22 Lage 4385: Not Just Letters to Boomsy

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

Dear Boomsy-woomsy:

Not that you're not dear and everything Boomers, but I have to stop thinking about this scroll as just letters to you. Because there's several others who might be reading and well I can pretend they're not there but that doesn't seem very friendly. Also "Here" made this scroll so that extra-dimensional monsters nonprimes could read it so "Here" must want them to read it and "Here" is a god. It wouldn't be right to try to thwart his wishes would it?

Or maybe I just don't want to admit that I screwed up the enchanting and wasted twelve weeks of my life making a dangerous artifact that I shouldn't be using at all.

Naaaaaw, I don't think that's it.

Anyway, hi to all my extra-dimensional peeps! It's very nice to meet you all.

I didn't get much done yesterday apart from writing what I'd done the day before yesterday and browsing through various parts of Sythyrs's life. Zie used to be young! Younger than me even! It's hard to believe. I didn't think Zi Ri came in "young" varieties. But I needed the time to do nothing in I think I've been so busy with enchanting and the job lately that it was nice not to have anyone expecting me to do anything.

But today I did want to find out what's up with the scroll so first thing this morning I went back to the enchanting lab at Vheshrame Academy to study it. All right not first-thing-first-thing, first thing I went to the river to catch a fish for breakfast because there's nothing better than fresh-from-the-river fish for breakfast. And I didn't get up until mid-morning because NO ENCHANTING TO DO YES! And no job to get to! I don't know why everyone worries so much about not having a job I think it's wonderful.

So it was almost noon when I got to New Sprowlween Hall. Which was as well since some of the students would be finished up with their day's work on enchanting by now so there'd be more room in the lab. There are actually three enchantment laboratories in New Sprowlween Hall; I went to the Laboratory of Various Visions because that's where I'd made the Scroll of Awesomenessity.

Assistant Professor of Enchantment Studies Gresh Resurget was there. He's a big ol' mastiff of a Cani who monitors the lab every third day. He scowled at me as I entered. "Delight-in-Fur, what are you doing here?"

"I'm Delight-in-Justice to-day, Proffy! And I'm here to work on my enchantment." I waved the spiky black bone scrollcase as illustration.

He scowled more. "No, you are not. You are finished with that enchantment. As of three days ago. I was here when you finished it up, and I've seldom been gladder to see a young enchanter complete a project."

"Awww, that's so sweet of you to say, Proffy." I beamed at him and twisted the black spiky bone scrollcase in my hands. The spikes are Illusidor, not real, so they don't hurt. Also so they look more like real Locador spikes. Which are lots harder to make than Illusidor ones.

"Only because it meant I'd seen the last of you! Now out!" He pointed to the door I'd just come through.

I gave him my best wide-eyed plaintive look. "But Professor Resgy, it's not working right. I just want to -- "

He stomped over to block my way. "No! Out!"

I squirmed past him " -- just an hour or two so I can see what -- "

"NO!" He grabbed the back of my tunic. "Twelve weeks, Miss Not-at-All-Delightful! Twelve weeks and one day! For a project you contended would be complete in just five! Need I remind you that you are not a student at Vheshrame Academy? That our facilities are not free to the public nor to whatever inept incompetent indigents seek to avail themselves of their use? Professor Halamoon gave you special permission to use this establishment to complete one, I repeat one enchantment. How you persuaded him to grant such a favor I do not know nor do I indeed wish to know but I do know that the term of that favor is expired. Your enchantment is complete! You are finished with the Laboratory of Various Visions and the laboratory is I assure you more than finished with you!" Resurget dragged me back to the door and pivoted me about to face it. "Now OUT!"

I looked over my shoulder. Three of the five students in the laboratory were staring at us and the other two were trying not to let his shouting break their concentration at a key point and ruin the week's work. I waved to Ferethlan and Naefar. "All right byeeee Resgy!"

I thought about sneaking in to one of the other labs in the building. Lots of the lab monitors don't know all the students and aren't going to bother you as long as you act like you belong. But Hal'd only'd given me access to the Laboratory of Various Visions and if they were going to be all fussy about "completing the enchantment" not extending to "making sure it works right" then ... there really wasn't a lot I could do about it. It wasn't like it was a formal agreement anyway. I could come back again the second day of next week when Hal would be there and see if he was feeling more generous than his assistant. I don't think Hal's mad at me for taking twelve weeks on the scroll. Everyone knows that sometimes the week's work doesn't pan out. Even Regsy knows that. I don't know what's got his fur all matted.

But that was seven days off and I wanted answers now so I figured I'd visit "Here" and Voidsy next.

