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, which should we start with?”

[alicornucopia]

"Eyes first."

[wind_on_my_face]

“Okay, I can show you how to make a slow eye and then you can improve it when you've gotten better materials — all of mine are in the eyes I'm using,” he says, waving at the ex-birds.

He takes some glass and something black from somewhere, and hands her half the black stuff. Presumably he expects her to claim it easily.

“You need something black to block out the light that's not coming in through the lens, and it'll also do for a slow sensor.”

He makes a hollow cylinder with a hole in one end and the other end solid out of the black stuff, and lets her look at the shape of it.

[alicornucopia]

She claims the black stuff. She inspects the shape. She copies it.

[wind_on_my_face]

“For the sensor, we make a fine grid of dots that aren't touching each other or anything else. The finer they are, the better you can see.”

Now there is a black fuzz at the far end of the cylinder, barely perceptible as being in a hexagonal grid.

“Then you make the lens. Since you haven't learned to see with this eye yet, open up the side for now and watch how the light falls on the sensor, then reshape the lens until it's as good as you can make it.”

He tweaks the sunshade above their heads to have a pattern of holes in it, then demonstrates holding his simple eye up to the sunbeams and nudging the shape of the lens until there are nicely in-focus dots.

[alicornucopia]

She follows along pretty capably.

[wind_on_my_face]

“Now just close it up, point it somewhere and keep it still, and pay attention to what you're feeling from the dots. If the sun is in view, that will be easier to notice at first.

“Since the plastic doesn't do anything in particular when the light hits it, it just heats up, this is really slow and it will blur if you move it.”

[alicornucopia]

She sets it up as directed. "How do you make a faster one, then?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“You use stuff for the sensor that does something other than just heating up. The kind I use makes a tiny bit of electricity out of the light, which you can feel just like you feel the heat.

“You could also improve the kind you have by doing something to make it cool down faster, but it still won't be fast enough to make a good eye.”

[alicornucopia]

"Why can't I just get water and... stuff... and make an eye out of that like a real eye?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“Real eyes are very, very complicated. Nobody knows how to make an eye from scratch, and if you did you would have to keep it alive with blood.”

[alicornucopia]

"I have enough blood for two eyes, maybe I would have enough for four."

[wind_on_my_face]

“There's still the problem of making the eye.”

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah. Won't I feel my own eyes and how they work when I get that far?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“You can't feel individual proteins, and you can't make them fit together right either. Animals are really, really, really, really complex.”

[alicornucopia]

"What if I got eyes from an animal, then? A dead one I guess. Like a fish."

[wind_on_my_face]

(This is a bit of a creepy obsession.)

“Then you'd need the rest of an alive fish to keep them alive. But you could use a live animal, yes, I suppose. I think it'd be harder to learn to see through them, and the fish wouldn't look where you wanted to, and you'd have to keep it in water so it could breathe and feed it —

Frustrated arm waving.

“Made eyes are just so much easier to deal with, and they're almost as good anyway.”

[alicornucopia]

"But you can claim live animals?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“Yes.”

[alicornucopia]

"Can you not move them around like you can move other stuff? You said the fish wouldn't look where I wanted..."

[wind_on_my_face]

“It would still try to look where it wants, and it would get tired and scared when it couldn't, and maybe die of that.”

(Creepy creepy creepy. How do we change the topic?)

[alicornucopia]

"Look," she says, "if I want to be a griffin, that's a sort of creature that's like an eagle in front and a lion in the back and it can fly and stuff, it's okay if my regular body has to hang out inside the griffin, how do I do that."

[wind_on_my_face]

(Okay, that is an acceptable change of topic.)

“Um.”

Think.

“That should work okay. I think you can do it” (without any extra eyes) “as long as you want to be a big griffin, so your head goes where its head is and there's room for the rest of you. Let me try—”

He starts pulling up the miscellaneous glass around and reforming his original bird shape.

[alicornucopia]

"Griffins aren't supposed to have human eyes," sighs the girl, but she sits back and waits.

[wind_on_my_face]

“You can put lenses over your human eyes that will make them look different.”

(Better than torturing fish.)

Okay, so what do griffins look like? The body is — mostly a lion, he thinks? — and lions are light brown. Light brown pigment in the glass, for starters, done.

Head of a giant eagle. Eye position — tricky. No, wait, she's already dedicated enough to this to want to try to see through fish eyes. Okay, optics so forward-facing human eyes can look sideways instead. Disguising tints. Nothing to be done about blinking.

He knows being a quadruped in the obvious way is terrible for the neck no matter what, so put legs in the front legs. Big griffin. Feet aren't human, so hide the human feet in the knees. Eagle feet.

The hind end won't contain any of her (his, for now) body so it's just a lion-shaped shell, but that doesn't matter to how it will move. Put some ballast in for balance. Cargo space.

Wings. Eagle wings. She probably wants to look like a live animal, not just have the form of one, so detail the feathers and coloring. Feathers other places feathers go.

“How's this?”