two kinds of mysterious floating rock

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Nick is minding his own business, collecting floatgrass and onions from a random island a fair bit south of the equator and wondering when it'll rain again, when someone rather rudely appears directly above him.

Comments

[greatestgift]

"I can try to get it all written down in a mostly organized way. There aren't really any other people in Terraria, so I haven't had to explain it to anyone before."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"No people there? At all? Not just - living space is sparse and far away and it's hard to go from place to place so you don't see your friends very often, but no people at all?"

[greatestgift]

"No people there at all. Well. Some people have been there, I think. But that part is creepy and hard to explain. Would you like the creepy difficult explanation?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I am in favor of explanations in full generality. If you don't mind. If it's too creepy and strange and difficult we can stop halfway through."

[greatestgift]

"Well, okay," she says. "So the first thing is that in Terraria there are these... creepy mindless person-things. They look like people, but they don't eat or drink, and they can only say an exact set of sentences - like 'Welcome to Terraria' or 'My name is Dylan' or 'Greetings, Sable. Is there something I can help you with?', and they don't pick which sentences to say very sensibly, as far as I can tell they just don't have minds. If they die a new one shows up looking just like them and saying all the same things but introducing itself by a different name. And Terraria is divided up into a lot of square areas all the same size each with an island in the middle, and the creepy mindless person-things on my island call me Sable, but some of the other islands have their own sets of creepy mindless person-things that call me Miguel or Florence or Wei or Priya, and as far as I can tell what happened is somebody came to that island and then died there and now the creepy mindless person-things are stuck using their name for everybody."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Well, they certainly sound creepy and mindless. I object to calling them person-things unless they've displayed any particularly personish characteristics. Do they tell stories, have preferences, do they get magic? And how is the place divided up, exactly? The islands would try to drift into other squares eventually, right?"

[greatestgift]

"The islands stay put, even the floating ones. The main island in every square is on land, surrounded by water."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"So solid ground in Terraria is actually habitable. Good to know."

[greatestgift]

"It isn't here?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"...No, it is not. You may have noticed that what we are currently standing on is, basically, a floating rock. Here, people have to live on floating rocks because if you go too far down the air fills with toxic sulfur and gets really really hot. If you go too far up there's no oxygen, which is the part of air we need to survive. So go down and you burn, go up and you suffocate. Not pleasant either way."

[greatestgift]

"Well then."

She looks contemplatively at the floating rock on which they stand.

"I wonder if imported Terrarian landscape would help you out any..."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"That depends on how you plan to import landscape. A - stone tower or something stretching all the way from the ground to the habitable band would be a nice place to build a real city. It'd probably be windy, though."

[greatestgift]

"Well, like I said, Terrarian floating islands stay still. Would a floating island that stayed still be useful, if I could build one?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"They stay still? Relative to the ground, without actually being attached? It'd be dangerous. Everything moves around up here, something would crash into it eventually."

[greatestgift]

"But something attached to the ground wouldn't be dangerous that way...? Why not?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"It would be harder to see from a distance if it's only a little island... But it would be dangerous, you're right, I didn't think about it properly. I have a lot of ideas and I talk about them without really thinking about it, but that's usually fine as long as I don't implement them without taking a good long look at potential problems first. Talk is cheap."

[greatestgift]

"I'm not sure if I could build an island that moved, but it might be possible. There isn't a - grid here, anyway. In Terraria the whole landscape is made of cubes all exactly the same size. I don't know what would happen if I started putting down Terrarian landscape blocks on a moving object with no grid."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Could you... Pick them up again if something bad happens?"

[greatestgift]

"Yes. Well, unless the thing that happened was the island zooming away from them too fast for me to do anything about it, or something went wrong with the magic that does the picking-up."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"This sounds like something we shouldn't try any place where people live. Discretion and valor and all that. If we head south for a couple days in my ship, though, that would be a safe enough place to experiment. Almost nobody lives more than a couple hundred miles away from either side of the equator, since the storms get worse as you go."

"You said you could make more wings. They're probably faster than an airship. Do they get tired?"

[greatestgift]

"No. If I didn't have to be awake to use them, I could keep flying forever."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"How do the wings... Wing? Are they part of you, or more like my glider? If I had a pair and could take them on and off whenever I wanted they'd make my ship almost completely redundant."

[greatestgift]

"I can take them on and off," she says. "I usually don't, but I can. You can try a pair, if you want—" and she digs in her many-pocketed jacket and comes up with a handful of pairs of wings, each with a span of only a few inches. One is pale blue and translucent, with a filmy goldfish-tails sort of look; one is feathered, brown and blue; one seems mechanical in nature, with long silver-accented black vanes fixed to a black-accented silver armature. The silver colouring is probably some kind of paint, but it does seem plausibly made of metal.

"Most everything in Terraria can be miniaturized for storage."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Does shrinking things reduce its weight as well? That will have interesting navigational uses. Not that making land from little cubes and flying around with magic wings isn't interesting enough already."

He picks the mechanical ones. They remind him of his glider, which he already more or less trusts. He looks confusedly at them for a moment, shrugs his jacket, and sort of... Holds them in vaguely the right orientation near his back.

[greatestgift]

She puts the other wings away after she expands the mechanical ones for him.

When held in the appropriate orientation near his back, they tug themselves into place and then attach, perfectly comfortably. And now he has wings, as fully under his control as any other limb. Somehow the metal vanes can feel the air around them and transmit this sensation, and somehow the wings just know how to move, and communicate the knowledge to him through unobtrusive intuitive hints.

"Convenient, aren't they?"