delta v over delta t when there is no t

[ertia]

In a bar, there is a girl.

She looks like she has saved up all of her decadent and slothful impulses for a solid decade and is indulging them all at once. She is sprawled on a couch with a book she's only half-reading, and an ice cream sundae, and smiiiiiiling.

Comments

[ertia]

"What'd you get?"

[first_and_final]

"Surrounded by eavesdroppers, apparently," he says, glancing over at the couch. "I have no idea what this is but it's delicious."

[ertia]

"You're not that far away!"

[alicornucopia]

It is called a "butter mug" or a "hot morning" depending on locality.

[first_and_final]

"The bar says it's called a hot morning. And I am still out of what I'd consider conversational range with anyone who has no significant elven ancestry."

[ertia]

"Elven?"

[first_and_final]

"Apparently you don't have nonhuman people in your world; well, we do in mine, and elves in particular have, among other attributes, very sharp hearing and the ability to project their voices to specific people across a distance."

[ertia]

"Oh. I do maintain all my senses a little sharp - not enough to feel creepy about it, by default, but I didn't have any trouble hearing you from here."

[first_and_final]

"My own mother's a quarter-elf, it's not creepy exactly, I just don't expect it of people by default."

[ertia]

"I wonder if most people at home will have better senses than you're used to from humans? I don't know what the baseline even is, but nobody wants things to be blurry..."

[first_and_final]

"That sounds like the sort of question that might profitably be asked of the knowledgeable interplanar bar," says Milan.

[alicornucopia]

Unfortunately, my own senses are uncorrelated with either and it's difficult to figure this sort of thing out from the published works of each world in which no similar scale of vision measurement is applied across the board.

[first_and_final]

"The bar isn't sure. Well, thank you anyway," he says.

[alicornucopia]

You're welcome.

[first_and_final]

He continues to drink his delicious drink.

[ertia]

Kithabel lounges. She accepts food recommendations from Bar and pays her with 'Satrapy sorcery credit', which she explains as deriving from the principle that sorceren are a valuable public good and should not be inconvenienced or delayed in attempting to acquire goods worth less than a certain medium-sized amount. She gets a room and naps and comes back and reads.

[first_and_final]

Milan asks the bar for recommendations of informative or entertaining books from Kithabel's world and then sits down to inhale them.

[ertia]

Her world has a lot of books! Bar is good at picking them. He gets novels and histories and what little tidbits about Kithabel's language Bar can manage in the translation aura of Milliways.

[first_and_final]

He appreciates her help very much.

Books! Book book book. So many book.

[ertia]

And eventually, with a big stack of books to haul home:

"I think I can handle going back to spending every waking hour hard at work imposing my will on the universe now. You want to wrap up?"

[first_and_final]

"Yeah. You said you could find a translation solution somewere, right?"

[ertia]

"I have a friend who's higher-momentum than me, she'll be able to do a translation object, she's offered me one for if I ever traveled outside my linguistic region. Might take her a day or two to swing by, so tell me now if you're allergic to anything, I guess."

[first_and_final]

"Happily no."

[ertia]

"Anything else that's likely to come up in the next day or two...?"

[first_and_final]

"Well, what's going to happen in the next day or two? I stay in your castle and attempt to creatively affect my environment; you go around sorcering and provide me with food and so forth?"