picknicking

[dark_light]

There's something unutterably pleasant about landing in a bit of woods in the middle of Nowhere, Manitoba, removing a sandwich and an apple from her backpack and having a picnic before she's ready to move on. She could eat in midair, but it makes it too likely that she'll drop something and find it unrecoverable.

Path's on her knee, and her cloudpine is propped up against the tree next to her.

Comments

[prodigal_miser]

He giggles, just a little. "It's a good thing I don't mind you taking credit for things I do if it helps a mutual goal, isn't it? Doooo I get a cut of the inevitable huge profits, or should I find other ways to make absurd amounts of money?"

[dark_light]

"I'll cut you in if that makes it easier to get you to make portals and I can help myself to a share of any readily collectable use you see of what I've been helping you with."

[prodigal_miser]

"Sure," he agrees. "I think I would have joined in on making portals with you anyway, because I am impressed and I support being diabolical for the sake of doing good things."

[dark_light]

"Is capitalism considered diabolical where you're from?"

[prodigal_miser]

"No, but cheating the system like we're planning to is."

He's still grinning. Oh man, is he excited.

[dark_light]

"There've been people benefiting from trade and new ideas they were the first of their cultures to find in another culture throughout history here on Earth. We're just the first to grab farther afield."

[prodigal_miser]

"Technically," he clarifies, "My people have actually done it before. But this is more viable than that other attempt, and hopefully will not end as badly."

[dark_light]

"Why, what happened last time?"

[prodigal_miser]

"Er. Well," he coughs. "Invasion? Fleeing to another plane to avoid nigh-certain death, madness, or slavery? That kind of thing."

[dark_light]

"Sounds... bad. And you went looking for chamomile anyway."

[prodigal_miser]

"To be fair, the people that tried the first attempt summoned someone from another plane without speaking to them prior, based off of the vague notion that that particular race had magic and they wanted it. I came here after a large amount of scrying to at least check to see if this plane had anything close to an invasion force," he explains. "And if it went horrifically, terribly wrong, then I'd be the only one doomed. Everyone else would be fine."

[dark_light]

"Unless we'd had the ability to travel between planes ourselves and could trace your incursion. What'd you see when you scried here?"

[prodigal_miser]

He winces. "Yeeeaaah. I uh - also wanted an excuse to not be at home anymore? Not seeing the sun gets old after a while."

Awkward head scratch. "Large buildings - I was amazed at your cities, I checked up to see if you had magic and the answer was yes. Then I checked for armies or a possible invasion force, and found out that there isn't anything particularly organized set up world-wide, though I'd have to avoid getting on any nation's bad side. Then I found out the people present weren't an utterly different species, but human, so if necessary I was going to do a bit of infiltration."

[dark_light]

"...Is there some reason you can't see the sun in New Kystle? Also, the speciation of witches is arguable what with the all-women marry-humans thing, but there's also the bears."

[prodigal_miser]

"The scry wasn't that specific, unfortunately. I did not know about the bears. The bears were a surprise," he says. "New Kystle is tide-locked to the sun. You can get either eternal day, or eternal night, or if you're lucky you can live in the area that's eternal twilight. Most of the government is living in the eternal night portion, because we're using the twilight and habitable day-parts for farming. So, no sun."

[dark_light]

"That sounds really inconvenient. I am pretty sure I can't unlock your planet, and even if I could I imagine it would destroy whatever ecosystem the place has and cause unpredictable changes to weather and so on. But I can do some things that affect temperature. Unfueled fires? Permanent ice? Scaling up enough for you to build a city around the one or on top of the other would take a while unless the day side has a lake for me to start with, but it could help."

[prodigal_miser]

"It's really inconvenient, yes. Any help you can offer would be appreciated! I think closer to the dividing line there are some lakes on the day portion, but further out and it's basically entirely desert."

[dark_light]

"Well, I can freeze you a dayside lake. That'll still take hours - long enough to fly around the circumference with a lot of evergreen needles spilling out of a bag, and I'll have to get ridiculous numbers of those from somewhere. But I can do it."

[prodigal_miser]

He smiles at her. "Thank you. I'd kind of like to hug you again, honestly. You continue to be amazingly helpful, and I'm seriously starting to think that doing a stupid thing and plane-hopping to here was the luckiest break in my life."

[dark_light]

"Given that you landed where you did, anyway. You could've appeared in - hey, how are you handling language barrier, anyway?"

[prodigal_miser]

"A spell. It's extremely, absurdly complicated but it's basically doing the same thing the thingamajigs do, on a larger scale. In my head. It's built to help with learning languages, by translating what you say and then giving me translations for what I want to say and - um, I'm actually butchering the explanation, it's complicated, have I mentioned? It took me weeks," he explains. "I'm the one speaking the language, but it's like I have a dictionary of spoken languages in my head, except it's not all in my head at once, it shows me translations to what's being said at the time and gives me translations for what I want to say when I want them."

Pause. "Did that all make sense?"

[dark_light]

"No, but it came close enough to drop down my priority inquiries list. But at any rate you could have landed someplace less hospitable, or thousands of miles from anywhere you could get chamomile and not near any friendly people with shareable vehicles either."

[prodigal_miser]

"I will try to explain it when I can think of a better way to explain it without taking hours to explain the explanations," he says. "Shareable vehicles I wasn't too worried about, I can both walk and teleport, but I had some very specific contingencies in place to be sure that I landed somewhere that wouldn't kill me, and would be out of the way. Honestly it's a miracle I landed near anyone at all. If I'd been somewhere thousands of miles from where I could get chamomile, I'd do some scrying to find out where it is and then make another spell to get there. Scrying inside a plane is far, far easier than scrying a plane from somewhere else entirely."

[dark_light]

"How did you handle the safety parameters? There's plenty of places that aren't environmentally hostile but would still give you a lot of trouble if you appeared spontaneously there for cultural or whatever reasons."

[prodigal_miser]

"I looked up everything that had given anyone else any trouble in teleporting in the past, wrote those down, brainstormed for a while for other possible problems teleporting could cause and based my parameters on a combination of both. Part of that was telling it to go to a place that no one owned, or had any claim to."