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]

The garden is sprouting with outrageous speed.

The mountain is approximately as close (and approximately as small) as it looked. A fairly hefty chunk of it appears to have crumbled into the lake, but what's left is here to stay: lots of solid rock, comparatively little sand.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She makes a circuit around it looking for signs of inhabitance past or present, flying down to investigate it from the direction of the lake. And looks for more magic things in the bluestream.

[pythbox]

There's a big hole in the side of the mountain opposite the shore. It looks rather like someone decided they needed to get inside that mountain in a hurry, and carved/melted/blasted their way in without bothering about niceties like aesthetics. There's also about half a door left out of what must once have been an imposing-if-unattractive set of heavy wooden double doors over the entrance.

Inside the mountain, some distance underground, there is a bluestream pattern that looks a lot like the one from the box, except there's more of it.

[sturdycoldsteel]

More resources, probably. But in case there's something else down there, she makes enough lines of bluestream to fly out in a big hurry (and apply fire, if necessary) as she walks into the mountain.

[pythbox]

The hastily dug tunnel leads into the mountain and winds gradually downward in a couple of wide loops before opening out into a big room that seems to have been at least partly a natural cave before whoever built this place got to it.

Assorted debris is strewn around the floor - overturned and broken furniture; miscellaneous trash; some fragments that could be bits of old bone.

A tall rack along the wall to her left holds about a dozen box/backpacks similar to the one she found on the ridge, some with intact leather straps, others whose cloth straps have mostly disintegrated: another dozen or so are scattered across the floor by that wall, having fallen or been torn from their moorings. Two of the scattered ones have further been ripped open, their leather sides half-shredded, metal frames twisted and bent, wooden interior panels splintered. Those ones appear to be mostly empty, or to contain the shredded remains of a book or two. But according to the bluestream patterns, all the intact boxes are full of magic spheres.

There is also a rack on the opposite wall that looks like it might once have held much bigger spheres, head-sized rather than fist-sized. Those are long gone. A securely latched wooden chest, battered but intact, lies on its side by the foot of the empty rack: according to the bluestream there is magic inside, resembling the bottle of magic liquid more than the solid spheres.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She has a quick glance through a couple of the boxpacks - are any of the books new and different?

After that she tries to open the chest.

[pythbox]

It's possible she could find more books by looking through every single boxpack, but it doesn't look likely from the first few examples: they all have the same set of four books strapped to their lids. Every single boxpack contains a minimum of the basic sixteen spheres, a full set of painting tools, several round metal plates, and a pair of gloves; most have a sack of seeds in there too; some also have more tools in the brushes-and-plates section, like a small sharp knife made of bright blue metal, or a straight-sided stone bowl.

The chest is neatly packed full of little bottles of blue magic liquid, similar to the one from that boxpack. But the liquid inside these has a clearer, steadier bluestream pattern and a more vivid colour: bright azure, with a faint green iridescence.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Not being able to read the books is getting very old.

She collects an example of all the different tools, though, and a couple of the bottles from that chest. She has no clue at all what it might do, so she doesn't open them yet.

The boxes seem like they might belong to individuals. Are there any things that look like names? Do any of them contain a journal or something like that?

[pythbox]

The boxpacks don't seem to be labelled by name, but one of them does contain an extra book that looks plausibly journal-like. Or maybe it's somebody's book of extra recipes. They sure did write down a whole lot of recipes in it, in between all the incomprehensible text.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She puts the extra book and her samples of the new tools and those bottles in her backpack and heads back up to the surface. If she needs more magic spheres at some point, she knows where they are.

She carefully flings a single drop of the not-quite-fertile-soil-liquid onto the ground, and waters it if necessary.

[pythbox]

The not-quite-fertile-soil-liquid undergoes the same transformations as the fertile-soil-liquid, but faster, more vigorously, and with a wider spread at the end of it. Probably safe to conclude that it's a purer or more refined form of the same stuff.

[sturdycoldsteel]

So all these things are unused magical emergency supplies of some kind of dead civilization.

She wonders what killed it. The climate is certainly unfriendly enough, and this world's magic isn't quite as suited to compensating for climate as a well-organized shaper civil service.

She walks in the direction of the hills to see if they have any interesting or relevant features.

(Are any of the occasional bones she's been seeing in the dry cracked wasteland recognizably human?)

[pythbox]

Mostly the bones are fragmentary, hard to identify as recognizably anything.

Is that a skull over there, though? Why yes! Yes it is. A very plausibly human skull.

Sheltered among the hills is the ruin of a village. There's no magic there, and no intact buildings: most are just rubble, though the biggest one has two whole walls still standing and a fragment of roof at the corner. Among these ruins lie yet more bones, many of which are definitely human in origin.

[sturdycoldsteel]

In the center of that ruined village, she makes a small pile of rocks, heats them red-hot with bluestream (for lack of wood to build a proper fire), and says the Remembrance.

