stones and sticks

[sturdycoldsteel]

Sometimes she just has to get away from the city. Kell and Durant are very firmly on top, and don't much care who they squish anymore. All the little ways they change the city to benefit themselves grate on her nerves. And she knows her strengths lie in magic and engineering, not politics, so when she gets in this kind of mood the only thing for it is to leave for a while.

She's exploring the wilderness near the Western Peaks. Solid stone mountains, sheer cliffs, snow. Harsh but beautiful landscape. One day she wanders into a little valley nestled between two ridges. It would have been hard to find if she was actually looking for it. Near the center is an ancient stone circle of some kind. It reminds her of the bluestream-activating circles, but the pattern of stones is unfamiliar and the bluestream that used to lie there is of course long gone.

She rebalances her backpack (good exercise, lifting a pack without the stream) and starts investigating the stones and ground for writing or inscriptions. She steps into the circle to look on the other side of a stone-

Wait. What. WHERE AM I?

Comments

[pythbox]

She is standing on a flat expanse of dry cracked sandy earth.

To her left, the sun sits low on the horizon over a sea or lake whose shore is a mere few minutes' walk away down a gradual slope; to her right, the slope continues upward, getting steeper and steeper until it crests in a tall ridge. Here and there, the weathered stump of a dead tree juts from the dry ground.

There is a faint breeze coming off the water; it smells fresh.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She looks at the bluestream almost reflexively. When it seems nearly empty, no shaping and not even fog, she looks again, seeking any disturbances at all.

[pythbox]

Nothing, nothing, more nothing, whole lot of nothing...

There, just past the far end of the ridge: non-nothing. Whatever it is, the effect it produces moves in a slow regular pattern that fades out gradually until at a distance of about twenty feet it's impossible to differentiate from the surrounding nothingness.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Water could become a concern if she goes off exploring. Her canteens are mostly empty. She walks down to the water and investigates. Fresh or salty or toxic-smelling, she begins willing a purifying-column in the bluestream into existence. It'll take a fair while - nothingness is strangely even harder to work with than the fog she's familiar with.

How's the temperature? She'll probably need to take off her heavy winter coat and pants, at the very least.

[pythbox]

It is uncomfortably warm, particularly in her current outfit.

The water is fresh and smells pleasant.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She purifies the water anyway, no matter how fresh it smells.

She strips off most of her clothes before proceeding further, leaving only a light shirt and pants in addition to her backpack. These get folded up and stuffed into/tied on the already heavy pack.

Now it's time to look for the source of that disturbance in the empty stream. She walks toward it. She walks most of the way, but once near the ridge she spends the effort to make a small area flyable rather than try to climb it.

[pythbox]

Just past the other side of the ridge, there is a long box lying on the ground. The tattered remains of a few cloth straps suggest that it might once have been worn as a backpack by a tall, strong, or possibly just overambitious person. There are six latches along one long edge. The latches, hinges, and frame are made of metal; the sides seem to be leather stretched over the frame, but to end up as rigid as they are, there might be wood or more metal under the leather.

All the bluestream activity is coming from the box.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She can't open it with the bluestream, the messy waves it's giving off aren't the right kind. She'll risk her hands getting bitten by whatever this is, but she's ready to jump back smart quick if anything... Sudden, happens. She tries to undo the latches.

[pythbox]

The latches are stuck, and one of them is bent, but they give way to applied force. The lid lifts.

Inside the box:

Four large books of approximately similar dimensions are strapped to the lid, three titled in an unfamiliar language, one with no title but an abstract illustration on the cover.

The interior of the box is divided into thirds. One third contains a bunch of fist-sized glass spheres (or something resembling glass, anyway) strapped into place in individual leather holders, each sphere a different colour. The next third contains a cylindrical case made of something resembling wood or bamboo, secured to the side of the box, and a stack of round, perfectly flat metal plates secured against the back; the rest of that section is just empty space. The final third contains a burlap sack with an assortment of seeds spilling out of it.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She moves the sack of seeds right side up so it won't spill any further. She flips through the books, illustration-covered one first. She doesn't even try to read them, just trying to tell if they're textbooks or journals or fiction novels, and looking for more illustrations or possibly charts.

What part of the box is the bluestream disturbance originating from?

