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Cam is out flying. There's a decent cloud of atmosphere around the gold plane, now, millenia of demons making air around themselves for comfort and not sealing it up because why would you bother. There's a small forest, here - the effect is kind of ruined by the lamps it has to grow under, but it's still pretty.
He feels an open summons and lets it grab him -
from_scratch
ending-of
- and he appears on a nearly featureless expanse of dark grey rock, in a circle drawn in dark blue ink on a thick pane of glass laid on top of the rock. The poor lighting conditions - moonless, starless night sky, with only a faint strange glow in the distance, lining the too-high horizon - make it difficult to see details of the circle.
There is absolutely no one in sight, and no binding on him whatsoever.
There is absolutely no one in sight, and no binding on him whatsoever.
from_scratch
...Oooookay. That's new. Cam steps out of the circle and makes a little lamp to have a look at it.
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He will just about have time to observe that it's drawn with mathematical exactness before he is abruptly transported to a different setting entirely.
There is a plain white floor underneath him, and a single pristine glass window ringing the perfectly circular room, leaning slightly outward on all sides so that an observer can stand at the edge and look out easily at things beneath the room; Cam, however, is in its exact centre. The ceiling is also plain and white. To his right, the sky visible out the window (the room is very high up, and shows little else but sky at this angle) is dark; to his left, it is the pale blue of a cloudless summer day.
Directly in front of him, there is a comfortable chair at the very edge of the room, facing into the centre. There is a woman sitting in the chair.
"I find the configuration of your universe very unaesthetic," she says calmly.
There is a plain white floor underneath him, and a single pristine glass window ringing the perfectly circular room, leaning slightly outward on all sides so that an observer can stand at the edge and look out easily at things beneath the room; Cam, however, is in its exact centre. The ceiling is also plain and white. To his right, the sky visible out the window (the room is very high up, and shows little else but sky at this angle) is dark; to his left, it is the pale blue of a cloudless summer day.
Directly in front of him, there is a comfortable chair at the very edge of the room, facing into the centre. There is a woman sitting in the chair.
"I find the configuration of your universe very unaesthetic," she says calmly.
from_scratch
"Well, where I'm from, teleportation has not been invented and I don't think there are any tourist attractions where the sky looks like this. This'd take, what, tidal locking on a really little planet so the twilight band was about building-width? Nothing like that in the solar system off the top of my head."
ending-of
"Not quite," she says. "My domain consists of an infinite plane split into two levels. One half is day while the other half is night; periodically they switch. You arrived on the current nightside, distant from any existing structures."
from_scratch
"Oh, so it's more like Limbo. But not exactly Limbo. I think Limbo's all one time zone. Okay. How and why am I here?"
ending-of
"I believe the object I instantiated to cause you to appear was of the usual kind. I would like you to give me access to your universe so I can reconfigure it to a more pleasing form."
from_scratch
"The circle you instantiated was not usual. A usual one would have either summoned a different kind of daeva or had me under a heap of restrictions. And: what?"
ending-of
"I did not prefer to restrict you in that way, and your kind has the most aesthetically pleasing ability. The current configuration of your universe displeases me. I would like you to give me the necessary access to change that configuration."
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"The afterlife sections are separated in an unaesthetic way. I would prefer stable transit between them. I have not yet decided whether or not to extend that transit to my domain."
ending-of
"Is that the name for the periodic overlap between the sections? What do you mean by 'patch'?"
from_scratch
"That's what those are called, yes, and I mean - make them suck less? They're too short and too small."
ending-of
"Ah. No. I believe I would design stable transit between the sections in a way similar to the transit system of my domain. The concordances lack... scope."
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"I am proud of my transit system," she says. "At the most basic level, it consists of a network of numbered stations in which each station in the network can send travellers instantaneously to any other station. The speed and scope are necessary for a continually expanding domain. Your afterlife sections are similarly infinite, and would require a similar solution."
from_scratch
"Okay... this sounds good, although I'm sort of concerned that demons who aren't as nice as me, or for that matter angels and fairies who aren't as nice as me, would insist on terrorizing each other and the Limboites."
ending-of
"That would be inconvenient," she agrees. "The local solution to that type of problem is to sort potential troublemakers into their own section, but it is imperfect. Perhaps you have alternate suggestions."
from_scratch
"Yeah, that seems to have the obvious problem of the troublemakers causing trouble for each other with no well-behaved people around to mediate. Are you as arbitrarily powerful as you sound?"
ending-of
"I can cause arbitrary reconfigurations of matter, and implement arbitrary magical rules if they are sufficiently well-specified. The specifications recognize aware beings and their decisions as fundamentals, and everything else has to be described in terms of the interactions of matter and energy on the most basic levels. It took me a very long time to specify a rule to inhibit the settling of dust onto surfaces in sufficient detail."