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]

[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.]

[inourhead]

[How does it do that?]

[here_together]

[As in what's it like to use one or as in what are the mechanics?]

[inourhead]

[Um, both.]

[here_together]

{image of a microscope}[You look in the tube and you see a circular view of what's on the base. We don't really know how exactly it works besides having to do with glass and light.]

[inourhead]

[Huh. Looks very ruins-artifact-y.]

[here_together]

[...Ruins artifact?]

[inourhead]

[There's a lot of abandoned and destroyed towns closer to the sinkhole than anybody lives anymore and they have weird stuff in them. That's why we were on our hike, we wanted to go find stuff and bring it home.]

[here_together]

[The sinkhole? What's that?]

[inourhead]

[There was a really big earthquake and the ground opened up to the hellscape and that's when all the klaonso got out. And other demons, way more of them than earthquakes ever spat out before. And everybody had to run away from the sinkhole and figure out cohabiting real quick.]

[here_together]

[We're really not sure where to start with that.]

[inourhead]

[It was a long time ago. It's the biggest disaster ever to happen but it was really long ago, centuries and centuries.]

[here_together]

[Less that, and more--your world is really hazardous, and we feel like if we could just find the right investitures we could fix it, or at least some of it, but there's still so much we don't know. We had no idea that there's apparently a hellscape directly underneath your flat world or that earthquakes release them or--anything like that.]

[inourhead]

[Oh. Well, there's a hellscape directly under our flat world and earthquakes will spit out a handful of demons but the sinkhole spits out as many as feel like emerging, basically."

[here_together]

[Okay, first question: are there any demons that are people.]

[inourhead]

[No. I don't think so, anyway? There might be demons who were people that just happened to find eating souls the only motivating thing in the world.]

[here_together]

[Then is there any reason that you know of that a mage with sufficiently ridiculous firepower couldn't invade hell and make it cease to be a problem.]

[inourhead]

[...Hell's probably infinite too?]

[here_together]

[Well, even if clearing the whole thing out isn't doable, it might be possible to wipe out the ones close enough to the sinkhole to be an immediate problem and then repair the ground somehow.]