And puts a few drops of fertile-soil and a couple of seeds into the ground even though they'll probably die later, because the Remembrance is about new growth.

With a sigh, she marches back towards her tent and garden. Are the plants growing ludicrously fast enough to be fruiting yet or will she have to wait a while as farming usually goes?

[pythbox]

A few of them are fruiting already!

The first one she planted is producing soft fluffy balls of pinkish-white fiber that looks like it might make a good component for paper or cloth.

The rest are producing... an assortment of things. The most striking is definitely the young shrub whose branches strain under the weight of whole plucked chickens, although the chickens don't appear to be ripe yet - they're still small and half-formed. Apart from that, there are a whole bunch of unrecognizable flowers and fruits and berries, one perfectly ordinary apple tree that just happens to be growing impossibly fast, a bunch of plants that haven't gotten around to producing their particular products yet, and one tall plant that resembles a sunflower and has droplets of unrefined blue magic liquid collecting in its furled cuplike leaves.

[sturdycoldsteel]

.......She eats an apple.

A plant that grows meat, that's definitely a new one.

[pythbox]

The apple is unremarkably apple-like and pretty tasty.

The chicken bush continues to grow its unripe chickens.

[sturdycoldsteel]

...This stuff could be pretty great, back on Telra. If she can go back somehow.

She distracts herself from the existential dread foreveralone this line of thought brings up by trying a few more recipes, preferring low complexity and usage of the basic colors there were a lot of back in that cave. She keeps detailed notes on the results, of course.

[pythbox]

This simple recipe uses the brown magic-sphere-ink with the hints of green and grey, and it produces approximately a cubic meter of rich soil.

This simple recipe uses the teal magic-sphere-ink with the hints of blue and green, and it produces approximately a cubic meter of pure distilled water.

This simple recipe uses the bright shimmering yellow magic-sphere-ink and the bright shimmering red magic-sphere-ink, and it produces approximately a cubic meter of glowing yellow... rocks?... with lumpy irregular shapes, each individual lump being about the right size to hold comfortably in one hand. They are pretty bright, and they will not stop glowing.

This simple recipe uses the brown ink with hints of green and grey and the pale blue-grey ink with hints of white and blue, and it produces approximately a cubic meter of pumice, all in one lumpy irregular piece.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She spreads the soil around her garden. Farming ahoy! Water, light source, building material. All convenient things to be able to make more of suddenly.

Maybe she can start to translate the books. She knows the words "water" "soil" "light" "stone" are probably in those recipes' titles somewhere. That's not much of a starting point, unfortunately. Nevermind.

How much of the yellow and red inks did that use up? If she made piles of glowing rocks all day, would she run out closer to a dozen, or a hundred?

[pythbox]

The yellow and red spheres she currently has could probably make more than a hundred piles of glowing rocks; she'd be well over a thousand before the supplies in the mountain started running out too. Some of the more complicated recipes that use more ink at a time would run her supplies down faster.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Well, that's enough to budget for some more experimentation, even if she'd rather figure out how to make these at some point. She goes for recipes that are all or mostly colors she hasn't painted with yet this time, and is willing to step up the complexity now that she has the basic idea down.

[pythbox]

Some of the colours she's painted with are the commonest ones. There are pages and pages of recipes combining the brown-with-green-and-grey ink with various others; a complex one involving that, the bright shimmering green ink, and the dark purple ink yields what seems to be a cubic meter of raw black diamond.

(A cubic meter is the approximate yield of recipes drawn on the most common size of plate. There are smaller plates, which yield appropriately smaller amounts, and one size of bigger plate that yields more.)

If she tries more of those recipes involving the brown-with-green-and-grey ink, she'll find they all yield dirt or rock of some variety, soil or marble or gemstone or iron ore.

The bright orange ink with hints of red and yellow is rare, but there's one recipe with it and shimmering-green and brown-green-grey and a previously unused pale blue-white ink, which when drawn yields a pile of crystals that give off lots of heat and not much light. They won't melt sand or stone, but they're uncomfortable to touch and if she leaves one next to a plant the plant will suffer, though it won't catch fire outright unless she leaves the heat-crystal there for a long while.

[sturdycoldsteel]

The green one must be earth, or substance, or something along that line. And the red fire/energy. Does that make the pale blue one life? close enough guess.

She starts using the little plates, if there are brushes small enough. Trying it with the green-dust-recipe first to see if a straight one-to-one shrinking of the standard size does the trick.

...What happens if she deliberately screws up a recipe? The one to make water, for example. She misses a line on purpose, and uses the wrong size brush for a different line.

[pythbox]

The smaller brushes and the little plates combine in a straightforward unremarkable fashion. Now she only gets about half a cubic meter of stuff per recipe.

Screwing up the water recipe in that particular way causes the water to appear in an uneven arc all around her, instead of neatly in a single mass in front of her.