space oddity

[rockeye_stonetoe]

One day in fairyland, there is an immensely bright flash of light a about a mile above the ground. Something like a metal house is suddenly flying through as if it came through a portal, faster than all but the fastest fairies.

It's flying, not directly down, but still very much towards the ground. It does not take long for it to stop flying and start carving through earth and trees. Eventually it runs out of momentum near a certain lake. The thing seems to still be in one piece, which is rather miraculous considering the two miles of destroyed trees behind it.

After a few minutes, a mortal covered in unusually bulky clothes emerges from the thing. All that is visible is his face. He starts inspecting the outside of his space oddity.

Comments

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I quote, 'Don't tell anyone that.' And yes. I have some on me that he didn't think to make me throw away, even."

[imeanforever]

"All right. If you give me the food, and then tell me your name, we can both get out of here."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He gives her the food and waits.

[imeanforever]

"When I eat it, tell me I rescind all your orders - unless there's anything preventing you from doing that? And is there any part of your name that isn't part of what you gave Yellow, so you can tell me that part?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Nothing will stop me from doing that. I hate the other half of my name, but that's hardly relevant, is it?"

[imeanforever]

"I'm not going to call you it." She looks apprehensively at the food, hesitates, and then chokes it down.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I'm sorry, but I have to be sure. Tell me your name. Tell me if the food thing is true or a lie."

[imeanforever]

She flinches, a nasty whole-body convulsion that leaves her curled up in a ball. "Alisyrrabel," she stammers, "it's true, it's true, you didn't have to do that, why did you do that -"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I rescind all your orders. My last name is Streiss." He shakes his head. "I had to be sure. If you were running some kind of con and he hadn't told you my name yet for some reason. I'm sorry, but I had to be sure."

[imeanforever]

"You could have - you could have made me bite through my hand or something if you - you could have made me do something I could fix," she says, choking back tears. "Never give me an order - that I do not expressly request of my own uncommanded will, or that you do not sincerely without mental contortion believe to be in my best interest as you genuinely understand it. ...Except the reciprocal of this one if you so desire. I rescind Yellow's orders."

And she flings herself into her room and starts stuffing fruit from her fruit bowl into a bag.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He semi-shouts through the door, "Never give me an order that I do not expressly request of my own uncommanded will, or that you do not sincerely without mental contortion believe to be in my best interest as you genuinely understand it."

After a bit more hesitation,

"I understand that you are afraid I'll be vasallized again, and be ordered to tell someone else your name. But you could have actually bitten through your hand if you were sufficiently committed to the con. I've been burned by trust once, my first priority will always be myself."

"I have a month's food in my ship and powerful weapons to keep me safe, and intend to leave this hellish place as soon as possible, so hopefully it will be irrelevant. If you need a lift a few thousand miles in a random direction so you never see Yellow again, my ship can probably do that."

[imeanforever]

"...Can you take me in a nonrandom direction first?" Fruit in bag, fruit in bag.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"It can do nonrandom directions too, though it's not particularly subtle."

He pulls out some sort of device from one of his many pockets and consults it. "For your information Yellow is about four miles distant, that way (point), flying away from here."

[imeanforever]

"I need to go that way," she points in a different direction and then shoulders her bag, "and take a cutting of my tree, and after that almost anywhere else will do."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"How far do you need to go? My ship isn't as badly damaged as I implied to Yellow, but it is still damaged. It will take me a couple of hours to get it flying again. I can make it so he can't get close and his voice can't reach inside, at least. Do orders work through sign language?"

[imeanforever]

"If there's a sign language in common, probably. They work through writing if we see him writing it, too. It's less than a thousand miles, closer to five hundred, I haven't flown the straight shot but I can point out landmarks."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"It'll probably be faster if you help me restart the power core and engines on my ship instead of, er, flying there yourself. Can I tell you to do things without intending them to be enforceable orders? It would save some annoying verbal maneuvering."

[imeanforever]

"Yes. It only counts if you mean them, and you can't mean them at me right now."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I can still mean them if I sincerely believe it to be in your best interests, as my model of your interests interprets them. For example, if you were doing something that might cause my fusion core to explode and wipe out the next hundred miles of landscape along with you and me, I would order you to stop since I don't think you want to die. At any rate..."

He walks out of the house and back towards the ship, still at the end of a long trail of smashed trees.

[imeanforever]

"I can't die." She follows him. She looks back over her shoulder at the house. "How sure are you that you'll be able to keep him from giving orders though the ship?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I'm fairly sure he won't be able to reach us, but I can't be certain since magic is, in fact, a thing. I'll turn off all exterior sound pickups, change the damper harmonics to create white noise, lower the resolution on all the cameras until we can't see him writing anything unless he writes it with trees, in which case I'll have enough warning to blast whatever he's trying to write with phasers. I apparently can't shoot him, but I could light fires between him and us. Can he project his voice through walls? That would be a problem."

[imeanforever]

"His kind has no magic like that. And Yellow isn't a sorcerer."

Behind them, the house goes up in extremely energetic flames.

"I'm a sorcerer."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Heh, I was going to do that myself. Here, let me help."

His eyes look distant for a moment, and a beam of light and heat arcs from a tube on the side of the ship to the burning house. The burning house stops being a burning house and starts being burning wreckage flying in all directions.

"I'm a little concerned he could tell our names to all and sundry. I might be able to hold him down and force-feed him if I shut off the sound on my environment suit, but tricking him into eating something is probably out of the question, considering the no-longer-a-house."

[imeanforever]

"Feeding him won't help. It's why you had to feed me before giving me your name - food from a vassal doesn't work. Your mistrustful stunt didn't permanently wreck anything but if the rules that you didn't know were slightly different or you'd tried some other stunt you could have left us both trapped."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I stand by my mistrust, since one person already had me for a slave. See, this is why I try to stick to known places. Emphasis on try. Every once in a while I get dropped somewhere that tries to kill or enslave me. This place is the first one that's succeeded."

They're at the ship now. A big door opens to let them into a big room mostly full of tree trunks.