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

[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."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Well, the mortal world is... sparkly," he says, smiling. "...Also, we have some difficulty transporting mortals between these various locations, and depending on how exactly your gates work, if you could create or teach someone to create a stable network of instantaneous interstellar transportation I don't think it's possible to overstate how rich you could get. Sending you home with the entire collected works of humanity, or at least as much of it as I can reach from my living room, would be cheap. What you could get for a gate network... I struggle to even describe it. You could buy your own planet. You could pay hundreds of people exorbitant salaries to comb the galaxy looking for the nicest previously unclaimed planet available and then declare it yours and settle down there with your library of all human knowledge."

[imeanforever]

"That might be nice. And I shouldn't necessarily go back to my tree very soon anyway. In case someone's looking for me. It'd be the obvious place I'd go."

[thisvorlunatic]

"When you say 'your tree'..." he says, trying to think of a way to formulate the question.

[imeanforever]

"The kind of fairy I am starts inside of a tree. I lived there, before. I'd only be going to take a cutting to plant a new one, but that could be long enough even if I went with my eardrums burst."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...Long enough for someone to - recapture you? What's - I mean - depending on the exact nature of the danger involved, that may be a problem that I and/or an arbitrarily large pile of money could help solve."

[imeanforever]

"My old master collects sorcerers and most of them are better than me and the tree's my turf, which matters, but I haven't been there in such a long time and I don't remember all the things I'd need to know to press the advantage. If my ears were broken someone would just have to heal me, that's all, and get out an order before I could puncture them again."

[thisvorlunatic]

"What if you were, for example, wearing something that blocked your hearing without damaging you...?"

[imeanforever]

"They'd just have to wreck it. Maybe it'd be safe to open a tiny gate, just big enough for my hand and a branch..."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I would be happy to offer you any reasonable assistance in getting a cutting of your tree, if it's that important to you," he says. "And varying levels of extravagant assistance are potentially on offer if you decide to do things like teach me sorcery or sell gates. Although the logistics of selling gates could get... a bit complicated."

[imeanforever]

"Complicated how?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"...I need to spend a minute thinking this through, actually," he says, and sits down at the desk.