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

[sturdycoldsteel]

"No. You have wings. Fully functional wings are pretty uncommon compared to cosmetic butterfly wings or something, and yours are an unusual design, but they're a known thing. I'm only walking because I don't trust myself to not fall out of the sky yet."

[from_scratch]

"All right then. Lead on. Have an Italian children's book." He presents her with a book, and then he takes off and takes his computer off his belt loop to read while circling over her.

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Ah, I'm no good at reading while walking. Flying, sure, but not walking. Thanks for the thought."

She walks downhill.

Soon she's on a rough dirt road smaller than either party's wingspan. "Here we go. Any tips for a first-time flyer?"

[from_scratch]

"Move your wings together. You might want a running start. However good you are at reading while flying, don't do it on day one." He lands; his computer becomes surrounded by a nice-but-battered-looking leather case and goes back on his belt loop. "The important thing is to keep air under you with lots of surface area and glide as much as you can; flapping is tiring and also cuts your surface area for part of the time you're doing it, so only flap if you have to."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I can do a flying start, even better."

She hovers five feet up, leaning forward, wings out, and pushes forward at near-running speed. The wings tense as she drops the hover. She glides forward for a bit, then pitches to the right and suddenly stops herself.

"Okay. That was a glide, kind of. Do I need to be going faster?"

[from_scratch]

"I... can't easily tell by looking when you're using magic for it or not, which doesn't help me give you tips. I can take off from a still start, it's not necessary to be moving, a lot of people just find it helps."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I'm nervous, is all. It took a while to master flying by stream, and I took some spills. That old hesitation is coming back."

She shakes her head and tries again. This time it seems to work better. After a jump-start and a few hard flaps, she's ascending steadily. "This is very strange! How do I turn!"

[from_scratch]

"That's when you stop moving your wings together. Which way do you wanna go? That wing goes down, other one goes up -" He get a bit ahead of her. "Watch." And he smoothly swoops left.

[sturdycoldsteel]

"If I fall out of the sky, appear something squishy below me, please." And stop flapping, get used to gliding for a bit - woah the wind changes, well of course it does - and she dips one wing, raising the other, to slooowly bank left.

[from_scratch]

"All right." He flies nearby, not close enough for his wingbeats to foul hers.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She ascends some more, and practices sweeping left and right a little more sharply. "I was right. This is thrilling! With the stream you're just pulling yourself along, but this is like - playing soccer against the air or something."

[from_scratch]

"This metaphor is new to me."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I don't know. I'm not really thinking about words much right now. Hey, you can see the mainway from here. Opri's over there, shall we head in that direction?" Point.

[from_scratch]

"Sure."

[sturdycoldsteel]

Fly, fly, fly. She does a shallow dive, but holds off on any more daring tricks. "Say, what're you reading?"

[from_scratch]

"More advanced theoretical magic stuff."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Ah. I've probably read half of anything on construction or thermo-kinetics you find. Half of my job as civil service administrator is researching better spells and double-checking everyone's work. Is it giving you any ideas on how to make my employees' jobs redundant? Because that would be pretty great, given how many people are tied up in this. Maybe we can get the compulsory labor repealed if workforce needs drop far enough."

[from_scratch]

"I mean, maybe, what do your employees do with themselves?"

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Work the water pumps and monitor the water quality. Operate the public elevators. Light up public areas at night. Make and repair buildings, bridges, roads, tunnels. Deal with snow and other inclement weather. Deliver letters and packages. Keep stores of food for emergencies. Keep emergency services ready to respond to fires and injuries. Attempt to predict earthquakes. Maintain the magical infrastructure for all these tasks."

[from_scratch]

"I can spruce up your water handling, I can make elevators that don't need a person in them, um, electricity is a thing, I can make buildings and bridges and I can under some constraints make roads and I can produce tunneling-related equipment. I can't control the weather except to add water to the system, which you proooobably don't want me doing on any significant scale, but I can do snowplows and maybe tweak your postal algorithms and supply vehicles to do mail runs in. I can make shelf stable food, although I don't want to screw up your infrastructure for doing that yourselves in any way without knowing lots more about my long-term availability and public reception. Similar with emergency services, although I can do snazzy firefighting gadgets and if I'm satisfied your police aren't evil little tyrants I can do policing gadgets too. I can do medicine, great heaps of it, I'm specially trained. I cannot predict or prevent earthquakes; what I can do is cause them in more or less the same way you might already start small forest fires to prevent accumulating tinder, but it's a risky proposition. I cannot interact with your magical infrastructure at this time."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I wouldn't trust the police. And the only reason Opri's civil services are in such good shape is because Grind, the civil services chief, likes gloating about her well-run city and so does not embezzle nearly as much of her budget as her neighbors do. Water handling and elevators will be excellent. Electricity... Does not translate."

"I can probably help you do a few of these things without getting called out on it, especially the water. Grind assigned me control over the water section, oh, three and a half years ago. I built pumpjacks to pull water from the aquifer instead of the river, and now we don't have people magicking gigantic tubs to rooftops anymore. Cut the water section workforce in half, after the initial investment and training."

[from_scratch]

"Electricity: tame lightning. Runs all the cool future swag. I can probably do some of your water stuff on pure mechanical if you want though."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Tame lightning. That's a bit of a scary thought. What would be best for the water stuff is things that are low-maintenance or at least low-workforce. Is the general plan here 'improve things and deal with violence or other unpleasantness as it occurs' or something else?"

[from_scratch]

"My plan is 'implement unambiguous, safe improvements while getting enough of my bearings to make fewer things ambiguous and more things safe'."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Makes sense. I maintain that you are likely to have to deal with an army at some point. The Senate does not like rapid change. I guess you'll believe me when it happens."

They're getting close to the city now. It begins suddenly, with high square walls. Inside the walls are clusters of colorfully decorated buildings, all at least six floors tall and some as much as fifteen. Some of the buildings have large sections open to the air, entire parks halfway up the city, and raised pathways are everywhere as well.

"We probably want to land and enter through the main gates, for politeness to Kell's guards if nothing else."