken somewhere around the time I was carrying the barrel over to the garden, climbed over and positioned itself on the stone table and looked at the assembled items with two comically oversized eyes.

  "Okay," I said. "Good morning Nibbles."

  It turned to me and gave a long wet blink. It made me crack a smile.

  "Today we're working on something," I said. "Not because you're doing anything wrong. You're not. But since I am kind of your dad now, I want to give you an arsenal of shapes." I picked up the first item. "This is a barrel."

  It looked at the barrel.

  "Round, vertical, two flat ends. The point of the barrel isn't just the barrel. The point is understanding why mimics like the barrel."

  I set it back down and tapped it.

  "It's boring," I said. "That's the point. Nobody looks twice at a barrel. It's in every storeroom, every tavern, every seemingly innocuous dungeon antechamber. It's background. The whole job is being so normal that you stop registering as a thing to investigate. That makes prey lower their guard." I looked at it. "You follow?"

  Nibbles two huge eyes, that had still yet to revert to any normal eye size, turned and regarded the barrel.

  Then it regarded me. Nibbles had the double take down, that's for sure.

  Then it became a tiny barrel.

  The transformation was something I'd watched a dozen times by now and it still had a quality I couldn't entirely account for. It was there and then it was attempting to be something else, the grey-pink surface resolving into the approximation of wood grain with the concentration of someone who had understood the assignment on the first pass. The shape was right. The proportions were right. The material was the particular quality of approximately-organic that Nibbles did when it was working on something made of living matter, close enough from a distance, the kind of wrong that only announced itself when you were paying specific attention.

  It held the form.

  I looked at it for a moment.

  "If I was wandering in a dungeon and you were hidden amongst other barrels I wouldn't even see you! If I had to be picky, your wood grain on the left side is running horizontally when it should be vertical."

  The left side of the barrel shifted subtly. The grain direction adjusted.

  I stared at it.

  "Did you just... " I said.

  The barrel held very still, it was a very barrel thing to do.

  "Okay... " I said. "You understand more than you let on."

  I was talking to a barrel. I am not going to lie, I had always loved the concept of mimics in my previous life. Even if I looked insane it was wildly fulfilling.

  I put the barrel aside and picked up the door handle. Simple iron, slightly curved, a latch mechanism still attached, the kind that fit comfortably in an average hand and which nobody in the history of door handles had ever looked at with suspicion. This would also be small enough that the replication could be exact. I turned it over in my fingers and felt the metal through my metal sense, the particular history of it, the hands that had touched it, the use worn into the curves.

  "Handle," I said. "Iron. Metal. This stuff is kind of my jam so it may be easier for you"

  I set it on the table between us.

  The small barrel leaned slightly, growing its two enormous eyes to really get a good look. This time it looked at the handle with a different quality of attention than it had given the barrel. I'd noticed this before but not named it. With organic materials it approached them like a student approaching a difficult subject, the determined focus of someone who intended to succeed through effort. With metal and stone it looked at them the way I looked at stone when I was about to shape it. Not figuring out how. Just deciding when.

  It became the handle.

  Not a transition. Not an approximation. The handle, sitting on the stone table right next to where I'd put the original, including the slight wear on the latch plate where someone's thumb had rested ten thousand times, including the texture difference between the grip and the plate, including the small imperfection in the curve where the original smith had made a correction.

  I looked at where Nibbles had been sitting.

  I looked at the handle.

  I reached out and tapped it. The metal ring of it was correct in a way that my metal sense confirmed was real, not an imitation of the correct sound but the actual acoustic property of that weight and density of iron. The grain of it under my fingertips. I pressed a little harder. The latch mechanism worked.

  The latch mechanism worked.

  "Nibbles," I said.

  The latch clicked back.

  "You replicated a working mechanism."

  A pause. One small eye appeared on the latch plate, regarded me, disappeared.

  "That's," I said. I looked at the handle. "That's actually remarkable."

  The eye reappeared. A second eye joined it. The latch clicked again, once, with the quality of something that had made a decision and wanted it acknowledged.

  I sat back on the bench.

  "You like metal," I said. "Not just as a shape. You like the actual material. The properties." I thought about this. "That makes sense. I've been pouring forge energy into you since you arrived. Metal and stone are home to you because they're home to me." I looked at it. "You're going to be very good at this."

  The two eyes on the latch plate moved in a way that required no translation.

  "yeah yeah, you earned that one, Lets see how you do with the next!"

  The latch clicked once. Definitively.

  I was extremely fond of this mimic.

  I was also, somewhere in the last hour, thinking of it as her now. Not a decision exactly. More like something that had quietly sorted itself out while I was paying attention to other things. The way she approached metal. The self-possession of her. The particular patience. Something had simply decided and moved on without consulting me, which honestly tracked.

  She was going to be very good at this.

  I'd asked Siraq to find me the most standard, unremarkable chest available in the settlement stores, which had produced a brief silence followed by the chest and the expression of someone who had several questions they had weighed carefully and decided not to ask. It was a good specimen. Solid wood banding. Iron corners with the correct degree of wear. A functional lock. The proportions that your eye expected from a smaller chest, the ones that registered as trustworthy specifically because they were so aggressively normal.

  I set it on the table.

  Nibbles looked at it.

  The barrel and the handle and the book were all off to the side. She'd worked through each of them with steady patience and the results had been predictable: organic materials approximately right, metal and stone materials exact. The book was close but the pages had the faintly-wrong quality of someone who understood paper conceptually without having experienced it. To be honest she was doing even better than I had hoped.

  "Okay," I said. "This is the one. In the games I grew up with, in the books I read as an adult, this was classic mimic. Walk into a dungeon, see a treasure chest, reach for the latch, and." I mimed the bite again.

  I gestured at it.

  "Take your time."

  She studied it for longer than she'd studied any of the others.

  I waited.

  The light moved a few inches across the garden stones. Somewhere in the tower a door opened. The displacer beast juveniles were doing something in the south corner of the garden that involved phasing through the hedge repeatedly with enormous enthusiasm, which I was monitoring in my peripheral awareness.

  Then Nibbles was a chest.

  I looked at the table.

