Unnamed Speaker 9

21, 40, 61.

51.

I'll just watch intently, holding my shell, and I'll say, I told you I'd be back.

I'll be back. He said, and we'll fill our bellies. and I will just jump, I'll dive in.

I will take

15, 16?

Survival, eh? I wish it would go down past religion occasionally. Survival. 19.

Boy. Come on, Beastie.

Goodbye. I never got to give you. Farewell, my love. And I'll hold that. I may return.

We could smoke all of this and take it with us by midday tomorrow.

She'll appreciate that.

Well, to be fair, Mr. Yornear, that the first native of Jakar that we encountered demanded a tribute of gold pieces.

As good as we can be. You're alive. That's what matters. We're still standing.

We know for a fact that they use these gateways with arcane magic.

I think that there may be no other choice. There's no way we survive going over.

It's always the biggest, baddest beasties that live deeper and deeper. Whether it's the Seer or the Earth.

We may have actually bought ourselves some time being transported this far south.

And arcane magics. That is right. I suppose Mr. Stavis Scotch uses arcane magics, but I wouldn't expect you to know anything about this.

Fuck.

Oh, that's weird. Neither do I. Well, perhaps Mr. Staviskelch can go with you. No, can't see anything. Scoop is looking down there and there's a bunch of skeletons still playing.

I guess we'll go together.

Oh yeah, your peoples are used to tunnels, dark tunnels.

That's pretty far. Drums in the deep.

So is the tower.

Well, they're connecting two cities of their empire. It's far more convenient to go straight through the mountain than go over it.

We have no idea what sort of strange magical technology you'll find in the Ruined Cities. Okay, all right, all right. You don't expect to see this kind of craftsmanship outside of Dwarvenholds. At least not that I've been to.

I see what you're saying.

You were observing and you remember. I was drunk on brandy. Eh, fine.

I will have spent this time packing my pipe.

As he lights my pipe. I think we made it out unscathed. That's easy for you to say. You're standing here, aren't you, Mr. Stabiscotch? Well, most of me.

There's only one way. Aye. East from even where we're at.

It's not like this is abandoned. Let's just take five minutes, real quick. We're stealing one of their vessels, clearly.

Nice, Mr. Stylist College.

Aye.

Mr. Fireblossom, now, I usually appreciate your company, but you have not been quiet a moment this trip. Can you please just let me focus? Classic.

So like an albino cave troll.

That may save our lives. It's better than nothing. And its silver lining is that Daisy isn't a fool. She would have gone back to her people. We've lost two weeks.

I'm glad.

Boy, there's no chance that she kept venturing south.

17.

13.

Also, it is the providence of the Lady that we've made it back to the sea. I don't want to leave so soon again.

I don't know. The next time...

But all you wouldn't give to just see a single wave.

Global attention after a female fencer was given the ultimate punishment for refusing to compete against a biological man.

there aren't a lot of ethical ways to hurt people in laboratory studies, but one way that you can do it is you can have them stick their hand in ice water and hold it there for a long time. And it turns out that the duration that they can hold their hand is a good measure for how, a proxy for how painful it is to them, right?

And there have been a bunch of studies like this where you assign people randomly to either swear or say words that are not swear words, just kind of neutral words. anodyne words, brown, chair, whatever. And it turns out that the people who are randomly assigned to swear can hold their hands in the water about 50% longer and report substantially lower pain subjectively.

So you could imagine that in lots of dimensions of athletic performance, where pain is a limiting factor in what you're able to get your body to do, swearing might actually make it easier to push through whatever that limitation is.

There was a fun study that did this. So it wasn't with driving, but they tried to induce a state of emotional arousal and physiological arousal by having people – this was with gaming, actually – have them play either a golf simulator – or a first-person shooter. And then they give them a task where they just had to produce profanity, as many profanities as they could within a minute.

And the people who were first assigned to the first-person shooter simulation were able to produce significantly more profane words.

I've had undergrads who have looked at this. So they, you know, where they survey, this is not peer-reviewed research, but, you know, anecdotally, where they ask people how offensive they think words are. And separately ask them how much time they've spent on various different sorts of gaming platforms and in certain different specific games.

And it turns out that there are specific words that show up a lot in Call of Duty, for example. And if you are a Call of Duty player, then those words you judge to be less offensive than if you are a gamer, but not a Call of Duty player.