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 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."

[dark_light]

"I approve of your procedure!"

[prodigal_miser]

He grins. "Thank you. It was a pain to come up with. I don't even remember all of the contingencies I used, now, I had to write them all down and have that as a reminder as I did the spell."

[dark_light]

"Quite reasonable. Witch spells don't tend to involve that many unknowns - you can screw one up, you can try a variant that's not safe, but there's nothing like 'I'm going to teleport somewhere, but can only be yea more specific'."

[prodigal_miser]

"Yeah, that part's annoying. Honestly my magic works much better when I know all of the unknowns, but it can cope with having a ton if the user's got some power to work with and is willing to sit down and think about all of the options. It's a wonderful intellectual exercise."

[dark_light]

"It sounds interesting. Pity I probably can't do it."

[prodigal_miser]

"I highly doubt it, sorry. I mean, I could give you the basic idea of what to do when you want to cast a spell in Kystle-magic, but - it seems pointless to teach you all of the principles behind a system for magic you don't have and can't get, especially when you've got your own wonderfully functional magic right there," he says. Then, he shrugs. "If you wanted me to, I could give it a try, though."

[dark_light]

"Low priority. If you discover that, I don't know, blood transfusions can confer the knack for it, I'll sign up for that."

[prodigal_miser]

"... Blood transfusions? Beg pardon? That sounds painful."

[dark_light]

"...No? They do it with hollow needles. Pinpricks, basically. They can take about a pint from a healthy volunteer donor, then they can give it to anybody who's lost a lot of blood, usually in accidents. If they have compatible blood types; there are types."

[prodigal_miser]

"Huh. That's very useful. I will have to put that on the list of things that need to be done. How do I find out blood types, what are the compatabilities?"

[dark_light]

"I have absolutely no idea how the tests are done. You can put it on your list of things to consult Wikipedia about. For some reason the types are A, B, AB, and O, with each coming in 'positive' and 'negative' for some other parameter, and if I recall right, which I might not so you'll want to check Wikipedia, you can get blood from anybody who has the exact same or strictly fewer of things than you - with 'things' being A, and B, and positivity for the parameter. So AB+ can get blood from anybody, O- can give it to anybody. There are probably exceptions with rare blood types that crop up in only a handful of people. I have no idea if your people will have the same kinds of blood types."

[prodigal_miser]

"Hmm. It'll go somewhat lower on the list of things that need to be done, then. I'll consult Wikipedia about it, and see where it goes from there. If all else fails, it's an idea," he shrugs.