holy place

[she_sells_seashells]

My alternates tend to take over the world. Advice available. Rates negotiable.

Shell Bell puts up her sign and nibbles her most recent charity meal. Not potatoes! It is not potatoes. Or fish or clams. It is rice and curry and a fruity yogurt drink. That nice person told Bar she could use his tab for four meals, and this is meal number two.

Comments

[seewhathappens]

"I want to read them as soon as possible, so I'm distributing them among my manifestations. I can bring them back just as easily when I'm done. If I want to keep them, I will pay Bar when I decide to."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Oh, that makes sense. You can only move stuff that way, not people?"

[seewhathappens]

"Only plants and inanimate objects, not animals or people, and only things that belong to me in some sense. Even if I am only borrowing them, as in this case."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Huh. Still, that means there could be trade. I'm now positive that we have more technology - even if it's really badly distributed - so this will probably be useful to your people back home once we're stable enough to produce exports. Wrecking the Capitol will interfere some with our tech production capacity but as long as District Three's okay we'll probably be able to recover most of it."

[seewhathappens]

"I am definitely looking forward to those opportunities."

[she_sells_seashells]

"It'll be great. ...Creepy question: I assume you can do food, like, meat, in principle can you do corpses? Because we have medical technology too, and sometimes if somebody is only recently, not too messily dead, they can be brought back."

[seewhathappens]

"...That's... possible. But transporting the recently dead doesn't work. So it may depend on whether or not there is a gap between the respective definitions of 'recently'."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah. It'll just take a while to train people on the far end to use the medical equipment even if we can spit out enough of it to meet demand. I think it helps if the dead person has been kept cold, especially underwater? One time when I was four the Hunger Games wound up with the last two kids fighting on a frozen lake and they both fell in. They had to fish them both out, wake them up, and put them back."

[seewhathappens]

"I see..."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah."

[seewhathappens]

"I am looking forward to being able to put a stop to that."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Me too. Do you want a map of the place - anything else I can get you so you'll be prepared to make as clean a sweep as possible?"

[seewhathappens]

"Maps, definitely. And whatever other information you think of. Especially if you can find more precise descriptions of their weapons and how they work, although I'm sure that will be difficult to come by."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Not with Bar's help. They're controlled in Panem, but Bar doesn't care about censorship laws." Shell Bell goes and comes back with more textbooks and an atlas.

[seewhathappens]

"Very good." He disappears the textbooks, but keeps the atlas with him.

[she_sells_seashells]

It takes Shell Bell a few weeks to be willing to leave Milliways while not literally starving. But eventually, with a little more meat on her bones than usual and discs of wood in her pocket -

- she steps out.

She immediately has to put in a full day of work on her clam boat and doesn't have a chance to talk to Kiro until the boat pulls in to shore and she's slipped away up the beach.

"Kiro?" she asks a disc.

[seewhathappens]

"Yes?" he answers immediately.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Oh, good. I'm on a beach right now, is that a good enough place to bury one of these or should I go inland?"

[seewhathappens]

"A beach will work fine."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Okay." She starts digging. "How deep?"

[seewhathappens]

"Deep enough that it's not likely to be accidentally dug up in the next few days."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Hmm..."

She eventually does go deeper inland, where the tide won't rearrange the depth as it pleases and where there aren't any tasty things someone besides her might think to dig up in the sand. She digs out a sloping pit a few feet deep, deposits a disc in it, and puts sand over it.

[seewhathappens]

"Thank you. That should do."

[she_sells_seashells]

"You're welcome. Um, I'd appreciate if you'd tell me what's going on, even though I've done all the parts you actually need help with now."

[seewhathappens]

"If you find somewhere safe to have a conversation with me every so often and say my name, I'll keep you updated on how much territory I've covered."