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One moment Loki is trying to kill the snake-monster before it gets any closer to civilization, and then next -
She jabs at its face, but with momentum intended to meet resistance, and there is none. With momentum intended to compensate for a dodge on the part of the creature, but it surges forward. She's engulfed, and then there is no snake, and there is no ground, and she's falling.
She gasps. The air is clean; she doesn't need to heal poison out of herself with each breath. She sees - floating land, of sorts, there, some kind of oddly geology-themed ship maybe. She could, potentially, turn Lævateinn into something with enough surface area to steer herself onto it rather than fall farther and suffer worse from the fall, but she just recently perfected a new...
She's a bird, a swift, and she catches the wind, and her spear is a twig clutched in her feet, and she wings her way to the land.
Rockeye's first glowfic. Loki (a Bell) falls on Nick in Cloudbank.
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purposeful_glory
cloudwanderer
It will take the glassmaker a few rounds of prototypes to produce an acceptable lens. In the meantime, Baroness Hath's feast arrives. She is contacted by one of the guards and given an address and a time to arrive. The address contains a fancy manor. It's constructed largely of wood and glass, in contrast to the floatstone buildings everyone else uses. Nick is at the door at the appropriate time.
purposeful_glory
Loki is on time too. She has even bought a set of more local clothes so that she doesn't need to look so outlandish all the time.
cloudwanderer
They are shown in. The feast takes place in a large room walled almost entirely in warmly-colored decorative stained glass.
Baroness Hath stands up. The room slowly quiets, and then she announces them. "Let us welcome the brave hunters Loki and Nicholas, who brought us the meat of a great beast! With this feast, we will celebrate one hundred and eighty years since the founding of the fine town of Liam!"
More quietly, she tells them, "If you would like to tell the tale I'm sure we would all enjoy hearing it. But if you don't want to that is fine as well."
There is lots of meat, lots of alcohol, lots of everything. It's all fresh, and whoever cooked it is excellent.
Squid really is delicious, once you get used to the texture.
Baroness Hath stands up. The room slowly quiets, and then she announces them. "Let us welcome the brave hunters Loki and Nicholas, who brought us the meat of a great beast! With this feast, we will celebrate one hundred and eighty years since the founding of the fine town of Liam!"
More quietly, she tells them, "If you would like to tell the tale I'm sure we would all enjoy hearing it. But if you don't want to that is fine as well."
There is lots of meat, lots of alcohol, lots of everything. It's all fresh, and whoever cooked it is excellent.
Squid really is delicious, once you get used to the texture.
purposeful_glory
Loki likes feasts. She is gentle with the alcohol, enjoys the meat, and can live with the mouthfeel of her kill for a polite serving's worth. "It's not so much of a tale. We went up, a squid visited us, and then I stabbed it until it died, the ship somewhat the worse for wear."
cloudwanderer
"It's still more adventure than most people are comfortable with," Nick comments. "After all, one does not generally go up for the express purpose of being attacked by a squid."
"If you are so modest, then it is all the more credit to you." Baroness Hath raises one more toast to the squid-hunters, but it's pretty clear that this feast is not really about them.
A few people seem to have a little too much to drink, and are 'advised' by the green-uniformed and stone sober Security Councilmen to leave. The security council is clearly well-respected. These rich and powerful people obey their judgement without questioning, even when drunk.
Nick decides to leave after about an hour and a half. "As nice as this feast is," he tells Loki, "I can't help but thinking it would be twice as good with half the people. And that's a sign that I've had enough 'socializing' for one day."
"If you are so modest, then it is all the more credit to you." Baroness Hath raises one more toast to the squid-hunters, but it's pretty clear that this feast is not really about them.
A few people seem to have a little too much to drink, and are 'advised' by the green-uniformed and stone sober Security Councilmen to leave. The security council is clearly well-respected. These rich and powerful people obey their judgement without questioning, even when drunk.
Nick decides to leave after about an hour and a half. "As nice as this feast is," he tells Loki, "I can't help but thinking it would be twice as good with half the people. And that's a sign that I've had enough 'socializing' for one day."
purposeful_glory
"As you like. I think I'll stay a bit longer."
