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I had a slow period in my Developing Theories class. All I had to do was mention the use of vacuum tubes as electrical components, give them a few samples to work with, and watch them go wild. So while the adults in the room are all dazzled by my brilliance and scrambling over themselves to come up with the best application and theory and use-case and documentation. On good days, my role here is just to wave a wand as The Puzzlemaster! and challenge them to create the best answer to my riddles three.

So I had nothing better to do than to kick back with ol' Nux Gysmo and let myself think out loud. He was working on his sketchbook, it looks like armor specifically meant to deflect and deter the hook-shaped claws of the Blind, and to up-armor all the spots they usually bite at, or spikes where they're likely to impact.

"So I was asking myself," I said, bouncing a ball off the wall, over and over. "How does a tree evolve the ability to create a poison specifically against positive emotions? That seems unlikely. But, first of all, maybe it's just magic. Okay. On the second hand, well, it's a pretty viable strategy right?"

"The tow hitch yanked itself inside my skin," Nux commiserated.

"Sure dude. Like, species cooperation is probably the most important strategy in the evolutionary lottery. Social groups are a game changer. That's well-established," I said, bouncing the ball and catching it, over and over. I don't have access to rubber, so it's just leather and air pressure. "So, it stands to reason that the ability to disrupt social groups of other species wouldalsobe a massive tilt of evolution. A hard counter to the dominant strategy. That was where my mind was, right?"

"Keith is an adorable bat."

"Yes he is. Thing is, that hypothesis only make any fucking sense if animals of a social group are a major threat to the lives and genetic future of these trees. And historically, prehistorically, that's never really been the case. Their threats are fires, weather conditions, parasites, disease, competition with other trees, or the actions of specific animals like an elephant ripping up a sapling, or a bird whose nesting habits are a danger." I paused, holding the ball and staring at it in my hands. "With one major exception."

"Tie the X in half?" Nux suggested.

I started tossing again. Bounce, catch, throw. "I can't think of any animal species that collectively endangers species of trees, other than humans. So, my hypothesisreallymeans that this toxin is an evolved defense against the logging industry and manmade deforestation. And that's ridiculous. Impossible."

"Start the tarts, begin the beingets!"

"You tell 'em Nux. I remember some story about how evolution can happen a lot faster than we used to think, taking decades or centuries instead of eons. But, that's for a shift of existing traits, I'm sure.Notfor developing whole new strategies to deal with a specific threat."

"Lick the salt, take the drink, bite the lime, and throw," Nux advised me. He started a new page, diagramming something that appeared to be a new laser array, this time including the light-multiplying crystals from the Hearstcliff cavern.

"Maybe later. But here's the thing: The beaches here have sand, Nux. That means that when the coastal landforms were developed, there were tidal forces depositing sediment. Okay, big whoop. But where's the fuckin' moon, man?"

"Giving the sisters their names, they are Daisy and Devotion."

"That's very sweet," I said, smiling. "But for real. This game has a recurring theme for glimmering points of light. Twinkling stars, the bling off a sword's edge, a very shiny hero-smile. So there's plenty of artwork of the night sky, and there was never art of a moon, which presumably would only have gotten in the way. But then I get here and there'sactuallynot a moon. Not even a dark moon locked in orbit away from the sun, astronomers would notice that blocking out stars. I'm pretty sure that landmass formation as we know it requires a tidal force and satellites, but we appear to have none. Hypothesis: there used to be a moon and now there isn't. Did it crash? Or did it slip its orbital tether and float away?"

"Varmints with garments?"

"Probably not," I sighed. "But at this point I'm open to new ideas. But... man, this whole fucking planet. The axial tilt is off, there's very little distinction between seasons. The summer solstice and winter solstices only have about forty-five minutes of daylight difference. So, we're very near the equator. But it's always so damn cold! Summer temperatures are comfortable, winter temperatures are lethal. All the seas are relatively shallow. This continent has no mountains on it anywhere. That isweird. Geologists have identified where the fault lines are, and there's no folding, pressing, subsidence... nothing. The fault lines are inactive. No naturally-occurring earthquakes, just the ones created by wizardry. The only major geological event is the Fissuring, which I'm pretty sure was induced by wizards and not natural. Right?"

"An invasion of abrasions, a legion of lesions." Oh yeah, he's definitely working to upgrade my laser cannon. And he is carefully marking all the safe handholds so I don't destroy my hands clutching the lens directly again.

"You said it, pal. Now, all this made sense when I was playing a video game. Simple map, simple geography. But that simple geography implies a very skewed geology. I've never seen an igneous rock here. Everything is sedimentary, with a little metamorphic. that's it. And the limestone! Nux, the very first cave I ever explored in Hearstwhile was the size of a world-class sporting arena. And all the others too. The landscape here is so riddled with sinkholes and caves that they're basically treated like free sewers and garbage disposal, everyone just throws stuff down into the ground and forgets it forever!"

"Have you tried turning it off and killing someone and turning it back on?"

"We'll call that Plan C, okay? What I'm getting at is how fucking long does it take for water to carve a cave that big? Or for that much sediment to deposit? How long does it take for a moon to drift out of orbit? How long does it take for a forest to evolve a response to clear-cut lumbering? Nux, I think this world is ridiculously old."

He handed me the new laser array, which would definitely need a stand and came with a magnification chamber. Neat. He tapped his pencil, grinning. "We could stand here wading through shadow essences all day, but the God Grinder still needs to be fed."

"Cool cool," I replied. "Look, one of the first indications I ever got that something is off, was back when I was about seven years old and my agricultural tutor said the words: 'what do you mean, different kinds of wheat?', and that was not a joke. He was confused. There's only one strain of apples here. Oak is a species, not a clade. All of our staple crops are genetically identical. The ecosystem here isturbo-fucked, and and it's all being held together with painter's tape and prayer. Oranges, lemons, limes, clementines, pomelos, tangerines? All limited to extremely specific regions and every year their harvest is a little less. Tomatoes barely grow here at all. Do you know how fragile an agricultural environment needs to be if all your scurvy protection falls on two crops of grapefruit and cranberries? And shit, I wish it was just plants. The degree of racial hegemony in this nation is... troubling."

Nux tuned me out, he was designing some kind of fine-strand netcaster to take advantage of the roiling, stumbling, aggressive movement of massed Blind. I need to start figuring out an opportunity to test this out.

I tossed the ball, and contemplated. This is an old, worn-out world that's been hollowed out, sanded smooth, and has barely managed to stay habitable to human civilization on one continent with one government that is is so top-heavy that if we actuallydidroot out all the corruption and the bureaucratic redundancy, it would crash the whole system, like a weight-bearing black mold infection. There are at least a dozen species that have evolved intelligence and sapience, and they're all hostile.

If the lands outside Hearstwhile are populated with trees like the Uchislowi, that explains why monsters thrive outside our borders. And it means that this nation is the last enclave on the world where love, affection, comraderie, friendship, and compassion mean anything at all. If this land fails, all that's left is the tyrannical gangs of the nailmonkeys and the unconditional individualism of the centaurs.

Maybe it's kind of fucked up, but I think I'm actually trying to save this world for love and friendship. Which, honestly, is not a role I expected to see myself cast for.

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