(I'm assuming the conversation about the Alliance is at dusk or dark, when stars are visible).  Mneta looks at the sky when talk turns to space.  "Cheerwind, the stars are suns, many like your own, many even larger.  So far away they look like tiny points of light.  And around many of those stars are worlds, some larger than your own, some as large as a star.  I've seen them.  We've sailed past them.  And they're so far away that we can only see the tiny suns, but can't see the tinier worlds.  Even passing close enough to see your world, and for you to see us, our ship would look like a shooting star, a bright spot racing through the sky.  And this is the first world we've seen with fairies.  No one from the Alliance has come here and returned, or there'd be a record and a warning beacon in multiple Alliance languages.  And a lot of different races is what I mean Shyeal.  You've grown up with it so it seems normal.  But even with hundreds of species in the Alliance, almost all worlds have a single dominant species and a couple of visiting races or trade partners.  It's almost unheard of for more than a handful of intelligent species to live in large numbers on a single world.  So I was wondering if lots of ships had crashed here in the past, to make this unusual mix of species."<br/><br/>(Both Shyeal and Cheerwind know the same origin stories.  At some point in the dim past, the Elven Gods waged war.  The Spider Queen, about to lose a battle, prepared to cast a devastating spell on the mortals, intending them to wither away to undead and serve her.  But a demigoddess heard her plan and had just enough power to convert it to "shrink slowly away" instead of "wither away".   The Spider Queen and her warriors left the battlefield, the shrinking mortals and the demigoddess she'd slain in revenge for ruining her spell.  The Elven Gods returned from their missions and were able to stop the shrinking but not reverse it.  This story is not tied to this world and is said to have been in the dimension called Faerie, that touches all worlds and that a gate to Faerie is how the elves and their kin got to this world.  Later (and only Cheerwind knows this part) the fairies made pacts with the insect lords (butterfly queen, wasp queen, dragonfly lord and grasshopper lord) to gain wings.  Only Shyeal remembers the rumors that once elves could travel between the stars using ships grown in the sky from branches of the great tree Yggdrasil.  She'd always thought they were children's tales.)<br/><br/>(One of the lead rangers agrees to test fire with you.  Do you invite Mneta?  Whoever fires braces the weapon against a branch to keep it steady and follows the instructions Mneta gave earlier.  A beam of red light shoots forth, with a "Vreeee!" sound, toward the boulder chosen as a target.  It's as bright as a lightening bolt spell, but is firing continually.  In a few seconds the heat from the light is noticeable, like weak sunlight on your skin.  A little later the boulder begins to smolder.  Turning the weapon off and checking the boulder, a pinpoint where the light was concentrated is red hot, and lichen has been burned near that target and goes from smoldered to withered by heat, to normal the further you get from the target.  "Well", says the lead ranger.  "You did say she said it had been weakened.  I can't see how this would be an effective weapon as long as you need to concentrate it, but it can start your campfires."  He hands it back to you or Mneta)<br/><br/>The few cabins have cots instead of beds, but that's still better than sleeping on the ground.  You all wake refreshed, eat breakfast and are ready to leave.  One of the rangers gives Mneta a dark green dress, explaining that her skintight outfit could be misinterpreted.  You leave for Spindlethorpe after she slips it over her outfit.