[pythbox]

The spheres in the first third are each emitting a unique, very subtle pattern, which all together combine into... most of the disturbance.

Moving the sack of seeds reveals a pair of heavy leather gloves wrapped around a small glass bottle. The pale blue liquid in the bottle generates a much stronger bluestream disturbance than the spheres.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Is the language in the books even slightly familiar? Do any of them contain pictures that seem to be referring to any of the stuff here?

[pythbox]

The three books with titles on their fronts are written in the style of technical manuals, with a lot of closely crowded text interspersed with occasional diagrams. The alphabet is totally unfamiliar and indecipherable, although if she worked at it she might be able to pick up on the number system.

The fourth book consists almost entirely of a series of entries in a standard format: an abstract circular diagram drawn in coloured inks, accompanied by a legend labelling each colour in the diagram, and followed by several paragraphs of text. Each entry has its own equally indecipherable title. At the back of the book, there is a lengthy chart with numbered entries corresponding to many of the labels from those legends.

The ink colours in the circular diagrams correspond closely to the colours of the glasslike spheres.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Recipes of some kind. Interesting. Maybe she can even grow food here- probably necessary for long-term survival. A suneater circle only helps so much.

She starts trying to figure out the number system, but then realizes it's actually quite close to sunset. Is there anything that might make good shelter around or is she sleeping in her tent?

[pythbox]

The shelter situation is unpromising. She could look along the ridge to see if there are any caves available, or she could look for a good place to pitch her tent.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Setting up her tent it is. She's never had much trouble sleeping in strange places. If it gets too cold she can always put some of her winter things back on.

After setting up the tent near that box of stuff she can use bluestream to make light and finish writing out this language's number system. Then she eats from her food supply and sleeps. Hopefully nothing attacks her in the night.

[pythbox]

Nothing attacks her in the night. Nothing so much as moves in the night. There doesn't appear to be a single living thing around at all.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Yeah, it's creepy. Anything alive would be very noticeable in all this nothing.

She wakes up at dawn. She almost wants to try one of those 'recipes' but with no idea what the result would be, the steps involved in 'cooking' or even how to get more ingredients, that would be reckless.

She makes a copy of the chart of kinds of colored glass magic things, ready to fill it in with her own language, and starts trying to piece together how this stuff might work from the charts and pictures in other three books.

[pythbox]

One of the books has a list of recipes in what looks like the second chapter. Each recipe is accompanied by one or more drawings of something that might be supposed to be the end result. It looks like a round metal plate, a pair of gloves, and a whole lot of paintbrushes and paint-related tools. The plate and gloves are similar to the ones in the box; if she checks, the cylindrical case is full of paintbrushes and paint scrapers and so forth, matching the ones in the images.

That book goes on to recommend particular brushes for drawing particular types of line in the recipe-diagrams, or at least that's what it looks like it's doing.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Magic via painting, how interesting. She takes notes on what she can glean from the books.

You know what, that bottle of something wrapped in gloves in a bag of seeds, it's probably the result of one of these recipes. Might it be a gardening tool? She carefully extracts a single drop (telekinetically) and plops it on an open spot of ground.

[pythbox]

It falls on the hard crust of dry sand and sits there, shimmering in the sunlight. Nothing very interesting happens, at least not overtly.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She adds water.

[pythbox]

Water and blue stuff react to form... more blue stuff, it looks like, or maybe just dilute blue stuff. The pale blue colour spreads without losing much of its initial potency.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She feels like touching it would be a Bad Idea. And she's glad she didn't do this too close to her gear. More water? If it doesn't do something interesting with more water, she'll go back to trying to figure out how to mess with those glass spheres.

[pythbox]

With more water, the blue stuff becomes noticeably dilute at last. It also begins soaking into the ground, and... multiplying? The patch of soaked sand is noticeably bigger than the amount of liquid she poured on it should account for. After a few seconds there is no liquid remaining on top of the ground, but an irregularly shaped patch of sand is dark and damp compared to its surroundings.

...Also the bluestream goes a little insane. The blue liquid just sitting in its bottle makes a constant pattern that fades at a distance; the blue liquid reacting with a small amount of water makes an amplified and distorted version of that same pattern; and the resulting liquid soaking into the sand makes a new, more chaotic pattern even more 'loudly' than the previous one.