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]

"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.

[alicornucopia]

She listens carefully to all these instructions. When he stops talking: "Can I fly now?"

[wind_on_my_face]

(Right, children, attention span. He should have skipped some of that. It's not like she's going to be hurt even if she does everything wrong, now.)

“Yes,” he says quickly.

[alicornucopia]

She takes a flying leap off the platform into the wind, wings spread wide.

[wind_on_my_face]

And she's flying. Or at least, the ground is approaching slower than usual.

If she figures out how to glide in a consistently straight line, then she can leave the island behind quickly and had better turn back unless she wants to try a water landing.

Thanjen follows her down, after making some shape adjustments so he isn't flying faster than her all the time.

[alicornucopia]

She tries turning. She flaps. She tries diving and swooping up. She does a lot of whooping while she does all this.

[wind_on_my_face]

The tricky part about flapping is that you have to do it just right or you lose more speed than you gain, but she's getting the right idea.

There's the beach again.

[alicornucopia]

She keeps her altitude as long as she can, until she's pretty sure she can flap well enough to get airborne again from a ground start - then land on the beach, fairly neatly for a first try.

[wind_on_my_face]

Thanjen lands next to her. (He's getting used to her being unexpectedly good at being a griffin.)

“Do you want to go up again, or try to take off from the ground?”

[alicornucopia]

"I'm going to try taking off to make sure I can. After that I want to be a mermaid."

She takes off, flies around in a big circle, lands again.