Outside Context Meteorological Conditions

[wind_on_my_face]

It is a well-known fact that flying into clouds can lead to loss of orientation.

It is a less well-known fact that flying into clouds may lead one somewhere else entirely.

In fact, only one person has learned this so far.

Comments

[pythbox]

The landscape passes below him: area of forest, area of desert, area of snow and ice, area of forest, area of jungle, area of desert, area of red, area of more desert...

Up ahead is the edge of this island, and past that a stretch of open water, and past that... a blurry horizon? As he approaches, it becomes clearer that there is in fact a blank grey wall of fog there, pefectly flat and vertical. (From farther away, it is hidden by the illusion of sky.)

[wind_on_my_face]

The landscape is only as what as most other things he's seen in the past minute.

Flying into cloud, though, is what got him in here in the first place.

He flies up to the wall, and transmits another emergency message just in case this spot is closer to the normal world, and turns back.

He circles, and makes a telescope, and looks around. Is there anything else to spot around here that could possibly help? (Are there any thermals?)

[pythbox]

No good thermals near the fog wall, that's for sure.

The landscape continues to conform to its regular grid. There are several floating islands in the sky, suspended atop extremely regular, grid-aligned, weirdly solid-looking clouds.

If he happens to look, the person with the canvas bag is still standing in the very middle of the island, holding out the canvas bag in his general direction.

[wind_on_my_face]

That person is a last resort.

He flies maybe halfway back and climbs to get a look at the tops of the floating islands.

(He's pretty what sure that this looking inside the box is not going to solve the what problem, but he hasn't thought of any other what ideas yet.)

[pythbox]

On top of the floating islands may be found extremely small forests containing shiny gold cabins.

Also to be found at floating island altitude: blue-haired women with wings instead of arms, appearing from whatever direction he happens not to be looking and firing sharp feather-shaped blue projectiles at him via an unclear mechanism that sure looks like they just spontaneously appear near the bird-women already headed toward him at arrow-like speeds.

[wind_on_my_face]

Well, he's got wings instead of arms at the moment, too.

He grabs some of the feathers in case they are at all informative about what. The rest plink off a shield. (Well, that purely symbolic attack is evidence for this being a thoroughly illegal game of some sort.)

He also gets to within hollering distance of one of the women (briefly) and asks if they would care to explain what the what.

[pythbox]

The women (there are two, to start with) do not speak at all.

The feathers vanish mysteriously a second or two after being grabbed.

Now there is a third woman.

[wind_on_my_face]

What.

The next feather, he encases in an inch of glass with the best reinforcement he can focus on at the moment.

[pythbox]

It vanishes mysteriously a second after he does that. One moment there is a sharp blue feather inside his reinforced glass; the next, air.

[wind_on_my_face]

There is slightly less what in the feather being replaced with air than it being replaced with vacuum.

He tries to claim the next one, as fast as he can.

[pythbox]

In a word, no. The blue feather is made of a completely unfamiliar material that is the same as all the other blue feathers but not the same as anything he has ever previously met; and then it is made of nothing, because there is air there instead.

[wind_on_my_face]

Well, that went nowhere in a completely what way.

There are other things to fail to understand. He lands on one of the floating islands.

[pythbox]

The cloud-like surface surrounding the dirt of the floating island is solid and can be walked upon.

The blue-haired winged women continue ineffectually bombarding him with sharp blue feathers. There are six of them now, all identical to one another.

The cabin has exactly one door, two grid-spaces wide and three grid-spaces high.

[wind_on_my_face]

What are the rules of this game?

He plays tennis with the next round of feathers.

[pythbox]

The feathers disappear when hit.

Now there are seven silent blue-haired women swooping at him to release volleys of mysteriously appearing blue feathers. All of them move in strangely identical patterns, with only tiny variations: swoop, release, turn back or fly past, face him again, swoop, release, repeat.

[wind_on_my_face]

One of the silent blue-hared women is now inside a comfortably sized glass globe in the middle of her (or is that its?) swoop.

[pythbox]

She crashes into the glass and attempts, unsuccessfully, to continue her flight pattern from inside the globe. Swoo—crash. Turn, orient on him, sw—crash. Turn again, orient on him, sw—crash. Impacts with the globe seem to disrupt her sufficiently that she never reaches the feather-firing stage of the swoop.

[wind_on_my_face]

Well, that's mildly disturbing. He'll take mildly disturbing over more what, though.

This globe gets staked down on the island. The other six can get the same confinement. And some smaller-than-feathers air holes for everyone.

He takes a look inside the cabin, which his wings will not let him fit into yet.

[pythbox]

Inside the gold-plated (or at least gold-ish-plated) cabin, there are gold-ish-plated walls and ceiling and floor, and there is a blue treasure chest with a gold-ish square-ish symbol on the front. That's it. Cabin, door, walls, chest.

[wind_on_my_face]

Hmm.

He touches the outside of the cabin and attempts to claim it and find out what's underneath the gold (gold? what?), preparatory to dismantling the whole thing. He doesn't feel like being inside somebody else's box.

[pythbox]

The gold is not gold. Underneath the not-gold is a solid extent of something else that isn't gold either. Unlike the blue feathers, it permits itself to be claimed, and is even reasonably straightforward.

(The blue-haired women in their glass globes continue to ineffectually swoop.)

[wind_on_my_face]

He plants anchors around the perimeter of the island for balance, then cracks the roof and the walls apart from each other and stacks them up on the nearest flat spot.

[pythbox]

Well.

He cracks the roof and the walls apart from each other—and as soon as he has moved any individual grid-aligned cube significantly out of alignment, it spontaneously turns into a much smaller cube with much weirder properties. The individual tiny cubes politely identify themselves as '1 Sunplate Block', and when two or more of them collide they merge into a single tiny cube claiming to consist of '2 Sunplate Blocks', '5 Sunplate Blocks'...

[wind_on_my_face]

He is completely out of whats.

If the universe is a CRPG, then the universe is a CRPG.

He moves the tiny cubes into a single stack out of the way and investigates the contents of the ex-cabin.

[pythbox]

The stack also helpfully informs him, via the same unobtrusive mental tooltip that told him its name, that he can use it to place Sunplate Blocks in the world.

Inside of the cabin there is, as mentioned, a treasure chest, and inside of the treasure chest there are several tiny objects, all more or less the same size as the Sunplate Block stack: a balloon, a book, a bottle, a bar, a bag.