remote station

[synchrosyntheses]

Teytis tel Jobont is not living up to her lantelis.

She had been en route to her usual position after a rest-and-resupply period. Instead of the expected uneventful trip, somehow she loses her anchors, falls through a bizarrely shaped storm, then finds herself impossibly over land instead of water and with her upper antennas chopped off like they were never there.

She was able to stabilize with only minor damage to the uninhabited land, but she cannot hear a single intelligible signal, and a hundred other things add up to this is no place anyone has ever seen before. Or rather, reported seeing before.

So here she sits in the sky, relaying nothing, thinking about everything.

Comments

[calescent]

"It's something you could do by accident?"

[synchrosyntheses]

“It would be hard to live a life without doing so, unless you carefully avoided being good at anything or ever reusing a tool.”

[calescent]

"...People here do not avoid those things."

[synchrosyntheses]

“That would seem to settle the question.”

[calescent]

"So this is something anyone from where you are from can do, but people here can't. And you can't do blessings. I think you got the good stuff."

[synchrosyntheses]

“Perhaps I could do some things for you.”

[calescent]

"Perhaps. Can you move the big thing even when you're here?"

[synchrosyntheses]

“I am there almost as much as I am here, though I imagine your mind-sense would likely disagree.”

[calescent]

"Probably. I couldn't read the little -" She gestures. "Thing that you had."

[synchrosyntheses]

“Anyway, I could move anywhere you want. I could also make you things that I don't see how you could make without any kored.” She looks around, perhaps at the construction of the house or the things in it. “Or possibly even teach some useful things that work without; I am a jobont and I have much information, though hardly what I would have brought if I had a choice.”

[calescent]

"What is a jobont?"

[synchrosyntheses]

“I —” Pause to sort through inadequate vocabulary. “I work with words, with knowledge. I keep it for a while and I pass it on. I take messages that come to me, not by speaking but by machines, and pass them on to those who should hear them.

“But for now, no one else has the machines, or knows that this is what I do.”

[calescent]

"That's an interesting sort of work."

[synchrosyntheses]

“Indeed, I found it to occupy myself completely. And I have nothing to do now, other than to learn about this world, and thus find every scrap of information I can about how I might eventually be able to get home. Er. Not that you haven't been welcoming.”

[calescent]

"I understand. Well, I have a lot of books. And I'd love to hear all about what you can teach us to make, or use your stuff to make for us."

[synchrosyntheses]

“If you would care to show me your library, then I could occupy myself for a while and you can get back to whatever you wanted to be doing before, I can only assume, alarmed people told you about the strange thing in your sky.”

[calescent]

"...It is pretty out of the way where it is, but might alarm fewer people if you put it on the ground, tucked between some hills. Library's this way." She leads the way.

[synchrosyntheses]

“I — all right, that is reasonable in the situation.” Teytis follows.

Teytis also (if anyone is looking) descends to the ground, reforming her outer ring until she's a mere strangely-made white and orange tower shorter than the nearby hills, and not apparently defying gravity at all.

[calescent]

People who are currently looking at the floating object are a little alarmed, but nobody comes to investigate right away.

Here is Kiri's library.

[synchrosyntheses]

Teytis looks at book spines. “Is there any particular book or section you would suggest I start with?”

[calescent]

"What are you interested in?"

[synchrosyntheses]

“Everything, eventually, but what comes to mind now: people I might meet; technology; topics something like ‘how people expect things to go’, perhaps history and etiquette and such; and more information on strange events, even the ones you’ve already told me about.”

[calescent]

"Hmm -" Kiri grabs her a book entitled A History of the Primacies. "Start on that, I'll get you some more." She sweeps off into the stacks.

[synchrosyntheses]

Teytis reads. This process appears to involve both her eyes and little floating black things looking at each page, and she rarely turns back to a previous page with her careful telekinetic page-turner appendages.

[calescent]

That is interesting, once Kiri comes back with more books: Developments in Trade and Manufacture volumes 1-4, Berringese Culture and Philosophy: A Comparison, The Monarchy of Welce, The Life of Ferv Satch, Seventeen Case Studies of Birth Blessings, The Etiquette Book, and Ances Lalindar's Journey to Malinqua.