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

[from_scratch]

"No. I mentioned vehicles? Flying vehicles which hold air in and can escape the Earth's gravity."

[kaolinandbone]

"How do you fly when there's no air to fly in?"

[from_scratch]

"Not with flapping. Propulsion."

[kaolinandbone]

"There are such things as propeller-driven airships in my world. They have a maximum operating altitude far short of the moon. Even if the crew doesn't succumb to hypoxia, there's an eventual point at which the air is too thin for the gasbag to provide any more lift."

[from_scratch]

"That's not the kind of propulsion I mean. In their simplest form, spaceships are propelled by explosions. If you show me an appropriate outdoors location I can show you a little model rocket."

[kaolinandbone]

"I've seen rockets before during firework shows. You say you built one large enough to carry people to the moon? And your planet survived?" She raises an eyebrow.

[from_scratch]

"In a word: yep."

[kaolinandbone]

"My sympathies for all the people lost to that particular engineering project."

[from_scratch]

"A couple spaceships blew up in early days but overall they're quite safe. They don't create massive craters, or anything, if that's what you're thinking."

[kaolinandbone]

"Apparently your world has better workplace safety standards than mine."

[from_scratch]

"Wouldn't surprise me a bit."

[kaolinandbone]

"Any chance of me being able to come to your world if and when you leave? It seems to have a number of advantages."

[from_scratch]

"Doubt it. Unless you can magic it with local tools. Or unless you turn into a daeva upon death, in which case you'll be confined to the world of whichever species you get until and unless you catch a summons."

[kaolinandbone]

"Alas, the proper sort of tranportation magic is unvailable to me or my world, so it appears I'm stuck here. Unless I care to commit suicide and hope. Which I don't."

She pours herself some more tea.

"In any case, I believe we were talking about the 'net.' Apparently it's the best thing since fire."

[from_scratch]

"Mmm, if you go back as far as fire there's competition like 'literacy' and 'inoculations' and 'physics', but yeah, the internet's pretty marvelous."

[kaolinandbone]

Lioncourt frowns. "'Inoculations', plural? A vaccine for smallpox was derived from cows about thirty or so years ago, but I haven't heard of any major advancements on that front for some time now."

[from_scratch]

"...Do you still have smallpox?"

[kaolinandbone]

"It's been eradicated in most civilized societies, but persists in some places in Ulvenwald and Lupinia."

[from_scratch]

"We got rid of it altogether, and can vaccinate against almost everything else and have gotten rid of some of those too. Polio, malaria - we still have the flu but we can vaccinate against each year's new strain - etcetera."

[kaolinandbone]

"We have no other vaccines of note yet. I would love to see how your medical technology has progressed beyond ours."

[from_scratch]

"I am a fully qualified medical demon, you're in luck. Although a lot of stuff is done with angels, who can bypass the need for a lot of the intermediate technological stuff, so we haven't advanced as far as we might have done without. Better outcomes, worse process documentation and exportability."

[kaolinandbone]

"That's somewhat unfortunate, considering the lack of angels on this planet. However, whatever you have is still years ahead of the current state of the art, so I hardly have reason to complain."

[from_scratch]

"I mean, you summoned me. Maybe if summonings work normally here I will teach you to summon angels."

[kaolinandbone]

"That is a very good point." She smiles. "Let's hope that summonings do work normally here."

[from_scratch]

"I will want to be a little careful about it. There's major downside potential to summoning too. For example, an improperly contained and malicious demon could destroy your entire planet."