There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
I've been bad about keeping in touch with everyone, actually, Findekáno scolded me about it.
There are in fact entire planets that specialize in being nice vacation destinations as their principal industry.
Vacation planets have to be progressively-minded. People do not go there to be tutted at about their choice of vacation companions. I'm hoping magic songs work in my world, I'd make a mint, but they might not, the place is not habitually sung to.
Well, I'd hope, it'd sure be convenient, but my universe runs on... y'know, physics.
I'm pretty sure in my world that's not even a coherent concept, physics running on music. And there are a lot of civilizations and physics is pretty commonly studied.
Five hundred years as measured by Macalaurë's compositions. I don't want to see Findekáno again while I don't believe he's real, even though he wouldn't be able to tell. In five hundred years either this is real or the situation has changed enough there's no strategically interesting insight to get from me.
...one of my more 'desperate emergency' responses to finally getting out of this dimension to go on errands, if the shorter-term plans don't cut it, involves taking a risk which if I'm going to take it anyway I might as well just outright install free will on all the orcs and Elves there are. That wouldn't do it either?
The thing that gave me my sorcery alphabet's part of a set. All the individual things in the set are so stupidly powerful that mostly you can do any given medium-sized thing with whichever you have on hand. And handling them is a risky proposition anyway. It's dangerous to even keep two of them on the same planet for long periods of time, I think this is half of why Asgard has possession of one. But the Tesseract is 'space' and it has a sibling that does 'soul'.
Nah. I wind up feeling like I'd better heal myself when I'm really pouring ice. I could just not do that.
I also think I'd notice if I were able to subjectively act freely and my mind started behaving unusually in some way.