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]

"Any improvements you want to suggest before I go do it?"

[makeyourselfuseful]

"None that I can think of right away! Try not to get yourself turned into anything inconvenient," she says.

[ertia]

"I won't."

[makeyourselfuseful]

Berete opens the door.

[ertia]

And Kithabel omnipotences the heck out of magics present and future, leaving their present decor intact for color.

And then she warns Milan that she is going to test them, since it is safer for her to do it than anyone else, and she zooms in among a patch of flamingos with their feet rooted to the ground, under a floating manatee with polka dots, between the cheese tree and the tree made of assorted colors of wire and with wagon wheels for leaves.

She is offered a list! Would she like to be a coconut which can screw open and closed and will contain pearls or decks of playing cards missing all their sevens every time it is opened anew? Would she like to be a book which consists of translations into 479 local languages of a certain bawdy poem? Would she like to grow grass instead of eyebrows? Or would she like nothing?

She would like nothing. She departs. "Done!"

[first_and_final]

...Milan has to try this.

He flies into a magic (and restores an extremely uncomfortable-looking snake to a state of having zero legs, and firmly outside the borders of the magic he also manipulates a vast complex arrangement of rocks and water bubbles and breezes and puffs of smoke and alchemical essence spheres encased in alchemically neutral glass and tiny fruit trees).

[alicornucopia]

The magic offers him choices! Would he like his scaly bits to be real, actual silver? Would he like to sing with a choir of a thousand voices? Would he like to swap the locations of his nose and left eye, his right hand and right foot, and his left ear and belly button? Would he like to make any salt he touches turn into sugar, and vice versa? Would he like nothing?

[first_and_final]

...

Okay, he's tempted. He'll take the silver and change it back if he doesn't like it.

[alicornucopia]

The magic provides!

[first_and_final]

Now he has some real actual silver on him!

...

This actually causes it to stop sparkling.

Kithabel, I am conflicted, he says, after exiting the magic and confirming this fact in a giant conjured mirror. The magic changed my scales to genuine silver and I look much more reasonable but I kind of miss my outrageous sparkly glory.

[ertia]

I'm not a good aesthetics consult, I find you mesmerizingly beautiful no matter what, she points out.

[first_and_final]

True. Maybe I'll ask Berete.

He finds Berete.

[makeyourselfuseful]

"...Did you fall in a magic and lose your... sparkle?"

[first_and_final]

"Yes. Yes I did."

[makeyourselfuseful]

"Well, you look slightly less like gem-eyed Aelare's reptilian cupbearer, so good for you."

[first_and_final]

"Is that an actual thing?"

[makeyourselfuseful]

"It's the sort of thing I wouldn't be surprised to find in that sort of folk tale."

[first_and_final]

I think Berete just told me that my outrageous sparkly glory makes me look like the servant-or-possibly-concubine of a local god.

"Anyway, we successfully fixed the magics and now I might fly in and out of one a bunch of times because they're very entertaining."

[ertia]

Kithabel giggles.

[makeyourselfuseful]

"Don't let me stop you," says Berete.

[first_and_final]

So off Milan goes to fly into another magic.

[alicornucopia]

Does he want to taste like peanuts and artichokes? Does he want to be able to enjoy diamonds as though they were delicious candy and also stop having quite so many ribs and vertebrae? Does he want infinite strings of little clay beads to dangle from his ears, to be pulled and trimmed at any length? Does he want his knees backwards? Does he want an elephant's trunk and a lion's tail? Or does he want nothing?

[first_and_final]

... This time he wants nothing! But he's also totally circling back for another try.

[alicornucopia]

How about skin made of paper, layers and layers of it that he could write on and peel off? Would he like to be seven feet tall, most of that ostrich leg? Does he fancy going around with no neck, just his head hovering above his shoulders and thereby slightly increasing his range of motion and eliminating most tension headaches? Does he want to be a rather attractive decorative lamp fueled by milk and capable of minor prophecy about the weather?

[first_and_final]

He would like none of these things, and just for the hell of it he teleports to yet another magic.