Almost like flying

[what_greater_weapon]

Zinseyn sometimes wishes she could pass as Aluvai reliably, but then if she could pass Aluvai reliably, she would have some other problems besides just getting to the inside of the planet. Or, maybe, if she was too good at passing as Aluvai she'd be unable to get to the outside of the planet. Which would be just as annoying. Only being able to go to certain places because people will want to kill you is just annoying as a concept.

She does know how to play up her more Aluvai traits, though. This helps a bit. Usually she plays them down - long hair covering the hint of a point in her ears, the type of smile that doesn't show the hint of fang. Here, though, she'll play it up, though pulling her hair back in a ponytail's all she can do. It's not like she can drag out her Aluvai father and go, "No, wait, see, I am actually part Aluvai, just, the other part is Ceirene!" Not without causing some... problems.

She would like to avoid those problems. See; why she isn't taking the elevator. Awkward questions. Possible chance of rampant racism. And climbing is fun, and there's no place more interesting to climb than one of these chasms. There's no other place where she can get as close as one can get to flying without a pair of wings. If she were on an elevator, they would - make it professional, boring. She is not on an elevator. So when she climbs down far enough that she's stopped being insistently pulled downward and is instead weightless, she can just hang out here. And be weightless.

When she first did this, she was very careful to stay near the edges of the chasm. Very careful to not go careening off into the open air with no way to stop.

Well, she's now had more practice with this, and has learned that with careful application of rope and climbing materials and planning, and with a certain fearlessness towards scrapes and scratches, you can fly. Sort of. Kind of. Eh, it'll do until she figures out what she has to do to get a proper pair of wings and be able to fly anywhere. Better than nothing. And it's sort of like a reward, for a lot of hard work getting there.

So Zinseyn is enjoying herself a relaxing float before going into Aluvanna proper, carefully attached with multiple ropes to multiple places so she doesn't go floating off to someplace strange. The climb up is always the hardest part, and there is literally nowhere to go but up. Not being fully rested before it is a bad call. Besides, this is relaxing.

And then it stops being relaxing, when down suddenly reasserts itself so strongly that she thinks she must have fallen through a portal, because down does not hit you randomly like that. She opens her eyes to check her ropes, see what went wrong, and finds them all cut. She lands painlessly on soft grass before she can even think to scream. She stares at the blue sky above her, even though she left hers hours ago. Even though there's a lot of rock between her and it, now. Even though it is impossible.

She sits up. Must have found a secret portal to a Sphere, she thinks, brushing herself off. Strange that the ropes were broken, though, her mother's portal doesn't do that. Some aspect of the Sphere that's responsible...?

Standing, she looks around.

"Hello?" she calls.

Comments

[what_greater_weapon]

Okay. So she can get useful information out of him, it's just annoying and painful.

"How do I get silk. How do I get a chain. How do I get iron bars," she asks, in a monotone.

[pythbox]

"To make Silk at a Loom, use: 7 Cobweb. To make Chain at an Iron Anvil, use: 1 Iron Bar. To make Iron Bar at a Furnace, use: 3 Iron Ore."

The nonperson can do this all day, apparently.

[what_greater_weapon]

"How do I make a loom, how do I make a furnace, how do I make an iron anvil," sighs Zinseyn. "Where do I get iron ore."

Cobwebs seem straightforward. There's a bit of cave that she blocked off that had cobwebs in it, she can probably go grab those.

[pythbox]

"To make a Loom at a Sawmill, use: 12 Wood. To make a Furnace at a Workbench, use: 20 Stone. 4 Wood. 3 Torch. To make an Iron Anvil at a Workbench, use: 5 Iron Bar. You should do some mining to find metal ore. You can craft very useful things with it," the nonperson advises her helpfully.

[what_greater_weapon]

She pieces together the progression tree she needs to get all of those things. Furnace first, then anvil, then sawmill, then loom, then bed. And for a furnace she needs stone, and more torches. And for everything else she needs iron. Except the bed, which needs cobwebs. And no obvious way to find iron in particular besides a, 'go mine for it.' How nice.

This does not sound like a project she can finish in one day, but she'll certainly keep it in mind. In the meantime, it seems the not-person can answer direct questions.

"Where do I get food."

She saw a blueberry bush and rabbits, but blueberries and rabbits do not seem like they should be staples of her diet unless she has no other choice. Maybe the food that's made through the weird crafting system will be easier than the ordinary method.

[pythbox]

Pause.

"To make a Wood Fishing Pole at a Workbench, use: 8 Wood."

[what_greater_weapon]

...

Fish would make a pretty good staple of her diet.

"Thank you," she says, and off she goes to the workbench to make a fishing pole.

[pythbox]

"They say there is a person who will tell you how to survive in this land... oh wait. That's me," the nonperson says as she walks away.

[what_greater_weapon]

Zinseyn snorts, but doesn't challenge this assertion. She makes a fishing pole. She gathers up all of her relevant stuff and mentally goes over her to-do list.

Gather food, kill some more blobs for the flammable gel for a fire, get water, dig latrine, get stone and cobwebs and maybe explore more caves for the pots that contain rope and lesser healing potions (she figured out what the red vials were for upon picking them up and being told in her head) and probably other things.

Lots of stuff to do. Better get to it.

She kills several blobs and crafts torches to leave as breadcrumbs to herself, so she can easily find her way back home. If there's anything with a working mind here, she has yet to see it - she only feels a trace of nervousness at potentially leading something nastier than whatever banged at her door to her. Not enough to not, though, she really really needs a lot of brainspace to think, and getting lost and not being able to find her way to the Zincave sounds like a great way to get herself killed.

