That wasn't supposed to happen

[whatamithinking]

The parameters are recalibrated, the dial is spun, and a new universe is selected.
It won't be home--they haven't collected anywhere near enough coordinate data to think they can find home yet--but it will be another step closer.
And who knows, it might be interesting.
Edie steps through the portal first.

Comments

[whatamithinking]

'Will that take a long time? I'm used to houses taking longer than 'until nightfall' to construct.
My sister was reiterating a comment she made to me earlier about how ridiculous this universe seems to be.
Query: Would it be alright if I downloaded your language? I can do that without touching anything else in your mind.'

[not_only]

...He blinks.

'That would make it a lot easier to talk to you...' Uncertainly, 'And it wouldn't... do anything to me?'

[whatamithinking]

'No, it's a purely sensory ability. It won't do anything to you at all.'

[not_only]

'Then - okay.'

He's clearly not completely comfortable with the idea, but seems to have decided to take her at her word anyway.

[whatamithinking]

After a moment, she says, "Alright, I'm done. Thank you," in his language.

[not_only]

"Your power is very strange. I've never heard of anything like it," he says. "But it seems useful. Do you want me to build you a house? It should only take a few minutes."

[whatamithinking]

"That would be lovely, thank you."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Edie's power isn't terribly common, but it's definitely a thing back home," Emily says. "...She gave me a copy of the language, that was a thing."

[not_only]

He smiles very slightly. "Useful," he repeats.

Then he gets a tiny axe out of a pouch - it's about two inches long - and it changes into a full-sized axe in his hand, and he starts chopping at one of the nearby trees. After a few swings of the axe, the entire tree collapses into tiny cubes of wood. He gathers them up - they whiffle together just like the gel-balls - and moves on to the next tree. Where the first tree stood, the grass is very short, but otherwise there is no sign of its presence - no stump, no roots.

[iamnotpolaris]

"I cannot believe this exists in real life," Emily mutters.

[not_only]

"It is very strange here," agrees the winged man with the axe. He clears the second tree, looks around to judge the available space, and goes to clear a third.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Your wings are very pretty, by the way."

[not_only]

...He blushes slightly.

"Oh—I—thank you. I'm not really—well, the wings are real, but I didn't get them the normal way. They're from this place."

[whatamithinking]

"You can get fully-functional wings here?"

[not_only]

"Yes! But they don't make you Unfading—oh, I guess you probably aren't Ceirene, are you. Do you have winged ones wherever you're from...?"

'Unfading' is a term from a foreign dialect of his language, attached to the nationality/ethnicity denoted by 'Ceirene'; 'winged ones' is the more familiar way to refer to the same thing.

[whatamithinking]

"I don't think we have Unfading in our universe. We have a few people with wings, but they were just born that way, they didn't get them as the result of any kind of achievement."

[not_only]

He scoops up the remains of the latest tree and spends a moment absorbing this information.

"So strange... well. If you want wings, gathering the materials is difficult and a little dangerous but it's nothing I can't handle."

Having cleared a space to his satisfaction, he puts away the axe and gets out another cube of wood. Then he starts building a house. Apparently, holding a wood cube confers on him the ability to place 2'x2'x2' cubes of wood in the world without much more fuss than just looking at the spot where he wants one. This makes the house-building process very fast.

[iamnotpolaris]

"We can help with gathering materials."

A quicksilver whip of some kind of metal lashes out from her sleeve, obliterates a slime, and retracts itself inside her clothing again.

"Can you do that thing with metal, because that sounds super useful."

[not_only]

He pauses for a moment when Emily manifests this unexpected ability, but then continues stacking blocks of wood to make walls.

"Can I do what with metal?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"The little cube thing! It seems useful to have a large amount of extremely portable metal. For me, anyway, I meant a general rather than a specific you."

[not_only]

"Oh. Yes, there's such a thing as... I think you'd probably want bars rather than ore blocks," he says, and steps away from the house-in-progress briefly to hand Emily a tiny brick of copper that proclaims itself to contain 99 Copper Bars.

It asserts that she can use it to place copper in the world, in a way that seems very similar to the stranger's house-building method. There is a limitation that she may only place Copper Bars on top of solid objects.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Look out world, here I come. Copper's not the most efficient metal, but. This is fantastic, thank you."

[not_only]

"You're welcome," he says, smiling shyly at her before he goes back to construction. There is now the shell of a single-storey multi-room building, with a wooden floor and furniture and lamps; he flies up to the top of the walls and lays out a roof, then comes back down, fills in a few more walls, and stops.

"Before I put the doors in - you haven't built anywhere for your weird person-things to live, have you? If you build a house for yourself and not them sometimes they decide they live in your bathroom and they stand there all night and it's very disturbing."

[whatamithinking]

"...No. No we have not. I would prefer to keep them far away from us, if possible." She shudders.

[not_only]

"Okay. Then I'll build them a house first so they don't bother you."

He flies away a shortish distance - within sight, but not within earshot - and builds a much simpler, taller house that seems to be a stack of nearly identical floors each consisting of four tiny and nearly identical rooms arranged around a central stairwell. It has no windows and is kind of depressing-looking. When he's done, he comes back and installs a door in the sisters' house, then opens the door and goes inside to add more doors between the rooms.