The Candy Man Can

[whatamithinking]

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

Comments

[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.

[endragoned]

But imagine the fun if she is.

[whatamithinking]

She couldn't have imagined him before she met him. Anything else as wonderful must almost certainly be nearly so unpredictable.

[endragoned]

He giggles quietly and gives her cozy wingsnugs, because she is endearing and delightful.

[whatamithinking]

Yaaay.

She begins plotting how to have hugs with two sets of wings involved. Just because it's not obvious doesn't mean it's not possible.

[endragoned]

What a delightful thing to plot!

He goes back to examining the slime. He hasn't quite figured out how its response to being attacked works.

[whatamithinking]

Okay, so wings fold like this, so if you put that there and that over there...

[not_only]

Meanwhile, Sivath has finished his architectural drawings.

This house is going to be... large.

It kind of has to be; even the eight floors of it that there are only have space for four dragon-sized rooms stacked in a column, each taking up two floors of space vertically. The four lowest floors are divided into nine huge squares, with the back middle column containing the dragon rooms, the central column an open atrium surrounded by stairways with balconies at every floor, and the front middle column similarly open; then on the next two floors, the whole front row and the back corner squares are omitted, and then the top two floors are just the atrium and another dragon room. There are glass walls aplenty, which (according to his careful marginal notes) can be vanished for convenience when people want to fly through them, or covered over completely for when people would rather not watch the flying eyeballs assault them all night. All the windows have the same covering option.

There is an enormous number of available bedrooms, each supplied with its own bathroom and at minimum a half-share in an adjacent sitting room, although plenty have sitting rooms of their very own. Every floor has a kitchen, a workshop, some storage space, and multiple public lounges. The whole thing is just shy of a hundred and fifty blocks across, which means the total floor space is in the vicinity of a hundred thousand square feet.

Sivath goes to show the completed plans to Emily.

[iamnotpolaris]

"...Wow."

[not_only]

"It might take me a few days to build it, especially if I have to get more granite and marble for the walls, but I can finish enough of it in a day for Edie's new friends to have somewhere to sleep."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I'll help build it, if you want. This is amazing."

[not_only]

"I'm glad you like it. Sure, you can help if you want."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I think this might be bigger than the school back home. I guess at this rate we can't be sure we won't meet enough new people to fill it up, huh?"

[not_only]

"Not unless some of the new people we meet are really large," says Sivath.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Well, we've already picked up one dragon..."

[not_only]

"True. So maybe we'll find more, and I'll have to build a bigger house." He contemplates the plans. "Or just enlarge this one."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Yeah. Shouldn't be too hard, Terraria being what it is."

[not_only]

Nod nod.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Terraria is really, really convenient when you're not trapped here."