Training Base
Mission Time: 34.5 days and counting

In which no one really wants to go to Vinylhaven.

Jela continues to dream of the days when the tree’s planet lived; we learn that this tree is too young to have known the branches-with-wings except through the memories of its elders.

In this chapter, we get the crystal to go with our soldier, as Jela learns that someone (“and we must assume that someone equals the enemy“) is dismantling portions of the universe itself, in a process the mathematicians call “decrystallization”. Somehow involved in the process is timonium, a mysterious semi-stable transuranic element of which we’ll be hearing more later. We’ll also be hearing again about the mathematician who did the pioneering work on the problem before he “had unfortunately come to the attention of those who found his theories and equations anathema”.

The elder of the two anonymous men who instruct Jela in the problem implies that it may potentially threaten the entire universe, and hints that his own thoughts tend in a remarkable direction: his studies, he says, show that there are other universes…