between then and know

[intricate_engineer]

It was a trap.
Glen should have seen it coming, but she'd thought the offer might be genuine. Wasn't the possibility of immortality worth the risk?
Well, not this time.
Her pendant, her way out, was broken.
She tried to use it anyway.

Comments

[intricate_engineer]

Maybe it's something more abstract like Progress or Joining?

Hmm, fire doesn't have it's own atoms, at least not in the normal sense. Air does but there is, in a way, Nothing joining them together.

Hmm, she tells the translator to try Motion, Force, Gravity, Unity, and Binding.

It will take a while to finish testing those. Until then, Glen is going to start reading the journal.
She might have more success once she understands more about how this society works and what its people value.

[pythbox]

The journal has a bunch of untranslated words too, but contains many decipherable tidbits that are useful or interesting.

For example, jotted notes on the theory of magic:

"[essence 1] and [essence 2] are opposites, but Nothing is sort of opposite [essence 1]..."

"Life and Air makes [essence 76], Life and Water makes [essence 82], Life and Earth makes [essence 88], Life and Fire makes [essence 94]? The first three make sense, but what's so fiery about [noun]s?..."

Recipes:

"[noun] [noun]: Life, [essence 88], [essence 94]. Much better than the book's." (A carefully drawn diagram follows, using the three indicated colours. Then there is a little cartoon of what might plausibly be a plant with rashers of bacon in place of flowers.)

Quite a long stretch of mostly-untranslated personal notes in the vein of "I [acted on] the [noun] today but I don't know if it'll stay [adjective]", and many others even less comprehensible at the current translation level.

And then:

"[Profane exclamation]! I'm a [profane adjective] [noun]! I almost [acted on] my essence spheres on the [noun]! [Proper noun] would've [acted on] me!"

[intricate_engineer]

Essence spheres?
How is this magic used?
The paintbrushes indicate drawings.
The power has to come form somewhere. Is it imbued in the paint or the ink? Drawn from the caster? Drawn from the earth? Incorporeal and existing in this entire dimension?

She flips to the beginning of what seems to be a textbook, and then checks to see if the translator is done.

[pythbox]

Motion, Force, Gravity, Unity, and Binding: no, no, no, no, and no.

Well, some of them are slightly better than completely wrong on some of the essences - Unity and Binding are wrong-but-not-that-wrong for [essence 2], and Motion and Force are wrong-but-not-that-wrong for [essence 1].

[intricate_engineer]

She isn't getting this.
She doesn't have the context or she's coming at it from the wrong direction or she's missed something important.
Whatever the reason, she isn't making progress and she doesn't have any time she can afford to waste.

She heads back inside the hill.
She's starving. It isn't making it hard to think, not yet, and she won't be in any danger until her food pills run out. Still...
What are the chances of someone rescuing her?
Alex would try, but he doesn't have the necessary skills to find her.
He might not even realize she's gone.
Some of her peers may be able to help, but they won't have all the necessary info and they might not be motivated enough to find her without it.

There's no food in the ocean. If there's no food in the ocean, there might not be food anywhere.
She doesn't know. She hasn't seen the entire planet. Maybe this is just one lifeless patch.
But if it is, she has no idea which direction to go in. She could easily end up heading deeper into the desert.

She sits down on the floor, staring at the broken chest and the strange tools.
"Who were you? Where did you go?" Glen whispers, picking up one of the objects she doesn't recognize.