high-energy physics

[warpfairy]

Federation political prisons are not particularly uncomfortable. She's not going anywhere, but she can read, she's considering taking up an instrument, the only really awkward thing is that she doesn't particularly want to be supervised while she's sweating her way through her next pon farr one way or another but that's years off. That and she wishes she'd taken longer to get caught. But she was running out of the really low-hanging fruit anyway.

This is what she signed up for. She makes up imaginary profiles of people on the planets she got to, people who can live longer fuller lives with the stars in reach, one per day. One per day and she'll have loads of estimated impact left unused when she dies. Perfectly reasonable tradeoff and she can still read books.

Someone wants to interview her about Vulcan; they don't want to lose anything that anybody remembers; she gives the interview and then picks up some poetry.

Comments

[lintamande]

"...but they'd still be extremely powerful things, right?"

[subtly_artistic]

"Yeah. We should leave nymphs and anybody else they'd be likely to take notice of until we are also extremely powerful things, I guess."

[lintamande]

"At this rate I'm not sure that'll take very long. Even the gods can't invent spells, can they?"

[subtly_artistic]

"Spells do get invented, gods can invent them - they can't do science though."

[lintamande]

"I suppose perhaps we should be learning some combat spells, here."

[subtly_artistic]

"Yeah, maybe."

[lintamande]

"How many of the humans we pull through are going to be more powerful than us? At a guess?"

[subtly_artistic]

"Depends how we pick them. My parents aren't. Their friends... aren't, but might surpass us in some specialty, since we haven't been doing combat magic and I'm not a very offensively powerful subtle artist. A lot of people if we insist they leave their magic items behind won't be anything special but would have threatening magic items."

[lintamande]

"Speaking of magic items. I noticed you're back to your old boots. Did the ones that let you ice skate break in Materia?"

[subtly_artistic]

"...well, this is a new pair, but yeah, storebought, the ones I made broke."

[lintamande]

"I wanted to go ahead and make them for you again but I couldn't find a human-shoes shop here at first glance. I'm sure there is one, just a bit farther afield. Can I go ahead and give that a go?"

[subtly_artistic]

"That would be great. T'Mir would know where to look," Bella says. "Or she might just have a spare pair of shoes in, y'know, my exact size. She says she's clumsy compared to a Vulcan but not that bad for a human," she adds. "It might be an us thing."

[lintamande]

"Oooh. Are there - other things that might be 'you things'? Your names, parents' names, ambitions..."

[subtly_artistic]

"Eerily similar personalities down to how we format our thoughts when we're working on problems and the notetaking habit. She's basically me with different starting conditions, and not all that different, similar parents except her dad was a Vulcan and they're apparently kinda odd."

[lintamande]

"I am very intrigued by what will result from our interplanar scrying for Bellas."

[subtly_artistic]

"It'll be exciting! I like having her around, she's great."

[lintamande]

"She's picking up magic very fast, and we couldn't do anything this ambitious without someone with local knowledge of the world."

[subtly_artistic]

"I know, so convenient! And of course she is delighted to be learning magic and founding an Elendil instead of catching up on her reading in prison."

[lintamande]

"I wonder if a lot of the Bellas are in - hmm, constraining situations. Since it seems like otherwise one of them would have invented interplanar scrying and found you. Unless no two worlds have the same magic systems, and yours is the only one that permits this kind of thing?"

[subtly_artistic]

"What seems likely depends on how many of us there are, how lucky we got. But Materia type wizardry being the only or nearly only solution to interplanar travel is not a bad guess."

[lintamande]

"We certainly wouldn't have developed it. And then - boats and swords."

[subtly_artistic]

"Boats. Swords." She shakes her head.

[lintamande]

"He's a good kid. But I can see how if you'd been banished to the Outer Lands instead of to Materia, and he needed a boat to get there -"

[subtly_artistic]

"...mm."

[lintamande]

"I just want to make sure we avoid situations where he could make the sort of mistakes he's apparently prone to."