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]

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.

[alicornucopia]

Well, that's sort of okay.

"How much do you have to push stuff before it can use the energy to fly?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“It depends on what kind of flying you want it to do. If you just want something to float, you can make it hollow inside, and that just takes the energy to push the air away once and it'll float forever.”

He takes a tiny bead of glass and expands it into a wispy sphere like a large soap bubble. It drifts away on the breeze and a little upward.

“If you want it to be able to go in a particular direction or carry a significant load, then it needs enough energy to lift and propel itself, just like anything else. Big wings are more efficient. As a general rule, imitate birds and you won't go far wrong.

“But if you mean you want to have your ball of glass floating with you rather than rolling behind you, that's a bit of a different subject, because you don't exactly want it to turn it into an island-sized bubble or have it noisily windily hovering all the time. You want to carry it.

“For example, our sunshade up there is supported by all this glass I've spread out on the ground around us. This is simple and no load on me, but I have to constantly reshape the glass to move it along, which is a skill I had to practice. The stuff I'm not using right now, I keep some of it in my clothes” — a little glass tentacle waves from a sleeve cuff — “so it's well balanced around me, but most of it right now is my mock-bodies that you saw me flying with.”

[alicornucopia]

"And those had to be all loaded up with pushing so they could flap?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“Yes, but I didn't do all the pushing myself. I used machines, like this solar engine.”

[alicornucopia]

"How does that work?"

[wind_on_my_face]

He moves the mirror to the side so they can see the machine sitting at the focus. Bright glare and heat shimmers obscure one end.

“The engine has a hot part and a cold part. The hot part is kept hot by the sunlight. The cold part is kept cold by blowing air over it. Inside, it moves air between the hot and cold parts, and as the air gets hotter or colder it pushes on other moving parts, and that keeps it running. And all the energy that's left over is stored.”

[alicornucopia]

Frown. "And you can use that energy the same as pushing energy for forcepatterning?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“It's turning the heat into pushing.”