  There were two chests on the table.

  I looked at the original. I looked at Nibbles. I looked back at the original. They were, to every sense I possessed including the metal sense and the stone sense and the general awareness I had of the material composition of everything in Ashenhearth, the same chest. The iron corners had the same wear. The wood grain ran in the same direction. The lock was a lock.

  I leaned forward very slowly.

  One of the chests opened its lid approximately one inch. Two eyes blinked at me from the dark interior, bright and expectant. The lid closed again with a soft definitive click.

  The silence went on for a moment.

  "Nibbles," I said.

  The lid opened one inch again.

  "That," I said, "is amazing!"

  The lid opened further. Both eyes appeared above the edge, and they were doing something I'd learned to read as the mimic equivalent of barely contained delight, the specific brightness of something that had worked very hard at a thing and had gotten it right and needed the person whose opinion mattered most to know it.

  I reached out and scratched the top of the lid.

  It just seemed like the right thing to do. The same motion I used between the alpha female's ears, a slow deliberate scratch that covered the full width of her head. The lid was warm under my hand in the way Nibbles was always warm, running on forge mana, and the wood grain moved very slightly under my fingers in a way that wood grain was not supposed to do.

  Then Nibbles made a sound.

  It was the sound a cat might produce if the cat had been assembled by someone who had read a detailed description of purring and tried to replicate it by sewing together dead cats. A wet, gurgling, resonant rumble that started somewhere inside the chest and vibrated the lid under my palm and which bore the same relationship to purring that Nibbles bore to the objects she was imitating: correct in spirit, original in execution, and entirely its own thing.

  I started scratching along the lid's edge.

  The sound got louder.

  And then I laughed, the genuine surprised kind, the kind that comes from something landing before your guard is up, and the sound from inside the chest intensified in direct proportion to my laughter which made me laugh harder which made the noise louder which was apparently a feedback loop with no natural ceiling. The displacer juvenile had stopped phasing through the hedge to observe. The alpha female had opened one eye. The settlement was definitely hearing some of this.

  I did not stop scratching.

  "You," I said, between laughing, "are ridiculous."

  The chest vibrated with happiness.

  I became aware of footsteps.

  Yuzu came around the garden wall at her usual unhurried pace, field journal under one arm, dark hair moving with the kind of effortless grace that made you feel like the world was slightly more organized in her vicinity. She was wearing the practical clothes she wore when she wasn't in her armor and she had the quiet alertness of someone who was never fully off duty and had stopped pretending otherwise.

  She rounded the corner. Stopped.

  Knox Ashford, Elemental Champion, sat on a garden bench enthusiastically scratching a treasure chest, tears of laughter running down his cheeks. while the chest produced a sound like a very happy drain. Two small eyes peered at her from the interior.

  She looked at me.

  "Nibbles got the chest perfect!" I said.

  "Yes," Yuzu said, with the measured tone of someone for whom this sentence explained everything while raising seventeen other questions.

  Nibbles stopped being a chest. She returned to her natural form on the table and regarded Yuzu with the frank curiosity she directed at people I was relaxed around, which was its own kind of assessment.

  Yuzu regarded Nibbles back.

  Then she came and sat down on the bench, one seat over, close enough to see everything on the table. The field journal went down beside her. She looked at the assembled objects. Looked at the original chest. Looked at the space where Nibbles had been when she was a chest.

  "She got the wear pattern on the iron corners," she said quietly. More to herself than to me.

  "Right?" I puffed up my chest in pride of my young mimic.

  "The corners on a chest like that develop wear asymmetrically. More on the ones nearest the latch because of how people handle it. She." Yuzu paused. "She got the asymmetry correct."

  "She also did the latch mechanism on the door handle."

  Yuzu looked at the door handle in the off-to-the-side pile. Back at Nibbles. Something in her expression did the careful adjustment it did when she was interested in something and wanted to be precise about how much she was showing it. "She's learning from you," she said. "The metal. She's better at inorganic materials because your mana shapes what she reaches for."

  "That's what I figured."

  "She's going to be very good at this."

  "I told her that."

  "What did she say?"

  "She clicked the latch at me. Which I'm fairly sure translates to 'obviously.'"

  Yuzu's mouth did the thing it did, the slight movement at the corner that was the most she usually allowed. She looked at Nibbles with the quality of attention she gave things worth understanding, the one that looked like assessment but was something warmer.

  Nibbles, who had been sitting with the patience of someone waiting for the right moment, chose this moment to become the field journal.

  Not the field journal approximately. The field journal exactly, including the weatherproof treated leather case and the small securing strap and the wear on the bottom left corner from being set down the same way ten thousand times. She sat on the table where Nibbles had been and looked like a journal and was a journal in every material particular my metal sense could confirm.

  Yuzu's hands stopped moving entirely.

  "The organic parts," I said, because I felt the need to fill the silence, "are still slightly off. The pages. The paper has the right thickness but the texture is wrong. Treated leather she handles better because it's been processed, it's closer to a manufactured material than a living one."

  Yuzu reached out and touched the cover.

  She pressed her fingers flat against it and held them there for a moment that was slightly longer than an assessment would require.

  "She's been practicing that one," she said.

  "For a while. I think she started when you stopped by the administrative tower and left it on the desk for an hour."

  Yuzu absorbed this. "She was studying it."

  "She finds you interesting."

  The quiet that followed had a warmth in it.

  "It's working," Yuzu said finally. Just those two words, with the tone of someone acknowledging something worth acknowledging.

  Nibbles abandoned the journal form, returned to herself, and regarded Yuzu with eyes that were doing something even I would describe as preening. The pure self-satisfaction of a job correctly done in front of an audience that mattered.

  "Don't try to take the favorite spot, thats mine," I said to Yuzu with a playful grin.

  "I'm not doing anything."

  "You're sitting there being impressed. She can tell."

  Yuzu pressed her lips together. The field journal went back under her arm with the deliberate motion of someone restoring their composure. "I'm not impressed," she said.

  Nibbles immediately became a small decorative chest with a bow worked into the iron latch.

  The bow was technically correct in every material particular. It was also unmistakably a bow. On a treasure chest. Being displayed at Yuzu.

