"I'm not..." Blink. "Wait, what?"

"For some reason people outside Gesland get weird about sex. – please don't go off on a crusade over them, holy wars never work out well for anyone involved – but if you want to teach people how to follow your religion, I think you'll find it easier to get the early momentum going here than it would be most places."

"Or I'd understand if you'd rather just focus on getting home."

"...what the fuck?"

Cameron shakes her head.

"You, I can't even, and I don't have a religion."

Cameron pauses to reflect on that statement, and winces.

"Technically."

No, a rabidly loyal social media following doesn't count.

"Maybe I misunderstood earlier. I thought you said you were a goddess? Became one, some time before you got shipwrecked? And you definitely look like one, and sounded like one when you did the," – she mimics Cameron's body language from when she recited her aria – "thing, a minute ago."

"Well, yes, but a magical girl is a god like a car is a horse. And you don't know what a car is. Uh. Like... something, that does a thing on its own, versus a machine that does the same thing, but better, and under your control?"

Cameron throws her hands up in exasperation.

"It may be that I am being unduly swayed by the similarity of sound, but – would a car be similar to a cart?"

"Are you saying you're a machine? You seem... more like a person, than I would expect." But her tablet is also nothing like any machine she's ever heard of, so who knows.

"Well, what is a machine? In the sense you mean, no, I'm not a machine. On the other hand, you are a machine, if you want to use the enlightened definition. My spells wouldn't work on you if you weren't."

Cameron taps on her tablet a few times, frowns, taps some more, and finally manages to find a cached video of a car being visibly controlled by a driver, rather than driving itself. Let's not mangle the metaphor any worse than it already is. She turns the tablet around and shows the Doc.

"A horse has a will of its own, but may still be mostly controlled; a cart has no will, though one may still lose control of it on difficult ground, or if one attempts to turn sharply at speed. You do appear to have your own will, as best I can discern. It is unclear from what you have shown me how a 'car' fares in this analysis. It may be that I am asking the wrong question, however."

Cameron drops her face into her hands and groans.

"You know what, we can talk about this when I get back. If this works the way I hope, it'll only be a few hours. If not, I'll see you after I resurrect tomorrow."

"Very well. Best of luck, and safe journeys."

"Will it be obvious from our end which it's gonna be?"

"Should be pretty obvious, yeah," Cameron says wryly. "I'd stand back. It's about to get windy."

Cameron closes out everything else on her tablet and opens the camera app. She taps record, angles it so Tegan and the Doc are in the frame, then turns around to the array.

"Xio!"

The mana dice light up like tiny rainbow suns, then the light seems to implode, and the mandala on top of the array streaks away into the sky, rapidly diminishing to an invisible dot. A powerful wind picks up, blowing in from all directions towards the array, powerful enough to make Cameron stumble, though its much weaker at even just twice the distance.

She turns, once more putting Tegan and the Doc in frame, then steps backwards onto the array.

The rising air picks her up and hurls her upwards. Holding tight to the tablet, she sticks out her elbows and holds her legs straight, keeping herself centered in the updraft as she picks up more and more speed. She's basically poked a hole in the atmosphere; the air is moving fast and picking up more speed every bit of altitude.

She pans up to the horizon as the town shrinks out of view below, doing her best to slowly turn in a circle as she does.

The landscape spreads itself beneath her. Town, fields, other towns, forest rivers hills lakes...

Costallow is still directly underneath her.

Yeah. She should've had to correct her course by now. Is this planet not rotating?

She continues to rise. The ride gets smoother as the air gets thinner. She keeps her healing spell active, and stops breathing. She'd be slowing down by now if gravity had a say in it, but instead she's still picking up speed. Nothing like true escape velocity, but still enough that she should be able to look at the planet as a whole.

Those aren't Earth's continents. Hardly surprising. She already knew this isn't Earth.

Those aren't Earth's constellations. She suspected she wasn't anywhere in the solar system, but seeing it is another matter.

Her tablet continues to record. She pans the view across the stars.

After a few minutes, she's out of the atmosphere and no longer accelerating.

She drifts (hurtles) into space.

A little less than two hours in, a halo of bluish-green haze emerges from the starry blackness in a ring surrounding her.

This is booooooring. But she knew that already. She switches her camera app into time-lapse mode, recording at one frame per second instead of sixty.

She alternates between watching the planet recede and looking out at the stars for nearly two hours, until...

A quick tap sets her camera app back to sixty frames per second.

...what is that?

Whatever it is, it's getting stronger, brighter, and wider, though the edges are still blurry.

It's oriented perpendicular to her trajectory; it might be thickening faster and farther on the prograde side of the line.

Oh shit. It's not getting thicker. It's coming towards her!

That's a wall! A surface! She's on the inside of a shell world!

Emerald Bliss!

Four glassy orbs, sparkling with inner emerald fractals, slide into being around her right wrist. Cameron doesn't stop to think before she launches all four with four quick punches.

The orbs streak away, adding their own speed to hers, so the first one, having more time to accelerate, hits the hardest, but all four strike with immense force.

The orbs impact with a force measured in megajoules, comparable to being hit by a semi truck at highway speed: massively overpowered in hand-to-hand combat, but woefully insufficient to the task at hand. Their net effect on the mile-thick glass wall is to slightly increase the size of the crater she'll leave when she hits it a second behind them.

