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Cam is dipping a grilled cheese sandwich into a bowl of tomato soup when he feels the summons. He goes ahead and grabs it. Doesn't even drop the sandwich.
Cam and Sable in Terraria
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from_scratch
"No, not really. It's faster and more customizable if I just," gesture, "make the house. Unless there is some advantage to blocks besides floatability?"
greatestgift
"Guarantee that your house will not fall down unless someone goes at it with a pickaxe? And do you know that you can't make blocks? You can make them in tiny cube form, after all."
from_scratch
"Maybe I can make blocks, but like - I'm accustomed to houses with electrical systems and plumbing in the walls and glass in the windows and while there is some lovely ocean around here I bet it's full of monsters and I got used to having a swimming pool? I am also not so much here for the blocks aesthetic. Maybe there's nothing else for it for reasons of defensive architecture, but."
greatestgift
"Well, this house is not really built to show off the grace and style of block architecture," she says. "And there is such a thing as a glass block, it's possible to have glass windows in a block house, I just don't like being able to see things hitting them at night."
greatestgift
"I had higher crafting priorities, and then I got used to not having windows?"
from_scratch
"Oh, yeah, I'm not criticizing your interior decoration, here, but I'm a demon," he says, "and do not have to be particularly careful about priorities when I want material objects. Do glass blocks focus sunlight in a way that makes things warm? I could encase my entire house in glass for defense reasons. If you can make a glass door which also works in a defensively appropriate manner."
greatestgift
"Yeah, glass doors are possible. So's a lot of really improbable glass furniture, actually. What do you mean, do they focus sunlight?"
from_scratch
"I... do not know if I can show you, because unphysics. But normally if you've got a piece of glass and it's shaped right, you can concentrate lots of light into a very small space, and even start fires. Sociopathic small children burn ants in this way with magnifying glasses. Also, literal glass buildings have traditionally been used to make hot, sunny enclosures suitable for growing plants in the dead of winter if you're so inclined."
greatestgift
"Oh, that. I have no idea, I've never tried building a greenhouse in Terraria. Or out of it. I have lived a greenhouse-free life."
from_scratch
"Maybe I will experiment with architecture on an island you are not trying to inhabit rather than risk cluttering yours with the ruins of insufficiently defended or excessively glass-enclosed buildings."
from_scratch
"That's very nice of you. Although I also don't have to sleep if I drink enough coffee, so I could just sit on your roof reading and icing eyeballs all night."
from_scratch
"It's up to you, I just don't want you to think you have to house me. Besides, the eyeballs thumping on the walls all night sounds irritating."
from_scratch
"Eh, I'll go first. So there's five worlds that I knew about before I showed up here. There's the mortal world. Humans live there, mostly on a planet called Earth, but some of them live on Earth's moon, or on artificial habitats that float in space, or on another planet nearby called Mars. I will now conjure up visual aids -" Cam makes an instance of his computer and pulls up a picture of the Earth. "Earth looks like that. Moon looks like this, Mars looks like so. Humans look like you, more or less.
"In the early twenty-first century, counting from an event of religious significance for a sizable portion of the human population, summoning became known. Summoning is drawing on the floor in a certain way and getting a daeva. Daeva come in three kinds - demons, like me, and angels, and fairies. Customarily, all three look like humans with wings, but demons tend to this kind of wings, angels to bird wings, fairies to insect wings. Demons make, angels change, fairies move. All of these species have our own worlds. Demons in Hell, angels in Heaven, fairies in Fairyland. Hell, all by itself, is infinite nothingness, but obviously its inhabitants can fix that. Heaven is infinite cloud-stuff, I can make you some if you want a better idea, which glows and is a nice medium density and generally convenient for angels to work with when they want to turn it into anything else. Fairyland is basically flat land with water features, and goes on forever in all directions and has its own plants and animals. When humans summon, they either go for a specific daeva they know of, or get a random one, and daeva can answer summons if they want to and not if we don't.
"Dead summoners become daeva - I may as well tell you that I used to be a human - but humans who die without summoning anything wind up in a fifth world, Limbo. It's flat like Fairyland but contains fuck-all, except that when people die each one gets a thing, which can't be a person or require the existence of people - you hear about folks dying and finding their favorite deceased dog or whatever. My parents wound up there, my dad got his house and my mom got a mobile home, which is like a little house on wheels that you can drive around under its own power if you're not familiar.
"I think we're probably much higher-tech than you. This object is a computer, pretty state-of-the-art, I have a little something embedded in my brain to let me control it like this but most humans don't get that option, it's just easy for demons. Computers are sophisticated information-handlers and the basic technology underlying the aforementioned video games. We also have machines that'll take us to celestial objects - hence the colonization of the moon and Mars - and lots of fun engineering and medical and whatnot advances, most of which I can conjure references for as needed if Terraria unphysics cooperates and we need them."
