“Okay,” Nita said, “fine, let’s stop discussing the investment value of the stuff for the time being! We can supply you guys if you need some. Meanwhile let’s get busy putting it in us instead of a bank.”
Graham crackers were broken out, and broken to size: chocolate was snapped into the proper-sized squares, Marshmallow fluff was applied to the crackers.
“And now what?” Ronan said, having watched this whole process skeptically.
“Well, we toast this somehow…” Nita looked frustrated.
“Here,” Kit said, and pointed at the fluffed graham cracker. “I was pretty good at this when I did it last…” The cracker obediently levitated out of Nita’s hands, soared out over the fire, and rotated so that it hung there fluff-side down.
The fluff fell off it and into the fire, where it instantly went up in a brief burst of flame, a scorched smell and a trail of black smoke.
Ronan burst out laughing. “Um,” Nita said. “Maybe the fluff needs to go onto the cracker a little harder.”
“Why do you even have that stuff?” Kit said to her under his breath as she started working on another cracker.
“I eat it on the graham crackers, okay?” Nita muttered. “And since some people put ketchup on their saltines, I wouldn’t make too big a deal about it if I were them.”
Kit grinned and said nothing further. Nita finished with that cracker and turned it over to Kit. “Here. Don’t wiggle it around so much this time.”
With great care Kit levitated this cracker too, soared it out over the fire, and only very gradually started to tilt the marshmallow-fluffed side toward the heat. The fluff started to run almost immediately, so that Kit had to keep tilting it back and forth. Finally it was threatening to melt off the cracker entirely, so Kit got it out of there and guided it over to Nita to have the chocolate applied and the second graham cracker squished down on top. Unfortunately, the fluff lost its heat almost immediately and the chocolate refused to melt.
Dairine snickered, triumphant. “That is the least effective s’more in the history of s’mores.”
“They’ve got a history?” Ronan said. “If this is anything to go by, I’d say it’s just about over.”
Nita threw Ronan a withering look and bit into the s’more. “It’s not that bad,” she said. But she was plainly making the best of a bad situation.
“All we need now is cocoa and scary stories,” Tom said, amused.
“If we’re having cocoa, I want some,” said a new voice, and Carl appeared out of the darkness beyond the stones in very similar hiking clothes to Tom’s. “Beats making my own.”
Over the various shouts of greeting, Tom gave Carl a wry look. “Don’t tell me you brought that with you?!”
“’Course I did,” Carl said, sitting down by Tom. “We’re a long way from home in a taxing situation. Am I not allowed to have comfort food? Think carefully before you answer, because I didn’t say a single word about your Triscuits.”
“You have cocoa? Have you got marshmallows?” came the immediate demand from several people sitting around the circle.
“Only the mini ones,” Carl said, looking regretfully at the campfire. “They’re no good for toasting.”
“No, not for toasting,” Nita said. “For s’mores. The marshmallow fluff doesn’t really cut it.”
“No, I see that.” Carl made a face. He stood up. “Well, it’s worth a try. Be right back.”
He got up and headed off for the short-transport pad, and quickly returned with half a bag of the tiny marshmallows. “This,” Dairine said, eyeing them, “is absolutely going to be one of those problems that only wizardry can solve…”
This proved true, as no one had anything like a skewer thin enough to toast mini marshmallows on. They wound up levitating them over the fire in small groups, which was delicate business—the mass of each individual mini marshmallow was so small that managing them in such a way that they all toasted evenly within the same time period was extremely difficult. Routinely half of them got burnt black while the other half were still only the faintest brown, and finally even Carl had to admit that they weren’t that much better a solution to the s’mores problem then the marshmallow fluff had been.
“Make a note,” Ronan said on being handed first even vaguely viable s’more and regarding it with mild resignation as it started falling apart in his hand, “the next time we go to evacuate an entire planetary population, bring full-sized marshmallows.”
“Not that I want to have to help do this again anytime soon,” Nita said, glancing in Thesba’s general direction with an annoyed look. “But then I can’t imagine this happens all that often…”
“You’d be surprised how often it happens,” Tom said, stretching his legs out. “This is kind of a special situation—it’s rare that a planet has this specific problem with getting its population offworld, or that it has to happen so quickly. Normally planets don’t just haul off and blow up the way Krypton was supposed to have; they tend to give you plenty of warning. But I’d say that the Interconnect Project winds up moving, oh, at least one or two populations a year entirely off their home worlds, ecosystems and all.”
Some of the wizards sitting around the fire exchanged concerned glances at that. “After all, we live in a fairly small, quiet suburb of the galaxy,” Carl said. “In closer to the core, and in the more populous arms, there are tens of millions of worlds inhabited by intelligent species, and of that number a small percentage come under catastrophic threat in any given year—solar disasters, black holes wandering through, local gravitic disturbances… A very small percentage, sure. And wherever possible, Planetaries and resident wizards keep a close eye on things and managed to derail at least some of the conditions that threaten inhabited worlds before they get out of hand. But sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. This is one of those times…” He ran a hand through his hair. “The big projects are always subject to logistical problems: it can’t be helped. It’s the small single-planet projects that’re usually the most successful.”
“And as a result you hardly ever hear about them after the fact,” Tom said. “Atlantis…”
“Well, that was a bit of a mixed result,” Carl said, and sighed.
Tom laughed a short sardonic laugh. “You think?”
“This something happened on Earth?” said Cheleb.
“The Aphthonic Intervention,” Tom said. “It’s in the manual. There was a continent in the planet’s early developmental stages that was one of the first homes of one of several ancestor species—”
Kit smiled, remembering a brief conversation he’d had on this subject with a most unusual pig. “I know four different versions of this story,” he said, “but not which one is true.”
“Only four?” Tom raised his eyebrows at Kit, amused. “I’d have said eight at least. But as for how many of them are true? All of them, of course. You should know by now, though, how different the truth can look depending on what angle you’re examining it from.”
“Oh God,” said Ronan, “it’s one of those Rashomon things, isn’t it.”
“Well, no. What sank the continent isn’t disputed. Atlan Seamount was the biggest underwater volcano this planet has ever produced, and the Atlantis continent lay right on top of it; its main volcanic neck and pre-volcanic basement cone came up straight up through the middle of the Atlan land mass. When the big eruption went off at last, the resulting explosion was like the one they expect to hit Yellowstone some day, except a hundred times worse. It cracked the body of the continent straight through in five places.”
“See, the wizards there had unfortunately tried to throttle the volcano,” Carl said, “and that never works. Then when it went off at last, they initiated a last-ditch backtiming intervention to go back and keep the triggering event from happening.” He shook his head. “Timesliding living beings on a surface is one thing. But timesliding the surface itself, especially when that involves a significant portion of the Earth’s crust—that’s something else entirely. It… tends not to work well. The continent was completely shattered, and the crustal structure underneath it was shredded.”