The Days of Tansy Capstone

Part 1: Threeforks

1

Tansy

"Everywhere normality of the mind may be observed. The habitants adroitly perform the motions which fed them yesterday, last week, a year ago. I have been informed of my aberration well and full."

-Jack Vance, Guyal of Sfere

I was a child of ill omen, even in Utopia. Born on the very stroke of Lughnasa, the midwife left my birthday blank, and it never did get filled in. I didn't know how to take my first breath. They had to do chest compressions until I figured it out, probably to make them stop touching me.

My grip strength was nil, and I got diagnosed on the spot, before the half-season had time to wink, with irresonance: the inability to tune into the how-to-do-it of my kind. Later I would ask people, "How do you know how to do that?" They always said "You just know," and I stopped asking. It was probably an embarrassment to my dad: Radagast Capstone, MMR, that's Master of Morphic Resonance and I had all the resonance of a stick. The other sticks were like, we can't help you.

Irresonance is super-rare, but there's more. When I was three, a healer discovered that placebos didn't work on me at all, and I got diagnosed as anti-manifestational. Get with the program, loser. Life is a dream and you're not pulling your weight. Anti-manifestation is almost as rare as irresonance, and my dad asked the healer, "What are the odds of both happening at once?"

"Zero," she said, "until now."

Mom's name was Tetra Bardo. I don't know why she married my dad. She was way cooler, and richer, too. Her family had made a fortune in the glass ball craze of the last century, and through generations of idleness, good for them, they lost it all to depreciation except their best stuff. We read obsolete gilt-edged compendiums under the warm glow of last-age lanterns, and ate our scrip gruel with silver spoons. Dad took his yaupon to work in a vacuum bottle, and Mom had a lapis inlay globe of strange upscroll continents, and best of all, the mummified hand of Saint Vitus. It was illegal to sell it as long as someone out there was still venerating him.

Mom was always on some new kick: candle-making, bowling, my dad, me, macrame. I saw how she looked at her watercolors and hoped that wasn't how she had looked at me, that would have been awkward. But she did hold up books for me and turn the pages. For me to turn a page I would have to give perfect instructions to every finger. But to turn a word on a page into a picture in my head, that's not even half a finger, I could do it all day.

Dad came to Threeforks Institute for his MMR, and then turned down a paid job for the city of Seedle, keeping the lid on the feral cat population, to stay and follow his dream of tree pareidolia. He didn't get paid -- this was Utopia. But the Institute gave him a free office that he filled with rubbings and daguerrotypes, piled up and pinned all over the wall: the very best examples of trees looking like people for no good reason.

What I really liked were the landscapes. It might have been a big mossy trunk where the moss became trees, or an aspen with bark wrinkles like waves on the ocean, or a path up the the stripy bark of a pine. You had to look just right to see it, and I zoned out and imagined walking into them.

Dad would take me down by the Plushy, before I even remember, up on his shoulders along the river trail. That's probably why I learned to walk, so I could see it on my own, but until I was six he kept coming with me, just because some coyote ate a kid a hundred years ago. Thanks kid, if you'd only brought a big stick, I wouldn't have heard my dad talk about God.

The way he looked at them, the big willows all bony with winter. "Look," he said, "that one's waving its arms." He showed me saints in branches and goblins in trunks, and at sunset he said he saw stained glass windows in the places where the branches weren't. That's just the sky, Dad.

My name is Tansy Capstone, Tansy being a wiry flower, and Capstone from Dad's dweeb ancestor who named himself after a prog band. I'm lucky to have it. The capstone is the perfect thing that you put on top of a building to make it perfect. It gives people completely the wrong idea about me.

2

Bounty

The other kids called me a booty baby, but I called them worse, and they weren't wrong. Since the Fertility Games got canceled, Birthers have poured their leftover scrip into foundations that pay bounties on babies. They said Mom threatened to abort me, of course she did, she knew how to work the system. She got the Flexers and neo-Mennonites in a bidding war, and in the end we got so much scrip for my existence that we didn't have to compost our own poop, and we ate strawberries we didn't grow ourselves. If either of them got a job we could have had our own chariot, but in Utopia the worst thing you can do is get a job. Oh no, I have to take a week off from pottery to dig a ditch for creds, just to afford kiln fuel.

