After yet another long walk—at least I don't have to worry about keeping fit in this world—Talla leads us to what looks at a glance like another huge estate. On closer inspection, however, the buildings are more uniform and utilitarian than the scattered houses of Talla's family estate. Most of them are two to three stories tall, and built of the same rugged sandstone construction as most of the city. Outside, there's a bit of greenery, but it's not as carefully maintained as the estate courtyards.

"What is this?" I ask. "A friend's place?"

"Not quite," Talla chuckles. "Welcome to Stebaari's University of Arts and Sciences! My home away from home."

"Your actual home isn't that far," Draga points out. "You could make the commute on foot."

Talla coughs. "Well, I didn't! I stayed in the dormitories like most of my fellow students during my studies."

"Slumming it," Vi grumbles.

"I know I asked for a more intellectual pastime, but uh...school? Really?" I sigh. "And is it really okay for you to just bring us onto campus with you?"

"It'll make sense, I promise," Talla assures me. "And while I've been away for a few years, I'm still a researcher here. You're my guests."

"Tier three cosmology, right?" I recall. From context, the equivalent of a PhD. "How's that been going since we crashed into your life?"

"You'd be surprised," she replies mysteriously. "But that's not why we're here! Come on, follow me."

As she leads us further in, I can't help but admire the campus. It doesn't quite match my mental image of a university, but it's more familiar than almost anything else I've seen in this world. Students bustling along with books clutched to their chests, or sitting on the grass for a lively debate, or even just relaxing quietly in the shade of a tree to read. It's not like back home, but it tickles something in the back of my mind that reminds me of the life I can't remember.

"[Earth, third planet, home,]" I whisper to myself. "[Saturn, sixth planet, rings.]"

Names, faces, and specific events are some of the hardest things to remember, and even though I've never felt any risk of losing the pieces I've managed to put back together, I'm so scared of losing them again that I make it a point to repeat them as often as I can remember.

It's not much, but it's something. Proof that the memories are still there, if I can just find them again. Did I have siblings? What do my parents' faces look like? Did I get along with them?

I don't know, and it hurts. The more I think about it, the more it makes me want to cry.

"Hey," Talla says softly, nudging me with an elbow. "We're here to have a good time, remember? Relax."

"Sorry," I mutter, wiping my moist eyes before they can spill over. "Just feeling a bit homesick."

"That's alright," she replies with a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "Hopefully this will make you feel a bit better. We're almost there."

Talla leads us into one of the smaller buildings to the side, the inside of which looks a bit like a library. There are rows of shelves, but while there are a number of books, most of the shelf space is taken up by boxes with colorful labels, small figurines, and odd-looking trinkets.

"Are those board games?!" Vi asks incredulously.

And it looks like she's correct. In the middle of the room is a long row of low tables, most of which are empty, but a few have boards and figures set up in what looks like games either ready to play or still in progress.

Only one person is present, kneeling on a cushion at the nearest table and bent over a sheaf of paper as she scribbles on it with a pen that she occasionally dips into her nearby ink pot. Her fur is a dusty blonde, where it isn't stained black by spots of ink, and her horns are simple narrow spikes angled back but without much curve to them.

She glances up as we enter, then does a double-take.

"Professor Talla?!" the girl exclaims. "Wow, it's been a while. Where have you been?"

"Anna. Fieldwork with the rangers," Talla replies casually. "Do you mind if we use the game room?"

"Laboratory," Anna says insistently. "And I guess not. Everyone else is busy attending lectures at the moment. Just don't touch any of the experiments in progress."

"You've got a whole laboratory for playing games?" I ask. "Dang, I wish my university was that cool."

Anna bristles at my comment. "Not just playing! We study, design, and analyze games and puzzles, applying what we learn to real-world applications in economics, statecraft, and even class theory!"

"Anna here is actually something of a prodigy in class theory," Talla explains. "Her degree is only first tier, but she's already working on her third tier thesis."

"First tier is enough to qualify me as a researcher, and I don't want to waste my time teaching classes as a second tier professor," Anna adds. "So yes, that's me. And you are?"

She fixes me with a curious gaze and I bow politely.

"I'm Allie—I mean, I'm Maev, but you can call me Allie." I'm still getting used to that.

"Not who—what?" she corrects me. "I've never seen your species before. The closest matching description is a species of cave dwellers occasionally spotted in subterranean convergence points, but you've got too many eyes and not enough teeth."

I blink. "There are one-eyed troglodytes?"

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"No eyes," she replies flatly, holding my gaze while she waits for an actual answer to her question.

"Uh, well, I'm a [Human]," I supply.

Anna's eyes flicker for a moment, as though reading something, then she frowns. "Useless as ever," she sighs. "Almost always sapient, though. That's uncommon."

"It is?"

"Serpentfolk are only 'usually' sapient, for example," she explains. "Always sentient, as far as I know, but some are born with low enough LEP that they don't get class slots."

My eyes widen. "That's a thing?!"

"Not common in civilized society, but yes," she replies, then hesitates, glancing down at her papers. "But you didn't come to talk about class theory—sorry. It's a force of habit."

"I'd love to talk more about it some time," I say with a smile. "I appreciate any opportunity to learn more about this—uh, I mean, the World Engine."

She perks up, smiling back. "Really?! Most people are content to just listen to the church's proselytizing about how it's the way the Goddess guides society. Any critical analysis is either shrugged off as pointless or attacked as heresy. That's why we have to use this stupid layer of abstraction!"

