There are five people on the platform when I get up there, but one of them’s already stepping onto a disk and sinking out of sight.

Unusually, they’re not in the same configuration as the others had been, one person in the center and everyone else on their disks. Instead, they’re shifting around to form a pentagon with me included as one of the points, and none of them is on a disk. I step off of mine onto the center platform and copy them, sinking down cross-legged and realizing with a bit of surprise that the platform’s floor is actually really comfortable, just the right balance of spongy and firm. It’s a different color than the other platforms were, a light grey instead of their steely gray-blue.

“Adam, right?” The second my ass hits the “floor”, one of the five, the one immediately to my left, is leaning forwards. “I’m Gavonne, but please call me Vosha.”

“Vonne, don’t flirt with the Magelord.”

“Or at least wait until we’ve had a chance to introduce ourselves!”

“Speak for yourselves, I think it’s cute.”

The four of them talk in rapid-fire, and I’m left blinking as they all suddenly burst into laughter. Blinking, disconcerted, and a little bit feeling like I’m being made fun of.

“I’m sorry, Adam.” Gavonne pats me on the shoulder; we’re just close enough that she can do that comfortably. “I call you Adam, right? We’re just all laughing at Nik’s line that they weren’t here to say.”

“The fifth, whom I displaced? I thought you could have more here. But yeah, Adam is good. I’ve had enough Magelord James for probably a lifetime already.”

“I want to see the flip puzzle!” Gavonne makes a face. She’s an incredibly cute sed, for all that the individual pieces of her seem uncanny; long, flat face, tufted ears, orange fur banded with shades of grey and black, and thick, fluffy fur that covers every millimeter of her body and tail. I have no idea what her face means, but it’s a nice face, makes me feel warm and relaxed. “Nik didn’t wanna, so they bailed. Oh! Names! I’m Gavonne, and you can call me Vosha if you wanna, but that’s real flirty, so if you don’t, Vonne is good!”

“Do not think light of her by this, Adam. Ah, I am Annak. It is a jest, you see; the word means giant.” The nephil to my right, simple trousers and shirt a couple shades deeper and richer than the grey-purple of his skin, speaks up, and I snort in good humor along with his chuckles. He’s actually shorter than I am, well under two meters. “Gavonne is first among us, and she is fond of speaking her mind.”

“In truth, tis so, and lo shall all know it to be; our girl will rise, our girl will fall, but ne’er downplay. Shar, friend.” The third of my four new acquaintances is dressed in a riot of bright colors, mostly in the teal spectrum, or maybe turquoise, I can never remember which of them is the brighter one and which is the duller. He’s an orc, corded with lean muscle and dressed in a sleeveless shirt that shows off swirling tattoos of water and sky in practically every shade of blue imaginable, and he talks like he’s incanting verse or reciting poetry.

“Mmm.” The fourth is another sed, a bear. We had bears back on the Spirit, so I would know; and I’ve seen Zidanya turning into one, so again, I would know, and this fellow is a bear. Bristly fur a dark enough brown that it edges into black, the only thing shocking about him is his size; he’s proportioned like he’s fully grown, but… “You stare. Douvn is small here, for speaking.” His voice—Douvn’s voice—is a rumble of faraway thunder, a shaking in the ground. “Titanic fists, suboptimal for puzzles. You will say Do, for a name.”

I nod down at him, and then Vonne pokes me in the side with a claw, startling me. “Oh! Introductions? Hi, I’m Adam. I’m… huh.” I take a deep breath. They wait for me with various patient looks that I’m moderately sure are some flavor of pitying. “I know I’m a stranger, and I’m grateful for your welcome, for all that I feel like I’ve intruded into a group that’s going to have a thousand years of running jokes I won’t get.”

I’m pretty sure the feeble smile I give is obviously feeble, because Vonne immediately pipes up. “No, no not at all. I mean, only a little bit!” She taps a hand twice on the floor of the platform, and a display ripples outwards, showing… showing times as pips with enormous gaps between them, I’m pretty sure. “Look! Do’s been here a bit over five thousand years, details don’t really matter, right, but we only get a few weeks a year, really. I mean, okay, five thousand weeks is… do you know what a week is?”