Scrip is distributed every half-season, and minted every winter by the treasury of Greater Cascadia, aluminum dinari and electrum orichalks, always with a new face to mark depreciation. I was born in the year of yarrow. The next year it was blue heron, then black bear, Chief See-all-it, great mullein, sockeye, Tahoma, coyote, and by then if I were a coin I'd be fit for melting down. Instead I got my third diagosis, empathic lethargy, and had to start meeting with our priest.

To keep getting paid for my existence, we had to pick a religion and actually go, which otherwise neither of them would have. Mom believed that the gods are mad and fate is incompetent. "Everything happens for a reason," she said, "a bad reason." I told my dad he should have invented his own tree cult, they would have totally let him, and then he could have called it Radagastarianism. In the end they chose mainline Pansolipsism because it wasn't too crazy and they had friends there. I was lucky, that church had the most amazing chancel: the space over the priest's head was much more interesting than the priest, and he would definitely agree.

"Whoever humbles himself," said Father Ripple, "shall be exalted." He loved our weekly meetings because I would talk shit and give him ideas. One time he said, "I am the straw through which God drinks God," and I said, "Why does God need you then? Why doesn't he just drink himself straight?"

He looked all wistful and said, "I ask myself that all the time."

"And if you're humbling yourself just to get exalted, then aren't you still exalting yourself?" He thought about that a long time and chuckled. "I guess God likes that loophole." The next Sunday he got a whole sermon out of it, and I was so glad he didn't mention me.

"The panImaginer likes that loophole," he said, and the whole church laughed. On a beat, he hit the liturgy: "I am a tendril of the Unknowable, dabbling in unknowing. If this life shall be remembered, live it well. If it shall be forgotten, what a life it was!"

At that cue, the hippie choir sang:

When petrolithic engineers
Cannot tell gneiss from schist
Then who can say, from what appears
What later will exist?
The mind will fill a firmament
Though all the sky is mist

So let us not be permanent
But bend to meet our fears
The last alighting light is you
The liminal will let us through
The laws of physics can't be true
Til all the world is fairy gears

3

Apocalypse

"That that event had taken place, there was no doubt; but, except for a few details, very little seemed to have been handed down as to how it came about, or of what was going on on the Earth at the time, or immediately after it."

-Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle In The Moon

Life is, though. A dream. "Look at these salmonberries I manifested," they'd say, and I told myself they just got lucky. But when I went out, I got nothing. One kid was so hotshot about his manifestations, I said "Prove it, let's go out together." Of course his cornucopia was nowhere. He said the actual hedges had moved or been dis-ripened. "I ate this exact one," he said, "and now it's a flower." After that, nobody wanted to walk with me anywhere, not that I wanted them to. They wouldn't even let me watch their dice games, because I'd turn a contest of wizardry into blind chance.

It turned out my mom was also anti-manifestational, and she hid it from my dad, in case his belief would pass it on to me. It didn't work. She was the only person in town, other than me, who had never seen the stars dance.

Only the late Ancients were dumb enough to put matter before mind, and look what happened to them. They didn't even leave the best ruins. The cathedrals of Franco-Prussia were definitely made by people who believed life is a dream: of God. To the high Ancients, it must have looked like the late Ancients went mad. "They put Descartes before the horse," was Dad's dumb joke. "They made matter so fundamental that it sucked them in like a black hole."

But what they did! Historians are starting to think they were lying about the phones: a billion devices that could talk instantly to any other phone around the world, and on top of that, images. Even if you had engines so small you could put a hundred on the head of a pin, all flashing codes a million times a second, you could barely send a meme to Abyssinia. I dreamed of going back in time, and trading some future tech, maybe foodfab goop, for enough creds to fly around the world both ways as the Apocalypse came on.

Apocalypse. We're not supposed to call it that in front of Transcendentalists, because then they have nothing to look forward to. But that's what the Ancients called it, and it sure looks like they got it. There are a hundred stories about how it happened: Late antiquity was a cocoon for human consciousness, and the Apocalypse was the emergence. The whole age was an act of magic, a great spell to make everyone see everything the same way, and they finally ran out of mana. The out-there world got so mad at something we did, that it stopped pretending to exist. The Moon got so offended at being landed on, that she winked away and loosed the stars.