Fuck fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck!

Cameron THROWS her tablet into her Pocket and INVIOLATE STAND.

The fabric of space itself shrieks. PAIN.

Cameron snaps awake some minutes later, choking on the vacuum, and instinctively reactivates her healing spell. She's intact, but with a screaming headache and the literal soul-deep ache of going way over her mana capacity.

Wait, that worked?

That should not have worked.

Inviolate Stand should've error'd out, at that relative speed.

Cameron files the weird behavior of her spell away for later and shakes herself. She looks around. She pulls her tablet back out. (It's still recording.) She's falling away from the crater her orb blasts made in the glassy underside of the shell. Something must have knocked her out of the gravity shade. (It's probably going to fail soon anyway, she didn't put that many dice into it.)

A copy appears, boot to boot, they spring apart, and the extra fades back into light as she hurtles downward, and the real Cameron shoots back towards the shell. Mental reorientation, because even after that boost she's still falling, and she throws down a shield under her, landing on it hard, but not hard enough to break any bones.

She stands, and looks up, getting a good shot with her tablet, then leaps up, springing from shield to shield until she reaches the lip of the crater. She makes a big shield to stand on and stares at the surface above her. What now.

Yep, that's a bigass glass ceiling with a crater in it, all right.

There's a – stirring, around her, as though a breeze were picking up, except that she's definitely still in hard vacuum.

And a ...form...coalesces... those are definitely the wrong words, there's still nothing there, but somehow a particular region of the nothing has a weight of meaning behind it, like the difference between her Raiment and a mundane outfit tailored to the same specifications.

The shape is indistinctly, but recognizably, humanoid.

And it ...speaks? There's no identifiable movement from the place where its mouth should be, and no sound; but something wordless is definitely being communicated to her by the figure.

[location/landscape/view : the expanse of the glass ceiling] – [[Cameron] – [human]]

vibration/earthquake of the glass – the crater

unfamiliar/unusual

[similar/analogous and dissimilar] to

• [location : near the glass]
  a human [forming – being formed]
  the human falling toward [the earth, as seen from the glass ceiling]]
• [first-person view traveling toward the earth]
  [location/landscape/view : on the surface of the earth]
  many humans
  selecting one
  • interacting with the human
    communicating with it
    building magic [around – attached to] it
    building magic informed/influenced by
    • own nature/preferences
      its nature/preferences
      communication/conversation/negotiation/discussion/[mutual [truth/[moral-good]]-seeking]
• [location : near the glass]
  magic [naturally-occurring – large/complex – poorly understood]]]
  the magic [falling toward [the earth, seen from the ceiling] – falling from [the sky, seen from the earth]]
  the magic attaching to a human

request/offer : communication

 
She could respond in the same way, if she so chooses.

...that's not a god. It's something like a god, though. Something in the same thaumological niche but based on different means?

It takes her several moments to untangle the knot of nested imagery it is projecting into her mind, and even then she isn't sure what its trying to say.

[impression of many images]
[request : purpose]

[location: outside-context]

orange red swirls across a sphere

[uncertain causality]
fabric of space sharding apart [uncontrolled transportation]

[region bound]
sol, mercury, venus, earth, mars, jupiter, saturn
vast machinery of golden light [conceptual tracery of volume : omnipresence]

the local 'earth' [contiguous space] --- [not within region]
an image of [the solar system] --- disparate --- an image of the 'local' earth and crystal shell
[information request : spacial relation]

human[Tegan, Doc] and human[many, defined region bound]
[information request : causal relation]

Cameron has practice projecting bundles of sensory impressions at Eelesia when words fail. She puts the question together and makes it 'louder' than her other thoughts in the way she's used to.

[many images – purpose] [comparison – communication – seeking to understand]

spatial relation : unknown
causal relation : unknown
conclusion : outside context

information request : [intentions – desires/values – relevant [assumptions/beliefs/epistemics] [framework/context/paradigm]]

offer : information reciprocal to previous request

offer/suggestion/proposal : conversation/[mutual [truth/[moral-good]]-seeking]/cooperation

Alright, Cameron can work with this.

That... Oh. The prophets Tegan talked about. It's comparing her to them. Does it, or others like it, send those prophets on purpose like Tegan believes? Are they all the same, or do all of them bring outside contexts?

Cameron imagines a formless unknown entity looming over the planet-in-a-snowglobe, at it, along with a questioning sense of what traits might be in that unknown. Just in case it has any clues to the nature of the creator of this habitat. She believes it that it just lives here and isn't responsible for any of this. Is there more space outside the crystal or are they in a closed loop?

As for Cameron's intentions, she doesn't know if it'll understand her undiluted core drives, but she doesn't try to translate them. She wants people to flourish such that they are freely enjoying their carnal urges, and all that entails. Her native physical environment is... raw-er. Less cultivated, magically. More cultivated, culturally. Endless layers of cleverly exploiting natural phenomenon in unaccustomed ways and equally endless layers of trying to fit people to one's vision rather than visions to one's people. (The former: pride. The latter: disgust.)

Reciprocation is unobjectionable. Cooperation is tentatively unobjectionable.

Also, can it manifest a visual form easily? For the sake of her visual recording device. Don't bother if it would be difficult, its not that important.