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[purposeful_glory]

One moment Loki is trying to kill the snake-monster before it gets any closer to civilization, and then next -

She jabs at its face, but with momentum intended to meet resistance, and there is none. With momentum intended to compensate for a dodge on the part of the creature, but it surges forward. She's engulfed, and then there is no snake, and there is no ground, and she's falling.

She gasps. The air is clean; she doesn't need to heal poison out of herself with each breath. She sees - floating land, of sorts, there, some kind of oddly geology-themed ship maybe. She could, potentially, turn Lævateinn into something with enough surface area to steer herself onto it rather than fall farther and suffer worse from the fall, but she just recently perfected a new...

She's a bird, a swift, and she catches the wind, and her spear is a twig clutched in her feet, and she wings her way to the land.

Comments

[rockeye_stonetoe]

As she flies closer, it becomes clear that the particular bit of land she was aiming for is actually two separate objects. One is a craggy, floating rock the size of a village, covered with a surprising amount of plant life.

The other floats off to the side, tied to the larger object by no less than a dozen thick ropes. It is closer to the size of a house than a village, and it seems made rather than natural - smoothed sides, windows, canvas wings that would be comically small on a bird.

On the larger sky-island, someone is chopping down a tree.

[purposeful_glory]

She lands near the someone, still bird-shaped, and observes this activity. He doesn't seem to have a daemon, so that means he's probably not Midgardian...

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He continues to cut down the tree. When it falls, he starts chopping off branches and carrying them to a large scale sitting in the grass near the flying house. He makes careful note of their weight, marking it down on a piece of paper.

He ties them together with more rope, and uses some sort of wheeled mechanism to lift them to the top of the house-ship. The ropes holding it down relax visibly. Then he clambers up the ropes and into the ship himself. A small bird could easily follow him if it wished.

[purposeful_glory]

Well, it beats staying here on this otherwise uninhabited tree-farm-thing, but she doesn't know how long he'll be traveling; swifts can fly a long time, even if need be asleep, but she'd still rather not be discovered and kicked off his ship to wander indefinitely if he took exception to a stowaway.

Hidden behind other foliage, she emanates sound from elsewhere than she is:

"Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He spins around suddenly, eyes going quite close to where the sound came from. "What the hell? Um, you're on a medium-sized island about 70 klicks up, close to the equator. Is this place yours? If so, sorry about your tree, I didn't see any claim marks."

[purposeful_glory]

"The tree isn't mine. I'm very lost," continues the voice from the same place. "Where is this planet, approximately?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"If you're asking what planet this is, I don't think I can unlose you. This planet is called Cloudbank, and if I remember my astronomy lessons right it's about nine hundred light-years away from Earth. Of course, nobody's been back to Earth since the stargate broke, so we can't be sure."

[purposeful_glory]

"...Well, I know how to get home from there. What's the stargate? Where is it?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"The stargate is... Some sort of massive ship orbiting the planet. It used to be a portal you could walk through and end up next to an identical portal that orbits Earth. It's hundreds of miles straight up, higher than anything can float, past the hydrogen layer. Nobody really understands the more complex parts of lost technology, sorry to say, so I haven't the first clue why it broke or how to fix it."

[purposeful_glory]

"Well, I don't have a way to get into orbit on me, more's the pity, even if we assumed I could fix the thing. This is very inconvenient. If the bridge doesn't reach here I may be stranded for centuries. Can I trouble you for some advice on where to spend them?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"That depends on what you want to do, I suppose. I don't know what you can do. I'm headed down to the equatorial towns, which is probably a better starting point than here. If you don't weigh more than two hundred kilos you can come along, I'm descending anyway so extra weight isn't as much of a problem as it usually is."

[purposeful_glory]

"I don't weigh that much, no." She turns invisible, shapeshifts back into her normal form, and walks an illusion of herself from behind a shrub to where she's standing and merges it with her no-longer-invisible self seamlessly. She speaks with her own voice, no longer thrown: "I'd appreciate the passage. I don't know what tasks there usually are to do on a ship like yours but I may be passable at some of them."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I've got regular flight pretty well automated. You could tend the garden, I suppose. I need to retune the engines for high pressure and finish loading that tree, and I prefer to set down on something sturdy at night so I don't collide with anything. But we can be off tomorrow morning at the earliest."

[purposeful_glory]

"I can help you carry the tree, if you like. My name is Loki, what is yours?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I'm Nick, and the help is appreciated. Nice armor, by the way, good metal is very rare, lucky you. Alright, let's drag the trunk over so I can weigh it."

[purposeful_glory]

"Is it that rare, here? It isn't so where the armor was made, so I wouldn't call it particular luck." She drags the tree. It doesn't seem to give her any trouble.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Uh. Wow, that's some strength. Yes, metal's rare here. All we get are these islands and whatever the winds blow up from the surface. They're mostly made of silica and hydrogen, not so much ore. Alright."

Nick has to exert considerably more effort to get the tree onto his scale. "...Two hundred forty three kilos. More than I expected, but within tolerance." He sets to trying the tree to the same set of wheels that hauled up the bundle of branches. The knots are fairly obvious, if Loki wants to help.

[purposeful_glory]

She helps. "So if this planet was settled from Earth, you're a human, aren't you?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Uh, yes? What, do aliens exist after all? Are you one?"

[purposeful_glory]

"I'm an Asgardian. Where is your little soul-creature, if you're a human, or do they only have those if born on Midgard?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I don't know anybody who has a soul-creature, apart from some people who think they really should have been born as jellywings or something. I've never heard of Asgard, what star does it orbit?"

[purposeful_glory]

"If you have star charts I could see if I could find it," she says. "When I was on Earth, everyone had an animal that accompanied them wherever they went, and could speak, and was their soul."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"You probably won't recognize my star charts, I know they're supposed to be pretty different from Earth's. Oh well. The souls thing is very strange. I'm not even sure souls actually exist, for all our doctors can tell the brain does our thinking and feeling and remembering, so what would a soul do?"

He pauses. "Well, you just appeared here out of nowhere. I don't know about anything that could do that. Maybe the rules are just different on Asgard and Midgard and whatever other gards you have."

[purposeful_glory]

"On Midgard their souls seem to mostly talk to their persons and each other. Occasionally the conveniently shaped ones perform useful tasks. I have never had one myself, although I had to let them think I did lest they be upset about my incompleteness."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I guess it could be useful to always have someone to talk to. I'm perfectly fine being all alone for four-day ascents and descents as long as I spend a few days in civilization in between, but I know some people who wouldn't be. Anyway, let's get this tree loaded and I can show you the garden."

The mechanism moves as he pulls steadily on a rope. When it reaches the top, he picks up his scale and climbs up the most substantial rope into a person-sized hole in the ship, waving for Loki to join him.

"I have couple of rules, though. If you're not from Cloudbank you probably don't know how to handle a ship, so don't mess with the gas sacs, or the water tanks, or the flight controls. Here's my bedroom - I'll set up a hammock for you somewhere. Don't throw anything overboard if you can help it, I can recycle most stuff. This is the kitchen, bathroom's over there. Up these stairs - these are the gas sacs, let's keep going up - And if it starts to rain, I'll need your help to put out tarps and buckets as fast as possible. Here's the garden."

Yep, that's a garden alright. It consists almost entirely of food-producing plants, most of which are similar to ones found on Earth. The plants are growing from shallow tubs full of dirt, and the whole roof is enclosed with a mostly-glass structure that lets sunlight in. It's very warm up here.