Whatever, everyone agrees that everyone agreed to disagree, that what was real got atomized, and the atom is you. Some of them must still be out there, the most talented dreamers, surfing the unmediated plenum, grazing our stodgy world and leaving trails of sparkle. But normally when two worlds meet, if one is obviously better, the other decides its own world was just a dream inside that world. It's like soap bubbles, you start with a cool foam and in the end there's just one lame bubble.

For a while, every gaggle of misfits had their own oddball universe. Some of them lasted hundreds of years, and they gave us all the cool stuff that we've been feeding off ever since: gravslant and magjets, megacapacitors and fiches, foodfabs and oracle mashups. At the Institute they call it the Transition. To what, they don't say. Everyone else calls it the last age. Since then, we haven't done any age-like things.

4

Afield

"They strolled beneath trees whose roots plunged into interred edifices - dislodging tiles, cracking ceilings, dislocating columns - and passed through fields where wild vegetables flourished upon marvels of art, evidence that the ravages of time beset even the most beautiful things."

-Theophile Gautier, "Arria Marcella", translated by Elsa Tonkinwise

Because of the Institute, Threeforks was an oasis in yokel-land. All the towns around, Hog Heaven and Plush and Speedtrap, were mostly Nativists and hippies, but we had every quirky passion of the overeducated. We had a fuzz bass and oboe band that sounded like the wind, and a zither and steel drum band that droned in clouds of suss. We had poetry slams in random meter, somebody would crash out on tetric anapest and they'd be rolling on the floor. We had credless swap meets, walled in with your wares until no trades were left, and the person who came out with the most stuff got dunked.

Actually, those are all the cool things I can think of. If Threeforks was the dream of God, I could see why, but I wanted more. So as soon as Dad would let me, I started going far afield, out past the cows and lentils and into the wild hills. I would lie under yarrow seedheads, watching the umbels tickle the clouds. On the hottest days I'd be down some north slope under hawthorns, barbed-wire branches in layers that slid as I swayed my head.

When it looked like rain, and didn't rain, which was a lot, I'd poke around the old suburbs. Some kids got lucky, and wandered into streets of strange houses that they could never find again, or found marvelous artifacts half-buried. I just liked to see all the crappy stuff that humans had made over the centuries, get so ruined that it was finally beautiful.

Dad still didn't like me to go out at night, but Mom always said "Stop coddling her," and I promised to stay off the tracks. Over the street from our conapt was a little park, and between that and the river was the ancient railline. The ties were long-dissolved but you could still see their outlines in tiny blue flowers, Dad said they were still digesting creosote. The spikes had been scavenged so long ago that the rails were all twisty with the flaws of their forging. In between was a coyote highway, and that wasn't where I was going anyway. I crossed the little wooden bridge, where I made sure to step on my favorite squeak, and followed the cobbled path down past the plots of the hobby farmers, to Cedric's.

Cedric was my best friend. We weren't supposed to hang out, because we were so un-inbred that they needed us to breed, and being friends as kids will kill that. But he was the only not-boring person my age. His family lived in a treehouse right at the fork of the Plushy and the South Plushy. These are enlightened times, we don't have social class. But in town, the hill people were snooty and the river people were crusty. Cedric's family had socks drying on chairbacks and rugs rarely shaken out. Cedric, in rebellion, was super-tidy. He even made his bed, and he polished the pinewood floor to a shine.

Also he had books! The paper of the Ancients was self-destroying, with acids that made it turn to dust in only centuries. Everything not on paper vanished even faster. What were they hiding? Now books were expensive. The library had classics on clean vellum, but nothing fun. I had to save up for a whole season to buy the complete set of the space pirate serial, Harridans of the Exosphere.

But Cedric's fam lived super-light. They ate trout from the river and potatoes, drank donkey milk, and saved so much scrip that they had a piano and a trebuchet, and Cedric had at least a hundred books. There were novels obscure even to the Ancients, transcribed by last-age monks. There were fanciful histories that might yet be true if the right artifacts are dug up. There were old vellum grimoires of failed cults and new mycelene comics from the presses of Seedle.

My favorite was a fanciful history called Ancient Astronauts. Experts say the moon landing was a myth, but a lot of people still believe in it, and this book had all the evidence. It even explained how they didn't have to get through the stars, because they manifested them higher, so high that they sent a machine a billion miles into the void, looking for someone who, I don't know, manifested the same universe?

The books were all in a big oak case, in some kind of order that only Cedric understood. I said, "What if I sneak in and rearrange them?"

