letter to cam #17

[thisvorlunatic]

You would not believe the month I've had.

I really did mean to get back to you within a few weeks of my last message, but circumstances intervened. On the other hand, it seems to have worked out all right this way, because there's an Ash and Stars tour coming up and I'm not dead yet. How would you like to attend a concert in addition to raiding the comm nets?

Comments

[pythbox]

The monument does not register an opinion about this answer.

Instead it starts teaching him things again.

For example:

There are six range levels in taieli. Everyone starts at the lowest level, and through practice and effort expands their range over time.

At all times, taieli depends on a well-enough-specified target: it's impossible to work magic on something you don't know is there, chancy to work magic on something whose relevant properties you don't correctly understand, and difficult to work magic on something you're vague about.

To begin with, an atailora can only modify or create things at strict touch range.

At the second level, one can modify or create things at approximately arm's length, the distance at which one could reach out and touch something without moving around much - a fuzzy estimate rather than a strict dependence: removing an atailora's limbs does not limit their range any.

At the third level, one can work at approximately a stone's throw, or the distance at which one could reliably hit something with a thrown object. Again, this does not strictly depend on one's throwing skills.

At the fourth level, one can work at approximately line of sight, or on the set of things one could see if one were looking at them. And again, atailoran with poor or no vision don't find their fourth-level range substantially different from those who can see clearly, although they might have more difficulty specifying targets.

At the fifth level, in addition to nearby objects as allowed by the previous four, one can work on any object or location with which one is substantially personally familiar, regardless of how far away it is.

And at the sixth level, the only restrictions remaining are the ones that always apply. Provided one has enough information about a place or thing to work magic there under any of the previous levels, one does not need to be anywhere near it or have ever heard of it before.

It's normal to begin to reach a new range level slowly at first, with difficulty, and only when working with the ainelin one is most skilled at using. But one's level is a single unified property, not divided up into nine separate lines of progress. Working with one's least practiced aineli is only ever one or two levels worse than working with one's best.

[from_scratch]

Interesting. Rather tidy. How unfortunate that "touch" means "with something that has nerves" and not "feel free to operate at any distance as long as you're willing to have desperately inconvenient fingernails". Still, he has some morphological freedom to use here.

[pythbox]

Since he is thinking along these lines, the monument offers him a brief overview of previous efforts to circumvent the progression by changing one's shape.

In general, extending one's physical reach past what would normally be one's second-level or third-level or fourth-level limit does not reliably facilitate working magic on distant objects even when one is directly touching them. However, some - not all - atailoran who modified themselves in such a way early on and kept the modifications for a long time eventually found that as they progressed to the second and third levels, their second- and third-level ranges were more proportional to the new body than the old. Collected case studies suggest that comfort and familiarity with the new body plan are positive contributing factors.

[from_scratch]

So no sudden emergency tentacles probably, but the wings and tail might help. They are comfortable and familiar!

[pythbox]

Once again the monument has no comment except to move on to the next lesson.

Another feature of taieli is one's Sense.

Every atailora has a single, unique sensory power. These Senses detect true things about the past or present state of the world. (Some rare Senses predict things about the future, but never at an effective range of more than a few seconds.) Some of them extend mundane senses in new ways; others manifest as a new sense entirely. Every Sense suits its owner in some way, but not always in an obvious one.

Although each one is unique, sometimes they have substantial overlap. The precise details of what is sensed and how the information is presented are always just a little different between otherwise similar Senses.

It is not possible to control what a new atailora's Sense is going to be, and there is no known way to predict it, either. One must wait and find out.

The Sense is not the only way to find things out with taieli. It's possible to build magical tools and measuring devices, and to directly use magic to investigate a thing without changing it; as well, the magic gives some feedback while in use about what its results are going to look like, although the specificity of this information varies widely with the complexity of the project and the particular ainelin being used. But a person's Sense is innate, natural, unique, impossible to remove, and often very, very hard to thwart: someone with one of their mundane senses extended might or might not be able to hear what is magically inaudible or see what is magically invisible, but someone with a Sense that detects nearby water cannot be fooled about the presence of nearby water except perhaps by applying unwise amounts of naharr, and sometimes even that doesn't work.

[from_scratch]

Neat. Maybe a little too much naharr in the Sense-granting mix, he'd like to at least get a range of options, but hey, free magic, he's not going to turn up his nose at a neat sensory upgrade.

[pythbox]

The next lesson is—

There is no next lesson.

There is a brief sensation of waitingness - rather like a loading screen, delivered in the conceptual monument-vision format without any visuals - and then the vision fades out and Cam is back where he started, in the middle of the enormous empty space.

With an extra sense.