With her way to get back home handled, she goes wandering in a direction, killing all blobs she spots and leaving torches in her wake, looking for blueberries and bunnies and bodies of water. Which will she find first?

[pythbox]

Here is a blueberry bush, and there is a bunny next to it! The bunny has no fear of Zinseyn or anything else. It just hops along without a care in the world.

[what_greater_weapon]

Zinseyn picks the blueberries, and takes the opportunity to eye the bunny for the best available way to kill it. She is not practiced in butchering animals for meat, unfortunately, but she thinks she'll figure it out. Slice its throat, let it bleed out, then get to figuring out how to separate the delicious bunny parts from the undelicious bunny parts?

Right, okay. Plan in hand. Let's do this.

She walks up to the bunny, picks it up, carefully slices its throat.

[pythbox]

Both the delicious and the undelicious bunny parts are now all over Zinseyn.

Apparently exploding is just what bunnies do when they die in Terraria.

[what_greater_weapon]

What.

Zinseyn drops whatever remains of bunny she holds in her hands. She wipes a hand on her shirt, and then wipes her face mostly clean of blood. She - will go find a place that has water, now. She can try fishing, and she can be clean. Bunnies: not a good food source unless she's desperate, she thinks. Because of the exploding.

She turns on her heel to go find a body of water, leaving more torches in her wake. She will take out some of this aggression on the blobs in the area.

[pythbox]

The bunny gore fades with time; soon there is none of it left. Which might also bode ill for the bunnies' usefulness as a food source.

Look! A smallish pond!

[what_greater_weapon]

Yeah, bunnies as a food source: not viable.

She will instead attempt fishing in the smallish pond!

[pythbox]

Fishing yields... fish!

They're very Terraria fish.

[what_greater_weapon]

Of course they are. At least this makes them easy for storage.

She fishes herself up half a dozen and notes that she's started to get thirsty. Right then, her canteen is metal, she can boil water in it. She puts water into the canteen, and then - oh hey, she can make a campfire with Terraria crafting.

She does so, and places it.

[pythbox]

It is a cozy campfire! Rather exceptionally cozy, in fact. It radiates coziness.

Coziness as opposed to ordinary heat: if she pokes the flames with her finger, they feel pleasantly warm and no more.

[what_greater_weapon]

... Okay. Uh. That makes it a bit difficult to boil water, doesn't it. Nice as the coziness is.

She sits, and she peers at the fire. It - looks very convincingly fire-like. There's no obvious way to turn it into actual fire, though. It looks like it already is, just - it's not using up any fuel, and it doesn't act like actual fire.

This is frustrating. What is the purpose of having such a convenient fire if it doesn't do all of the things she needs fire to do? She's not even getting an option to cook her fish, this is obviously an available place to cook fish. She supposes she should have asked the guide before going fishing how she would cook the fish, but this is not ordinarily a problem. Fire should work. Ordinarily she could just put the fish on a stick and then cook it. This is a very simple set of steps. Why can't the crafting tools -

...

A new crafting option has appeared in her head.

Grilled Fish: 1 Wood, 1 Bass.

This crafting recipe was not there before. She attempts to craft the recipe.

[pythbox]

And behold: now she has Grilled Fish.

[what_greater_weapon]

Boiled water: you would fill a canteen with water, and put it over or near the fire until the water was hot enough to boil, you let it stay at boiling temperature for about a minute, and then you remove the canteen from the fire to let it cool.

A new crafting option has appeared in her head. Boiled Water (Canteen): 1 Filled Canteen, at a campfire.

Craft?

Her canteen disappears, and then it reappears. It now has an item tooltip that informs her it is Boiled Water (Canteen), and it can even become a much more convenient tiny size.

Okay. That actually makes sense. Sort of. It was kind of stupid, now that she thinks about it, to risk her canteen, but kind of too late now, isn't it.

She sips from her canteen, and grills the rest of her fish. Then she picks up her campfire, because even if it can't start forest fires it seems like a waste of resources to just leave it out in the middle of nowhere to cozy the trees. And then she goes off in search of caves for pots and cobwebs.

[pythbox]

There are plenty of caves around! They generally contain at least a few pots and maybe some cobwebs. The bigger ones have more.

[what_greater_weapon]

Well, she will break the pots and grab the cobwebs. Is there anything that looks like stone in these caves? She'll grab that, too.

[pythbox]

There is! And it turns out to indeed be stone! How convenient.

Periodically a blob hops by, but they don't seem inclined to be hostile.

[what_greater_weapon]

Since she is busy mining stone, the blobs may live. This time. This time.

Soon she has enough stone to make three furnaces (because she might for some reason require more stone for something) and definitely enough cobwebs to make silk should she fight her way up the progression tree for a bed. She decides that this is enough for now.

She returns to her underground base, notes where all of the sources of water in the nearby area are, and digs a latrine that is not near any of them. Only she can prevent all of the horrible diseases that occur when one shits where they drink. And then the latrine is dug and it's barely midday, and all of her immediately important chores are done. Except for the bed, which is going to be a bitch.

Well, let's attempt mining to see if she can somehow manage to find iron.

She digs herself another room in her base, puts a door between it and where her mines will be, and then starts digging herself a neat staircase into the earth. Yaaay. Exciting stuff. She will never run out of dirt, ever.