"Then I'd have to kill you, because how do I know, if I put them back, you won't rearrange them again?"

I said, "I could alphabetize them, which you should do anyway."

"How would you do the categories?"

"One category: For dweebs." He hit me with a pillow.

5

Comparative Religion

"It's a delusion if it happens to one person. It's a cult if it happens to twenty people. And it's true if it happens to ten thousand people. Well this is a strange way to have epistemological authenticity... We vote on it?"

-Terence McKenna

The Birther bounty required me to go to school. We're a zero coercion society, so I would have been totally free to not go to school and my family would have to live on scrip biscuits, which are guaranteed to taste worse than any food you pay for.

So I went every day, and annoyed my teachers by not being interested in whatever it was they were trying to teach. I'd say, "I want to learn shadow walking," and it was so awkward, they all knew I was anti-manifestational, they felt so bad that they left me alone to pace the playfield. I imagined I would wear a rut to downscroll Australia and battle dingos.

It turned out I couldn't annoy both my teachers and my parents. On the way home from our church, where I never sang, I would sing the songs of the other churches we passed, like:

Allu Akbar, God is great
Life's a snackbar, don't be late

My dad had to explain how their actual theology says you can be as late as you want, and by then I'd be singing the next one:

We all float together on the void, on the void
We all float together on the void
From the edges of your eyes to the edges of your fear
From the furnace of your heart to your great big rear
Keep us all apart, try us on for size
We all float together on the void

Dad ratted me out to my teachers, for knowing all the words, and they were like, at last she's interested in something possible: religion. They arranged for me to attend a bunch of services, and I had to write a report. This is some of it:


[*These two lines are from Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens.]

After all that, I decided the Pansolipsists weren't so bad. I started singing along with the hymns, quietly mouthing my own words:

Suck the gut and free the ass
The butthole says, this too shall pass
Bust a nut and rip a seam
Life is but a dream

6

Teachers

The problem with Utopia is that everybody wants to be a healer and nobody's sick. From my birth they were on me like flies to honey, every athlete and kineticist in Cascadia, to make me better. Mom held them off for a while. Her attention was more than enough for me, until it wasn't, and then she let me at them.

Boxers and ballerinas, gymnasts and stick fighters, I burned through them like paper. A blank slate, they thought, habits unmolded by custom, to mold into beautiful motions. Instead it was training a cranky girl through a straw.

"I don't know where to start," they'd say, and I'd say, "Can I go now?" Then they'd pick out their favorite body part, and whittle my error down to not knowing some completely intuitive motion. "Whoa," they'd say, "was I doing that?" After two or three whoas, they'd run off to work on their own stuff.

The first one that stayed was a bodybuilder. I was so feeble that he got the Institute to biopsy my fibers, and his eyes bugged at the results. Your cells are so willy-nilly, he said, I don't know how you can move at all.

We started with the tiniest exercises, one finger, two finger, three finger curl, it was so tedious, and all the while him zapping me with his experimental myocyte aligner. But after a week, I cracked an actual walnut in my fist. That's what bust a nut meant in my song. It was so cool, I let him try to fix my posture.

"You look like a saggy puppet," he said, "put your shoulders back," and of course I did completely the wrong thing. When he finally figured out how to give good instructions, they still didn't work: heel-toe, pelvis tilt, pretend you're dangling from a string. We kept at it, and finally we cracked the combo. Toes first, tight stomach, and tucked chin, which kept me from sticking my neck out a bobblehead.

"Now," he said, "all you need is to be loose." Yeah, good luck with that. But he let me keep using the myocyte aligner. Later he sold one to every hospital in Greater Cascadia. Luckily they barely worked on normal muscles, or they'd be illegal. But in one summer I got so strong I had to hide it or people would get freaked out.

Now that I liked my body, I invited back some of my teachers, the ones who weren't off giving seminars on the subtle motions of the whatnot, so I could learn crude skills: catching and throwing, driving and cycling, swimming and riding. They had to use a donkey, I freaked out the horses. But my favorite teacher was the stick fighter. He had to design an extra squishy stick so I wouldn't brain him, and finally he said, "Let's work on subtlety," and we fought with willow switches until I bled.

I even tried to go out for sports. A few years before, they wouldn't let me play because it would embarrass me. Now they wouldn't let me play because it would make me feel superior. I wish people would care more about their own feelings, and less about mine.