  The sound Yuzu made was brief and genuine and entirely unguarded and immediately suppressed. She turned her head to the left and looked at the middle distance and said nothing for a moment while her expression did several things in quick succession.

  When she looked back, she had herself in hand.

  "That's," she said.

  "I know," I said.

  "She put a bow on it."

  "She did. I can guarantee Dewdrop showed her that one."

  "That's." Yuzu looked at Nibbles. The careful composure was present but there was something behind it that had shifted and wasn't going back. "That's very effective."

  Nibbles vibrated with satisfaction.

  We fell into a comfortable quiet, the three of us in the morning garden, while Nibbles cycled through the remaining objects on the table with the focused pleasure of a student who had discovered she was naturally talented at the subject. The coin was next and I watched her work through it with the particular patience she deployed for fine detail, the profile on the face side coming through exact because the face was metal-worked into the surface, the lettering on the reverse taking three attempts before she had the depth of the engraving right. The object was too small for a mimic but she was nailing it.

  "The lettering improved on the third pass," Yuzu observed.

  "She's iterating."

  "Like you do with earthbending."

  I looked at her. "How do you mean?"

  "You never do a structure the same way twice," she said. "You do it once and then you do it better. Not from planning. You just." She made a small gesture. "You incorporate what you learned. It's not revision, it's refinement. It happens between one step and the next." She looked at Nibbles working on the coin. "She does the same thing."

  I hadn't thought about it that way.

  "She's learning from you," Yuzu said. "Not just the mana. The way you approach things."

  I looked at Nibbles, small and focused on the stone table, getting the coin right on her fourth pass and holding it with the stillness of something that knew it had gotten it right and wanted that to be clearly visible.

  "Huh," I said.

  Yuzu looked at me with the considering look she'd been giving me less lately. Then it shifted, the way it shifted more easily now, into the other thing. The warmer thing.

  "Figured she was female about an hour in," I said. "Something about the way she settles when she wants attention. She doesn't present herself. She arranges herself."

  Yuzu turned to look at me directly with the particular attention she gave things that surprised her. "I came to the same conclusion," she said.

  "Which reasons?"

  "The way she responded to Kas coming back was different from how she responded to Siraq in the same moment." She looked at Nibbles. "And she's been practicing that journal form specifically for me. Not for Knox. For me. That's not a neutral choice."

  I looked at Nibbles. Nibbles looked between us with the patient expression of someone who had been waiting for the humans to sort this out.

  "She has a gender because she decided she does," I said.

  "Which is," Yuzu said, "functionally equivalent to having one. Also which I believe is one of your core rules."

  I sat with this for a moment.

  "Okay," I said.

  Nibbles became the decorative chest with the bow again. It stayed up for longer this time. Both eyes visible above the rim, very bright.

  "She's celebrating," Yuzu said.

  "I know."

  "You're smiling."

  I was smiling. "I'm allowed to smile at my mimic child."

  The word came out the way it always did, easy and unguarded, and Yuzu went through the small adjustment she went through when I said it about any of the settlement's various chaotic small residents. The one where something in her expression softened by exactly the amount she thought was unnoticeable.

  I noticed.

  I had started noticing all of it, the small adjustments, the precise way she managed her expressions and the specific moments when she stopped managing them. I'd been noticing for a while. I'd been noticing without doing anything about it, in the way you know a conversation is going to happen and you just wait for it to have the right shape.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The quiet that followed was a specific kind of quiet.

  "Looks like the arachnae are having a slow morning," I said. "Good. If anyone's earned one, it's them."

  "You think about them," Yuzu said. Not a question. The gentle version of an observation that meant something.

  "Hard not to," I said. "Someone has to care."

  She was looking at Nibbles but her attention had gone somewhere else, the inward place she went when something was sitting with her that she hadn't decided what to do with yet. The field journal was still under her arm. She wasn't opening it.

  "Yuzu," I said.

  "Mm."

  "When did you last just," I tried to find the word. "Sit somewhere. Without the journal."

  She looked at me. One dark eyebrow. "I'm sitting now."

  "The journal's under your arm."

  "That's not the same as using it."

  "Isn't it?"

  She considered this with the seriousness she gave everything. Then, with the deliberateness of someone making a conscious decision, she leaned forward and set the journal on the table beside the objects. Sat back. Folded her hands in her lap with the specific posture of someone trying very hard not to immediately look like they were cataloguing things.

  "There," she said.

  "There," I agreed.

  Nibbles got the next shape exactly right on her next pass and looked at both of us and the eyes were enormous, glistening and bright with the particular light of something that wanted to make sure we were paying attention because it had done a very good thing and required witnesses.

  I proceeded to give Nibbles a chef's kiss. Which made her wiggle with happiness.

  Nibbles looked at Yuzu.

  Yuzu looked at Nibbles. At the coin again. "You are advancing at a very fast rate," she said, and her voice had the tone of someone who knew they were being appealed to and was choosing to allow it. "Well done."

  The small chest scurried to the edge of the table nearest Yuzu and sat there and looked up at her with enormous eyes.

  Yuzu reached out and touched the top of her with two fingers, carefully, the way you touched something you weren't sure about the protocol for and didn't want to get wrong.

  Nibbles made the noise.

  The gurgling-purring noise, abbreviated, more of a single resonant thrum than the full production from earlier, and Yuzu's hand went still and her eyes went wide and she looked at me with an expression I had never seen from Yuzu before, the specific expression of someone who had been entirely caught off guard by something small and genuine and had no defenses for it because they hadn't known they needed them.

  "She likes me," Yuzu said.

  "Oh yeah."

  "She likes me... " Yuzu said again, softer.

  She started petting Nibbles. Small, careful strokes. Nibbles leaned into them with the total commitment she brought to everything she decided to commit to.

  I leaned over and pressed a kiss to Yuzu's cheek.

  Unhurried. Deliberate. The warmth of her bronze skin, the faint scent of her, just a moment and then I sat back and looked at Nibbles soaking up the attention.

  Yuzu went still.

