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]

"We are, in fact, over an ocean right now. Here, I'll show you how to access the external cameras..."

If she touches this panel over here and mentally asks it for vision, it will feel as though she has an extra pair of eyes looking out from the front of the ship. Clouds pass below them, beyond the clouds is a sea of very purple water.

"Let me know when you see a good place?"

[imeanforever]

"Any sufficiently sparsely populated land should do, but a forest would be most comfortable. I'll keep an eye out."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I'll go back to trying to sorcer, then."

The ocean will last for a while. Then desert, mountain, swamp, scrubland, cliffy hills, a tiny, sickly-looking forest squeezed between a series of lakes and another mountain, more desert, more scrubland...

The next day, Liam has gotten pretty good at making lights dance about, though they still tend to suddenly extinguish themselves when the ship flies through particularly unfriendly harmonics. He asks for more advanced sorcery exercises.

[imeanforever]

"Can you do two at once yet? Or a line instead of a mote of light?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I tried two at once. I got up to five, but couldn't keep them dancing around. They don't have to be points? Geometry could be interesting." And he goes back to playing with light.

After a while he experiments with fire, reasoning that it must be fairly easy since Promise lit up Yellow's house with a thought. He manages to light up a piece of wood after three hours' concentration.

And finally, below them is a decent-sized forest with a river running through it, not surrounded by any particularly harsh terrain features. Nick estimates they are more than 20000 miles from where they started. He sounds vaguely irritated about it.

[imeanforever]

"This will do," she says.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"And I figured out the jump constants to acceptable error yesterday. I can say goodbye to this slave-making non-planet. No offense to you, of course."

He drops her off. He flies a circuit and prints a detailed map of the surrounding few hundred miles. He offers to use his ship's mining laser to do some landscaping.

And he asks, "Are you probably going to still be here in a hundred years? I might try to come back and hopefully get de-aged at that time."

[imeanforever]

"Assuming nothing horrible happens and the place doesn't turn out to have unfriendly neighbors, yes, I could easily be here in a century. I would be much obliged if you'd forget my name before coming back."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Alas, I can't predict whether that will happen. Selective amnesia is not a thing humans can do. The best chance will be if I don't think about you at all. I'll give you a communicator. It'll be useless without another communicator to talk to, but if you do have to move please tell it to record a message and bury it somewhere out of the way. I'll be able to find it."

[imeanforever]

"I'll see what I can do."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Farewell." He hands her the communicator. He goes into the ship. The ship climbs high, high above the clouds. There is a flash of light, and that's all she hears of Liam for a long time.

[imeanforever]

Plenty of time to plant her tree and food plants and learn her surroundings and generally recover her equilibrium.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Some sixty years later, she hears rumors of a flying palace that appears and disappears in a brilliant flash of light, wandering around queenscontinent and blasting any fairies who don't leave when it tells them to. It sounds an awful lot like Liam's ship, if a bit bigger.

Five years after that, the flying palace approaches her forest. Does she still have that communicator? If she does, it beeps insistently.

[imeanforever]

She has it, although she doesn't usually carry it on her person. She fetches it out of the back of a closet.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Hello, Promise. It's Liam. It took almost a hundred trips to find you again, this place has really uncooperative geography. May I come down and visit? I want to test something."

[imeanforever]

"What do you want to test?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Sorcery is not the only kind of magic. Any more details would ruin the surprise - You'll have to see it to believe it."

[imeanforever]

"I'm... not sure I like the sound of this."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I promise you, if it works you will love the results. Order me not to lie if you like and I'll say it again."

[imeanforever]

"I'm not sure orders will work over these devices. Or sure that you know me well enough to guess what I'll like."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Fine, ruin the surprise, I'll just say it. I found magic that might be able to change your true name. I've already had my name changed. Now I want to see if you can give me any orders."

[imeanforever]

"The last time I was your vassal and you weren't mine you made me give you my name when I was trying to help us both escape Yellow."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"And if this magic worked, once again you're my vassal and I'm not yours, and yet I'm not giving you any orders right now. Not that I don't appreciate a healthy dose of caution and paranoia, but I'm offering to free you from old masters out of the kindness of my heart and not a hope to get de-aged, which I could just order you to do. If it worked."

[imeanforever]

"You probably don't know if orders work through these devices either." She doesn't mention the other risks associated with ordering her to de-age him. "But you can land. Don't crash into any plants I use."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

The ship doesn't land nearby - it's far too big to easily find a landing spot in a forest. Eventually it settles on metal legs, bridging over the middle of a river.

Liam gets out and starts walking to Promise's location.