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“Five thousand weeks.” I flicker my Visor just to check, reflexively, because honestly, why do math in my head when I could do math in my head and then validate it? “Three gigaseconds. Most of a life span, back on the Fleet. But a few weeks a year?”

“Do is oldest,” the gigantic bear-sed grunts. “Not greatest of heart, wisdom, cleverness, brilliance, or knowledge. But Do is oldest, and knows some tricks.”

“Anyway,” Vonne says with a rush of words, “after Do the oldest is Zake and anyway what I mean is we’re not actually…”

“Old.” Annak reaches across, leaning for it, to flick Vonne across the forehead, startling her into silence. “We live only when we are called. For the five of us, in the last millennium, we have always been called together, which is gracious of the Lady; but as such, we live for one week, three years out of four. More often, in the millennium before that, before things… became more civilized.”

“Anyway!” Vonne drums impatiently on the ground, and the display of Do’s venerability disappears. It’s replaced by the runic diagram for the translated probability puzzle I’d thrown at someone earlier out of pure petty spite, which I now have the good grace to find embarrassing. “This puzzle! We can’t solve it!”

“I’m… sorry?”

“No, this is amazing!”

“In time, our minds of all the foes we set them ‘gainst dispose,” Shar says, smirking, and then I get it.

“So you want a sounding board, for me to tell you if you’re running down any dead ends, and maybe a hint?”

“No hints!” Vonne freezes after she yelps it, then seems to relax. “Well maybe a tiny hint, if we’re still stuck.”

“It was clear to us immediately, of course, that the overall puzzle-rune provides a string of coin flips of an overall fifty-percent probability.” I nod at Annak in confirmation. “Myself and Do had the notion, after we all gave it some thought and tried several other ideas, that we might find strings of results, and when we looked more thoroughly than we thought reasonable, we did.”

I wince at that. “I…” I’m about to say I didn’t write the puzzle, but; and then I realize that anything I could say after the but would be a hint in its own right, so I don’t. “I can’t comment, sorry.”

“Alphabets encodable are into seven and no fewer flips of the coin.” I blink at Shar; the hint I was trying to avoid giving is obviously irrelevant, that’s nice. Also, I’d forgotten the sheer size of the Cadoran alphabet, and I’m grateful yet again for the ridiculousness of Omniglot.

“Do finds a number in a pattern. We find more patterns, separated by the number.”

“But then!” Vonne’s tail baps me in the hip; it’s extremely gentle, probably because of how incredibly fluffy it is. “We find a message about being trapped in a coin flipping factory. And then it offers us pie.” She sounds mortified. “Pie! I mean, it’s delicious, and there’s pie down on the ground, and I’m hungry now.”

“Vonne.” Do is laughing, and the platform shakes.

“Right! So. Are we missing something? Why pie?”

I look at her and scratch my chin. “So, you want a hint, then.” There’s a pooling silence, and I look around to everyone’s nods, and my shoulders sag downwards. “You’re going to hate this and love it at the same time.

“It’s not pie. It’s pi, e.”

They all look blank for a bit, and then Shar starts laughing. He waves everyone off, then gets himself under control for the most part, snickering instead of laughing. “Circles, constants, these combine to make the end of that benighted line.”

There’s a chorus of groans. Do’s sends a shudder through the platform, Annak’s involves him sprawling on his back and slapping the unsteady ground; Vonne’s involves her pouncing on me, and my arms wrap around her as she hugs me, hugging her back tentatively.

Well, not that tentatively after a moment. Her fur is incredibly soft and silky to the touch.

“I can’t believe it, that’s amazing. I hate it so much. Where have you been all my life?”

“In another universe, technically. Being something halfway between an extremely pampered slave and irreplaceable breeding stock.” The words slip out of me, as they hadn’t in any of my other conversations, and I’m braced for them to hurt, but they somehow don’t.

“That’s awful! And actually also kind of hilarious!” Vonne bounces back to her feet, and she lunges for a disk. “Come on! I’m hungry. You, me, and some food, so that you don’t accidentally give any hints to the others, cause your hiding-things face is worse than mine and that’s saying everything. Food, food!

“We’re gonna have pie.”