on a lark

[alicornucopia]

She combs and combs the world aside and there is another world, just ahead, and she steps in.

The combed-away hole closes behind her. She puts her comb in her pocket.

Thanjen (Unbitwise)

Blueberry (kappa)

Hivers (Rockeye)

Comments

[alicornucopia]

What if she pulls on it, how stuck is it?

[wind_on_my_face]

She can feel it being pulled away. She can do something about that. It's exactly as stuck as she wants it to be.

[alicornucopia]

Huh. She experiments with amounts of stuckness, then plucks it off her right hand and holds it in her left.

[wind_on_my_face]

Only her right hand seems to have the ability to stick to pencils.

“Right now you can only use your right hand, because you started with it. There's some other things you should practice first, for safety, before you start claiming more than one body part.”

[alicornucopia]

"Could you say more about what exactly it is I did?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“You claimed the outside of your pencil, and your right hand. The writing exercise let you focus on having the pencil move as you needed rather than moving the pencil using the grip of your hand.”

[alicornucopia]

"But I still don't really know what you're talking about. I'm not used to this being something that happens."

[wind_on_my_face]

“No one must have shown you before, then, and that's really weird.”

(Don't press. Move on. Teaching is more important.)

“Everything in the universe is somebody's, or nobody's. All this," a wave at the glass desk and the birds, “is mine, and the pencil is yours now, and this island is probably nobody's.”

[alicornucopia]

Slow nod.

[wind_on_my_face]

“If it's yours, then you can move it,” — the sun-shade wobbles a bit — “reshape it,” — a blob of glass rises up and turns into a pair of disks, one floating above the other — “and forcepattern it.” He presses down on the top disk, then lets go and it flies up into the air. When it comes back down, it stops in its original position relative to the first disk without any bounce or noise.

[alicornucopia]

"What is forcepatterning? Besides 'that thing you just did'."

[wind_on_my_face]

“It's when instead of just moving something around, you make it so that it will react in a particular way in the future. You did a little bit with the pencil already; I saw you adjusting how fixed to your hand it was.”

[alicornucopia]

"Oh. How do I claim more stuff?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“You touch it, and pay attention and learn what it is, and then you have the outside of it, and then you can work on the inside of it.

“It's easier to claim and keep stuff that doesn't have much structure. That's why glass is useful. Here, you can have some of mine to start with; it won't be any harder if I'm not opposing you, and you need some more practice material that is simpler than a pencil.”

He picks up a blob of glass that rises out of the puddle, and hands it to her. It displays no inclination to gloop in her hands.

[alicornucopia]

She sticks the pencil to the back of her claimed hand so it will be out of the way and holds the glass and frowns at it.

[wind_on_my_face]

After a minute, the part of the glass that she is just holding is on the inside, like the wood of the pencil under its paint.

Now it's all gone, and the entire lump of glass is hers.

That old argument about whether glass is really a liquid? She could answer it definitively, if she knew what to make of what she's sensing.

[alicornucopia]

Squish.

[wind_on_my_face]

It's not immediately squishy to her hands, but she can sort of loosen it up inside until it is. Or just have it flow into any particular shape she pictures.

[alicornucopia]

Yes, but squishing things by hand is fun.

But presently she has turned it into a sphere and now she's investigating the pencil more closely.

[wind_on_my_face]

She could strip the paint off the pencil and unfasten the eraser, if she wanted.

“It'll take a couple hours even after you're much more practiced to claim the wood of the pencil, because wood has complicated cells in it. And then if you tried to reshape it, it would turn into mush.

“I think I should show you forcepatterning next. Could you turn some glass into this shape?” He points at the pair of glass disks he used to demonstrate with.

[alicornucopia]

She puts her pencil back on her hand and refashions the glass.

[wind_on_my_face]

“Now you have two pieces of glass, which aren't attached to each other” — he waves his hand through the gap between his pair of disks — “except that they are. What happens if you try to push them together? With your hands, I mean.”

[alicornucopia]

Push. They repel like magnets: bounce.

[wind_on_my_face]

“Notice that that's kind of bouncy sideways, too. You can't have anything that is stiff in one direction and soft in another, unless you have a big framework to fake it inside or more parts involved.

“Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself. Pay attention to what you did to make the two disks stay apart. You can make it rigid instead of springy. There's a connection between every part of one disk and every part of the other; take those connections and find the way they're a gentle change, and make them sharp instead.”

[alicornucopia]

The girl looks at him with extreme dubiousness, but some combination of these instructions and invisibly fumbling with her glass later she manages to set them rigidly separated with respect to one another.