trade my soul for a wish

[from_scratch]

This is a successor to "call me maybe", which is getting crowded.

Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.


with Mark (kappa)

with Adanya (Aestrix)

with Sable (kappa)

with Ari (andaisq)

with Metella (kappa)

with Miles (kappa)

with Isabella (Eva)

with Steel (Rockeye)

with Daphne (Maggie)

with Edie (Maggie)

Comments

[kaolinandbone]

"I think you might be putting it a little strongly, but conjuring arbitrary matter will do that, yes. There is a reason why there have been wars over conjurors."

[from_scratch]

"I'm not putting it strongly. Unless there's some local magic stopping me, I could destroy the planet. You might not know what a black hole is, but imagine I just made an entire sun, right here."

[kaolinandbone]

Isabella is already too pale to lose color, but she pauses significantly before responding.

"Please do not make an entire sun right here."

She shakes her head.

"Gods. Do you really not have any upper bound on size?"

[from_scratch]

"I promise not to make an entire sun right here. I probably have some upper bound, but it is definitely astronomical in scale. Demons can and have made stars. Oh, also, if you die I vanish - assuming normal rules are in effect - so if I did want to destroy the planet I'd have to put you off it first or I'd only wind up destroying however much of it sufficed to take you with it. Not that I expect this to be very comforting."

[kaolinandbone]

"Given that I would possibly wake up afterwards, that is somewhat comforting, yes."

She breathes out.

"Alright. So. I think I've more or less exhausted myself on questions for the moment. I have a lot to think about. Do you have anything more you'd like to ask about my world?"

[from_scratch]

"Well, you're a vampire. Back where I'm from there are daeva and humans, plus non-sapient animals, and that's it. What else have you got?"

[kaolinandbone]

"So far as I know, only humans. Victorian propaganda says that there are vicious were-creatures that live in Lupinia and occasionally take the forms of humans, but I am understandably suspicious of this considering that they are trying to colonize Lupinia. Ulvenwald definitely has strange things living in it, but if any of them are sentient and nonhuman we haven't found them yet. There are also rumors that Oceania is awake-in-itself - stones talking to people, hurricanes demanding tolls, that sort of thing - but it's so far away and so few explorers have been there that such stories are likely to be more myth and tall tale than fact."

[from_scratch]

"Are days here twenty-four hours?"

[kaolinandbone]

"Yes, if you live in Grand Victoria. Mori recently moved to a twenty-hour day with 100-minute hours as part of a general crusade against nonstandardized units."

[from_scratch]

"Okay, that and the gravity suggest the place is Earth-sized... and you have one moon..." He picks up his computer again and does nothing obvious to manipulate it. It flickers between various displays and settles on a picture of the Earth, spinning languidly. "Does this look familiar?"

[kaolinandbone]

"Why is it backwards?"

[from_scratch]

"Do you put this pole on top in your maps?" he asks, pointing at Antarctica.

[kaolinandbone]

"No. I'm saying that it looks like you took west and east and changed which direction they were pointing."

She points at where England is on the map.

"This island is clearly Grand Victoria, but that would place Ulvenwald to the east. That coast is clearly the mainland with Mori." Her finger slides across the pacific to North America. "And here's Ulvenwald, but it's inexplicably to the west. Is this what the rest of the continent looks like? It's enormous!"

[from_scratch]

"This is a picture of my Earth. If this is some kind of mirror Earth, that's... weird." The picture winks out; he fiddles with some settings in the image's metadata; the Earth reappears, flipped horizontally. "That look more familiar?"

[kaolinandbone]

"That looks more correct to me, but the planet's still spinning the wrong direction. The sun rises in the west."

[from_scratch]

"What an interesting definition of 'west'." He switches the direction of rotation too.

[kaolinandbone]

"And you're saying the sun rises in the east? How odd."

Lioncourt shrugs with a smile.

"I suppose it's fairly arbitrary which word you use to refer to the direction, so long as you're consistent."

[from_scratch]

"Yeah. We probably wouldn't even have this translation difficulty if your language weren't apparently related to some I already speak, I'd just translate your 'west' as whatever local word for where the sun rises. But, no, 'nishi'."

[kaolinandbone]

"Your world has languages close enough to mine to prove inconvenient? ... Wait, I should have asked this question first. How are you able to understand me in the first place?"

[from_scratch]

"Oh, summoned daeva get summoner languages instantly on appearing. Very convenient, prevents translation difficulties where the summoner is speaking German and the demon is trying to speak Arabic."

[kaolinandbone]

"Both of which I have never heard of, so go on: Your world has languages that are similar to mine?"

[from_scratch]

"This one we're speaking now is like a cross between Japanese, Latin, and I think maybe Gaelic but I have very little Gaelic so I couldn't say for sure."

[kaolinandbone]

"This language is Victorian. I know one other, which is Old Lupinian, but I'm hardly fluent in it. In Mori they speak Moritic, and New Lupinian is a completely different language from the Old Lupinian. I have no idea what they use in Ulvenwald. It's most likely Victorian."

[from_scratch]

"Yeah, your Old Lupinian is like a weird dialect of Ancient Greece. ...Do you happen to know where these languages are from, and what other languages they're related to? Locally?"

[kaolinandbone]

Isabella shakes her head. "Alas, I am not an expert on etymology or linguistics."