7

Sim-Psilocin

Gran was Dad's mom. She had moved here so he could take care of her, but she rarely asked for anything, and lived alone in a prime ruin up on the edge of the hill. There was a big patio for parties, and the kitchen was right above an ancient garage full of her chickens, so she could drop food scraps straight down. Every half season she'd kill one, and invite the whole family to feast on chicken and biscuits. Family being Mom and Dad and me, and then her nosy neighbors would see us and bring more food, and they'd all end up drunk or sussed around the firepit, singing Infinite Wishes:

Got a day pass into heaven washing dishes
The righteous they sure put away the beer
If I really have infinite wishes
How did I end up here?

You'd think they'd run out of rhymes, but they just kept going with more verses. This was another:

I'm starting to get superstitious
What happens is just what I fear
If I really have infinite wishes
How did I end up here?

I wandered off and stood on the very lip of the hill, looking down over my stomping grounds, when Gran came up and said, "Fate will have its way with you."

"What?" Gran always got right to the point but this was weird.

"They probably told you that you can be anything you want. I can feel the threads from here. There's something you have to be, whether you want to be or not."

"Then I'll just do what I want anyway, and if fate doesn't like it, let fate do the work."

"There's a good girl."


As an elder, Gran got slack for lawbreaking, and could give me drugs underage. "It's medicine," she said. "A quarter flip of sim-psilocin never hurt anyone. They should give it to babies. For you it might already be too late."

One Saturday I went up, and she sat me in her workshop and measured my head for the dosage. First she tickled my scalp with a spidery massager strapped to a vibrating hand-pack, where she twisted knobs to find the thrum of the skull. Then she had my eyes follow her finger while a Blickinator plumbed my cortex.

She said, "Your neuronic density and synaptical disorder are both off the scale. Good job, you beat the test." She tweaked a dial and shook her head. "Girl, your brain can swallow psychs like the sea. There's not enough sim-psilocin in Threeforks, and I should know."

Sim-psilocin is an oracle echo of magic mushrooms. You could grow them but it was easier to scrape the crust off a vat of goop. There's no way it tasted better. I could only choke down a triple dose while Gran dipped her one dose in tea.

I sat there waiting for something to happen. Pretty soon she was using the Blickinator on herself, following her own finger while her other hand dialed in the resonance. "Close the drapes," she said, "here it comes." She put on a blindfold and earmuffs and curled up under a blanket, and I sat there bored in the dark, maybe a little loopy, and went to look around.

Gran grew her own sim-psilocin, and more than her own. It wasn't illegal, but she had to keep it on the downlow to not get inspected. She never showed anyone her rig, or even said where it was, but I knew how big ancient garages were. Bigger than this. The chickens knew me and kept quiet, while I found the hatch in the back, hidden in a cabinet, and slipped through to the brewery.

There was a light tube off the garage main, not a lot but it was sunny and I could see the whole setup. She was even making her own substrate. A jar of wheat was soaking, and would have oversoaked if I wasn't there. That's probably why the sprouting wheat was only half sprouted and stinky. I gave it to the chickens and moved the fresh-soaked to sprout. Also the desiccator was way overdue for changing, the grinder was misaligned, and the vat was the wrong temp.

It took me almost an hour to fix it all, by then Gran was probably talking to Durga on the astral plane. I went out to look at trees, and maybe the drug finally worked, because I saw what a dolt my dad was, for making trees look like stuff. It's only when they don't look like anything, that you know them.

8

CEVs

Every time Mom really wanted to talk to me, she used a trick, and it always worked. She said, "You were right."

This time I didn't even remember being right. It was when I was three years old and still half baked for this world. But Mom said I was waving my fingers in the sun, strobing my eyelids.

When she asked what I was doing, I said I was making movies, even though I'd never seen one, and I told her how I started with a four-pointed star, pulsing out from the center, and then I turned that into zooming down a tunnel, and then into walking on a path through the woods.

I must have been a lot smarter at three. Now I was a dumb twelve and she was finally bored enough to try it. I'd find her kneeling before the sun, head up, elbows awkward, thumbs on temples and fingers twiddling to strobe her lids. Whenever I came up it always seemed to get better. "Ooh," she'd say, "a carousel!"

