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]

“Okay. You've finished claiming and reinforcing your body, right?”

(She probably has, or she wouldn't be at all comfortable inside that griffin shape, but, safety, don't assume.)

[alicornucopia]

"Mostly."

[wind_on_my_face]

“Okay, let me know when you've finished. And while you're working on that, let's get you some energy so you can flap. Make another thing that slows down like you did before. It doesn't need to be on the ground, so just make two small parts that can turn against each other.”

He makes a thing that might be intended as an example: it's a cylindrical cup sort of like the eye casing, with another cylindrical part on the inside, but both parts have grooves and bumps that plausibly could be used to grab and turn them.

[alicornucopia]

She copies this design.

[wind_on_my_face]

He shapes his so that it fits onto hers, and starts spinning the inside parts. This apparently useless activity turns out to be rapidly increasing the stored energy in her spinny thing — hundreds of times more energy in just a few seconds than she was storing using her muscles in the practice sessions.

[alicornucopia]

"Wow."

[wind_on_my_face]

Eventually, that bunch of glass feels full and the particular sensation of there-is-stored-energy-here starts spilling into the nearest other stuff — her griffin-shape and her body.

She could direct it to flow somewhere in particular if she wanted.

[alicornucopia]

She spreads it around all the bits of the body she will want to move, mostly the wings but also the neck and legs.

"I think I have my whole body now."

[wind_on_my_face]

Eventually, two things happen at the same time: she feels full all over, and she suddenly feels hot in the spinning thing.

He stops spinning it.

“There! You've got all the energy you can hold right now.”

[alicornucopia]

"Weird... how much is it? How could I hold more?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“About thirty gigajoules. You hold more by claiming more stuff so you can put energy in it. That's one of the reasons why I keep more of me around.” The ex-birds wave a little. “But unless you're planning to do something really big, you don't need more than a fraction of that. I just gave you a full charge because I have a full charge and I have it because I'm overly fond of being prepared for anything.”

[alicornucopia]

"Well, thank you very much," she says politely. She starts experimenting with flapping her wings, and finding a comfortable gait with the griffin feet.

[wind_on_my_face]

He abandons the griffin shape for his original airplane-bird, and makes a smaller-griffin-sized platform with railings on three sides, floating an easy step above the ground.

“Whenever you want to go up.”

[alicornucopia]

Onto it she steps. She practices with her beak: clack clack.

[wind_on_my_face]

Express elevator to the skies! He follows along beside it, apparently using his wings to steer but not to propel himself.

She may wish to figure out how to nudge her ears into adjusting to the pressure change comfortably.

Visible from here: one more island and, much farther away, a continent. Some specks in the sky, one stationary in the oceanward direction, others moving.

[alicornucopia]

She pops her ears. She can do that without the stuff-claiming, even.

"Are those more flying people?"

[wind_on_my_face]

Telescope eyes.

“That's someone just out flying. That one looks like a whole household moving. And that's a relay — actually, my friend Teytis.”

[alicornucopia]

"What's a relay?"

[wind_on_my_face]

(Of course she doesn't know anything about communications either. Otherwise she could have learned the rest for herself.)

“Relays pass messages so people can talk to each other and share information around the world.”

[alicornucopia]

"What kind of messages? Is it like mail or like the internet?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“The internet?”

[alicornucopia]

"...It's like what you said but it might be different some ways you didn't mention."

[wind_on_my_face]

(Compose. Keyword search. “internet”. Transmit. Is this something that was a thing once upon a time or in some part of the world he never visited?)

“Oh. Well, relays don't move mail, they receive and send messages over radio.”

(No results.)

[alicornucopia]

"Okay."

[wind_on_my_face]

He starts explaining the things she will need to know to get something useful out of jumping off the platform and gliding to the ground.

He says that the most important thing is to keep her wings aimed mostly into the wind, even if that's not the direction she wants to go. She should learn to feel the direction of the wind with her feathers. If she goes too slow, she will just “stall” and fall down (so she should get herself pointed downward to recover). She can trade altitude for airspeed and vice versa.

And, of course, landing without smashing up the landscape, which is accomplished by gliding just above the ground until she is about to stall, attempting to climb so as to stop herself horizontally, then dropping down onto the ground like she had just jumped up from it.