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]

"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?”

[alicornucopia]

"That looks mostly great except -"

She has a lot of strong opinions about coloration and where the feathers should blend in to fur and so on.

[wind_on_my_face]

He tries to adjust things. His mock-bodies come over to give him a look at his mock hindquarters. (The same skill that let make up an almost acceptable griffin on the spot is evident in their perfectly human appearance.)

[alicornucopia]

Eventually, he has it right! "Good. That looks like it's supposed to."

[wind_on_my_face]

He starts teaching her how to make it.

Since she doesn't have much glass she will have to make it carefully thin and maybe load some unclaimed sand instead of glass in the back to get the weight distribution right (she can work on claiming it later), but it's still doable. If she insists, he will share his stores of pigments so she can get the coloring too. It's very, very faintly bluish, though, because the glass made from the sand was bluish.

He's still walking around as a bigger griffin for the reference. It's clearly not his dearest wish to be a griffin too, though.

And how is she doing with the eyes-on-the-side-of-the-head optics?

[alicornucopia]

She takes to it like a natural.

[wind_on_my_face]

Well, that's surprising. Humans: what interesting variation will they come in next?

“I imagine you would like to learn to fly, next.”

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah!"

[wind_on_my_face]

(If she can fly, then she can definitely leave the island under her own power. Because she sure didn't arrive here in a boat that still exists anywhere he saw, and he searched carefully while they were making glass.)

“Okay. There are two ways to start. One is you learn taking off first, and you have to deal with the ground being right below you. The other is I take you up really high and you work on starting to glide while you're falling. That can be scary. Which way do you think you would like better?”

[alicornucopia]

"I'm not scared of heights."