The Candy Man Can

[whatamithinking]

'Hey, Emily, it's safe to take your imaginary fingers out of your mental ears.'

Comments

[iamnotpolaris]

Emily is not actually interested enough in architecture to watch over his shoulder. She will reapply herself to the task of trying to make jewelry out of the pretty ice balls. When they inevitably prove themselves to be pretty comprehensively resistant to puncturing she will likely give up and embed them in something and/or wrap them in wire.

[endragoned]

The demon is fascinated by the local trees. And when he notices a slime hopping by, he's even more fascinated by that. Such bizarre creatures! He loves it.

[whatamithinking]

"They're not real animals. They don't have minds at all and they explode when they die. The explosion leaves behind stuff, the balls my sister's working with came from a frosted version of the slime thing."

[endragoned]

"They are... alive, in a manner of speaking," he says, watching a hopping blue slime. "But not in the way I'm familiar with. I can't tell much more about those without catching one - the trees, now, those I will enjoy investigating."

[whatamithinking]

"Huh. Bet it's not that hard to catch one." She's going to grab some spare fabric--a shirt or something--and try to grab one of the slimes without exploding it.

[endragoned]

The slime wiggles very aggressively and attempts to hop out of the shirt, but is unable to find an escape route.

The demon and dragon giggle at it.

[whatamithinking]

She grins and proffers the demon the makeshift slime-bag.

[endragoned]

Scoop. Gosh that's wiggly.

"Fascinating..." he says, examining the slime with his magic.

[whatamithinking]

'Ooh? Like how?'

[endragoned]

He shows her:

It's not alive the way a normal animal is alive. It has no need to eat or sleep or produced waste; it does not age or decay. But it has a kind of aliveness to it. It is possible to injure or kill it. The pattern of its movements is simpler by far than those of an animal or an insect or even most moving plants, but there is a pattern and the pattern is contained within the creature in an alive sort of way, though a very alien one. He wants to disentangle the strange logic of it and figure out how these things react to their environment.

[whatamithinking]

That is fascinating. And not something she would have noticed on her own, since whatever patterns it has don't register to her telepathy as a mind.

[endragoned]

This is fun! He thinks he will just sit right here on this bizarrely not-quite-alive grass and examine this bizarrely not-quite-alive animal in more detail.

[whatamithinking]

Edie will try to catch a Terraria bunny. Those may or may not be not-quite-alive in the same way.

[endragoned]

Terraria bunnies are comparatively easy to catch. They make no effort at all to flee her, although they do try to wander off aimlessly once in a while so she has to keep hold of them if she wants them to stay put.

Meanwhile the demon is puzzling happily over the movement patterns of slimes.

[whatamithinking]

Since he is absorbed with his slime, she won't interrupt him with the bunny just yet. Instead she will sit down beside him with the bunny in her lap and put her head on his shoulder.

The bunny isn't registering to her as a living thing, but it's still soft and fluffy enough to be fun to pet. She will also do that.

[endragoned]

It is so fluffy and soft!

He absent-mindedly tucks his wing around her when she sits next to him.

[whatamithinking]

Mm.

She can sit there quite happily petting fluffy bunny and listening in on fascinated slime examination pretty much indefinitely.

[endragoned]

Snuggles. Fascinated slime examination.

The way this thing works is amazingly odd. It has only one way to move, by hopping in a chosen direction, and there are a few simple ways for it to react to various sorts of obstacles, but absolutely no way for it to start hopping - it exists in a constant state of either hopping or attempting to hop. Nor does it have anything he can identify as a reproductive capacity; wherever these things come from, other slimes are not involved, and they must spring into existence mid-hop with a direction of travel already set, because if you got one to start out motionless it would just sit there completely inert forever.

[whatamithinking]

...Oh, hey, he has no idea about video games either.
This is what video games are like and these are the blatantly obvious similarities.

[endragoned]

...Well, that... explains a lot, doesn't it. Although there remains the question of why there is a world that is like this. Did someone build this place? The creation of universes is not his area of expertise.

[whatamithinking]

Who knows? This is what Milliways is like (Milliways is what started this whole thing in the first place)(why doesn't Emily get doors anymore)(she cannot even a little bit pretend she isn't glad they ended up doing all this worldhopping)(wordless affection) and Milliways seems pretty obviously artificial too (didn't someone say the backyard had been copied from Scotland?) so probably beings of unknown but impressive power who decline to make themselves otherwise obvious are running around making blatantly artificial universes.

[endragoned]

What a curious collection of places she has seen. He wonders what the next one will be like.

[whatamithinking]

Who knows? Twentieth-to-twenty-first century Earths are pretty common, compared to anything else, but they happen less than half the time.

[endragoned]

Well, it will be interesting to find out, then.

[whatamithinking]

Mhm.

Statistically speaking, it seems wildly improbable that she'll be as thrilled with it as she was with this last one, though.