  The careful management that governed every expression she allowed was simply gone for a moment. She was just there, on the bench, warm and present and entirely unguarded, one hand still resting on a mimic who was purring at her, and her deep purple eyes very wide.

  One full second.

  "The chest," she said. Her voice was entirely steady. The steadiness of someone who had decided on the word steady and was committed to it. "She got the weight distribution right this time too. You can tell by the way it sits."

  "Yeah," I said. "She's pretty amazing."

  Yuzu looked at the chest. Nibbles looked at Yuzu. I looked at the Shadowfen over the garden wall, the morning light doing what morning light did, and the forge in my chest was warm and simple and not complicated at all.

  Yuzu's shoulder was slightly closer to mine than it had been.

  Neither of us mentioned it.

  "She's going to get big eventually," I said. "Nibbles. Mimics get big."

  "How big."

  "Wardrobe-sized. Full armoire." I paused, turning to Nibbles and taking on my baby voice. "I will have to start doing back stretches, can't have my mimic walking on the gross dirty ground, can I?"

  Yuzu turned to look at me with four different expressions happening simultaneously in the careful management of her face and losing. "That's," she said.

  "I know."

  "Knox."

  "I know."

  The corner of her mouth gave up. The smile came through, small and genuine and absolutely hers, the one she didn't manufacture, and Nibbles wiggled closer to her hand, wanting to soak in the positive atmosphere.

  ```

  [MIMIC DEVELOPMENT LOG: DAY 139]

  [INORGANIC REPLICATION: CONCERNING ACCURACY]

  [ORGANIC REPLICATION: STILL APPROXIMATE. STILL TRYING.]

  [NEW SOUND DOCUMENTED: CLASSIFICATION PENDING]

  [NOTE: THE MIMIC HAS A GENDER NOW]

  [NOTE: THIS WAS HER DECISION]

  [NOTE: THE SYSTEM CONSIDERS THE MATTER SETTLED]

  ```

  ---

  I found the medical space in the early afternoon. After checking to make sure everyone had settled well and the settlement was running smoothly, which had taken about four minutes because Gerald existed and Gerald was extremely good at his job and I should never have second-guessed the administrative infrastructure.

  I was going to the medical space not because I'd been thinking about it. Or not only because I'd been thinking about them. It.

  It was on the list. Every space in the tower was on the list of things that needed checking in the days after the arachnae arrived, the particular list that came from having built a building and then needing to watch how people actually moved through it versus how I'd imagined they would. The list was real. The medical space was on it. I had legitimate reasons. Don't fucking judge me.

  I stood in the doorway and the legitimate reasons arranged themselves quietly in the background while I looked at Seori.

  She hadn't heard me. She was at the main work surface with her back to the door, moving through some kind of preparation with the concentrated efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times and in worse conditions than these, which told its own story. The medical satchel had been unpacked and distributed across three surfaces in a system that was immediately legible as a system even before you understood the specific logic of it. Everything in a position. Everything intentional.

  Her hands didn't hesitate.

  This wasn't the Seori from the tower walkthrough, flustered and apologizing and somehow managing to make the column incident funnier each time she retold it to different people. This was the version underneath that. The quiet professional certainty of someone who was genuinely, seriously good at a necessary thing and had earned that goodness through years of practicing it in conditions that didn't reward anything less.

  I was staring. The fact that as she was moving in steady moves another part of her swayed.

  I looked at the room instead, which was the sensible thing to do, it was a good room afterall.

  The light was wrong. Functional, the space was perfectly usable, the primary work surface faced the eastern window which gave ideal morning light and complicated afternoon light, and the afternoon was exactly when a healer's work tended toward the kind of detail that needed good illumination. The surface heights were built on Mo's descriptions and my best estimates and were probably right in the aggregate but probably not right for Seori specifically, for the particular pace and reach of her movements, the specific way her body was arranged.... Ahem.

  The storage made sense for general use and was fighting her system.

  "Knox."

  I looked up.

  She had turned around. She was looking at me with the composed professional expression she kept in the medical space, the one that was genuinely different from the expression she used everywhere else, and underneath the composure was the awareness that she'd been observed before she knew she was being observed and she was deciding what to do about that.

  The rose-quartz plating along her cheekbones shimmered slightly in the light. I noticed that I noticed.

  "Just checking in," I said. "Making sure the space is working for you."

  "Everything is functional," she said. "Thank you for asking."

  I looked at the east window. "Light shifts in the afternoon. The main surface loses good illumination right around the time you'd want it most."

  She followed my gaze to the window. Back to me. "I've been compensating. Its not hard to light a lantern... "

  "You shouldn't have to compensate," I said, raising a hand casually, something I was learning I probably shouldn't do. These hands had a certain energy to them. "It's a simple fix."

  "You don't have to." She said it quickly, the reflexive deflection she deployed when she thought she was asking for something, which she wasn't doing. "I've managed in worse spaces than this. I couldn't imagine what it would cost."

  "I don't have to pay anything," I said, gentle enough that it wasn't a dismissal, just a fact. "You should have the right space."

  I crossed to the south wall and shifted into stance, feeling my connection to the stone and metal around me, my forge veins starting to warm up, my palm lightly impacting the surface, barely a gentle slap.

  The stone knew what I was looking for before I finished moving. The moving and the answering happened in the quiet language of materials that understood their purpose, and an angled channel opened through the south wall, not a window, a precisely angled aperture that caught the southwest afternoon light and redirected it across the work surface in a clean even spread.

  The illumination shifted across Seori's primary surface. Better. Exactly right, actually.

  I moved to the shelving next. Looked at her system. She'd organized it with clear logic, the immediate access materials nearest to the work surface, secondary supplies one step out, reference materials at the back. Sound practice. The existing horizontal shelving was fighting it because the spacing didn't allow for the depth differentiation her system required. Items at the same depth when they needed to be at different depths depending on how often she reached for them.

  I shifted my stance and placed my second palm against the wall as well.

  This part I genuinely liked.

  The forgestone veins in my forearms and hands brightened, eye scaldingly pink hair and beard fluttering in the stirred ambient mana. The shelving reconfigured. Slowly enough to watch, fast enough to be purposeful. Brackets rising and adjusting, depths changing, the horizontal spacing redistributing around the logic she'd already established rather than asking her to adjust her system to fit what was there.

