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Ehail blinks, when she finds the bar instead of her room.
She goes in.
She looks out the window, at the exploding things.
"I don't think this is my planet," she observes to herself, tucking silver hair behind her ear.
~~~
with Elysse
with Lazarus
salus-populi
"What's a 'planet'?" inquires a woman sitting alone at a nearby table. She has some kind of puzzle in front of her, made of interlocking wooden pieces which she is patiently manipulating.
She has to echo the word Ehail used for 'planet', because it didn't translate for her; her language doesn't have a word for those.
She has to echo the word Ehail used for 'planet', because it didn't translate for her; her language doesn't have a word for those.
...It sure doesn't. Ehail tilts her head, sifting through the language.
Then she says, "Where I'm from, a planet is a very large shape made of land and water that floats in the air. Mine is square."
Then she says, "Where I'm from, a planet is a very large shape made of land and water that floats in the air. Mine is square."
salus-populi
"Oh. We do have sky islands," she says. "Some of them are pretty large; I'm not sure how much you mean by very. Is your 'planet' geometrically square, with straight sides, or is it just lumpily four-sided in a squarish way?"
"It's ten miles thick. The top has - texture, terrain, but the sides and the bottom are flat and meet at right angles," says Ehail. "It's - I don't remember exactly, something like fifteen thousand miles on a side."
salus-populi
"...That's huge," she says. "I'm not even sure I've heard of an alucine big enough to hold something like that."
"Alucine..." Ehail blinks. "Oh. We - don't have those, or only have one very large one, depending on how you think about it. I suppose unless you count - here - but I'm not sure if this is the same thing."
"There are a lot of planets in it," says Ehail. "And the planets are many hundreds of thousands of planet lengths apart from each other."
salus-populi
...She thinks about this.
"That's the strangest thing I've ever heard. Do you even know where the boundaries are? You wouldn't, I guess."
"That's the strangest thing I've ever heard. Do you even know where the boundaries are? You wouldn't, I guess."
"If it has edges no one has found them," says Ehail. "I think currently the thinking is that it doesn't. But it was a while ago that I was in school."
salus-populi
"...So it's just... infinitely big? Or is it like - there's a lake outside that door," she gestures to it, "and if you travel far enough away from the lake you find yourself coming back toward it. Your super-alucine could be like that, I guess."
"I don't know about the lake," says Ehail, glancing towards the door. "I would be a little surprised if my world wrapped around like that, but I don't know for sure that it doesn't."
salus-populi
"I'm going to have to rethink how I understand people talking about their worlds," she says thoughtfully. "Until now I thought they meant, well, worlds. Collections of alucines, or networks of them linked by portals. But I guess they come in more configurations than that."
"I don't know a lot about other worlds," says Ehail. "I think I probably would have heard about it at least once or twice if most of the ones my world's people know about aren't at least sort of like ours, though."
"Sort of? It isn't my field," says Ehail apologetically. "We know that there are a lot of others. There isn't much ongoing contact with any of them."
"Er, most of the time I just do householdy magic," says Ehail. "But research-wise I am working on, um, a cure for something. I'm not really getting anywhere."
"...Something. You can't get it. Unless that's not your natural hair color." Ehail shuffles her feet a little. "I don't think you can possibly have heard of it."
"Well," says Ehail with a small sigh, "it's called being a 'shren'."
Ehail nods. "So, in my spare time, I work on that. But not very effectively."