shiny new world

[mrsparkle]

Sadde's running.

Not for any particular reason, just because it's faster. He's been meaning to go to one of the capitals for a bit and now, he supposes, is as good a time as any.

And eventually he's not running anymore, because he's close enough to civilisation that someone might spot him. Not that he wouldn't be able to notice them by scent before they saw him, but still. And as he makes his way to the Norway capital at this more leisurely pace, he notices the tiny, shiny key. He walks towards it and picks it up and immediately notices just how magic it is. He can tell by the way the key feels like things, and different things depending on where it is.

He verifies that what the key feels like is consistent in absolute location by waving it around a bit and seeing that the same place always feels the same. "Huh," he murmurs to himself.

He straightens up and thinks. The first obvious thing to try is seeing whether it opens any doors - a universal skeleton key sounds like the kind of thing a magical key could be - but the second obvious thing can be tested right there and then. He pushes the key into thin air with some purpose, as if he wanted to unlock an invisible door, and then turns it, et voilà, the faintest of door-shaped outlines appears before him.

He locks the door, and it disappears. Unlocks it again, and there it is. So he pulls it open and sees-

Comments

[from_scratch]

"Sure."

And Cam makes a cute li'l space probe and puts it on a nanotube and lobs it into space.

[peterxy]

There is a fuzzy area a bit less than one millimetre thick where the air becomes increasingly rarefied until it's completely absent, so no strange discontinuous effects happen, just the equivalent of leaving 1 atm into no vacuum really quickly.

The space probe will see: space. Nothing particularly interesting about it, other than it being space - no nearby planets or stars or even debris.

[from_scratch]

"This looks like incredibly boring space! So the bias may be, say, planet-biased but only statistically, as opposed to strongly filtering for there being stuff. If it were about matter we'd be seeing more stars and gas giants..."

[mrsparkle]

"Yeah. I also didn't find any other places with people, and there are enough different places in a single room where I could fit the key that even with superspeed I would probably take weeks or months to try them all."

[from_scratch]

"Huh, you landed right among people when you came to Hell..."

[mrsparkle]

"Yeah, it made me wonder if the universe of origin, or the place in the universe of origin, could have something to do with it. I wasn't exactly in a public place back in my world, I was in fact in the middle of some woods, but I was closer to, uh, civilisation, so to speak, than we currently are."

[from_scratch]

"It's not a bad commute to the plane of gold, but we could go try this in a city if I could think of a suitably private place in a city."

[mrsparkle]

"Yeah! But we should probably get other tests that don't need that out of the way, first."

[from_scratch]

"Yeah."

[mrsparkle]

"Let's see, what other tests are there. Trying to summon you from another universe but we should wait until we're sure you're not receiving any other summons while technically-summoned, there's still in theory a chance these portals close themselves after a while but we have no reason to believe that anymore... Is there a good reason for me to try summoning fairies and angels here?"

[from_scratch]

"It would be interesting. But I'd want to do it someplace without a view and not let them out of the circle to avoid premature publicization that this isn't just a house on Earth somewhere where they were summoned."

[mrsparkle]

"Any other obvious tests?"

[from_scratch]

"As long as we're trying wacky things could look into summoning Limboites, probably won't work but if it did it'd be amazing."

[mrsparkle]

"Right, I was thinking about that but haven't really come up with anything plausible. I do wanna explore your circles a bit more, though, like that 'used up' part, and see if I can't find any principle we'd be able to generalise to summon Limboites that no one did for daeva..."

[from_scratch]

"...I'd like to verify that time passes at the same rate even when there are no portals. Put a clock through, close and lock portal, re-open."

[mrsparkle]

"We could try that, do you expect it not to?"

[from_scratch]

"Not especially, but if it doesn't I definitely want to know."

[mrsparkle]

"Well that one's easy to test right away." He opens a door, a few metres above a cold desolation.

[from_scratch]

...Cam attempts to make the clock in the desolation without passing it through.

[peterxy]

There it is.

[from_scratch]

"And I can make things through portals, that's good."

[mrsparkle]

"Yup." He closes the door and locks it, waits five seconds, then unlocks it again.

[from_scratch]

"Looks synced. Can't necessarily count on it, but at least it's not habitually at some ridiculous multiplier."

[mrsparkle]

"It just occurred to me that we don't actually really need to wait until your being-summoned test is done, I could go to another universe and try to summon a different daeva from there."

[from_scratch]

"You could, but that can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing and I can't think of anybody I expect on a personal level to be uncurious and without any interest in messing with you."