  I stepped back.

  The forgestone fingers and veins faded back toward their resting state. I rolled my neck once, the small satisfaction of finished work, and looked at what I'd made.

  Then I set my weight back onto one foot, rested a forearm on my raised knee, and studied the shelving with the mild critical attention I gave everything I'd just finished, looking for what was right and what could be better.

  I became aware of a quality of silence behind me.

  I turned.

  Seori had not moved. She was standing at her work surface exactly where she'd been when I started, both hands resting lightly on the surface, looking at me. Her four pink-blossom eyes were doing something complicated. Not the professional assessment mode. Not the flustered mode from yesterday. Something that was neither and didn't have a category yet, the expression of someone who is revising something they thought they understood.

  The rose-quartz plating along her cheekbones had deepened.

  "The southwest aperture," she said carefully. "The angle will catch the light from the third hour past midday."

  "Through the seventh," I said. "After that you lose the direct angle but the reflected light from the west garden wall picks it up. Should stay usable until well after dark."

  She looked at the aperture. Back at me. "And the shelving."

  "Built around your system," I said.

  She was quiet for a moment.

  "You watched how I was working," she said. Not an accusation. The specific quiet of someone identifying something precisely.

  "Not in a weird way or anything." my eyes choosing that moment to inspect the moved shelving.

  "You watched," she said again, "and then you built what the work required without asking me to explain it."

  "The arrangement said everything."

  Something moved across her expression. Quick and genuine and then carefully resettled but less restrained.

  "Thank you," she said. It came out quieter than she'd intended. The particular quiet of something sincere that hadn't been planned to be said aloud.

  "Don't worry about it," I said. "This is your space. It should work for you."

  She nodded and turned back to her work surface, and I should have left, I had the whole list still, but she spoke again before I reached the door.

  "I saw you with a young fairy yesterday," she said. She didn't turn around. Her hands were resuming their preparation, the same efficient rhythm, but slightly different. "By the fountain. You were there for most of the morning."

  I stayed.

  "I noticed from the window," she said. "While I was setting up." A pause where she was choosing words. "She was very animated."

  "She's always very animated."

  "You didn't look like you minded."

  "I don't."

  Her hands moved through the preparation. "She shows you things," Seori said. "Looks to see if you saw. You always look."

  I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything.

  "Who is she?" she asked. "To you."

  The question had a shape to it. Not who is she in the sense of tell me her name. The kind of question you ask when you've been watching something and you have a hypothesis you need to test before you decide what it means.

  "My daughter," I said.

  Seori's hands stopped.

  She turned. Not quickly. The slow turn of someone giving themselves a moment.

  " ...The fairy?".

  "Dewdrop," I said. "Yes."

  "She's." Seori looked at me. Then at the fountain through the east window. Then back at me. "She's a fairy."

  "Yes."

  "And you're."

  "Also yes," I said. "All that junk."

  She processed this. I could see her processing it, the careful methodical mind that had organized a medical space in five minutes working through a new input that didn't fit the existing categories. "You adopted her," she said slowly.

  "She decided she was my daughter," I said. "That's closer to what happened. Dewdrop identifies something and then it's true and everyone works backward from there. But I will admit, she had me at day one. How do you NOT love her?"

  Something shifted again in Seori's expression.

  "How long ago," she said.

  "Early. Before the walls were up. Before I'd built anything here worth mentioning. She found me and decided and that was the beginning and the end of the decision process."

  "You were alone," Seori said quietly.

  "I had Nyx," I said. "But. Yes. It was early."

  She was looking at me with full attention now, the medical professional composure present but occupied with something other than assessment. The four pink-blossom eyes steady and warm.

  "You didn't argue with her," she said.

  I thought about it. About the early days, the fountain before the city had grown around it, the tiny determined purple person who had appeared out of nowhere and decided. "No," I said. "I didn't want to. She was." I paused. "She needed someone. She picked me. That was enough."

  She turned back to the work surface. Her hands were still for a moment, just resting on the surface, and I watched her from across the room and the afternoon light from the new aperture in the south wall fell across her rose quarts plating.

  When she turned back her eyes were bright.

  The room wasn't large. I stepped forward and reached out, and my hand was not a small thing in any light. The forgestone veins still faintly lit in the ash-grey skin. The dark alloy of two-thirds of my fingers catching the afternoon light, the metallic sheen of it, the slight curve of a claw at each tip that could move tons of stone and press a thumbprint into solid iron without trying. An instrument of reshaping, An instrument of chaos, blood.... ruin, but also an instrument of holding my daughter, running along the snout of my dragon mate, grappling with Kaz before dinner, playful touches with yuzu, gentle caring with Mo.

  I turned it over.

  The back of one finger, the softest contact available to me, caught the tear at the outer corner of her eye in the moment before it fell.

  We both stopped.

  She was looking up at me. The full height of me, all eight feet of it, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to find my face. Four pink-blossom eyes very wide, all of them. The rose-quartz plating across her cheekbones had gone a shade I hadn't seen before, deeper than the flustered pink from the column incident, something else underneath it. My hand between us in the air, the forgestone and the dark alloy and the claw that could shape obsidian, holding one tear with all the care I had.

  One breath.

  Two.

  "WELL. The water pressure in the lower channel junctions," I said, turning and adjusting a belt I was not wearing. "The humidity system runs from Floor One and affects the whole building. I should check the distribution nodes." I nodded sagely at nothing in particular.

  "I'll need to restock the compress supplies," she said, her hand coming up briefly to touch where the tear had been. "Before the week's out. The inventory I brought won't last long if there are injuries during the settling period."

  She turned back to the work surface.

  "I'll note it down," I said. "Supplies won't be an issue, resources is one thing we don't lack." I laughed slightly and realized that probably sounded like I was bragging, so I looked at the aperture in the south wall instead. "Let me know if the light angle needs adjusting. The geometry isn't locked."

  "I will," she said. Her eyes found the shelving, the window, the compress on the work surface, anywhere with purpose. Not at me.