Going to Temple

First I went back to the river in the hopes of catching sweet riverbeetles but fisherOrren had already staked all the good spots with beetletraps. So instead I bought two almost as big as my head from one of the fishers. I took them home and put them in the live tank while I wrote "Here" a thank-you note and wrapped his present. Because I was going to his temple which is sort of like his house and it's good manners to bring a present for the host. Also I owed him a thank-you for the Scroll of Awesomenity (I am going to be stuck with this name for my enchantment FOREVER at this rate).

There are whole books and academic treatises and probably courses at Vheshrame Academy on the right sort of gifts to get for gods. I can't help but feel that all of it is as approximately as useful as advice on what to get for other Primes. Sometimes you stumble on just the right gift and mostly you hope that it's the thought that counts. I'd already spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to give "Here". Mostly with gods you try to give them things which are valuable, rare, the result of specific effort on your own part -- a big bag of lozens will make the priests happy but as a god-gift it just does not have that personal touch -- and something the god happens to like. Like giving Flokin presents in the shape of a cat or torture-devices to Gnarn or rare medicinal ointments to Kvarse. I am not so good at valuable or rare, so I was only trying for personal and appropriate. I have a midnight jewel scorpion encased in a block of solid water (not ice, it's not cold, it's just solid). It's not really jeweled, it's just named that because its chitin is very very shiny. I put it in a little wooden box and then wrapped the box up in black paper and tied it with lots of black ribbons. Instead of bows, I cut the ends of the ribbons into spiky points.

I wrote a card to go with it:

Dear "Here":

I found this scorpion in the ruins of a Chromodon's zoo in the Verticals roll'gainst of Zevesty. It actually found us. It was one of a dozen that attacked us while we were there looking for the Carcanofex. They were very very very poisonous: the right claw (or maybe the left) makes you crazy itchy and the left (or maybe the right) makes you howl hideously and the stinger is deadly. We killed most of them by asphyxiation and I liked the way this one looked so I preserved it in solid water afterwards.

The Verticals near Zevesty are the farthest outwards I've ever been and travel makes me think of you so I wanted you to have this. Also because the scorpions are pretty and scary and terribly dangerous and that makes me think of you too.

Thank you for helping me sooooooo much with my latest enchantment project! I love it and it's doing WAY more than I expected it to which is weird and kinda scary but also amazing and I'm sure you have a good reason for it so yay! Thank you!

Lots of love,
Delight-in-Justice

Then I had to unwrap the present to put the card inside and wrap it again because you don't want to describe a gift before it's opened.

After that I boiled the riverbeetles 'til their spots turned and their shells fell off while I started hosh grain cakes baking. Then I fished out the beetlemeat to put on top of the hosh grain cakes and baked all of it a few more minutes until the beetlemeat fluffed up nicely. I topped them off with melted honey butter and packed them into a picnic basket and hurried off to the temple.

---

The temple to “Here” is on the Boulevard of Seven Plus Twelve like all the other temples. Except for some of the auxiliary temples to popular gods like Mircannis and Kvarse and Virid. Their main temples are on Seven Plus Twelve too but they have temples in other parts of Vheshrame as well. “Here” isn’t that popular and only has the one: the Temple of Reflections in the Void. A few times the temple has tried to have entrances installed in other parts of the city that would open onto Reflections in the Void but the Duke’s always turned them down because no one wants teleport gates that close together since they attract extra-dimensional monsters. Nasty evil extra-dimensional monsters, I mean. No offense to any extra-dimensional nonprimes reading.

Reflections in the Void is doing pretty well even though “Here” isn’t a very popular god because Locador is a very powerful and popular Noun. I mean “Here” is the god of space and when you think about it there’s space everywhere and Primes always want to have more space in the ways that are convenient for them like bigger houses or cupboards or yards so that you can’t see the neighbor’s unkempt house from yours. And less space in the ways that are inconvenient for them like long walks down the driveway because your property is so large or digging through the huge junk drawer that’s got tons of junk in it or traveling to visit friends in Daukhrame. “Here” is the only god that can give you more space where you want it and less space where you don’t want it at the same time. How awesome is that? Anyways Vheshrame has some well-established enchanters and mages (like Sythyrs and the Fiaunnrhels family) who appreciate “Here”’s work if not necessarily “Here” personally (godly?) so the temple gets a reasonable amount of income from consecrations and whatnot.

From the outside Reflections looks like a two-story building of lacquered black wood with tall pointy spires poking out at an angle from the roof and shiny oval mirrors instead of windows. Big twisty clawed black petals surround the building, like a Locador spell blossoming around it.