Loki herself will want a good long while alone in her apartment sketching out spell-parts after this, but she's endured longer feasts that were less informative.
Loki herself will want a good long while alone in her apartment sketching out spell-parts after this, but she's endured longer feasts that were less informative.
cloudwanderer
Baroness Hath spends much of the evening semi-drunkenly ranting about how this is the best-run and safest town within four hundred kilometers, she works hard to keep it that way so doesn't she deserve a night off and a nice delicacy once in a while? She also apparently heard that Loki likes books from somewhere. She presses several books about the town's history on Loki about halfway through this rant.
The feast could be considered over when more than a third of all persons still present are asleep/passed out drunk.
The feast could be considered over when more than a third of all persons still present are asleep/passed out drunk.
purposeful_glory
Then Loki will go home with her books and feel quite content with the results of the evening.
And she gets cracking on a transmutation spell.
This should actually not be that hard for anything chemically simple - pure elements. A full version that will interact with things like wood will certainly take a very, very long time, and this project uses almost nothing high-level she remembers from her previous spellwork, but turning any single-element into any other single-element, particularly if she preserves mass, might be doable in only ten to fifteen years. Of course, the most common elements here are gases that will yield very little mass - even the rock is probably admixed silica - but hydrogen is cheap and metal is expensive and both of these things are elements.
And she gets cracking on a transmutation spell.
This should actually not be that hard for anything chemically simple - pure elements. A full version that will interact with things like wood will certainly take a very, very long time, and this project uses almost nothing high-level she remembers from her previous spellwork, but turning any single-element into any other single-element, particularly if she preserves mass, might be doable in only ten to fifteen years. Of course, the most common elements here are gases that will yield very little mass - even the rock is probably admixed silica - but hydrogen is cheap and metal is expensive and both of these things are elements.
cloudwanderer
The glassmaker contacts her the next day and shows her an array of sixty or so attempts at the right shape for a mirror-telescope-lens. Some of them are close, but not quite good enough.
purposeful_glory
She identifies the ones that are closest and tells him what the matter is with those and sends him back for another try.
cloudwanderer
This time the result is nearly perfect. He has a little trouble making the glass completely smooth because he doesn't have any steel tools, but the current results should be good enough for a prototype. Can he have some silver with which to turn the two required lenses into mirrors?
purposeful_glory
Yes he can.
...Hmm, after she smooths out the small imperfections a little with an appropriately changed Lævateinn, he can have them back to do that with.
...Hmm, after she smooths out the small imperfections a little with an appropriately changed Lævateinn, he can have them back to do that with.
cloudwanderer
The result is hand-delivered to her door the next morning. Two curved mirrors packed in cloth padding, the exact shape and size needed for the telescope Loki has in mind. She has had plenty of time to secure the other materials she needs.
purposeful_glory
She thanks the glazier, collects everything else, experiments with various configurations until she finds the best one, and comes up with the prototype. She wraps the barrel of the telescope in soft material so that it can absorb slightly more knocking around than a precision instrument intended to be mounted on a stable surface. There are no really stable surfaces.
Then she goes looking for buyers, presuming that they'll probably be someone with a ship but not necessarily.
Then she goes looking for buyers, presuming that they'll probably be someone with a ship but not necessarily.
cloudwanderer
Nick would like to try out the telescope before making an offer on it.
purposeful_glory
He may do that! So may anyone else who'd like to. With the understanding that if they break it they owe her the cost of the commissioned lenses and the materials.
cloudwanderer
Nick is extremely impressed with the telescope. "As clever as Lost Technology" is the exact phrase he uses. He thinks it could use some more stabilization, but that's something he can do himself.
He gets into a small bidding war with another ship-owner and pays 140 grams of silver for it, a little over twice the cost of materials and netting Loki more profit than six months' wage as a crate-hauler.
He gets into a small bidding war with another ship-owner and pays 140 grams of silver for it, a little over twice the cost of materials and netting Loki more profit than six months' wage as a crate-hauler.
purposeful_glory
Lovely. She tells the other ship-owner that she can have another ready soon if he'd still like one.
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