  I left. Probably more abruptly than was smooth. The door was right there and I used it.

  I made it to the corridor. I put my back against the stone wall outside the door and looked at the ceiling and breathed out through my nose, slow and even.

  The forge was not doing the thing it usually did.

  The forge was doing an entirely different thing that required no translation whatsoever.

  Nyx was a force of nature. A core part of my very being, present in the bond the way gravity was present, constant and foundational and there before I had language for it. The trio had come in and set up shop in the particular way they had, each of them distinct, each of them real, and I would tear the sky apart before I let anything touch them.

  This was different. The initial awkward stage, the awareness before the certainty, the warmth before the belonging.

  I hadn't sought any of this out. I hadn't thought I deserved Nyx. Thirty years of invisibility had done its work and I'd come out the other side believing the most I could reasonably expect was to be left alone in peace.

  Then the dungeon happened. Then the transformation. Then the forge settled into my chest like something that had always been there and was just now being acknowledged, and the part of me shaped by thirty years of making myself small had quietly, without announcement, stopped having a say.

  I could feel the timelessness of what I'd become. Not old age and rocking chairs. Something else. Solid in a way that had nothing to do with age. Like bedrock that had always been there and had only now been asked to hold weight.

  Through the bond, Nyx preened in the sunlight, warm and present and entirely aware of the shape of my thoughts. She always was.

  I pushed off the wall and went to check on the water pressure junctions.

  They were fine.

  ```

  [MEDICAL SPACE: IMPROVED]

  [HEALER: SETTLED]

  [FORGE STATUS: ...]

  [NOTE: THE WARDEN INSPECTED THE WATER PRESSURE]

  [NOTE: THE WATER PRESSURE WAS FINE]

  [NOTE: THE SYSTEM HAS CHOSEN NOT TO ELABORATE]

  ```

  ---

  I went back.

  This took approximately two and a half hours of doing other things on the list with most of my attention while the rest of it was in the south corridor of the arachnae tower. I checked three different water pressure junctions. They were all fine. They had been fine the first time. They remained fine.

  I had a legitimate reason to return. The shelving, the working load test. I'd built it quickly and under working conditions you wanted to confirm the... bracket anchorage. Yeah that.

  The bracket anchorage was fine.

  "The brackets look solid," Seori said, without looking up from the compress she was prepping but a smile spread across her face.

  A pause. Her hands continued their work but with a renewed energy. getting more animated in her work. "The light angle in the southwest aperture is perfect," she said. "I've been working in it for an hour. The spread is exactly right."

  "Good." I genuinely tried. I was a functional adult with responsibilities and a settlement to run and I tried. And then she moved and the trying became significantly more difficult and the forge briefly stopped doing anything resembling its usual steady rhythm. I had always considered myself a composed man. I was reconsidering that assessment.

  "It's better than any space I've worked in," she said. She had resumed her preparation without seeming to decide to, hands moving through it with the ease of someone doing something they genuinely loved.

  I sat down on the low stool near the door because standing in the doorway with my arms crossed and my eyes on the ceiling was not a smooth look for a man checking on bracket anchorage.

  "How long have you been a healer?" I asked.

  She looked up. The question had surprised her, I thought. Not many people asked healers questions about themselves rather than about their patients.

  "Since I was twelve," she said. "My mother taught me. She started me on basic wound care and I." A small pause. "I didn't want to stop. There was something about understanding how things worked, how a body healed, what it needed. I wanted to know all of it."

  "Your mother was a healer."

  "A very good one." Her hands resumed the preparation but slowly now, the rhythm different. The change of conversation and her slower movements making it easier to keep my eyes focused appropriately and get my composure back. Giving her the seriousness and attention she deserved. "She treated anyone who came to her. That's the first thing she taught me. You assess the injury, not the person carrying it. The injury doesn't know whose body it's in."

  "That's a good way to put it."

  "She had a better way to put everything," Seori said. Something moved in her expression, fond and complicated and old. "She said medicine that makes exceptions isn't medicine. It's preference with bandages."

  I looked at the aperture in the south wall and the clean afternoon light falling across the work surface. "She sounds like someone worth knowing."

  "She was." The words came out easy and then settled into something heavier. "She treated a soldier once. During the second purge. He was injured and he came to her and she treated him and afterward he reported where we were camped."

  The room was still.

  "She knew it was possible," Seori said. "When she was treating him. She could see what he was. But she treated him anyway."

  "Did she regret it?"

  "I asked her that." Seori set down the compress and looked at her hands. "She said if she'd turned him away she would have been someone different. Someone who made exceptions. And someone who makes the first exception has already decided their principles are conditional." She paused. "She said she'd rather be a healer who sometimes got hurt than something that wore the shape of a healer and wasn't."

  I thought about that for a while. Thought about the gate, about the thirty-seven people outside it and the question that hadn't really been a question.

  "She was right," I said.

  "I know she was." She picked up the compress again. "That's why I've been watching since we arrived."

  "Watching?"

  "Watching how this place works," she said, with the careful quality of someone putting words to something they'd been thinking through for longer than the conversation. "Whether it's what it looks like." She glanced at me. "Most places that look like something are something else. The look is the point. What's underneath is different."

  "What does Ashenhearth look like?"

  "Like somewhere that means it." She said it directly, the way she said things when she'd decided. "The bear kin organized themselves. You didn't arrange them. The fairies argue about everything and you let them and they reach the right answer. The tower." She gestured vaguely upward. "You built it before we arrived. Not a holding space. Not adequate quarters. You gave us a mythical building, You even built a floor for the weaving frames."

  "Mo told me about arachnae communities," I said. "Traditions, what mattered to people. I tried to build toward that."

  "You built without being asked and without knowing if it would matter," she said, with an amused giggle that I was noting for absolutely no reason. "That's the part. Most people build and then tell you what they've given you. You just built and then the door was open."

  I looked at my hands. The dark alloy of the fingers. The forgestone veins faint and steady in the grey skin.