Dad said, "Why don't you just get a strobe light?" He went to Hog Heaven for the parts, and after a week it still didn't work. I took a look and he had a huge solder glob shorted to the casing. He's such a goofball. After he fixed it, Mom could trip day and night.

She had friends in other towns, and she got them doing it. They compared notes over pigeon post and one time they all reported doing the same beach walk, ocean on the right and town on the left. That gave my dad a dangerous idea.

He was a big good-doer, but the one law that bugged him was the information speed limit. It was enforced in every confederation within two world turns: Information shall move no faster than a man on horseback, a bird in flight, or the wind.

If you break that law, both bureaucrats and Jihadis will be after you. Only dweebs like my dad wanted to keep trying after all the disasters. He rankled at the info-puritans, and described all the ways you might get around them. Beacons in the hills, obscure frequencies, semaphores on mountaintops, pareidolic smoke signals, cannon shots of rubberized fiches, relays of bird calls.

Synchronous closed eye visuals were not even on the map. You couldn't spot them in the hills, or hear them on a radio. "And yet," Dad said, "with three sigmas of improbability, you could send reliable messages!"

His first idea was to give everyone a clock. The Ancients had time so objectified that any wristwatch would match any other. Now you could fall out of sync just by going to the wrong neighborhood. Upscroll they supposedly had Qbit clocks that use entanglement to always read the same. I think it's a scam, because how would you know?

Dad kept rambling about Qbits until Mom cut in, "You doofus, it's already time arbitrary. I could do it with you now yesterday, if we don't compare notes." Dad thought that was funny for some reason.

"Mom," I said, "what's your frequency?"

Dad said, "The strobe? Seventeen hertz."

Mom looked at the ceiling and said, "That would work. Never mind what time it is. If Phyllis and I are both at exactly seventeen hertz, that would have some synchronic value." Dad said, "I could make a dial to set the frequency," and that was that. That was the only time my parents got obsessed with the same thing at the same time, and they were a force. Over one winter they had specs and boards, and in spring they sent for parts.

He took a ditch-digging gig to pay for it: an eight-pack of crystal clock kits from Frisco. We ate scrip biscuits and modquats for a weeks, and I had to watch him solder, fumes of plumbum and flux paste probably frying my brain or I'd be too smart for my own good. If I didn't watch, he'd dream himself laying mirror like an artist, while his lugs jumped the circuits. Once I went to get water and he made three bridges.

When he thought they were all done, he lined them up and had me watch as the flashes diverged. "Dang," he said, "they were working before." Obviously he had been over-manifesting, so then we had to go through the whole range of freqencies, with me watching while he tweaked the varistors.

The final product was a circuit-board, a dial, and a flasher. Dad was going to cheap out on the casings, so I gave a whole season's creds to a local artisan. He put it all in a disc the size of your palm, thumb on the dial and flasher in the center, eight woods in eight stains. I got the white birch, Gran got the yellow oak, Mom the purple chestnut and Dad the green pine.

They sent out four and I didn't hear what happened. That was just about the time that I was leaving.

9

The Outer Dark

I had been listening to the thrum of the town. Ears are easier than eyes to go wide with, and as the evenings got warmer, I'd go up on the rooftop and listen to cartwheels on the highway, balcony chatters, a handsaw at the joinery, far whoops from students at the Institute, the river.

My parents probably still thought I was going out. For once they were both in the kitchen, which had a heat vent to the roof. I don't know how long they were talking about me, before I noticed it over the grasshoppers.

"I'm surprised she's still here," said my mom.

"She's only twelve. Solo roaming isn't legal until thirteen."

"By then, half the summer will be gone."

"You're not even worried about our daughter in the outer dark?"

"The outer dark? There are ships on the high seas, right now, waiting for sky and sea to merge so they can skip the oceans. There are archipelagoes of islands bigger on the inside. In Caxiletas there are canyons so timestretched no one has come out yet. Even our backyard is three passes from the High Planes, and from there it's two whims to Gondwanaland. And you call it the outer dark."

Dishes clinked. My dad said, "You know..."

"We'll deal with it. I've done gardening."

In the morning I sent a query by express pigeon. It took ten days, any less and I wouldn't have had time to say goodbye to all the trees and paths around town. Lucky for my folks, it came back negative:

Registry of Immanence
Seedle, Greater Cascadia

Query: Number of living venerators of Saint Vitus
Result: Zero

I left it on my bed.

Part 2