random pointless swirls | Glowfic Constellation

An audible sigh. I am going to go destroy a tree on my side of the gate. They're not smart enough to really care, nobody's using them, and it might relax some of this - frustration.

She invisibles herself and leaves. She doesn't come back for at least a day.

imeanforever

Promise gets to work establishing herself in her new home. Grow the tree as fast as it can stand. Grow the food plants; learn the area.

Steel is gone for some more days.

A different mortal wanders through the gate. "What the hell is this place?"

imeanforever

"Hello. This is Fairyland and it's very dangerous. I advise you to turn around. The gate isn't for you, it's for someone else."

"Noted. On all counts. I don't suppose you have decent construction-diagrams for the gate? It could be incredibly useful to end this fucking war already."

imeanforever

"How would that help?"

"Use it to kidnap the prime minister-cum-dictator who keeps cracking down harder when four fifths of the people have made it clear that's the exact opposite of what we want, is what I was thinking. And, not incidentally, transport some of the northern fringe's food surplus into the capital without getting sliced up by swords."

imeanforever

"I'm not prepared to take sides in your war on the strength of one random person's opinion, however lopsided you make it sound."

"Fair enough. I don't suppose you've seen a shaper who goes by Steel recently? Tall, dark hair, butterfly wings, no expression half the time. Heard a rumor she showed up at Teth then freaked out and ran off again. It'd be nice to let her know I'm still alive."

imeanforever

"If I see her I can let her know. What's your shaper nickname?"

"My trade name? Morn. Nice to meet you. What's your trade name? And did you make all these - waves? They look like a team of twenty shapers got their hands on a big supply of some sort of hallucinogen."

imeanforever

"I'm Promise. And no, I didn't make them. And I really do think you should go back through the gate."

"You don't want to tell me what's up with them, fine. I'm going. The town-soon-to-be-city of Teth has lots of food and medicine if you know anybody who's starving, by the way. We're getting a bit crowded, housing-wise, but we're working on that. And nobody starves on the Northern Star's watch."

He goes back through the gate.

Steel is back a week later, with four massive books full of detailed information on the war.

She gives them to Promise, summarizing the results. Rumors about how it started (pretty much everyone agrees that her disappearance was the spark), the current state of the war (tense stalemate), how the average not-soldier population is holding up (fairly well, all told), the attitudes of each side (Telra Senate claims the North Star is a terrorist organization making an excuse to hurt people and get rich, North Star claims the Telra Senate is a dictatorship bent on keeping power at any cost) and lists of chains of command for various parts of both sides' military and civil organizations.

It took a while to get all this. I hope it'll help stop this ongoing disaster.

imeanforever

Morn's alive, or was a week ago, Promise mentions. He wanted me to tell you. I think he's with the North Star.

Really? That's some relief, at least. He must not be in any particularly important position, or I would have found him during my scouting. He wandered through the gate, I assume? Did he mention Link?

imeanforever

Didn't come up. But yes, he wandered through, and I managed to talk him into turning around.

She laughs. It's louder than usual, since she has no hearing to modulate it. I'm not surprised. His reaction to weird things has always been "nope, I'm going home."

imeanforever

Actually, he wanted me to tell him how to make a gate. But it wasn't hard to dissuade him.

Again, not that surprising. When he encounters resistance he finds another path. He probably spent a day or two studying the gate from the other side, tried to make one of his own, and given up only for now and only when that didn't work. He'll probably tell the North Star about it, actually. Maybe you should move it or someone else might come looking.

imeanforever

Promise sighs. I can close it, but I don't want to cut you off, and making huge numbers of them seems like a bad idea. Maybe I can open it for a minute on some schedule that you'll know and then you can come through whenever you can be here at that time?

Close it for now at least. I brought a fair amount of food. Not sealed like usual, but whatever. I want to go over this info and see if we can come up with a plan for peace through strategic placement of orders. I don't have biographies or anything, but I have a couple pages' notes on all the major figures.

imeanforever

Promise shuts the gate. Sure.

Steel starts going over her half-dozen books of notes. Maps, rumors, accounts of major battles, notes on all major figures, more rumors, newspaper clippings and photographs where they are available and appropriate.

As a first pass, the evidence indicates that both sides are at fault for the war. The Telra Senate was taking away peoples' freedoms, censoring the press, and so on. But the North Star escalated to violence first, and they did so when other options were still probably viable. And in the time between then and now, both sides have done varyingly nasty things in the name of defeating the enemy.

imeanforever

Yep. This is very messy and so mortal.

Promise is keenly aware of the irony involved in ordering someone to stop curtailing others' freedoms, but she is equally unclear on whether getting ahold of key people at the top will be nearly as effective with mortals as it is with fairies. If she had the name of a court master, she'd have the court unless she made a mistake. The mortals could just decide to stop obeying their leaders.