  "I had a door once," I said. "Before I had words for what I needed, before I even knew I was missing something, someone left it open. Not because they knew me. Not because I'd earned it. Just because that's what doors are for." I turned my hand over, looking at what it had become. "Thirty-five days in a dungeon that wanted to see what I was made of. Stone and dark and something ancient deciding whether I was worth keeping. What got me through wasn't strength." I paused. "It was an egg in the dark that chose, before I'd done a single thing to deserve it, to stay with me anyway." The afternoon was quiet around us. "You don't forget that. You carry it forward. And eventually the only thing that feels right is making sure someone else finds the same door already open."

  Seori was quiet for a moment. She was looking at me with the bright steadiness that had replaced the professional composure and wasn't asking permission to be there anymore.

  "No," she said, reaching up to tuck a strand of glossy hair behind her ear. "You don't."

  The afternoon moved around us. The settlement kept its sounds, the voices and footsteps and the distant argument three floors below that sounded like fairies debating sparkle distribution. The south aperture sent its clean light across the reorganized shelving.

  "This is what I wanted it to be," I said. "Ashenhearth. Not a theory. Not an ideology. Just a place where the door is already open before you know you need it. Where you don't have to explain why you deserve to come in." I looked at the aperture. "My primary principle. No exceptions. As long as you are not hurting others or the world as a whole, you should be allowed to do, or want, or... love whoever you want."

  When I looked back at her she was smiling, dimples and all. Not the small professional version. Not the gentle one she'd given the child on Floor Five. The full one, warm and genuine and a little helpless, the expression of someone who has found the thing they were hoping existed and is overwhelmed by it in the best possible way.

  I was very glad I had come back to check the brackets.

  ```

  [MEDICAL SPACE: FULLY OPERATIONAL]

  [BRACKET ANCHORAGE: CONFIRMED FINE. AGAIN.]

  [HEALER STATUS: SETTLED. GENUINELY.]

  [NOTE: THE WARDEN RETURNED TO CHECK THE BRACKETS]

  [NOTE: THE BRACKETS WERE FINE THE FIRST TIME]

  [NOTE: THE SYSTEM NOTES THE BRACKETS WERE NOT THE REASON]

  [NOTE: THE SYSTEM OFFERS NO FURTHER COMMENT]

  ```

  ---

  ~~~ Day 139, Late Afternoon

  I heard Dewdrop before I reached Floor Eight.

  She had been there, by my estimate, approximately twenty minutes and had covered substantial ground. I was two floors below and catching it clearly.

  "AND THAT BUILDING ON THE EAST SIDE IS THE ADMINISTRATIVE TOWER WHERE GERALD LIVES AND WORKS AND YOU SHOULD NOT STARTLE GERALD BECAUSE HE IS VERY IMPORTANT AND ALSO HE HAS TINY ARMS AND THEY WAVE AROUND VERY FAST WHEN HE IS UPSET."

  I slowed on the ramp.

  "THE LAKE IS WHERE TONY LIVES. TONY IS VERY OLD AND VERY BIG AND HE HAS FIVE HEADS AND PAPA NAMED HIM TONY. TESSARITH LAUGHED FOR A VERY LONG TIME. I ALSO LAUGHED. IT IS A FUNNY NAME BUT ALSO IT IS A GOOD NAME BECAUSE PAPA CHOSE IT AND PAPA DOES NOT DO THINGS WITHOUT REASONS EVEN WHEN IT LOOKS LIKE HE DOES."

  I stopped on the seventh floor landing. Leaned against the wall. My eyes watering a bit at my daughters words.

  Through the stone I felt two presences on the observation deck above me. Dewdrop, bright and buzzing with her particular energy, the warmth of her moving restlessly as she described. And the other one. Small and still. The near-black shimmer that I'd come to recognize, the quality of her stillness, the way she occupied space as if she was trying to take up as little of it as possible.

  She was at the east window. Where she always was.

  She hadn't left while Dewdrop talked.

  "THE SOUTH GARDEN HAS THE DISPLACER BEASTS AND THE BIG ONE IS THE MAMA AND SHE IS VERY NICE ONCE SHE DECIDES YOU ARE OKAY AND ALSO THE BABIES PHASE THROUGH THINGS BUT PAPA SAYS THAT IS DEVELOPMENTAL AND THEY CANNOT HELP IT."

  A pause.

  "I HAVE A MIMIC," Dewdrop said, at a slightly lower register. Not quieter. Dewdrop didn't do quieter. Just more deliberate. "HER NAME IS NIBBLES. I NAMED HER. PAPA FOUND HER AND I NAMED HER AND SHE LIVES ON PAPA'S SHOULDER. SHE IS VERY GOOD AT BEING THINGS. SHE CANNOT DO WINGS YET BUT I AM HELPING HER PRACTICE AND SHE IS TRYING VERY HARD."

  Through the stone I felt the small still presence at the east window. She hadn't moved. She was listening. I could also feel Nibbles give a quiet purr of recognition.

  "I KNOW IT IS A LOT," Dewdrop said. "ALL THE THINGS AND ALL THE PEOPLE. IT WAS A LOT FOR ME TOO WHEN I FIRST FOUND PAPA. IT FELT VERY BIG... HE WAS VERY BIG." A pause. "BUT IT GETS SMALLER. NOT THE PLACE. THE FEELING. THE PLACE STAYS THE SAME BUT THE FEELING OF IT GETS SMALLER AND THEN IT GETS LIKE A BLANKET INSTEAD OF LIKE A CEILING."

  I stood on the seventh floor landing and did not move.

  "PAPA IS VERY GOOD AT THE BLANKET PART," Dewdrop said. "HE DOES NOT MAKE YOU ASK. HE JUST." A pause. "HE JUST KNOWS."

  The observation deck was quiet.

  I heard Dewdrop move, the soft buzz of her wings approaching the ramp.

  "SEE YOU TOMORROW MORNING," she said. Not a question. Not an offer. A statement of fact delivered by someone who had decided what tomorrow morning contained and was sharing this information as a courtesy. "WE HAVE PLANS."

  She hit the ramp at full speed, and shot past me trailing purple light and the faint scent of honey, registered my presence with "PAPA!" at maximum volume, reversed in midair, landed on my shoulder, and said: "I MADE A FRIEND."

  I looked at my daughter. At the enormous purple eyes and the complete certainty she carried everywhere she went, the kind that didn't need permission or approval because it wasn't performing. It just was.

  "I heard," I said. "You did really well."

  "SHE IS VERY QUIET," Dewdrop said, earnest and matter of fact.

  "I noticed."

  "THAT IS OKAY." She patted my cheek. "I AM LOUD ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US."

  Then she was gone, off toward the grove at Dewdrop speeds, already on to the next thing, trailing sparkles that caught the late afternoon light.

  I stayed on the ramp. "You, my wonderful daughter, are loud enough for everyone," I said quietly.

  Through the stone above me the small presence at the east window was still. She hadn't moved from the window during the exchange. She was still looking out at the Shadowfen, at the settlement below it, at the view she'd chosen specifically.

  After a while, very slightly, her attention turned toward the ramp.

  Not a movement. Not a step or a turn. The angle of something shifting, the way you orient toward a direction without admitting that's what you're doing. Like listening for a sound that had stopped and finding the silence it left behind.

  I went down the ramp.

  The forge was warm and steady in my chest.

