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]

Kithabel has left him breakfast in her dining room by the time he gets there. It is keeping itself warm.

[first_and_final]

How kind of it. He scarfs down the breakfast and makes the rounds. Any alteration to his surroundings that it occurs to him to try, he does; if it didn't work yesterday maybe it'll work now. He constantly makes his assorted objects fly around and change colour. Perhaps the rocks and water should glow, yes, let's have them do that.

He hasn't ever turned up this high for this long before - technically speaking, he hasn't turned up this high before at all, because he is periodically pushing the total up as far as he can. It might not be sustainable; he has no idea. But if he collapses at some point, well, he can start thinking about moderation then.

[ertia]

Whether he collapses or not is up to him. Kithabel remembers to leave him lunch before she takes her next nap. (It seems like she has drastically reduced food needs.)

[first_and_final]

Since the goal was to match her sleep schedule, he requests another four hours from the alarm rock after he has his lunch. Then it's up again and around again, push push push, will this be the hour that he starts being able to make objects move around without constant personal attention? No? How about now? Also, he should have those drastically reduced food needs. And these plants should produce fruit on command faster.

[ertia]

Well, whether it's expanded attentional capacity or actual momentum improvement, things will happen a little faster today, but he will still be hungry for dinner by the time she makes him dinner and his objects will still fall to the ground if he ignores them.

[first_and_final]

Unacceptable. Clearly he needs to try harder. He can expand his attentional capacity faster if he puts his mind to it. It hurts a lot but he can always cope, that was the fairy's blessing. Fairy curses ought not be messed with but by the same token fairy blessings are very reliable.

[ertia]

The attentional capacity means he can do more things at once, and that does mean he acquires momentum faster, but you have to be approaching sorcerer level to do without food, and he is not there yet.

[first_and_final]

But if he keeps pushing the extent to which he can directly inflict pain on himself with sorcery, maybe he will get there acceptably fast.

He can keep going at this accelerating schedule for quite a while. He's pretty sure he's approaching six times normal mental capacity, so that's one entire Milan to continually hurt himself, between two and four to manage his assorted ongoing effects, and between one and three to focus on whatever else he's trying at the moment.

Can he conjure water or other things out of thin air? Can he plant a new plant and grow it to adulthood? Can he get a butterfly to land on him? Can he alter the taste of his food? Can he detach a strand of one of those lovely climbing vines, beautify it further, and have it fly around with his other orbiting objects, and of course can he strictly forbid it from wilting while it does so? Can he make his music louder, can he get it to automate itself at all, can he likewise automate the flight or colour-changes of his orbiting objects, can he make the orbiting objects perfume themselves prettily and can he automate that, can he stick his pebbles together and unstick them and re-stick different ones in their choreographed flight, can he alter the opacity of Kithabel's windows and if so can he do the same thing to his water-spheres on an ongoing basis, and of course for any effect he has ever successfully accomplished can he do it again, faster, prettier, more ambitiously, in a comprehensive wide-ranging rotation.

[ertia]

Automation is still beyond him. He's not cheating that hard. Conjuration is also not happening. Everything else: yes.

[first_and_final]

Well, then, he can check back on conjuration periodically and keep working on the everything else.

Perhaps he can coax flowers out of his orbiting vine. Perhaps he can go back and get a branch of one of the fruiting plants and coax flowers and subsequently fruits out of that, and go around with a constant source of more food to eat and play with. Perhaps he can make his pebbles transparent in addition to making his water opaque. Perhaps he can make his pebbles larger or smaller. If he can make them bigger and then split them into more pebbles and then rejoin them to other ones and make them smaller again, that's yet another thing he can go around constantly doing. And the colour changes on all these objects can be intricately patterned instead of simple. And they can cycle through colours and patterns and opacities and scents and musical notes and - densities, can he do densities - and so forth all the time. While also constantly orbiting him.

Indulging his hubristic and meddlesome nature is fun.

[ertia]

He makes an entertaining picture like that.

Would he like to accompany Kithabel on her tasks this waking-period? She can fly him along with herself and he can see if anything she gets up to is inspiring.

[first_and_final]

Absolutely.

[ertia]

Right then, off they go. Kithabel is, today, doing some healing - a specialist is taking some time off; they can do that - and then placing some magic equivalent of internet relays and conjuring up more to be brought farther afield by faster fliers, and then turning a farm's worth of corn weird colors (mostly for holiday decorations, but some of it will turn into interesting cornmeal) and then bringing in some rain and doing fun things with the lightning and then digging a tunnel through a mountain for a road.

