chalk

[alicornucopia]

In Paraasilan, Esmaar, a pair of roommates are about to break a rule that, compared to the one about running in the corridors or even the one about unlicensed teleportation, is there for a good reason.

In unison, they complete their shared spell.

~~~

with Adarin (Aestrix)

with Ekador (kappa)

with Brilliance (kappa)

with the admin (kappa)

with Teah (kappa)

with Katran (lambda)

with Hall (kappa)

with Joy (kappa)

with Kalinda (Christy Hotwater)

Comments

[or_coincidence]

"Blueberry," says Blueberry. "It's nice to meet you! Should I start figuring out how to send you back home now?"

[alicornucopia]

"Sure, if you want to tell me when to summon you on my end in terms of something suitably non-astronomy-based."

[or_coincidence]

"I don't know..." she says thoughtfully. "Come to think of it, we might not use the same units of time. So any measurement I gave would be pretty inexact. How hard is it for your magic to pass messages between worlds, as opposed to people?"

[alicornucopia]

"I can send you letters and collect them again later, but it's the tedious circle business every time. I can make a decent estimate of time conversions if you can show me something keeping time."

[or_coincidence]

"Hmm. Well, there's the clock."

She points a wee hoof at the clock. It's a little cuckoo clock.

"The long fast pointer goes by one little mark per minute, and there are sixty minutes in an hour, and the short slow pointer goes by one of its big marks per hour, and there are twenty-four hours in a day. And a second is one-sixtieth of a minute."

[alicornucopia]

"The language handled the ratios for me," Kaylo says, watching seconds tick by. "So a second looks to be about a split, aaaand, arithmetic arithmetic, an hour is close enough to an angle to make very little difference in the smaller quantities."

[or_coincidence]

"Okay then. Let's say... half an hour after I send you back, you can bring me to Elcenia? Does that seem like a reasonable amount of time, or should it be longer?"

[alicornucopia]

"It's going to take me longer than that to find, select, and draw a spell, and it could take a couple angles to find a teacher who'll authorize me to do it even if you don't account for the casting part," says Kaylo.

[or_coincidence]

"Hmm... okay, three hours? If it gets to be much more than that I'd want to wait until tomorrow and that seems more complicated."

[alicornucopia]

"Three hours is doable. And once I have the circle I can mostly reuse it without a problem so we can work it out from there. I don't think my roommate wants overnight guests, even tiny unicorn overnight guests."

[or_coincidence]

"I probably wouldn't be allowed to stay overnight in a strange world anyway," she says.

[alicornucopia]

"Ah, you've got somepony minding you? I can tell you're juvenile for the species and approximately how much but that doesn't tell me about your social status, you see."

[or_coincidence]

"Yes. I have an adoptive mother named Clover Honey and she's not bad about things like letting me stay late at the library, but I think she wouldn't want me to stay overnight in strange worlds at least until I was confident I could get home on my own if I needed to."

[alicornucopia]

"I don't know how well a unicorn spell will do at interfering with a summon," Kaylo says. "It'll be worth testing, anyway - under circumstances void of unicorn magic you can only go home from a summon if the summoner reverses the spell or dies. Well, or if someone does a break, but hardly anyone's any good at breaks."

[or_coincidence]

"We can experiment," Blueberry says cheerfully. "It'll be fun."

[alicornucopia]

"It's good that your mom's well-behaved about library-ing," Kaylo mentions.

[or_coincidence]

"Yes! It's very convenient."

[alicornucopia]

"Anyway, I'll go see about summoning you - and you wanted me to tell that purple and green fellow something?"

[or_coincidence]

"Well, maybe, but I think if I'm going to be visiting the world in three hours anyway it doesn't matter as much. I was going to say that he should go somewhere there aren't any dragonlike creatures nearby - would that be easy to do, or are there lots of dragons around where you were?"

[alicornucopia]

"Not a ton. Headmaster's wife, me, one other student."

[or_coincidence]

"Well, that's pretty easy then. Tell him that if he really wants to go home right away, he should go somewhere there aren't any dragonlike creatures nearby, and if he doesn't he can wait for me to show up and talk to him myself."

[alicornucopia]

"Sure thing."

[or_coincidence]

"Thanks!" says Blueberry. Then she floats her scroll of notes in front of her, opens it, and picks up her quill to start scribbling a second version.

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo peers over her shoulder while she does it. Well, pretty much over all of her.

[or_coincidence]

Yes. She is very small and peerable-over.

Scribble scribble think think scribble look something up in a book scribble scribble think scribble.

"Hmm..." She frowns a tiny frown at the finished version of the second spell, then fetches a blank scroll and opens it up beside the first scroll and transcribes her notes more cleanly. They're not written as understandably as the compass spell in the textbook; subheadings include 'Safety safety safety' and 'What?' and 'Where?', with lists of fragmented sentences laying out relevant parameters.