blood sweat tear

[imeanforever]

He's moving her to a different court to see if it'll improve her attitude. She's allowed to fly. It's been a long, long time since she was allowed to -

She is only allowed to fly to her destination, not anywhere else. She notices that she is not where she should be, that she cannot progress to where she was told to go, and she careens out of control when her wings won't flap anymore, and she crashes.

---

with Miles (kappa)

with Minus (kappa)

Comments

[imeanforever]

"Names aren't irrevocable. I'd forget them eventually. It would take me a long time, though, probably longer than a mortal usually lives."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Irrevocable from the perspective of the mortal, then. Anyway." He gestures vaguely at the corridor of guest rooms.

[imeanforever]

She looks at them. She picks one. She swallows a painkiller and flops onto a bed and sighs deeply.

[thisvorlunatic]

"I'll be around if you need anything," he says, and goes back downstairs to put the pastries away and maybe question his sanity a little.

[imeanforever]

She sleeps for a few hours.

[thisvorlunatic]

By which time her host has not quite decided whether or not he should call his mother. If Promise looks for him, she will find him playing a fast-paced colourful holo game on a comconsole downstairs.

[imeanforever]

She does look for him. She blinks at the holo. It's so holographical.

She's a pretty quiet flier; he might not notice her until she accidentally flexes her hand and hisses.

[thisvorlunatic]

"That didn't sound good," he says, looking up from his game. "Did the painkillers help at all? ...How do you know your magic doesn't work here?"

[imeanforever]

"It's not supposed to work in the mortal world. I don't know why. I guess I've never been here before." She tries making a fairylight.

[thisvorlunatic]

The fairylight: works.

"That sure looked like magic to me," says Silver.

[imeanforever]

She blinks at it in surprise.

Then she makes more of them, in layers, grids about a foot square -

"This place is flat," she says indignantly, black eye disappearing and hand straightening out. "It's flat and all the books said it was impossible to cast here!"

[thisvorlunatic]

Silver experiences a brief intense collision of competing trains of thought.

"—So," he says when he's sorted himself out, "I'm glad you can conveniently heal yourself, I wonder why your information about the mortal world was so wrong and what implications that might have, and is that just a fairy thing or could I learn how to heal myself that conveniently?"

[imeanforever]

"It'd take a while."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Depending on how long of a while, I might still be interested," he says. "I have - well, the short version is I was poisoned as a child and it fucked up my bone development and the reason I yelled when you landed on me is that in my experience unexpected impacts usually lead to broken bones. Being able to un-break them on the spot would be very useful. Is there something I could trade you for - magic lessons? How long would it take to get that far?"

[imeanforever]

"Years. Maybe longer with no books - maybe not as long with flat harmonics - if it's flat here I can probably just gate to my tree, I don't know that I need anything from here..."

[thisvorlunatic]

"You might not need anything, but you might like some things," he says. "I'd have to find a way to censor out all the names, but mortals have produced vast amounts of media, I could send you home with enough music and literature and holovids to keep you entertained for the next several thousand years even if you find you hate ninety percent of it. As the first example I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more."

[imeanforever]

"That sounds like it would take up a lot of space."

[thisvorlunatic]

...

Silver grins.

"That," he says, pointing at the desk where he was playing the game, "is a comconsole. I deduce that you don't have any in Fairyland. Just a second."

He clears the game away and pulls up a menu, which he rapidly navigates to find a holographic pie chart.

"So, I'm using about one percent of its information storage capacity and I have about," he squints at the display, "two hundred and fifty hours of music, two hundred hours of vids, and a hundred and fifty million books. And most of the physical size of the object is not data storage, it's cipher circuits and projection equipment. I don't know offhand how much physical space it would take to store the collected historical media output of the entire galaxy, but I'd be surprised if it overflowed this house."

[imeanforever]

"Oh.



"What's a galaxy?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"...I think I will answer that question with pretty pictures," he says. "First—" A holographic model of a solar system appears. "Do I need to explain planets?"

[imeanforever]

"I think I have the general idea behind planets. They're round."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Right. So that's a solar system. It contains a sun and some planets. There's usually just one inhabited planet per inhabited system - sometimes two, I don't know if I've ever heard of three - and there's only on the order of two hundred inhabited systems in total, but," he calls up a second holographic model, "that is a galaxy, and every tiny sparkle in the fog of tiny sparkles is an individual sun."

There are a lot of tiny sparkles. He enlarges the display until it fills the vid plate's entire active area, and there are still some places where the tiny lights cluster into an undifferentiated glowing mass.

[imeanforever]

Promise looks at the galaxy. "That's a lot of planets," she says. "Why is it organized like that?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"Gravity?" he hazards. "I'm not a physicist. I can probably find you anywhere between an article and a few dozen books on the subject, depending on the exact depth of your curiosity."

[imeanforever]

"Fairyland isn't like that," she says. "It's just flat. With mountains and caves and things, but basically flat."