alicornutopia | blood sweat tear

Promise makes more grids, fluttering around the room.

"I am deeply curious about what information these little lights are actually giving you," says Tea.

"I'm trying to make them all the same starting from the assumption that the harmonics are flat, which they never are, and I'm underpowering the spell enough that they don't just turn up in the exact intensity I have in mind the way they would if I were using them for illumination. So when the harmonics are light-friendly, they're bright and steady, and when they're not, the positions of the lights that are dim or wobbly or both and how much of each they are tells me what the harmonics are relative to the bright steady ones that best approximate the level of my 'flat' assumption."

"...hmm," he says. "And what patterns are you detecting so far? I almost think I'm seeing something that corresponds to the exact shape and position of your imaginary metaphorical tree, but I'm not familiar enough with the medium to know if I'm picking up on a real pattern or just seeing faces in the figurative clouds."

"I don't have a map of my tree. I - learned to make maps after I left it and I haven't made one since going back. But I can see if there's something in the space which looks like a coherent pattern of its own."

Grid grid grid. She's not pausing to write down everything, so it goes faster.

The edges of the room are drunk in a normal local fashion; the space around the spell diagram on the floor has had its drunkenness incompletely reordered into somewhat distorted geometric patterns reflecting the spell layout; and where her imaginary tree stood, a coherent and very Fairyland-like pattern overlays the fading remnants of baseline intoxication and spell-geometry.

"So you can affect harmonics. At least as a side effect," Promise concludes. "They're wobblier than they'd be in Fairyland, but I wouldn't think much of it if I found a spot there that mapped like this."