"In the early twenty-first century, counting from an event of religious significance for a sizable portion of the human population, summoning became known. Summoning is drawing on the floor in a certain way and getting a daeva. Daeva come in three kinds - demons, like me, and angels, and fairies. Customarily, all three look like humans with wings, but demons tend to this kind of wings, angels to bird wings, fairies to insect wings. Demons make, angels change, fairies move. All of these species have our own worlds. Demons in Hell, angels in Heaven, fairies in Fairyland. Hell, all by itself, is infinite nothingness, but obviously its inhabitants can fix that. Heaven is infinite cloud-stuff, I can make you some if you want a better idea, which glows and is a nice medium density and generally convenient for angels to work with when they want to turn it into anything else. Fairyland is basically flat land with water features, and goes on forever in all directions and has its own plants and animals. When humans summon, they either go for a specific daeva they know of, or get a random one, and daeva can answer summons if they want to and not if we don't.
"Dead summoners become daeva - I may as well tell you that I used to be a human - but humans who die without summoning anything wind up in a fifth world, Limbo. It's flat like Fairyland but contains fuck-all, except that when people die each one gets a thing, which can't be a person or require the existence of people - you hear about folks dying and finding their favorite deceased dog or whatever. My parents wound up there, my dad got his house and my mom got a mobile home, which is like a little house on wheels that you can drive around under its own power if you're not familiar.
"I think we're probably much higher-tech than you. This object is a computer, pretty state-of-the-art, I have a little something embedded in my brain to let me control it like this but most humans don't get that option, it's just easy for demons. Computers are sophisticated information-handlers and the basic technology underlying the aforementioned video games. We also have machines that'll take us to celestial objects - hence the colonization of the moon and Mars - and lots of fun engineering and medical and whatnot advances, most of which I can conjure references for as needed if Terraria unphysics cooperates and we need them."
greatestgift
"...talk about farmer magic," Sable murmurs to herself.
"All right, I'll try to tell you about my world, but I haven't seen it since I was twelve and I didn't know everything, okay?"
"All right, I'll try to tell you about my world, but I haven't seen it since I was twelve and I didn't know everything, okay?"
from_scratch
"Of course. Although if you can remember the titles of any books or anything I can make those. Probably unless something weird's going on."
greatestgift
"Not offhand... I'm not sure anyone's written a book on this stuff."
She frowns to herself and sits down at the table with a bottle on it.
"Okay. I live on a planet. It has humans. A long time ago, there were people with... well, magic. We don't know a lot about them, but they could do things no one can do anymore. They built huge cities, and straight roads that are better than anything we can build today. Some of the roads are still around, but the cities are long gone, because of malices."
Here she stops for a moment, staring in concentration at the table.
"Malices are... I think I have to explain ground first. Ground is like - a different way of seeing the world, maybe a truer way, maybe just a stranger one. Everything that exists, that has life or substance, also has ground. You, me, this table, the walls. And you can tell things about stuff by looking at its ground, if you have the sense for it. If you're good with it, you can change things by changing their ground. Most people, even people born with groundsense, can't do much that way. We think... we think the mage-lords had strong groundsense, stronger than anybody alive now, strong enough that they could do magic with it that we can only dream of."
She shakes her head.
"I don't know about that; I've never seen the ruins of the old cities, even. I do know about malices, though. They have nothing but ground. They're just - insubstantial creatures, until they make bodies for themselves. And they eat the ground of everything around them. I don't - I don't know quite how to explain blight, with none of it to show you. First the animals get sick and die, then the bugs and the plants, and everything turns sort of grey, and in a really bad blight patch things start to lose their shape and all fall apart into grey dust. It happens slowly if a malice is just around, but they can do it fast and on purpose too - ground-rip things, pull the life and substance out of them. They start out with nothing, and then they make a body that isn't very good and can't even move around much, and then they eat ground until they have enough to make a new body that's better, and they go looking for more."
She frowns to herself and sits down at the table with a bottle on it.
"Okay. I live on a planet. It has humans. A long time ago, there were people with... well, magic. We don't know a lot about them, but they could do things no one can do anymore. They built huge cities, and straight roads that are better than anything we can build today. Some of the roads are still around, but the cities are long gone, because of malices."
Here she stops for a moment, staring in concentration at the table.
"Malices are... I think I have to explain ground first. Ground is like - a different way of seeing the world, maybe a truer way, maybe just a stranger one. Everything that exists, that has life or substance, also has ground. You, me, this table, the walls. And you can tell things about stuff by looking at its ground, if you have the sense for it. If you're good with it, you can change things by changing their ground. Most people, even people born with groundsense, can't do much that way. We think... we think the mage-lords had strong groundsense, stronger than anybody alive now, strong enough that they could do magic with it that we can only dream of."
She shakes her head.
"I don't know about that; I've never seen the ruins of the old cities, even. I do know about malices, though. They have nothing but ground. They're just - insubstantial creatures, until they make bodies for themselves. And they eat the ground of everything around them. I don't - I don't know quite how to explain blight, with none of it to show you. First the animals get sick and die, then the bugs and the plants, and everything turns sort of grey, and in a really bad blight patch things start to lose their shape and all fall apart into grey dust. It happens slowly if a malice is just around, but they can do it fast and on purpose too - ground-rip things, pull the life and substance out of them. They start out with nothing, and then they make a body that isn't very good and can't even move around much, and then they eat ground until they have enough to make a new body that's better, and they go looking for more."
from_scratch
"The evidence that this fallen civilization had magic is that they had cities and roads? ...Also: on the list of things for an indestructible demon to be concerned about: can you affect my 'ground'?"