  ```

  [DEWDROP STATUS: OPERATIONAL. AS ALWAYS.]

  [SETTLEMENT NARRATION: COMPLETE. COMPREHENSIVE.]

  [TOMORROW MORNING: SCHEDULED]

  [NOTE: THE SMALL ONE STAYED FOR THE WHOLE THING]

  [NOTE: THIS IS NOTED]

  ```

  ---

  ~~~ Day 139, Night

  Nyx found me by the lake, or I found her. The bond made the distinction academic.

  She was in dragon form. The full weight of her, shadow-black scales shifting ember-orange with her breathing in the dark, the shadow magic wisping from the scale edges in the cool night air like a permanent weather system she generated herself. She was curled at the lake's edge in the particular way she curled when she'd decided to be still for a while, the long tail laid out along the stone, the massive head resting forward on her forelegs, ember-orange eyes open and on the settlement.

  I came and sat next to her shoulder.

  She shifted. A slow, deliberate, large-scale adjustment of weight and position, and my back found her side instead of the space beside it. The shadows dancing through her ambient mana settled around me immediately. She was warm in the way of something that maintained its own internal climate without effort, deep and even and steady, and it went through my back and into the places where the day had accumulated.

  "Long day," I said.

  Through the bond came something patient and unhurried. The specific quality of her attention when she was listening without needing to respond, the fullness of being heard by something that had no agenda for the moment.

  I relaxed into her hold and looked up at the tower. Every window lit. The arachnae had settled into their floors over the course of the day and the warmth of it was visible from out here, the particular light of a building that was inhabited rather than just occupied. Warm and variable, different qualities in different windows, the individualization of people making spaces their own.

  Tony was below the surface. I felt him through the forge-bond, distant and deep, the ancient patient weight of five heads and centuries of accumulated existence. The bioluminescent rhythm, slow and steady in the dark of the lake floor. He was content. He had submerged this morning for the arrival of thirty-seven strangers and had been introduced to those strangers today and had his name confirmed in front of witnesses, that was enough for Tony. He was a being of large patience and small satisfactions and he had found a good place for both.

  I tried to find a comfortable position against Nyx's scales.

  The scales were beautiful. They were also not a mattress. The ridges ran in patterns that were presumably ideal for a dragon and which created a landscape for anything attempting to rest against them that required significant navigation. I shifted left. A different ridge. I shifted right. Back to the first ridge, which I now confirmed was preferable to the second ridge, which was information I could have used earlier.

  Nyx watched this process.

  Through the bond came something warm and distinctly amused. Not the sharp amusement she deployed like a tool. The private kind. The one she didn't bother hiding from me.

  "You could help," I said.

  She shifted one scale plate. This made things marginally worse in an interesting new direction.

  "That was the wrong kind of help."

  The bond warmth intensified. The ember-orange eyes stayed on the tower.

  *You're comfortable,* she said through the bond. The bond-speech carried the specific tone of someone stating a conclusion.

  "I'm not comfortable!" I said, exaggerating the level of contorting I was needing to do.

  She let out an amused snort, shadow-smoke curling from her nostrils, before turning slightly, curling her tail and the rest of her around me like a burrito that was all tortilla and very little filling.

  The warmth of her and the steady sound of her breathing and the bond between us humming at the frequency it hummed when we were both exactly where we were supposed to be, was perfect.

  Nibbles, made a small sound and nestled deeper into the crook of my neck. She'd been quiet since the afternoon, the satisfied quiet of a good day, and the forge mana she pulled from me in her sleep was barely noticeable, a phone charger drawing almost nothing, a small steady warmth cradled against my neck.

  The settlement breathed around us. The tower breathing and the kitchen cooling and the east barracks settling, three hundred and seventy eight people finding the end of the day. The Shadowfen breathed around the settlement, doing what it did, which was being large and dark and not our problem tonight.

  The tower had lit windows.

  I counted them. Working up from the ground floor, floor by floor, the warm light in each one. Counted the medical space window where Seori was probably still working because that was the impression she gave of herself. Counted the observation deck, dark, no one there now. Counted the weaving hall window, still lit because some of the arachnae had started working almost immediately, which Tessarith had watched with the quality of someone seeing something they'd thought they might never see again.

  I let my head fall back against Nyx's scales.

  The stars above Ashenhearth were doing what stars did, which was being extremely distant and completely indifferent and objectively beautiful, and I watched them for a while with the particular emptied quality of someone who has run a full day and arrived at the end of it and found the end of it was fine.

  *Rest,* Nyx said through the bond, quiet as breathing. *I have you.*

  The forge settled in my chest like something putting itself to bed.

  I did.

  ---

  [END OF DAY REPORT: DAY 139]

  [MEDICAL SPACE: OPERATIONAL]

  [BRACKET ANCHORAGE: VERIFIED. TWICE.]

  [FORGE STATUS: RUNNING WARM. UNUSUALLY WARM.]

  [NOTE: THE SYSTEM IS NOT JUDGING]

  [NOTE: ...MAYBE A LITTLE BIT]

  ---

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