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

[not_only]

"I don't think I need you to leave me alone," he says. "I guess mostly what I do is work on making things or designing houses. Um, would you like some armour like mine? Oh, I forgot to give you my extra tin bars—" he passes her a tiny brick of '85 Tin Bars'. "But if I remember right, I have everything to make a few more good sets of armour. If I'd known I was going to be meeting more people I would've brought my extra heart candies..."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Thanks. If I want to wear armor, I mold metal around my body. You probably don't have some of the metals I carry on me for that purpose--they're really good exotics only available in a few universes out of the ones I've visited so far."

[not_only]

"Terraria armour is different. It has weird magic. Mostly making it easier to kill monsters in this or that way, but still."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I don't usually need to kill monsters, but that's not never. Does the armor miniaturize like the tools and the bars?"

[not_only]

"Yes."

[iamnotpolaris]

"That would be lovely, then. Edie and I have some extradimensional storage space, but it's not unlimited."

[not_only]

"Okay."

He finds an unoccupied space near a window, de-miniaturizes a chair and desk and small table, and gets out some tiny metal bricks. Then he starts producing miniature suits of armour. One set is blue and one set is orange. And they have three helmets each, for some reason? Then he turns to the desk with the six helmets and - condenses them, into two crowns.

[iamnotpolaris]

"What are those made of?"

[not_only]

"Cobalt and palladium."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Previous things I have run into called palladium turned out to be long-term toxic. Should I be worried about that in this case?"

[not_only]

"I don't think so. Terraria things seem to sort pretty neatly into Helpful and Harmful, and armour is a Helpful kind of thing. And Terraria metals are weird. Like, gold makes a stronger armour than iron. I'm no smith, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong."

[iamnotpolaris]

"That is Definitely Wrong."

[not_only]

"So I don't think you have to worry about palladium armour being secretly poison."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Good. I expect I'll end up with that one--blue is pretty definitively Edie's color."

[not_only]

"Okay. Um, the colours can be changed but I left most of my dyes at home, so they can only be changed to black, white, or red."

[iamnotpolaris]

"You can dye metal?"

[not_only]

"You can with Terraria magic. If you would like part of your armour turned red, black, or white, I can demonstrate."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Red, please. Red is so much more my color than orange."

[not_only]

He gets out a tiny vial of red liquid - he really doesn't look like he has room to be carrying all this stuff, but then, Terraria things all seem to come in miniature - and holds it and picks up the tiny orange crown. Now it is a tiny red crown. And then he picks up the tiny orange top and bottom halves of the tiny orange suit of armour, and now they are also red. Then he puts the vial away.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Brilliant. Thank you so much!"

[not_only]

"You're welcome."

[iamnotpolaris]

"So what do they do, besides be armor?"

[not_only]

"I—hmm. Here."

He hands her the dyed palladium armour.

It describes its properties somewhat abstractly and wordlessly (perhaps this is why Sivath didn't think he could explain) but very comprehensibly. It increases her ability to harm monsters using certain kinds of weapons by this much, and her luck in scoring a particularly good hit on a monster by that much, and it protects her against injury by external sources to this degree, and if she wears the whole set, whenever she successfully harms a monster she will be magically healed by approximately this much over that length of time, and so on.

[iamnotpolaris]

Ooh.
Emily is very practiced in taking in nonverbal conceptual information; the fact that this doesn't have a mind behind it is synaesthetically weird but doesn't significantly impede comprehension.
She looks at it speculatively. "I wonder if I can mold this into a different shape."

[not_only]

"I have a feeling, just from vague Terraria experience, that you'd have better luck if you un-miniaturized them first."