[first_and_final]

Ooh, fun things with lightning, can Milan do fun things with lightning? Can he catch a spark and make it join his tiny parade? And some snatches of cloud, those too, he can cycle his water from water to mist and back again. He can test out just how much stuff he can colour-change at once on the corn, and he does not mind at all if Kithabel erases his work. He can ask Kithabel if he can try some of the simpler healing cases available. His flying objects can range over a wider area. He can decorate Kithabel's tunnel, and check his working scale again while he's at it.

Being able to do all this stuff merely by being hubristic and meddlesome at it is kind of incredible. But it is also wildly insufficient, because he is not yet effortless master of all he surveys. He should do more things.

[ertia]

It's actually sort of hard to decorate Kithabel's tunnel - she made it quite pretty to begin with and there's some lingering willfulness in it - but he can change some colors if he tries. He can do small sparks. He may heal this person's bruise while Kithabel gets everybody else and comes back to finish the bruise for him.

And then they can go back to the palace and sleep.

[first_and_final]

The colours of Kithabel's tunnel are largely fine; what he does is split off lots of bits of rock from his pebble parade and shape them into aesthetically pleasing decorations and stick them to the walls in appropriate places.

He is deeply frustrated by his slow progress on the bruise, and immediately resolves to do even more things. Constantly expanding his curse-pain is familiar enough that it takes less of his attention now; maybe, he thinks the next morning, he can push it a little faster - no, that was a bad idea. Okay. He can maintain a steady pace on that and instead push himself harder on manipulating his entourage of objects, and find more things to do. Try to make the sparks dance across his fingers without stinging him. Try to make them dance across his fingers and sting him without dissipating. Come on, can he not be effortless master of all he surveys yet?

Apparently not.

Time passes. Milan continues not to be effortless master of all he surveys. But he figures out new tricks to add to the rotation in his constant halo of manipulated objects, and he gets better and faster at all the things he can do, and he becomes able to do yet more things, and he paces the halls of Kithabel's castle and cares for its gardens and redecorates its immediate environs.

It's really annoying not being effortless master of all he surveys, though.

He adjusts the quantity of sleep permitted by his alarm rock, up to five hours from four. This helps a little, except that it slows him down further. He takes a day 'off' and runs at a mere twice normal speed; this is so atrociously, intolerably slow that he ramps back up to full before Kithabel comes home, and after a few more days he cuts his sleep intervals back down to four hours. That's better.

Despite periodic renewed efforts, he can't quite make himself add to the curse-pain any faster. Sheer willpower can only do so much, and pain does hurt. If it didn't, it wouldn't be any good to him. So he climbs steadily and tries not to be too hard on himself for not going faster.

Five months and three weeks after he first entered this world, he wakes up and instead of appeasing his alarm rock he flings it out of the room. It didn't deserve that. But he is still not effortless master of all he surveys and it is very frustrating and he can't stand to be slow but the cost of speeding up is definitely starting to wear on him. Oh, now he is crying. Crying is not doing sorcery. Do some fucking sorcery, Milan Kosorin, you lazy ass.

[ertia]

Kithabel comes to check on him when she finds that his breakfast has not been eaten and loud turtle-originating music has made it through the entire Cantata and into the second act of the Afternoon Opera.

[first_and_final]

Milan is in bed, burrowed under blankets and pillows with only his eyes showing, sorcerously flinging pebbles against the walls of his room and then fixing both the walls and the pebbles.

[ertia]

"Depressive episode?"

[first_and_final]

"What was your first clue," mutters the blanketlump. A pebble shatters against the wall. Each individual shard picks itself up off the ground and turns a different colour and a different complementary pleasing smell and grows to a uniform size and perfectly spherical shape, and then they all fling themselves at the wall again.

[ertia]

Kithabel looks at the door out of his room.

She looks very hard at the door of his room.

If it even thinks about not doing what she wants she's going to disintegrate it and replace it with one of a completely different design and rearrange the entire hallway out of spite, see if she doesn't, it had better know who's boss -

She opens the door.

And Milan is flung through the air into Milliways quite unceremoniously.

Kithabel follows him through, so she can let him back into her world instead of him winding up back in his own again.

[first_and_final]

He smiles slightly.

"Nice going."

[ertia]

"Thank you," says Kithabel smugly, and she goes and orders a 'surprise me' and flops by the fireplace.

[first_and_final]

Milan goes over to the bar much more slowly.

"Hi," he says. "What are my options if I want to stay here for a few weeks but don't necessarily want to pay for it out of my savings?"

[alicornucopia]

Kithabel's credit may extend that far. You can sleep on the couch without paying for a room. You can earn a room by taking a job cleaning or at security or the infirmary. You can run up a tab.