cooperation | Glowfic Constellation

"Is this one all right or should I put on another?"

kaolinandbone

"I'd like to hear some more variety before deciding."

Isabella is intrigued by there foreign songs. They seem to use a different scale than she's used to. It's... Not bad, but it could take some getting adjustments.

Keo plays brief samples of a few other crystals.

kaolinandbone

Isabella selects a downtempo arrangement of mostly stringed instruments.

"Thank you for taking the time to help me settle in a bit. I'm sure you must be busy."

"The school's responsible for you," Keo says. "And my daughter was one of the summoners."

kaolinandbone

"True enough. Still, I would have expected many people to delegate such things rather than attend to them personally."

"I'm uniquely able to do safety checks as necessary," shrugs Keo, "and the school employees are teachers and librarians and even less qualified to handle a circled offworlder."

kaolinandbone

"Makes sense. Some things you have to do yourself if you want them done right." Isabella's fingers slide along the faded paper of the parasol in her lap.

"Anything else you need while you think and the encyclopedia and chair are on the way??"

kaolinandbone

"Nothing jumps to mind. And I can summon you if I think of anything, after all." Keo.

Isabella stands up and walks a brisk circuit of the small circle, careful not to drag her dress through the spilled tea. It's definitely going to get cramped in here if she has to stay for a while.

Keo nods acknowledgment and teleports away.

kaolinandbone

Isabella settles in to wait for books and furniture, letting the slow strings of the alien composition sweep through her mind, drifting away on the tide of sound...

And after a while a chair, and then a stack of encyclopedia volumes as tall as she is, appear.

kaolinandbone

Isabella accepts the chair gratefully from whomever delivers it! Her lower legs are starting to fall asleep from sitting seiza-style.

Pulling volume one off of the stack of encyclopedias, she carefully leans her parasol against the pile, settles into a chair, and flips to the index. Let's see what sorts of things exist in this world, shall we?

The index includes a lot of things, many of which are listed, handwritten, in the index as proper nouns unexplained except via their subsections (for instance, "Oridaan" is next to "Oridaanlan history" and "Oridaanlan physical geography" and "Oridaanlan dialects" and may be assumed to be a political unit). The world has rabbits and chocolate and wine and clouds and a moon and oceans. It has merfolk and elves and dragons and vampires and wolfriders. It has several unrelated kinds of magic.

kaolinandbone

Isabella is happy that this world includes chocolate! She checks to see if it has tea as well before flipping to the section on the local vampires. The various other magical races can wait: for the moment, she needs to see what her hosts' reactions would be to her asking if she can bite people. She can go without for quite some time, but it would not be comfortable, and if she's really stuck here for a year then she would risk sliding into torpor and that would be rather problematic.

There is tea.

The vampires bite people. There is a short section on vampire religion, which asserts that one of the handful of facts vampires have allowed to leak about their faith is that it forbids them to bite people without permission. Apparently they prefer elves most of the time, dragons when they can get them, and the average person can be bitten by a vampire of about their size once every three weeks if the vampire eats a normal amount once weekly. (At least one country has stabilized into a population of almost one quarter vampires and three quarters elves, which implies very snug arrangements for sustenance.) Vampires here have children in a humanlike fashion and have peculiarly-calculated lifespans and can each turn into bats, which they must do to sleep. They are pale and dark-haired and do not have circulatory systems or digestive ones. They can echolocate. Their bites are painless and can be easily healed by lights if one prefers this cosmetically.

kaolinandbone

Lights? Isabella flips to the section on this world's apparent biomancy-equivalent. And wait a second, of course this world has celestial bodies, that is a normal thing, does this room have windows, why did she not check that as soon as she arrived-

Well, she checks now.

There is a window. The curtains are closed; most of the light in the room is from the glowing ceiling.

kaolinandbone

Alright, good. That's good. Her hand runs along the weathered wood of her parasol's handle. A single window... Indirect light through glass, her parasol, and her clothes doesn't pose much of a threat to her unless she's astonishingly clumsy. Even if someone opens the curtains, she should be fine.

She lets out a shaky breath. Alright, back to the encyclopedia. What is a light, exactly?

Lights are a kind of inborn magic user, making up three to four percent of the population evenly distributed across species in most places. They can cup their hands together and make a ball of colored light (color consistent per and varying between lights) which, if contacted by a sick or injured non-light, heals them entirely and very fast. Some countries have socialized healthcare based on lights. Complex health problems must be addressed by lights with training or by witches or wizards with medically oriented magic; lights can't do literally everything.

Lights also don't have to eat, if they get enough sun, although they do need to drink a lot of water.

kaolinandbone

That implies interesting things about the spiritual presences in this world. If only she knew more than basic theory of shamanism.

Speaking of which, let's investigate the sections on celestial objects. What mystical significance do they have on this world? ... Do spirits even exist in the way she expects? Vampires are apparently somewhat different in this world, as is magic. She should probably not assume anything about how spirits work.

The moon is a large hemispherical gray rock which spins and orbits the planet. The sun is a large ball of fire which also orbits the planet, around the southern bit.

The planet is square.

kaolinandbone

Wait, what? Square? Does that mean that there's edges? Isabella investigates: is this a flat world, or is it a cube or something else that would require even more interesting gravity?