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

[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.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Luckily there wasn't any bluestream-structures nearby to be destroyed. But this does seem to lend credence to her 'garden tool' theory. Hopefully some of those seeds will make edible things.

She plants the healthiest-looking seed from that sack there, guessing at the correct depth based on its size and the fact that it looks like a dicot. Sand, even magic-thing-affected-sand, isn't usually the best place for a plant but if it germinates at all that will tell her something.

She extracts some stone from the ridge and spends a while making a big stone water tank. This will save her a bunch of trips to the lake if she's going to be here for a while, and working with stone is reassuringly familiar. She starts working on the most primitive kind of 'road' leading from her tent down to the water, but it won't be ready for a while.

While resting from working on the bluestream, she tries to figure out where the different materials all these recipes seem to use come from.

[pythbox]

Well, the colours in the diagrams correspond with the colours of those glass spheres, and one of the spheres seems to have a colour that's very close to the colour of the blue liquid in the bottle.

If she looks through the books for recipes involving only that colour, she'll find a section in that one book with all the paintbrush recommendations that seems to be discussing recommended stroke order for drawing magic diagrams. There's no clear indication of the intended result, but it goes step by step through a pleasingly symmetric diagram drawn with a single brush type in pale blue. If it's meant for students to practice on, it probably won't do anything too horrible.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Well she is a student of this, and does need practice.

She gets one of the metal plates and gloves and the correct paintbrush. Now how does she get the blue stuff out of its glass sphere? Just touch the brush to it?

[pythbox]

Touching the brush to it works very well! The pointed sponge at the end of the brush absorbs the blue liquid and now she has a brush with blue liquid in it, ready to paint.

If she follows the instructions precisely: the curves and lines painted on the plate glow blue for a few seconds, the bluestream undergoes some truly fascinating convolutions originating from the lines during those few seconds, and approximately one cubic meter of green dust appears out of thin air in front of her. It falls a short distance until it impacts the ground with a loud whumpf. Now she has a huge pile of green dust.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Horray, green dust. She investigates it for a little while, pours a little water on some and peers at it in the bluestream.

It's going to be very annoying if she has to figure out every recipe's result by actually trying it. But she's not a linguist, so there's no helping it.

She should probably take an inventory of the various glass spheres available, matching them to the colors-chart from that recipe book. So she does that. It's getting towards noon by the time she's done, so she takes a break and has some water and a snack.

Then she looks over the recipes again. Do any of them list more magic-glass-spheres as results? Is there any inspiration she can extract from the books about how the magic-glass-spheres are made, what they are, and maybe how this kind of magic could lead to a lifeless wasteland?