No One Here Would Understand As Well As Me

[here_together]

It's probably harder for most people to stay off the grid than you would think, but when you have unusual enough (and useful enough) talents, there's always someone willing to help you out, in exchange for something only you can give them. (Incentives. Supply and demand. The carrot is so much more useful than the stick--and so much less likely to get you hurt in return.) And their magic (it has to be their magic, even when they're a her instead of a they, otherwise the investiture would just fall apart) is uncommonly useful.

Right now they (definitely a they, right now) are kicking back and relaxing in a little no-tell motel. There's free wifi, at least, and the employee who discretely got them a room in exchange for clearing up a few issues also snuck them some decently filling snacks, so they're pretty much good to go until they decide to do something else. Or something interesting happens.

Comments

[here_together]

[I suppose we haven't been thinking through all the implications of your world's demon problem.]

[inourhead]

[The other kinds of demons all have physical bodies and can be kept out of towns most of the time. We were just on a dangerous wilderness hike for what in retrospect seem like kind of stupid reasons, having been eaten by a demon and all.]

[here_together]

[Do you know how the dreamwards work and why they're expensive?]

[inourhead]

[There's some rare expensive materials where if you put all their special properties in the same thing it can hedge klaonso out. And the properties break if you try to expand the materials the way you can most things.]

[here_together]

[Ah-ha. Do you know what the materials are? They might not be as rare and expensive here.]

[inourhead]

[Yeah actually, since I was gonna be a professional troporter -] And she lists a bunch of things that Emily and Edie have never heard of.

[here_together]

[Might be worth it to go to a geologist of some description with that list just in case but we don't recognize any of those things. Damn.]

[inourhead]

[Oh well.]

[here_together]

[We were hoping it was something like aluminum that used to be really rare and expensive and is now used to make disposable containers, among other highly affordable objects.]

[inourhead]

[I don't think I know what aluminum is.]

[here_together]

[It's a kind of metal that's really hard to refine unless you know how to do it right.]

[inourhead]

[Maybe we don't have it. Or we do but we don't know how to refine it, I guess.]

[here_together]

[Seems likely. Here, there was a slice of history where people had discovered it and could refine it but only with great difficulty before we figured out how to do it better, but it wasn't a huge slice.]

[inourhead]

[We wouldn't have that problem. If we had any of it we'd have as much as we wanted.]

[here_together]

[Unless it had weird dreamward properties, but that doesn't seem likely.]

[inourhead]

[Yeah. The dreamward things and living things are the only ones where there's much problem getting lots.]

[here_together]

[Do living things have inherent properties that make it difficult aside from souls in humans or are they just tricky because biology is complicated?]

[inourhead]

[You can only move properties to places that have somewhere to put them. You can't put aliveness in a rock or something, because rocks don't have a place to put it. You can't even bring an animal to life if you sacrifice another animal to get it because dying means losing the place to put your aliveness. So all alive things have to actually grow, we can't just get rocks and turn them into steak or whatever.]

[here_together]

[Well a steak doesn't really have aliveness--you said you could do food, right?]

[inourhead]

[...you can't just troport sizes for food. You have to troport all the properties of the food into a thing the right size, or there will only be as much... foodness... in the big food as there was in the small one. And nobody eats troported food if they can avoid it.]

[here_together]

[Fair enough. Emily is so curious how this all works on a chemical level but that's not something we can investigate at the moment.]

[inourhead]

[Well, I can port some stuff for you later if you want.]

[here_together]

[If we can find a microscope or something she might take you up on that.]

[inourhead]

[What's that?]

[here_together]

[A machine that lets you look at things too small for the eye to see.]