I haven’t seen all of the interior but the entranceway is a long narrow hallway, at least three or four times as long as the entire outside of the building. It’s lined with windows that look out into random places of the World Tree and other universes. Today the views I saw of the World Tree were: somewhere in the Verticals where Nrex were fighting conlee; the Underneath where a great blue-green monster with a thousand arms each ending in a three-pronged hook was pulling out upside-down purple and orange trees and tossing them into empty space below; a close-in view of Reluu and Mircannis hanging in the sky; the whole of the Tree as seen from tens of thousands of miles away. For other universes there were: a tiny universe made of liver where miserable nonprimes hunched beneath a dripping red sky; a cone-shaped valley with a silvery sky-sea from which a waterfall poured continuously down to the lake at the bottom of the valley; a giant glacier dripping water onto a world chained above an endless sea; a branch-sized Zi Ri bearing a whole civilization of nonprimes on zir wings; a city of glass and gold populated by monsters with centipedal bodies and a hundred burning hands. I don’t know if all the windows really look out at other parts of the tree and/or universes or if some of them are just Illusidor very cleverly disguised to look like Locador (Illusidor is good at disguising itself and I think that would be easier than making a window onto a place that’s thousands of miles away I don’t even know how you’d make a window on a place that’s thousands of miles away. When I asked Voidy he said "It is a mystery of the Deep God" and got mad at me for suggesting it might be Illusidor).

There were more windows that I either don't remember because they were boring or really unpleasant to look at so I didn't for very long and I don't want to remember them. (One showed these thick wet slimy green-brownish tentacles slapping against the window like they were trying to get through eep!) I was staring at the window of the branch-sized Zi Ri and trying to figure out what all was living on zir when a sepulchural voice asked, "Enjoying the view?"

Comments

[zeeth_kyrah]

I would actually enjoy watching out most of those windows, it sounds like.

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

I love looking through some of them too! A whooole bunch aren't so nice and some people find the whole thing disturbing but every time I visit I always find several that are just amazing and awe-inspiring.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Are you still an adventurer? I guess that explains how you were able to afford an enchantment project without being a student funded by the university or whatever.

Also... is it any harder for "Here" to read the card inside the wrapping than outside it?

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

Oh no I haven't been adventuring in months! I'm a fur-stylist now. I still have my membership in the Stylist Guild so I can find another job at that once I get around to it anyway. Which I guess I will. I am kind of sick of fur-styling but I don't know what else to do yet. I don't really want to go back to adventuring. It's not very reliable income and I'm not very good with lozens. I got the stufff you usually have to pay for on enchantments, like lab fees and consecrations and materials, mostly through favors Primes owed me.

... and I'm sure "Here" can read it inside the box. Yeah.

But he's a god so he knows what order to look at things in if he wants to be surprised. Right?

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Can you actually go through these windows? };)

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

Nooooo I don't think so? I'm sure I can't! They look like they're scrying spells, though. Portals would be much harder to do.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Can someone on the other side of these scrying spells look back at you? };)

That'd be one way to make friends from really far away!

And if they can't see your side, then well, it seems like they could be used to spy on people very easily. Which might be a bit worrisome for anyone with something to hide!

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

They could look back if they scried the Temple! They can't look through as part of the Temple's spell though.

It's not a very good way of spying on any given thing because the view through the windows is always shifting to somewhere else entirely.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

So, great place for someone who just likes being nosy. };)

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

That was an AWESOME entry! Wow, loved the descriptions!

Oh, ask them if they have any windows with pictures of cities with awe-inspiring views of very very large towers of metal and glass!

[delight-in.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I don't think I can really do the Temple of Reflections in the Void justice but it's one of my favorite places!

I'll ask Nighters about the glass-and-metal towers? The windows change alll the time so she'd know better than me. There was a gold and glass city but it didn't have any towers. Domes mostly.

[gavinfox.livejournal.com]

Great! Basically, you are looking for:
*A very large and spread out (by your standards) city
*With towers that hold many many people
*The towers seem to be made of glass and steel and concrete
*The towers are places where people are busy living, working, and playing
*The people generally don't seem to be especially miserable or terrified
*The people always seem to be focused on moving from here to there within the city
*There seems to be only one major species of bipedal, intelligent creatures making this their home

A note, a place like that might not actually be a city in the world I live in, but any place that looks like that will probably give you an idea of what is normal for city life in the world I live in. Also, as near as I can tell, this enchantment links to a few other nonprimes that are from a world that seems to be mine, or at least is recognizably similar to mine, and that description would apply to them too.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

didn't think Zi Ri came in "young" varieties.

We come in 'young and foolish' and 'old and foolish' varieties, or so it seems.