He can now directly perceive the shape of the monument, and its location on a cold, dead, airless, heavily meteor-scarred planet, and the fact that there is absolutely nothing else around for quite a long way in any direction.

[from_scratch]

Cool. He's not sure what this would have been competing against if he'd gotten a shortlist to make a selection of his own, but this is cool.

There's nothing else around for a long way. This thing has range. Maybe not Hubble volume range, but a few astronomical units, it's hard to tell when there's only nothingness out beyond the planet but he can change focus for more detail for rather a while before he starts to shrink within the planet's own diameter on the far side, and he does assume the planet is planet sized. Come to think of it, he can tell - sort of - it's yea dense, and there is yea much total matter in it, and with a benchmark chunk of rock he could conjure up and a calculator he could work it out exactly. He doesn't have the formulae memorized and conjuring his computer to look things up and handle the math could be dangerously distracting, in case the monument will kick in with further show and tell. So he doesn't figure out how big the planet is right away, but he could.

At smaller ranges he has more fine sensitivity. It's only a little better than running his hand over things at distinguishing texture, and that only if he senses things a few meters distant - he is not a microscope - but it goes through stuff, he bets it won't care as much as his hand would if whatever he's investigating is hot or cold or electrically charged. He slides his new Sense all over the walls and the floor of the space; he spreads his wings and checks out the ceiling. It's not actually that materially interesting in here, but it's enough to give him an idea.

[pythbox]

The stone making up the monument is dense and solid. There are no seams or joins; it is all a single piece.

It is also extremely symmetrical. A little hard to catch - the surfaces are smooth enough that it doesn't show easily to the eye or hand - but the interior grain of the stone, if he stands in the center of the floor and inspects it, reads as though constructed in one of those drawing programs that mirrors every stroke in perfect radial symmetry. Nine ways, of course. Even there, it's seamless - no obvious lines where a single wedge of stone was copy-pasted nine times - but the repetition of details is perceptible.

The 'glass' of the windows in walls and ceiling is very, very close to the stone of the walls in composition, and texturally near-seamless where it meets them. Rather as though the monument was first constructed out of solid stone, and then the windows were turned transparent and smoothed out until no visible irregularities remained.

[from_scratch]

It's all very... aesthetic. Cam now has aesthetics about a sensory mode he has had for two minutes, good show. His aesthetics like this monument's layout but think it's a little plain. It's probably this smooth on purpose but would it really have killed them to decorate it a bit more?

He has a look at a window, visually, to compare against his new sense - he should think of something to name it. X-ray vision is too comic-booky, too visual, too directional, too - huh, he has range sufficient that he might be perceiving some things faster than the speed of light would bring information about them to his location, if it propagates through some mechanism unrelated thereto which happens to really book it over long distances.

[pythbox]

The windows, on close inspection, do have small imperfections at their very edges consistent with the textural information his Sense provides.

With no objects to inspect from astronomical distances, it's hard to tell whether or not his Sense has a lightspeed limitation.



An interdimensional portal opens up, at floor level near the center of the room.

[from_scratch]

Iiiis that his ride home? (Does his Sense work through it?)

[greatcomposure]

His Sense does work through it!

The space on the other side is smallish - smaller than the interior of the monument - and contains one human-shaped individual and not a whole lot else. Beyond the bounds of that space, error: nothing to perceive.

[from_scratch]

Cam pokes his head through. "Am I all done? That did not involve any boring wandering around in the monument at all between or after the slideshow."

[greatcomposure]

"Well, do you have taieli now? I'm told the Sense should be very noticeable."

[from_scratch]

"I do have a Sense. It is very cool."

[greatcomposure]

"Then you're all done. Come through to the demiplane and I'll gate you back to the house."

[from_scratch]

"Why do you have a demiplane? Why are we routing through it?" asks Cam, stepping through.

[greatcomposure]

"Think of it as an interdimensional airlock. In case something unexpectedly went wrong, or you happened to be playing with fireballs at the exact moment that I cast the gate, or I mistargeted and my gate landed outside the monument. Not very likely, but there exist places that are more hazardous to gate to than the taieli monument, and an extra gate spell from me isn't a huge investment of resources."

[from_scratch]

"Makes sense."

[greatcomposure]

She closes the gate to the taieli monument and opens another one to the living room of the lake house.

[from_scratch]

Through strolls Cam.

Hello, solar system.

[greatcomposure]

Barrayar is an inhabited planet orbiting an approximately Sol-like star, orbited in turn by satellites and spaceships and a not-very-impressive moon.

Cordelia steps through and closes the second gate.

"Congratulations on your successful expedition. Should I fetch Miles?"

[from_scratch]

"Sure."

Cam likes the way the star looksfeels in his new sense. He might name it "starsense".

[greatcomposure]

Off she goes.