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

[wind_on_my_face]

“It'll be easier if we turn it into glass first; sand is more complicated because it's in separate pieces.”

The bowl over their heads stops providing shade. Now it's turned sideways, and the mirrored concave side is concentrating a lot of sunlight on a patch of clean sand well away from both of them.

[alicornucopia]

"Oh, I thought you turned it into glass with the magic thing."

[wind_on_my_face]

“The — magic — thing?”

[alicornucopia]

"The thing you're teaching me to do?"

[wind_on_my_face]

(Fine. This is not the time to get into an argument about words. If she wants to call it magic, she can call it magic until she has access to the collected knowledge of humanity rather than some strange censored version.)

“All right. You could claim the sand and then reshape it into glass, but that would take longer because instead of just glass, you have sand grains with air and dirt between them.”

The mirror is moving its focus along the sand, gradually adding on to the edges of a disk of fused sand. It's not exactly window glass, but at least it's melted smooth on the top.

[alicornucopia]

"The glass you're making will take a while to cool off, though, won't it?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“Yes, but you don't need to touch it with your hand, just touch it with the glass you already have, and once you are able to reshape it, you can cool it down quickly.”

[alicornucopia]

"Oh. Okay."

[wind_on_my_face]

After a few minutes he puts the mirror back over their heads, and waits for the molten spot to cool down closer to the temperature of the rest.

“Take your glass and just poke the mess somewhere. Claim all the fused part, don't worry about anything that isn't easy; it'll break off.”

[alicornucopia]

She mushes her glass into a long stick and then pokes the melty spot.

[wind_on_my_face]

“Now that you have all of that glass, split the stick before where it gets hot and take back your original glass. You'll use that for an anchor point, so hang onto it or wrap it around you or stand on it.”

[alicornucopia]

She does as he suggests and turns it into a bracelet.

[wind_on_my_face]

“Forcepattern the bracelet and the hot glass so the hot glass will stay exactly as far away from you as it is now. Now just reshape it into a wide, thin ribbon, thin like paper, which will push itself up into the air away from the hot pool as you make it, and necessarily curve over this way.”

He gestures suggesting a semicircular arc over their heads.

“By the time it reaches the ground on the other side, it should have been cooled enough by the air that you can touch it.”

[alicornucopia]

The hot glass wobbles up, snakelike, flattens out, arcs over.

[wind_on_my_face]

“Looks good.”

[alicornucopia]

Nod, nod.

[wind_on_my_face]

It takes another minute or so to get it all moved, but eventually the glass is all piled up over there like a plate of inedible noodles. Blue-tinted, giant noodles.

He walks over and touches it with a glass-covered hand (his glass, which is colorless), and then a bare one. She can feel his hand.

“All cooled off. You've got a couple kilograms of glass there, I think. You can do a lot with that if you don't actually need solid thickness in particular.”

[alicornucopia]

"Solid thickness?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“I mean, if you wanted to make a lens or something where you need there to actually be glass in the middle, or if it needed to be heavy. You can make reinforced hollow objects instead if you only need the shape.”

[alicornucopia]

"Oh. I don't think I need heavy things very often." Experimentally, she tries dragging her lump of glass spaghetti from its anchor on her bracelet to see how much of an impediment it is.

[wind_on_my_face]

It's all still constrained to be about the same distance from her bracelet, so it doesn't stretch out like if she pulled an end; it remains tangled up and starts getting partly under the sand.

It'll be pretty awkward to plow the beach by pulling with one arm on a bracelet. Perhaps she should consider switching to a harness of some sort.

[alicornucopia]

"This seems like it will be hard to carry around everywhere I go."

[wind_on_my_face]

“It was just like this to cool off. Now you can reshape it into something sensibly compact and carry it however you like. And I don't mean to suggest that you should carry around exactly this much glass and more stuff on top of that; this is just for practice for now and you can decide what you want to do when you leave.”

[alicornucopia]

"Okay." She munches it all together in a ball. Maybe she can forcepattern it so if she kicks it, it'll roll in the relevant direction. ...Balls already mostly do that, but she wants it to roll in a straight line. Kick.

[wind_on_my_face]

It seems that there are only three directional results she can get: towards her bracelet, away from her bracelet in no particular direction, and fixed to her bracelet (and trying to move the ball anywhere by twisting her bracelet is a bit too much for her wrist).

A little work with “towards” will make it stay in a radius like an unenthusiastic leashed pet, and not roll away if she kicks it wrong.