She gestures at the library of games around us.

"It's a fun abstraction, though!" Talla retorts cheerfully.

"It is fun," Anna admits begrudgingly. "Feel free to browse. Anything on the shelves isn't in use right now. I can help you with the rules."

Despite her surly demeanor, Anna does seem pretty enthusiastic about helping us find a game. Unfortunately, it's hard to get much out of the various boxes, and I can't read any of the labels, so I'm naturally more drawn to the figures, trinkets, and the stuff already laid out on the tables.

"Hey, isn't that the game you played on the ship?" I ask, pointing out a table of familiar playing cards.

"Fusion," Vi confirms. "Looks like it, yeah."

"We've got other decks if you want to play," Anna offers. "But Fusion's a pretty crap game. That experiment is something we've been working on for a while. It's too random to be solved, but we're pretty sure that the betting system is broken enough that it can be rigged with as few as three colluding players against an arbitrary number of opponents."

I hum thoughtfully, wondering if any of the card games I know can be translated to work with their playing cards. Probably just the baby games. I move on to another table, with a set of small figures on a grid-like board. Something like chess or checkers?

"What are these?"

"Strategy games," Anna replies. "Very abstract, but useful to study. Most of them have very complex rules, but there are a few simpler ones you can try."

Hmm. I'm not a huge chess fan, but I bet Anna would love it. It would be simple enough to get some pieces together, so maybe I'll teach her the rules some time. Not right now, though—I'm not in the mood for something quite so competitive.

Moving on, I find another table entirely occupied by one big puzzle. A jigsaw puzzle, to be precise, and it's huge. It must be hundreds if not thousands of pieces.

"You study puzzles like these too?" I ask.

I get betting, strategy, and chance, those all have real-world applications and implications that are studied in my world too—though maybe not in quite the same way as they're doing here.

"It's useful for studying pattern recognition, inference, and extrapolation," Anna hedges, though she doesn't sound entirely convinced. "It's also kind of relaxing."

Fair enough.

"Allie," Vi interrupts. "That shelf on the right. At about eye level. Is that what I think it is?"

I have no idea what she's talking about, but I wander over to scan the shelves for anything familiar and soon spot the same thing she did. It's one of the mechanical trinkets—little puzzle boxes, interlocked rings and hooks, that sort of thing. Except in this case, it's a cube made of a three-by-three stack of smaller cubes. Each face of the smaller cubes has a little symbol painted onto it—circles, triangles, squares, etc.

"No fucking way," Maggie breathes.

Without the familiar colors, I probably wouldn't have recognized it on my own, but thanks to Vi's direction I have found what is unmistakably a Rubik's cube.

"Oh, blood and acid, not that thing," Anna groans. "That's been here longer than I have, and I've never seen anybody solve it. You're supposed to match the symbols on each face of the cube. See, you can turn them like this..."

She grabs the puzzle cube off the shelf and twists it a few times in demonstration.

"It's annoyingly fragile, though," she sighs. "More than a few people have 'accidentally' broken it, and it's a nightmare to put back together. We only have the one, and whoever made it isn't around anymore."

"I wouldn't waste your time," Talla sighs. "I've played around with it a few times, but it's really hard."

"May I?" Vi asks.

I shrug and mentally relax, letting Vi take the lead. We're getting better at that, and while it's still not always easy to switch on command, we manage it more often than not.

Taking the puzzle from Anna, I rotate it in my hands, examining each face. It's an odd feeling. I don't remember learning how to solve these, or what sparked my interest in them, but even just this simple act of turning it around in my hands feels right.

It also feels wrong. The cube is too big, and too heavy. When I experimentally twist the cubelets, they're both too stiff and too loose—offering resistance while simultaneously threatening to come apart if I push too hard against that resistance. The symbols are harder to see patterns in than more familiar colors, but I still see them.

After a bit of inspection, my hands almost move by themselves. It solves layer by layer, rather than face by face. First a cross, matching each piece to the right center—the middle part doesn't actually move. Then the corners, filling in the second layer at the same time.

That's the easy part. The top layer is the hardest, and involves the most memorization. Talla and her friend are both staring at me with interest now, and it's a little embarrassing. Draga looks out of place amid the games and puzzles, more curious about the way the scholars have suddenly taken interest than in what I'm actually doing.

I try not to get distracted, looking over the cube again, trying to find the familiar patterns and letting my fingers do the rest. Something feels wrong, though. I can't quite place it, but something is off about the patterns.

But my fingers still remember, even if they want to flick the faces into place, which doesn't work. It takes a few false starts and a lot of finagling with the cube as it catches in places and nearly breaks when my muscle memory makes too swift and confident a motion, but a few minutes later the final layer is done.

Or...almost.

"Godshit!" Anna swears. "You were so close!"

One piece. A single cubelet on the corner is out of place, each of its faces twisted one position away from correct. I understand now why it felt so wrong.

"No," I shake my head. "It's solved."

Talla furrows her brows. "But that piece is wrong."

I nod. "Exactly. The piece is wrong. Not me."

Anna stares at me for a long moment, then looks at the cube, then Talla, then turns away and walks off without a word.

I blink and look up at Talla. "What did I say?"

Before Talla can answer, Anna returns with her ink pot and pen, slamming them down on the table with enough force to spill a few drops of ink. She arranges the paper in front of her, dips her pen in the ink, and poises herself to start a new page, staring up at me with a severe expression.

"Explain."

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