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]

"Wow," says Silver.

[imeanforever]

"This is the Flowerswarm. It's famous but I hadn't actually seen it before."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I might take holos to bring home," he says. "...But in the meantime: second gate?"

There are maps and pictures of the test destination.

[imeanforever]

"Not an instant settle," Promise diagnoses presently.

[thisvorlunatic]

"Can't have everything, I guess."

He does in fact take holos of their outrageously pretty surroundings.

[imeanforever]

"Can I turn the ship invisible?"

[thisvorlunatic]

"...you may, but if that makes it difficult to fly you might have to turn it visible again before we go anywhere."

[imeanforever]

"I just meant for the view and so we're less conspicuously in a weird mortal device to anyone looking."

She turns the ship invisible.

[thisvorlunatic]

"The view is... certainly something. It reminds me of - a planet with a galactic reputation for refined aesthetics."

[imeanforever]

"Nobody grew the Flowerswarm, as far as I know - or at least nobody's maintaining it."

[thisvorlunatic]

"It's very pretty."

[imeanforever]

"Yeah. There's more pretty places I know about, I can put other pairs there."

[thisvorlunatic]

"That would be nice. I'm also wondering if it's possible to go a hundred times this high and set up a station with air onboard - if all the paired gates go through areas of thin atmosphere, then it seems like it would be uncomfortable to pass through them, and it's worth thinking about that sort of thing if you plan on selling lots and lots of gates. The obvious downside of course is that you'd need people to maintain the station, and I have no idea how easy it is to actually keep a station afloat above an infinite plane of ground... I suppose going a very long distance down from the surface is also an option. Do you know what's underneath Fairyland, if anything?"

[imeanforever]

"If you put something that can't fly very high up it will... fall, I imagine. And I'm putting the gates right next to each other. Under the ground is more ground."

[thisvorlunatic]

"We can test the discomfort thing, I suppose. ...If it's, er, ground all the way down, I'm now wondering what would happen if you opened a gate to a hundred light-years below the surface, or something like that. What if anything does happen when one end of a gate opens into the middle of a solid object?"

[imeanforever]

"Well, you can't go through it because there's solid object on the other side."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I can think of some ways around that, depending exactly how it works. ...There admittedly might not be a huge practical gain from carving out a tunnel complex a hundred light-years under the surface of Fairyland, but it would be really cool."

[imeanforever]

"I'm willing to open a gate like that if you really want one. I guess if you can burrow you can do it through a gate."

[thisvorlunatic]

"If you have a limited willingness to open gates I'd prefer not to spend it on things that don't gain me anything but fun and don't gain you anything at all. On the other hand, if we could build a tunnel complex a hundred light-years under the surface of Fairyland - or some other, even more outrageously huge distance - I feel like that would potentially be a more practical place to put your gatepairs, or even just to put a - a sort of orbital transfer station, a gate transfer complex I guess, where people could come in one gate and go out another of their choosing, at vastly reduced risk since I know for sure no mortals are going to successfully tunnel through a hundred light-years of dirt looking for fairies."

He shrugs. "I don't know, what do you think? If fairies someday invent more advanced forms of flight, and there are open gatepairs hanging out in the sky above all of Fairyland's nicest landmarks, someone's going to stumble through them for sure and then your mortal customers' descendants are in trouble. A hundred light-years of dirt is a much more effective obstacle."

[imeanforever]

"If the tunnels are geographically distinctive than anyone who wanders into the mortal world and finds they can cast there can find the place. Gates alone are never geographically distinctive. What I should probably do anyway is make endcap gates so that if someone approaches them from the Fairyland side they don't even notice, they just proceed through to the other side."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah, if that works then it eliminates the concern about fairies stumbling through the gates and the only thing left is the convenience of not having to quadruple-layer every gate. If someone wanders into the mortal world and finds that they can cast there, that's a pretty big problem all by itself and I wouldn't be particularly worried about them gating into the hub in particular... to be honest, if someone wanders in the mortal world my two main worries are that they might take a fancy to conquer the galaxy and end up starting a huge war, or that they might end up under the control of a mortal who, in turn, takes a fancy to conquer the galaxy and ends up starting a huge war. Our gate hub wouldn't have much effect on either scenario."

[imeanforever]

"Yeah. If you're really worried about that helping me get the Queen would let me address anything like that which came up."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Would it?"

[imeanforever]

"...She's Queen because her kind magic is to know every fairy's name."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...well. That... would definitely change things, yes. But - once you have the Queen, how do you propose to keep her?"